Phi for All

Wow, you're always hard to pin down, but you're (usually) not obtuse about it. How about the same situation, but the guys are looking out over the Grand Canyon. Forget about safety, forget about what they should be doing differently to gain the same view. Pretending to be obtuse in order to make things work out for you in a discussion won't work twice (or at all).

Oh Ed, I never considered that angle with breastfeeding before. Making something seem uncomfortable because there's now an alternative is classic brand marketing strategy. It's worked to sell many products, but also gave us some of our weirdest taboos.

I prefer iNow's answer to that post as well. I have no interest in performing for his Gish Gallop approach. I do all that work posting relevant facts for thirty questions, only to have them dismissed in his usual short-sighted, fuckem-I-got-mine-everything's-fine manner. And there's no dispelling this kind of fear, except with the very knowledge and perspectives waitforufo and other conservative mindsets reject. These are self-imposed, anti-intellectual hobbles to reason, but they must feel pretty good around the ankles, and they do keep things moving really slooooooooooooooooooowly.

conway has requested a ban, and we've responded with a year's suspension, to give him time to let his ideas mature. Kudos at least for recognizing a problem, conway. Best of luck.

You still misrepresent me, even though I feel you are reading my posts. You're making up the bit about not giving credit for discussion. Isn't it inherent in replying that you're at least giving that? And isn't there a big difference between "At least you're willing to discuss this" and "You never address the valid points made, but instead sick up these well-refuted, ignorant talking points as if they're a sound, valid rebuttal"? I do see how different my approach is from iNow's. Do you see how different waitforufo's approach is? In fact, I wrote about how solid iNow's was, and I watched it get dismissed in the very way I mentioned above. I don't DEMAND that people recognize my opinions, but when solid facts and sound logic get dismissed by "some people may get hurt by your suggestions", I feel like an emotional response is all the conservative mindset understands. You don't seem to grasp historically what's worked to make America strong, and the whole idea of long-range investment in People, but you're not really willing to kick widows and orphans to the curb like you have pot-smokers and poor minorities because it's hard to paint them as unworthy. I feel there's hope when I find common grounds, but as soon as any big-picture solutions are suggested, the conservative mindset gets scared and starts pulling out the irrational arguments again. No offense, but maybe you should address the points, join the discussion, instead of misrepresenting what I say. Can you talk about iNow's heavily researched arguments instead? Maybe try to rebut instead of dismiss? And no using the passive/aggressive "I have strong opinions about America, but I don't have to support them because I'm Canadian" approach. Yeah, you know what I'm talking about.

Thanks for asking. I've observed, in my lifetime, an America that was rooted in it's People. We made investments in Them, which paid off in so many ways educationally, technologically, and economically. We were at a point, when I was just becoming aware of such things, where the wealthiest seemed to understand that each should give to the public trust, from each according to his ability, for each according to his needs. Then the age of the efficiency experts dawned in the corporate world, and when they were finished being efficient, they set their sights on ways to trim bone instead of meat. They needed a way to judge the worth of the people receiving supposedly inalienable rights and government benefits. They worked to shift their tax burdens to the People while also shifting benefits for all into benefits for them alone by raging against social program spending. It all looks as if the conservative mindset wants to deny that all humans, let me repeat that, ALL HUMANS, deserve our basic help. There should be things Americans especially can't have taken away arbitrarily, just because conservatives don't think they're worthy if they don't jump through the right hoops (food, shelter, education, healthcare, things needed to cover the basics of staying alive in the 21st century - not the 18th). Hey tar, my wife shared something with me this morning. It was a couple of pictures showing the difference between equality and justice. It showed three people watching a sporting event over a fence. One very tall, one medium, and one short. They were each standing on equal boxes, so they had equality, but the short guy still couldn't even see the game. The tall guy had a penthouse view. The second picture shows justice. The tall guy gives his box to the short guy, and now they aren't equal in that regard, but everyone is now enjoying the game. Why does the conservative mindset seem to want to deny everyone getting justice, and enjoying life? You impose so many "You're not worthy" clauses to every bit of legislation that it's caused us to have the highest incarceration rate in the world. Do you really believe we're that horrible? We're raking in record profits while the conservative mindset has allowed corporations to ignore their duties to the country that gives them charter. We have poverty and starving children still, but they aren't worthy in so many people's eyes. I believe we need to remove the barriers that are keeping Americans ignorant and fettered. Most of those barriers seem to be adaptations of the conservative mindset. That is what's with it.

One of the most long-winded strawman fallacies I've ever read. Considered. Rejected for poor logic and arguing something I never said. Please consider thinking before putting words in people's mouths.

