Phi for All

Do you see how treating another group (men in this case) unequally is what caused this problem in the first place? If you aren't willing to help correct the pay disparity, aren't you tacitly approving it? Please offer your idea on how to correct gender pay disparity in a way that satisfies your desire to have your cake and deny it to women too.

We actually had some discussion backstage about some kind of distinction so newcomers would know who could be trusted to provide mainstream answers that won't get you kicked out of school. I think we can set up a user group to show a banner that proclaims this person a Homework Mentor (or something). Our Resident Experts can always be trusted, especially in their areas of expertise. Beware of Mods trying to sell you "atomic clocks". Those things are bulky and look horrible on your wrist. Why sacrifice style for a few orders of magnitude more accuracy? If you're interested in elegant, classic timekeeping, I'm happy to help, for a modest phi....

It's a shame some folks have to come into a discussion with such a chip on their shoulder. They pretend their ideas are what is offensive instead of their behavior. All we want to talk about are the ideas, but their attitude makes everything personal. I hate seeing minds go to waste like this. Perhaps this is the perspective he learned from his "dad'? I don't think it's working.

And I agree with this. I simply dislike having the stance behind the event misrepresented. And in this instance, the view that it's a problem caused by both men and women is not only wrong, it's flat out harmful. I think it encourages men to do nothing about the problem unless they see equal effort from women. This just isn't a case where helping women is a detriment to men, and it's frustrating to see it portrayed that way.

It's like terrorism, Mordred. They use cheap tactics, irrational emotions, and rigor-free bombing of your mainstream explanations, hoping to get a big, disproportionate response from the intellectuals they despise. Cowards, tiny-minded and juvenile, just trying to justify their belligerence and hatred of what they don't understand.

I certainly do. Insisting on treating all equally, at this point in this movement, ignores the fact that something extraordinary needs to happen to correct the CURRENT inequality. The problem with your centrist stance in this case is that NOTHING will be done about the problem, since you're advocating that both genders need equality, instead of women needing some extra attention on their plight because the scales are already tipped against them. Your stance insures that people will do nothing about the problem women are having, because they'll see it as a men and women problem that cancels each other out. Of course the end result should be treating all equally. But you can't seem to see that bringing awareness to unequal pay that abuses women is what is needed to change the situation. You see it as unfair to men, and that frankly baffles me. You'll do nothing to help women stand up for themselves because you think that would be unfair to men. Huh.

Here's something I really want you to embrace. We get SO MANY people through here that were exactly as you describe yourself during your early education, even up to the point where they have your revelation about ignorance vs knowledge. The difference is, most of those folks didn't do what you did, enroll in formal coursework. Instead, they decided to teach themselves science. The result for most is a sketchy, unfounded grasp of popular science that makes them think they understand really complex concepts, based on watching some unreviewed videos and reading some 250 word blog articles. These people are deluded into thinking physics and cosmology are things you can just pick up along the way, with no rigor or methodology involved. Sadly, they show up here claiming science must be wrong, because there are things about it that just aren't very intuitive. So I have to say how proud I am of you for going back to formal education. Learning mainstream science (or whatever you want to pursue at Vanderbilt) is like laying a good foundation for your home. If you want it to last, and mean something, you prepare it to be strong. Congratulations, and stop beating yourself up. It's causing you to approach situations negatively, and you need to be on the lookout for opportunities now. You rarely find those when your outlook is gloomy.

So your tactics so far are to ask a question you don't want answered, but when it's answered anyway, you deny the answer and claim nobody knows. And you think that's a valid approach. And you're really belligerent, claiming you'll be banned on ideas instead of breaking the rules of civility and evidence. You're very par for the creationist course. You bring absolutely no new lies to the table for debunking, choosing to rest on dubious and misrepresented laurels. Meh is a good response to your posts.

Another "I know squat about science, it makes no sense to me, so it's wrong" argument from incredulity. Completely unassailable since it was derived emotionally, from religious beliefs, making it impervious to reason. I get tired of bothering with people who are proud of their ignorance, and work hard to keep it sacred and unchanging.

We've had so many of these discussions about science as a belief. None of them are interesting, since they rely on a tortured definition of "belief" that somehow includes absence of belief as belief. Like bald is a hair color, or my lack of stamp-collecting means I'm an anti-stamp collector, someone who doesn't believe in stamp collecting. It's also painfully obvious there's a HUGE agenda going on with dad. He's here to preach, not to learn or discuss. Is there a good reason to go through this crap ad nauseam?

Science has it's definitions and uses of the concept of time, but they often don't match up well with definitions others use. Mathematically, or in use with our coordinate system, time is part of equations we can use to quantify rates of change. It's got different definitions and uses in philosophy and religion, so they don't interchange well. Thus they're a ripe target for the creationists who want to trap long-winded science-types in a semantic and circular argument.

