Phi for All

Without being too simplistic, we're seeing what happens when the extreme fundamentalists of a religion are given a world stage, which gives them money and influence to increase their efforts. Normally, their own societies would take care of such extremism, but these sects become armed, dangerous, and very difficult to deal with by normal, societal measures. Imagine the Westboro Baptist Church suddenly getting a big boost of money and weapons. And guidance from experts on waging shadow wars. They would probably also suddenly gain a bunch of new members who aren't as interested in killing LGBT folks as much as just killing in general. Causes like that always attract people for many reasons. They could easily go underground, split up into cells to make it harder for the FBI to identify them. Bob's your uncle, religious extremists become terrorists. Or they would say they're doing the Lord's work, which makes them Christian Soldiers.

But for a while, you had the better machine. While it was supported, the tapes were smaller, you had four heads vs VHS two heads, the quality was better, and you had justified bragging rights. By the time I could afford a VCR, VHS had won. But I have a buddy just like you, and he always argued that buying state-of-the-art was expensive, but you had technology nobody else would get for at least a year. You got to enjoy it while everyone else was waiting for the price to come down. He loved that, and I can see the appeal. Bringing this back to medicine, we need pioneering research and products. I look at this sort of like immigration. It's necessary if you want your population to grow. Holding on to the old because it would cost jobs isn't very progressive. Look at how long we've held on to fossil fuels for many of the same reasons. Electric cars won't kill oil, but maybe it will promote more responsible use of it. Similarly, medicine will benefit from cures, and since something else always seems to crop up, it will make room for more research to end the new maladies.

They say every time a bell is rung, it means a LDS has slipped on the way over.

! Moderator Note Hey! Deep breaths, please. Let's focus on the arguments and avoid making things personal. And report this if you want to respond to it, but don't bring it up in the thread.

I don't think that's EVER the way to look at it. Dyson forced giants like Hoover to abandon most of their product lines when he popularized the bagless vacuum cleaner. Iirc, selling people disposable bags was a US$3B industry, turned on its head practically overnight. Sure, some jobs shifted, but Hoover is still around, Dyson has moved on to electric cars I'm told, and the world is a better place for all that, at least when it comes to extra bags in the landfills. As far as the business of medicine, it's really a poor industry to apply business models to. We want care and maintenance to grow, but not diseases and pharmaceuticals. It really bothers me to think some of these folks have money as the priority, rather than helping people treat or avoid disease in a high-density society.

Showing where your ideas lack support isn't ridiculing you. Nobody needs martyrs in science.

That would only be true if there was no gravitational field. Weight measures the pull of gravity.

I don't think there's anything inherent about technological progress that erodes moral fortitude. I think modern marketing wants as wide-open a path to your money as it can get, so they always push the boundaries of what's allowed. Our entertainment used to be more heavily regulated. Some of the shows we watch today would have brought shocked reaction if they aired 20 years ago. Producers would have been crucified. It is interesting to note the attitude towards foul language. It used to be more heavily enforced, but now the perspective seems to be, "These kids hear worse in school all day". Well, of course they have, that's not the point. Do they need to hear it all evening, too?

! Moderator Note Waiting for the "theory". No more wasting people's time for you. Thread closed.

If you knew the theory better, and still had a problem with it, we'd all expect you to ask questions, to help you find out if the problem belongs to you or the theory. When you admit you don't understand the math involved, and show us that you have many misconceptions about the theory (all of which are being patiently pointed out to you, as part of a rigorous methodology), then it becomes a matter of misunderstanding, rather than "going against 'accepted' principles". Does that make sense?

I like that one. That's the way it always seems to me, that the person who wants to overturn modern science based on yootoob vids and Discovery Channel documentalmasturbations is like someone who walks in on a bunch of pro footballers and declares, "I have a way you can win without using your feet at all! And the money you'll save on shoes...."