The probability of you (as an average person) stumbling upon something missed by people who have dedicated their study and lives to science is exremely low. Sure, it's happened before, but still within that statistically low probability. And that's why we have discussion forums like this, and why this particular site also has a Speculations section for those who think science has it wrong. If you post there, make sure to read the rules. We like evidence to back up any assertions made (because that's what mainstream science has already done and continues to do, build a preponderance of trustworthy evidence). So to answer your question, you should figure out what it is you want to share to begin with, maybe a synopsis that gives us some meat without giving away any intellectual property. We'll do what scientists always do, we'll check your arguments and evidence and discuss what's right and wrong about it. Lather, rinse, repeat at each step. This should give you a pretty great idea about whether you need to start protecting your ideas, or if they're based on misinformation and misunderstanding. Science isn't about proof. It's about piling up the evidence that supports your idea, while simultaneously looking for ways it's wrong. That's what we do here, we give a fairly rigorous look at all new ideas, and I hope that's why so many people come here to do what you're doing. We aren't going to sugar coat anything, and you'll get replies from amateurs, talented hobbyists, and professionals at all levels and many disciplines. Enjoy, welcome, and good luck! edit to add: Stop using stupid to describe what you feel sometimes. The word you want is ignorant, which is easily fixable using the exact method you chose (good job!). You can't fix stupid.

What is it with conservative mindsets?! It's like you're translating my words with your nifty right-wing decoder ring. Where did I say waitforufo's questions weren't valid? What I actually said was that he ignores valid, sound answers and rebuttals to his questions and arguments. Your decoder ring is obviously broken. Or perhaps it was designed that way. That's anything but fair. That's the problem.

Oooops. 1. David Bowie, Alan Rickman... 2. Michael Jackson, Sammy Davis Jr, Judy Garland... 3. Robin Williams, Marilyn Monroe, Kurt Cobain...

I've been venting on tar because I've gotten tired of watching valid, sound arguments get waffled away or denied outright. You're cut from the same cloth, so I'll defer to iNow's excellently informative response to your most important question. His response is reasonable and undeniable. Seriously, all of his points are fact checked - read them and check yourself instead of making up what you think he's saying. If you'd stop trying to dress his arguments up in rags so you can just point and laugh, you might appreciate a surgical and nuanced insight into very specific problems. You've never given credit for sound, valid arguments made by your opponents in a discussion. You appear to find it much easier to whip out the smug brush and paint it all despicable and unworthy of consideration.

Tough to breathe through sand, I would imagine. This is a big part of what I'm talking about. You've complained about so many inadequacies, but the minute you think there's something liberal or socialistic that might help, you suddenly claim "we are already doing it right". Nobody knows what you stand for, so it's very hard to take your claims seriously. You complain with no purpose, you strategize using misinformation, and you seem unable to grasp so many fundamental concepts. We have all these historical instances of potential success to draw upon, other countries who have solved some of the problems we face. We even have our own successes to build upon. The GI Bill educated so many that wouldn't have otherwise had a chance at college, but rather than recognize that success, you want to doubt whether educating more would be even more effective. That's part of your crazy. We get a healthcare system that insures more people for a bit less money, and you doubt whether going all the way with it is a good idea. We have all this precedence for success, but your narrow-minded fear keeps blocking progress, helping make the lying liar fat cats fatter, while your brain idles in neutral, and the rest of us who care about liberty and justice get to watch you vacillate. It's ugly, and it's frustrating. You give our money to industries that are well-established, then you give us excuses why this makes good business sense. Unbelievably, you gripe about the public feeding from the public trough, but don't bat an eye when the corporations hog the table. They're called public funds for a reason, and I find the mega-corporations reasons non-compelling.

You're crazy the way the crackpots who come here are crazy. You think you're being "skeptical", using your judgement to doubt solutions you aren't familiar with, but you never bother to dispel your skepticism by informing yourself. Instead, you sick up these bogus talking points that have nothing to do with what's really happening, but you can't know that because you buy into the bullshit fed to you by the media. The media you call "liberal", even though it's owned by conservative corporations since 1996. "Liberal" isn't the right word for them. "Fascist" is much closer to the truth you're denying. It's not skepticism if you don't bother to educate yourself about what you're afraid of, what you're questioning the wisdom of. The spin doctors you are obviously enamored of are tickled pink when you spread their BS without question (like BernieCare will be worse, just because). You are a poor critical thinker based on what you post. It's not "My way or the highway", it's obvious to every person involved in this thread who has any type of intellectual background, especially in science areas. Your "logic" is pure "this makes sense to me" garbage, and fails to inform anyone of what you actually believe in. I've seen so many people try to tell you this in a hundred different ways. This is 101.

