Phi for All

Not wearing red is a bizarre one. The lightning itself would have no preference, so perhaps it's related to the "don't go near animals" decree? Perhaps wearing red might attract the animals? My mom used to tell us to stay away from the windows, but she never said why. I always dismissed this, thinking she meant that the lightning might be attracted to me through the glass. It wasn't until I was in high school that someone mentioned you stay away from windows because a close strike could cause glass to shatter and strike anyone near it. Sorry mom, I should have listened.

And imagine it's this way. The co-worker is working two jobs to make ends meet and is doing horribly at it. He suddenly gets a 100% raise in his day job, is able to quit his other job, and buckle down to do really well at his great new job. Oh, but this won't happen because hey, lazy do-nothing. You asserted, "I'm a Capitalist", and I commented that you aren't 100% Capitalist if you're an American. I then proceeded to support my comment with examples as evidence. I think you missed the part where I was describing Americans, not you specifically. You're a bit defensive, imo.

I think there are a couple of different employee types "at work" here. For some, this type of situation is ideal, everyone (doing the same job) is making the same money, all the work is set up to be equal, all the benefits the same. They stop worrying about fairness because it's all fair, and just do the job. For the people with your mindset, the situation is a disincentive, since you're more concerned with not doing more than you have to unless you get extra. People like this should avoid union jobs since they don't support the concept behind it. I think it seems a lot like Communism to some.

It would have to cost me less than paying the police to arrest you for extortion.

This really reminds me of the Baltimore Needle Exchange program Malcolm Gladwell references in The Tipping Point. The media tells the public that the city is giving out free needles to drug users, and paying $1 for used needles. The citizens freak out! Then it's explained that this will reduce the serious AIDS outbreak caused by reusing needles. The citizens relax. Then they find out some of these druggies are making money off the system by bringing in bags full of needles. The citizens freak out again! It's explained that this is great, that the program wouldn't be as effective without these guys bringing in bags full of used needles. The citizens relax again, until the next media alert. Part of me wonders if the media isn't exploiting the fact that people are often torn when it comes to some of these off-the-wall solutions. Appeal to Outrage increases ad revenues.

You aren't a 100% Capitalist if you're an American, I guarantee you. There's some Socialist mixed in there, and some Communist too. Your federal government owns several corporations, like the Tennessee Valley Authority, and Fannie Mae, and the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation. Communist principles. Your federal government uses taxpayer dollars for national projects like interstate highways, airports and seaports, parks, and social assistance. Socialist principles. The Capitalist part of American society needs quite a bit of overhaul. Regulations are too loose, corporations aren't paying their share of taxes to maintain the roads and ports they use more of, and businesses are allowed to mess with fair market practices through abuse of the legislative system. When it's all balanced correctly, it's the strengths of many ideologies that make us diverse and adaptable. Arg, it's like you aren't reading what's been written. Communism is used successfully in many places, including many Western countries. What isn't being done is for a society to be 100% ideology X. That seems to be stupid strategy no matter which you pick. A 100% Capitalist society would be horrible. You would literally have to pay for everything personally. No public parks, museums, transportation. Everything would be privatized, and nothing would be done about those not fortunate enough to be wealthy. Same thing for any single ideology. There is no single best way to use all resources.

! Moderator Note After a certain amount of time, people have quoted and referred to posts, and we don't want them to be changed, since it makes replies look wrong, or misapplied. If you ask a question, and it gets answered correctly, but you're then allowed to change the question, you waste the time of responders. If it's only to make you look better, that's not fair to those made to look foolish. Why do you want to change what's already been said? Can't you make corrections in subsequent posts? Or are you concerned that you're science is being corrected so often?

But I was able to drink a glass of water while typing both these posts.

And the reason it's so hard is that you haven't studied these things formally, to learn how the best explanations for various phenomena are formulated to maximize their trustworthiness. You've cherry-picked what interests you, but that means you don't have the connective knowledge that allows a scientist to look for support in evidence, to ensure his observations tally with reality. Science doesn't look for "proof", it looks for evidence that either supports or refutes. We aren't trying to prove anything. We have to be careful with this concept of "making sense". Science tries to remove as much subjectivity from its processes as possible, and when you really boil it down, "making sense" means "it makes sense to me", which is terribly subjective. Unfortunately, many people equate "it makes sense to me" with "logic", another big mistake.

You're talking about a complete takeover, but there are limited forms of Communism that seem to have merit. Do you think those should be ignored because some have abused them? Castro didn't raise taxes on businesses. He nationalized all the businesses, making them part of the State. It stifled economic progress for quite a while (mostly because of embargoes), and left them dependent on the Soviet Union for economic and military aid. But Castro also deposed a military dictator. He abolished discrimination, brought electricity to the whole island, educated his people, focused on healthcare for all, and kept unemployment low. One has to wonder how his flavor of Communism might have fared if the US hadn't been so active in suppressing Cuba. Besides backing the former military dictator (Battista), the US also lost some businesses outright when Castro took them over and made them part of the State. That's the biggest fear Capitalists have from Communism, imo, that sudden government takeover of everything you've worked for. But it's the extreme, it doesn't have to be about takeover. Yet it makes many shy away from anything to do with State ownership programs.