I don't think you provide enough benefit to justify all the time you suck from reasonable, qualified scientists on this site. You force crackpot ideas in where they don't belong, you can't seem to keep information given to you in your head for more than a couple of posts so you keep asking for it over and over, and you pick on things like our moderation of thread-hijacking, like you don't understand why anyone would actually want you to stay on topic. Some of the very people you're criticizing now with this stupid, stupid, incessant badgering just don't deserve it. Your signal to noise ratio requires sifting through your posts to find any relevance. I just can't believe you get kicked out of so many discussion sites for this kind of behavior, yet you never change, you never seem to equate the two. "What trouble have I caused?" Clues = 0. As you can tell, I've lost all patience with you. I'm amazed (and saddened) that you still get such excellent replies, though you mostly ignore them.

You're just wrong. The passion for science is learning it the right way, not by cobbling together an approximation from sources that are only interested in sensational things they hope will keep you watching, for profit. Once you understand why science is SO SUCCESSFUL, you'll understand that removing emotion from your research, taking a more dispassionate attitude, will help you remove the kind of subjectivity that fuels your emotional attachment. Passion is your enemy once you start using the scientific method. And that's not to say you shouldn't have passion for your work. It's just that you should have that passion because you studied science the right way, not from TV. TV representations are crude and don't give a deep enough explanation, and almost never include tie-ins with other disciplines. Science knowledge is like a jigsaw puzzle cut from the skins of an onion the size of our planet. They intertwine and support and form deep connections. Popsci representations just can't be as detailed as the average viewer can handle, but needs to understand the subject. Remember, science isn't about proving anything, and it's certainly not about proving your idea is right. All we can do is correct mistakes, refute what doesn't match reality, and compile evidence to support our ideas. You've put so much emotional attachment into this idea, that now even though you keep seeing assertions you've made shot down, you're still convinced you're right. That's not science.

Tolerance means a dialogue can happen. After that, many things are possible, most good, some bad. Brussels has nothing to do with tolerance, imo. It's more a question of vigilance, but I think Brussels shows that it's possible to be tolerant, vigilant, and still be vulnerable to extremists.

Holy crap, why don't you just grow up, and accept that you made a mistake, and OWN IT? You're the one who can't resist commenting like a juvenile on legitimate criticism. What, does nobody question your behavior where you live?

Abuse isn't tolerated much when it's all volunteers giving of their time. You are far more trouble than you're worth, even as a negative example.

Raise your hand if it would bother you to be on even playing field with people who are unlike you ethnically. By even playing field, I mean everyone has access to at least a minimum standard of social assistance (nobody is homeless, all have healthy food, shelter, healthcare, and education to the college level). Now go out and be prosperous. I've met lots of folks who don't like the concept one bit. Free market advocates, each one of them, but when it comes to fairness in competing personally, they'd rather not allow folks of few means any way of getting ahead of them. They take it as an insult if you start out poorer but end up richer than they are. You'd be doing the very thing they preach about wanting everyone to do, pull yourself up by your bootstraps and make something of yourself. But if you used to be poor and you surpass these people, they resent the hell out of it. Personally, I wish every person on the planet had access to university. I wish everyone had all the knowledge they felt they could handle. Sometimes I think the reason we can't have this is because of those people, the ones who resent people more knowledgeable than they are, who used to be poorer but now are more prosperous. And of course, the mega-corporations don't want everyone to be really smart. They need that people-for-peanuts formula to satisfy the board.

Isn't that what I said? You think welfare creates dependency, yet you refuse to look at real numbers, in favor of your comfortable lie that nothing is better after 50 years. Guess what? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_dependency All this hatred towards minorities and other welfare recipients, when the "problem" you go ON AND ON AND ON ABOUT is less that 4% of welfare recipients. And guess what else? We have historic evidence that if an administration is firmly behind the programs they're responsible for running, they tend to do a whole lot better (take FEMA for example, and the differences between their handling of hurricanes Katrina and Sandy). So if we stopped listening to people like you, stuck in the past with your 78s skipping on the phonograph, we might actually get those dependency figures down to an even lower single digit number. I invite you to join the rest of us in 2016, where reality doesn't acknowledge your sad old lies.

Stealing this, and pretending I said it first. Plagiaribbonfish.