What we have now is certainly better than before ACA, but it still allows middlemen to profit unnecessarily in an industry we can easily do without, healthcare insurance. We simply don't need to pay for those double digit profits, not when (AGAIN) we have examples of single payer universal systems we could follow to a tee and get the same results from. Why don't you get that?! Your link is just another bunch of refuted objections, fearful and denying, pretending there's a problem paying for universal healthcare. Is it that you don't know how to use numbers? Is it that you don't understand why private profit jacks up our costs for no reason? Why do you ignore all the success from the other countries? Why don't you understand the simple math involved in costs between private and publicly funded healthcare? I thought iNow explained it perfectly, so a child could understand, but he was right, you ignored him. The UK spends half of what we do on healthcare. Somehow, you gave your brain to the profiteers and their prophets, and let them convince you that we're not as smart as the United Kingdom, that we can't do what they do, that we're somehow fundamentally different and require healthcare that's more expensive and has a higher mortality rate, fewer doctors per patient, and fewer hospital beds. You support raping the People for profit for an industry that has no more relevance in this society. Leeches, ticks, sucking us dry when public funding is SO much more efficient and beneficial to our society when it comes to health. I don't expect you to understand this at all. You just don't have the skills, and all I really want is for people like you to stay out of the way, and stop being such obstacles. I realize there's no hope for you, that you're very comfortable listening to the lying liar's lies, that they somehow make you feel better about yourself by replacing intelligence with "common sense", that wonderfully deceptive "logic" that works so well on people who've shifted their brains to neutral and handed the keys to the documented crazies.

Policy governance in space is a big issue right now. How do we use space peacefully, to the benefit of all Earth? If you're a sovereign nation, do you own the air space above you past where your planes can fly? If you're a poor African nation that just happens to be on the equator where all the rich nations are parking their geosynchronous satellites, should you have a say in who is doing what above you? Space debris is also a problem. Each bit of debris that collides with other bits in orbit creates more debris. We're trying to reduce the possibility of creating more with new protocols, but what should we do with the debris that's already out there? Who is responsible if debris destroys someone's technology? If I were you, I'd also include a bit about how we're the only species capable of leaving the planet to colonize elsewhere. We're also capable of bringing other species with us. Earth will be destroyed eventually when our sun burns through its hydrogen, and we only know of this one place that holds life in such diversity. I think it's important that we spread some seeds throughout our galaxy.

It does nothing to remove the effects of his hands and the heat associated with him, and a mask still allows for respiration at a reduced rate, so it's not removing all the air flow. Since it's such an obvious process objection, why do you think he should use it? We're just going to object that he hasn't removed as much outside influence as he could.

Well, if you have to change what I meant by my assertion, do you really disagree with it? Do you really feel that a heavily suggestive billboard is more explicit than a big picture of people fucking? I agree that the heavy suggestions of sex don't go over as many heads as we think, but blatant sexuality isn't always the major message depicted, whereas there's little else to talk about with the fucking billboard.

Brain in neutral, pundits behind the wheel. I'm noticing lots of parallels between conservatives and crackpots. Both seem to latch on to isolated bits of data without bothering to stitch them together to form information that actually informs them. If they bothered, they might see how none of the bits they like hearing really go together, and may actually be counterproductive to their overall ideal. And because they didn't use any critical thinking skills to reach these conclusions, they're firmly, 100% convinced they're right. It's downright bizarre, and shows why a thread like this was necessary. These conservatives defend W's overhaul of Medicare just because they hate the concept. This hate allowed them to shift their brains to neutral, let the pundits take over, and support an administration that was favored because W was a businessman (like Trump), and of course THAT'S what we all need! Then they continued to support him when he kicked America in the teeth and took away their power to negotiate for Medicare drugs. What a GREAT BUSINESS DECISION, thank God for W! I'm sure any CEO in the country would get a huge bonus for giving away that much of their company's power. Stick-your-head-in-the-sand mentality doesn't protect anything. Conservatives forget that we can't breath like that.

This is exactly my point, and I don't think allowing public sex is in line with this stance, even if it is a natural bodily function. My concern is more about an organic approach to sexuality. Children should be encouraged to ask questions about anything they're curious about, especially about sex since there is so much potential for grief as well as pleasure. So we answer questions openly, but try not to push the kids beyond what they want to know. And we do things like not show people having sex on billboards, or public TV, or in public in general.