I don't find any evidence for god(s) or unicorns either, so the default is they don't exist. How is that a belief? It looks more like absence of belief due to absence of evidence. Neither here nor there, I suppose, since you reveal that you weren't interested in learning anything anyway.

I don't drink, so we'd all be better off without alcohol.

Why sorry?

Mostly, it's been never finding evidence that the laws of physics were ever any different in the far past on Earth. That's how science works, looking at evidence. If there is none, we assume the answer is no, until something shows us differently.

Except a shadow isn't a physical thing. It's a space where a light source is occluded. If light is absorbed by an object rather than reflected, it will add mass through energy. Block the light with shadow and the mass is removed, but it wasn't because the shadow had negative mass. Limited analogy: It's more like a canopy that keeps the rain from adding mass to objects below it. The canopy doesn't have negative mass, it just keeps extra mass from accumulating on the objects.

My POV sees men paying a dollar for a cupcake (the normal price) as normal, not discrimination. That women make 70 cents to that man's dollar, and so only pay 70 cents for the cupcake is showing that inequality for what it is. Yet your POV says that's discrimination in reverse somehow. Women aren't being favored in this situation, but I'm not sure you'll ever be able to see it that way. You're too fixated on the the unfairness, and don't understand why spotlighting the fact that this is what women deal with every day is valid, while claiming it's unfair for men isn't. There is a difference between men being paid more vs women being paid less, as you yourself point out. However, you don't respect that stance since you then claim it's all discrimination of one group against another, instead of what you said earlier, that WOMEN ARE PAID LESS!!!!! This reminds me of your stance that crazy ideas come from both major US political parties, when the evidence clearly shows a preponderance on one side. You can't say that men are being discriminated against by any of the suggestions put forth so far. Remember how what the men are paying is the normal price?

This is the part all of us need to work on. Taking a personal feeling, and turning it into a "we" situation to make it seem like more of a mainstream POV. Not singling you out, EdEarl. "We" quite often includes those who couldn't live without the LGBT folks in their lives. People's lives are enormously different in the details, which drives so many things in our society. If people weren't so different, we'd only need one brand of every type of product, only one flavor of ice cream. In fact, that's what this argument is like, it's like saying rum raisin is an unnecessarily complicated flavor and we'd be better off without it.

It never ceases to amaze me how your perspective works. In the instance you're mis-describing, the normal price of the baked goods were a dollar. That's what a white male was charged, normal price, $1. Got that? Now bear with me. Some people were charged less to show how pay disparity works. MEN WEREN'T CHARGED MORE, I REPEAT, MEN WEREN'T CHARGED MORE!!!!!! You obviously perceive this as unfair, and you should, but it's what's been going on with women's pay for quite some time now. Yet, you still perceive all this as being "additional obstacles" thrown up at men to even the playing field. I'm sorry, but wtf does paying women fairly do to throw up obstacles at men? Is that really how your mind works, that if we try to fix the system so it STOPS unfairly abusing women, that it makes it harder for men?!

It's not your past that hurts you, imo, it's how you approach this problem. I think you doom yourself with your appraisals. You started out insulting this site, even though you had hoped we might be able to help you. Similarly, you judged your first college dismally, and you had a dismal experience. You sort of shoot yourself in the foot right off the bat, and lead with negativity while still hoping for a positive outcome. I think you're doing the opposite with Vanderbilt, putting them on a pedestal that's just out of your reach. Not as a challenge, but as a way to claim that nothing less will do, so if you fail you can at least say you were going for the big prize. You didn't say why Vanderbilt is the goal, other than you've always wanted to go there (which is NOT a great reason, btw). This is your education, and it should be tailored to what you want to do. Are you wanting to do scientific research? Or is it more prestige that you seek?

I don't know how to respond when you put so much of your imagined motivations into your claims about what I said. You've read into it what you wanted, it's slanted and biased your way, when all I wanted to point out is that there has been an unnecessarily perpetuated male domination for years in many situations, processes, and levels of society. I'm sorry you deny the obvious, and I'm sorry you choose to assign motives I don't have to my words.

Revelations pattern recognition. A lot like the Nostradamus quatrains, people have been seeing patterns in the Book of Revelations for centuries. People see the word "count", and think calculate, then compute, then suddenly the Bible is predicting computers because someone "counted" something.

I so agree with you here. I try to make sure the people who have to put up with me in person, friends and family, get some extra attention as often as possible. Even if it's just a kind word or a cup of tea, these are the people who love you best, and they deserve to be treated by you accordingly.

And not all of them are used to express pain.

Wow, that's pretty dodgy stuff. Why would anyone assume the sounds of released gases from plants that are cut are screams of pain, and not just, you know... the sound of released gases? There are no studies provided, though the first says there have been many. I get the feeling all the studies were similarly vague and unconvincing. If you have any links to a peer-reviewed study, I think that would hold more weight than the sketchy claims of someone who claims it's pain that causes chemical distress calls in plants, instead of simple chemical mechanisms for defense.