The reason for this is that you came to your conclusion emotionally. You didn't use reality, or available evidence that supports the LCDM model. You saw what you thought was a flaw, you convinced yourself you were right, and now you're practicing horrible science by trying to "prove" that you're right. I can tell because no real scientist is adamant the way you are. Science requires a degree of uncertainty, and that's why we use theory, instead of "proof". When an hypothesis can't be disproven, when all the evidence supports its conclusions, then we start to call it a theory. It should come as no surprise that scientists would favor the model that has the most supportive evidence over anything less.

Yes. It's a mechanism that has lots of potential in medicine, especially now that we're at a point in our evolution where fight or flight is not as strong a factor in our survival. There's also cloning, so you may be able to grow a new arm using your own tissue, then have it attached. This may be a better way to control the process.

More like he's a saint for doing all your work for you. He shouldn't have had to do that.

I have little connection to a person who fears change, to the point where they'll accept criminal actions by their leaders rather that try to stop it and work towards something better. We've had 50 years of conservative vandalism in this country. 50 years of handing our rights and liberties over to corporations interested in making money at our expense. 50 years of ignoring routine maintenance to our infrastructure. 50 years of degrading minorities with clauses of judgement in our social programs ("We'll treat you as human IF we think you deserve it"). 50 years of these bloated ticks sucking out the lifeblood of this country and giving back nothing in return. I have little connection to a person who thinks dropping gasoline onto a fire will smother it, or somehow make it less costly and damaging. Our current war on terrorism has been the single biggest conservative rape of foreign policy since the Reagan administration. Attacking Islam the way W Bush did was one of the biggest mistakes made in modern history, imo. IF you're a human being, that is, and not an exploitative mega-corporation making money when things are hottest, by engineering the heat yourselves. For the hundreds of thousands of humans who had to die to make those profits possible, I'd like to apologize for my country. I have NO connection at all to a person who would put personal, hateful restrictions on public funding of basic needs, like healthcare, shelter, and food. People like that have convinced themselves (with help from Rush, Beck, O'Reilly, etc) that once someone goes on welfare, it's all parties and the lazy life. They have no connection to reality, no connection to what these programs actually accomplish. They fear it's true, so it is true. Conservatives look to confirm their fears at every turn, cherry-picking the negative, ignoring the positive. And they often try to make it seem that all perspectives should get equal consideration, even when the potential damage is quite apparent. It's clear that this type of behavior is a big part of why we're in the situation we're in. History shows us that we often have to make the changes that are necessary for the country, and then deal with the fallout later. Conservatives will complain, and in their ignorance they'll bitch about higher taxes and forget they're paying far less to insure their health. They'll forget about how much they griped about the horrible roads that are now fixed, and focus on how much more they're paying in taxes. And the conservatives will complain that all this diplomacy isn't making us visibly safer from terrorism, despite the fact that we won't be killing off so many humans, and we'll be having a dialogue among leaders, instead of trying to kill the mosquito with an RPG.

Why are you so bad at preparing an OP for meaningful discussion? It would help to have links for reference. It would sure stop a lot of wasted time asking wtf are you on about. The chupacabra reference sure didn't help clarify anything either. Neither did the comment about the math "being there" a hundred years ago, but not now. How about taking another shot at it?

Violence, chaos, and a lack of regulation are simply more profitable environments for many of the mega-corporations. If we stopped trying to light everything on fire before we deal with it, and just deal honestly, we could use the calm to reduce violence around the world, deal with terrorists economically as well as philosophically (will they need to keep attacking us if we stop drones and carpet bombing?), and hopefully show the world that the current liberal trend can really help overall prosperity. But we have to get rid of the extremist conservative clout in our politics to do it. They've made that abundantly clear. They aren't interested in working legally within the system. Mostly because they're crooks and liars who profit from the corrupt way things are now. I notice Republicans have been re-writing Reagan's history yet again. They no longer tout the oft-told tale of how The Ronald slew the demon commie Soviets without firing a shot, just by using economics against them to bring down the Berlin Wall. Probably because that's the best answer now, dealing diplomatically and economically with the countries that allow terrorists to train within their borders. But lighting things on fire still makes more profit. Margins are high when you steal with a license.