That's a pretty typical fear response. Find something you can spin as common sense, then proceed to let it keep you in ignorance and fear forever. "I'm not gonna listen to anything else after you said 'them'". I'm not surprised. Same with the "teach personal responsibility" BS. Sounds so good, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, go it alone, don't ask for help from anybody, all the great people did it this way! Bullshit. We're a cooperative species that's smarter than anything else on the planet. We have obligations if we're going to use those brains responsibly, and a first good step would be using our strengths instead of letting people cagier, more tricksy than you talk you out of it. We thrive when we work together. Personal responsibility is SO much more powerful when it includes the people who helped you get where you are. I'm so sick of seeing decent people being fooled again and again by lies from lying liars. We're social creatures, and you/them are just going to have to realize it and figure out how you're going to deal with the truth. Public funds have the greatest potential for overall benefit in our society. You/them remain blind, even when it's explained ad nauseam that universal healthcare, as practiced by every top country except us, is cheaper than what we do now, and provides everyone with a higher level of overall care. We could have a system like that, except for you/them bastards. You'd rather suffer through a half-assed, more expensive system just so you can keep the medical insurance middlemen in business, and not rock the boat, and keep being skeptical of EVERYONE ELSE THAT MAKES IT WORK. I'm not a violent guy, but I'd really like to slap you across the face for that. You/them are eternal fearful skeptics, always saying it won't work while you cover eyes and ears as it's being explained to you how it could. And you/them do that with everything you're afraid of; welfare, immigration, the prison system, abortion. If you want to stop this us vs them mentality, then start supporting a more mature look at today's issues, and stop letting the media turn everything into an argument over the fence. Life has more shades of gray than you're willing to allow, and that's seriously hampering your critical thinking skills. I think you feel the need to break your objections down to very specific, very subjective and personal anecdotes because none of your arguments really hold up in the general case. You've always cherry-picked isolated stories that support you while missing the point of general trends and observable reality. And that's more "them" tactics. It's how your pundits get you guys to put your brains in neutral while they go joy-riding with your judgement. Please don't take this personally. I'm so fed up with folks defending positions for "skeptical" reasons, and shutting themselves off from reasonable perspectives. This country is doing massively well but the People have been cut out of the equation. That's not going to change without some backbone decisions, and some smart people taking a stand, while the rest of you/them figure out what you really do believe in so you can see how badly you're being represented in your own country.

Forgive me, but your statement precluded it being false. He doesn't need to prove it because you set it up that the statement is "proven to be TRUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUE!"

I think sex is different than some of the other issues mentioned because of the emotional and physical vulnerability, and the exploitation potential. Explaining why Aunt Maisy is in that box you're putting in the ground has it's own problems, but they aren't the same as trying to explain watching a public blowjob to an 8-year-old. I agree that there are some unreal expectations placed on kids and their sexuality. I detest the whole kid beauty pageant scene, and I think setting those kinds of expectations on kids is criminal. And the idolization of the sexually innocent yet awakening waif is part of what stems from that. Unreal expectations regarding a complicated part of human development, with some interesting hormonal chemicals to help it come at you really fast and furious. It's too much. For me, the control is to help a child find out about themselves without hiding anything they're genuinely interested in knowing. I don't feel I could do that if people were free to impose their sexual activity on my child in public.

This is the kind of parameters I was talking about. How about this? If he puts a clear glass bowl over the apparatus to remove air currents and heat transfer, and shows us all sides of the paper so we can see there are no metal strips that could be affected by a magnet, and let us examine the toothpick to make sure it's just wood, we isolate most of the outside effects that could move the spinner. If you can do this in a single shot with no jump cuts or turning off the camera, it would also help. Any ideas for isolating vibrations from the table? If this can be done, I'd be much more impressed if he can make the spinner move, no matter how close he stands.

I wanted to say how reasonable, smart, and hopeful your list is. There's no fear there, just a desire for fairness and a return to greatness via rational routes. Not nostalgic but rather practical about our history. If you boiled this down for Red Scare conservatives to "We want to invest in the People of this country, to support the backbone of America", it might even appeal to the Fearful. We just need them to see that corporations aren't People, they employ People. Right now, corporations are ticks in our ears, lying while they suck some more blood. Along with taxes, I'd like to get some regulatory teeth back. I sure would like to see us fix our backbones enough to deal with this corporate/media incest we've allowed to happen.

Doubtful. Have you ever known anyone who was delusional about just the one thing? Delusion is a mechanism, it's not a one-off symptom. And if the single thing is true, there's no delusional diagnosis to avoid, right?