Cuba's national healthcare interests me. I don't think healthcare works well with insurance, or any business model for that matter. The focus should be on health and not profits. Cuba doesn't pay their doctors enough, from what I've heard. It would be interesting to have healthcare and education be State owned, and pay doctors and teachers very well, with perhaps some non-monetary State perks as well (free access to public transportation/museums/recreation centers?). I think both medicine and education suffer when profit is the priority, and it's two sectors that are very important to post-manufacturing economies. Do you think a Communist program like that would work alongside the Capitalist/Socialist mixture most western countries have? I have a hard time imagining an entire workforce under Communism. While everyone in a society has value, how can you treat a clerk in a convenience store the same as a neurosurgeon when it comes to compensation if everybody works for the State?

And what has been "proved" in science?

Don't make the mistake of assuming any political or societal ideology has just one level. Communism, like Capitalism and Socialism, is a whole range of thought. I don't think anyone has ever had a 100% Communist government and been successful with it (or 100% anything, come to think of it). The idea of the state controlling and distributing certain goods or services isn't a bad idea. In the US, we used to have local governments owning public utilities, so the governments were the power provider for the country, which I'm pretty sure is a Communist goal. Privatizing them certainly increased the cost to the citizens, and whether or not they're better run now is debatable. Imagine if the State decided to take one item that virtually every household needs, let's say a freezer for storing food. The State sets up or buys a facility, and arranges to make a high-quality, ultra-efficient freezer. Each household in the country will get one for free, and those who can't find other work can work in the State freezer factory to receive their "unemployment" checks. This guarantees that everyone has a way to buy food on sale and store it for long periods, which creates lots of downstream benefits. This is a way to implement some Communist strategies while still maintaining a Capitalist/Socialist foundation.

This is usually my impression as well. When I see a post from seriously disabled, it's usually talking about science being messed up, or inadequate, or lacking in some vague way. But I never get a sense of how to fix the problem. At one point I thought it was justification for giving up on the study of science, but assigning motives to a particular stance isn't always accurate or fair.

We couldn't get the guy in charge of the drones, so we got the guy in charge of the atomic clocks that control the GPS the drones use. I'm not sure we've ever had a puppeteer, someone pulling strings like a marionette. That could be interesting if they coould demonstrate distinct styles of writing. Mostly what we get are sockpuppets, another account so someone has more hands to wave while ignoring calls for evidence. Those aren't hard to spot, in general. It does tickle me when someone joins, posts a thread on some controversial topic, gets some contradictory or unwanted replies, and then suddenly someone new joins to agree with the controversial OP. A quick look at IP addresses shows it's the same person, new account! Being wrong is no big deal, but being dishonest about it is completely different.

What you fail to grasp is that being wrong and needing to be corrected are NOT synonymous. It's unlikely that what we know now of physics will turn out to be wrong, but it's inevitable that it will need to be corrected. That's how it's supposed to work, constant updates as we increase our knowledge. I'm not sure what one can do with a stance like this. Are you arguing that we should all stop learning mainstream physics because our understanding of it isn't perfect? Why bother learning it if it will turn out to be different 100,000 years from now, is that what you're suggesting? Aren't we constrained to using our best current explanations?

! Moderator Note You need to do your own homework. We can offer help, and no more,

And infinitely imaginary.

A couple of decades ago, I think it was 60 Minutes did a special where they took one of their people's taxes and did them 28 different ways, using every option from top tier tax attorneys to H&R Block. They finished by having the guy do his own taxes, and then turned in his info with a request that the IRS calculate the taxes owed. None of the 30 different ways of calculating this guy's taxes matched, they were all different, some by quite a bit. Math shouldn't work that way.

I don't think it has as much to do with understanding as it does with definition. No matter what you do to test if something is infinite or not, you actually have to wait for it to stop or continue forever. You could say it was finite when it stops, but how could you ever say it's infinite without waiting around forever to see?

In the US at least, we have no left to turn to when it comes to major representation of liberal ideas. We can have them, but there's nobody to turn them into legislation that doesn't get "right-washed" into helping Big Business more than it helps the majority. But you're correct, there are alternative candidates, but the two-party system kicks them all to the curb. Nobody wants to think their vote will be wasted. But a flat tax hurts the survivability of lower income people. If you make $30,000, it's harder to live on the remaining $27,000 after taxes than it is for the person who makes $500,000 to live on the remaining $450,000. Flat taxes end up helping the wealthy, despite how reasonable they sound. I still agree with Sanders and Eisenhower. Tax the crap out of the highest earnings. It doesn't prevent the wealthy from going for it, and it keeps more of that crazy money circulating through the economy.

Someone here mentioned f.lux, and I installed that on my computer. It syncs with my local time, so that at sunrise my screen starts using its normal cooler colors, continuing until sunset, when it starts transitioning to redder, warmer colors that are more conducive to relaxing before bedtime. It works very well.

This is an offshoot of modern political conservatism, imo. Focus on the injustice happening on a very small scale while ignoring (and sometimes impeding) all the large scale good that is being done. Fed by agendas rooted in stopping all social programs the wealthy don't participate in (and therefore don't want to pay their fair share of), we get this bizarre effect where conservatives are basically standing on everyone's oxygen tube and wondering why we're all so blue.

You can keep your grapes. They're giving ME figs now! I'm glad to see municipalities using interesting solutions for common problems. Canada and the US are too wealthy overall to have problems with homelessness. Countries can't forget their People.

The MR16 halogen bulb is a great example. They're used extensively in retail, and in homes where artwork is being displayed. They have mirrored reflectors, they're usually low-voltage, and they run a very hot 50 watts. The LED equivalents haven't been very effective for the price, and some have to have a small fan inside to cool the lamp (if your store is quiet, like your average jewelry store, you can hear them spinning).