Phi for All

I fault them when they've exhausted ways to reduce and maximize reasonably, and turn their sights on reducing their tax burdens, or increasing subsidies (paid for by everyone) for already profitable companies, or shaving income from productive middle class workers to make executive salaries or stockholder returns look better. There are a lot of decent corporations out there who wouldn't squawk too much if regs were tightened, who only take advantage of sloppy loopholes other corporations have widened in their favors because it's been made legal. I wish one of the big guys would step up and call out these practices that don't invest in our economy so much as bend it over a barrel and sodomize it. I'd love to see a US company set a goal for benefiting US citizens through education. We won't stay at the top unless our workers are better educated. We will keep letting ourselves be manipulated until the majority are better educated. It's hard to pull the rug out from under someone smart enough to see what you're doing.

Explanations pulled from one's ass are a) not easily scrubbed clean by reason, b) usually accompanied by a lot of hand-waiving, and c) apt to stink upon close examination.

I used to rant about a minimum subsistence standard that nobody was allowed to mess with on the basis of worth, the way many like to treat welfare. I'd amend that now to include all the things you mention here (I was less liberal then). If you're a human on Earth in a big enough town, you shouldn't be homeless, you should have basic clothing and healthy food, access to healthcare, and education at any level through college. We could pay for this with some livable changes. Capitalism has still flourished when the 1% get heavily taxed on income far above the norm. The wealthy have continued to get wealthier under heavier regulations. The kind of wealth we need to get a handle on is the wealth that comes from playing the system. Like some stock and banking investments that have nothing to do with helping the economy grow a new business, and everything to do with squeezing out short term returns that just pillage those who actually work in order to benefit the investors. Like paying lobbyists to work with politicians to make it cheaper for you to do business, also at other's expense. Some of our biggest corporations make their highest margins on lobbying dollars. GE, usually among the top ten most profitable corps on the planet, spent US$84M lobbying Congress from 2008-2010, and during that time received US$4.7B in tax rebates. They were one of 30 big US corps that actually paid more money to lobby than they contributed in taxes during that time. We've allowed regs to become so relaxed, these companies have no allegiance to the capitalistic republic that gave them their corporate charter in the first place.

OMG, is that yours, or did you hear that elsewhere? Dang, I just got this irony meter for Christmas! It was an order of magnitude more sensitive than the last one that got broken. The technology just can't keep up anymore.

There are those envious of the wealth, but in my opinion, the problem is the mentality amassing great wealth engenders. If we all start out equally wealthy in terms of income, savings and investments, it seems rational and reasonable to pool a certain amount for the greater good. We build infrastructure, we invest in programs that benefit all that can take advantage of them. Really expensive things like swimming pools and airports and hospitals and national highway systems can happen because we all invest in them. Then, some folks start amassing wealth. They start pulling away from the commons gradually, build a pool for some privacy, maybe put their houses on bigger plots of land for some more insulation. Buy a jet so you don't have to fly commercially. It becomes a mindset, I think, where the wealth is an entitlement to cocoon yourself away in a world of upgraded luxuries. You start thinking that the police the public funds pay for aren't adequate. You need private security. You start thinking your money can protect your children better than public funded institutions. You pay to lobby to allow guns in your society because you think you can protect your kids better than the police can protect everybody's kids, which floods your whole society with dangerous weapons, ironically making it almost impossible for anyone to protect their families. For me, it's certainly not envy. I know some very wealthy people who don't spend their wealth on insulating themselves from the masses. They start foundations that benefit the existence of life around the globe, or support those that already do. I also know wealthy people who don't give a rat's ass about allegiance to a country or society, yet wrap themselves in patriotism for profit, because the wealth is all that matters to them. For me, the inequality of wealth is all about the irrationality of giving that much power to people who care less every day about me and those I know.

The pull is constant, but the matter is changing, heating up as it nears the accretion disk, right? As it heats, it's gravitational energy changes as well, so while the pull is constant, it's pulling on matter that's changing rapidly as it's being pulled. That's the way I've understood it. An earthly example that's not entirely dissimilar (maybe only in my mind) is a roasting marshmallow. The heat surrounding it in the fire is constant, but the marshmallow itself changes how the heat affects it. It starts out white and reflects a certain amount of the heat, but as it goes from white to burnt black, it reflects less and absorbs more.

It irks me when people claim things assertively after redefining a term so it has nothing useful or meaningful about it. "This is the way the universe is", 100% certainty with absolutely no falsifiability to even suggest we might be able to test such an idea. It's almost pointless to discuss since there's no evidence to reference. This particular rant is an affront to my humanist side, but my objections are really more about rational thinking. I can't imagine how this philosophy could make me a more effective human. And talking about it is 100% guesswork.

... and there goes our grant. So close.

So the OP has this info from a friend? And just asks a simple question, wanting to gain some knowledge? And then when the membership offers honest answers and a potential end to ignorance, the OP pulls out his dishonest agenda and we see the crackpot in innocent friend's clothing. You're not crazy, you're an intellectually dishonest person who is trying to explain something you don't understand by ignoring everyone else's explanation. That's what I think.

! Moderator Note Done, because trying to correct misunderstandings is nearly impossible when one insists on redefining familiar terms.

Then you must be unique (I think that's what you wanted to hear; does that make it bullshit too?). In my experience, even though pain from an injury doesn't completely go away while recovering, it lessens when you aren't thinking about it. A quick query of friends and family reveals the same, sorry for the anecdotal evidence. Many studies show the brain controls it all. Doesn't it seem reasonable that the brain can affect pain levels? I think it's possible I'm still right, but you're so fixated on some evil higher power who's out to get you, that you never stop thinking about it, and thus you get no benefit from distraction. I'll take you at your word for your observation, but only because I have little choice. My incredulity is based on how untrustworthy anyone's perspective about themselves is. We often wear heavy filters when we look deep inside.

! Moderator Note No perspective to indicate size. Could be a foot long. If you post any crap like this here again, I'll flag you as a spammer. We're not here to promote your channel. Thread closed.

I'm sorry you chose to react to the bullshit rather than to the legitimate questions I asked. Have you ever been distracted from the pain by something that takes your full attention, only to have the pain return when you think about it again? That's not fully physiological, is it? Two questions. Please answer.

This needn't be personal. I understand the frustration though, since this discussion has gone far beyond any definition of skepticism. Every response supports a conclusion that this is about denial.

! Moderator Note One of the Admin's Rules for Moderators is not to delete anything. Moderators only "hide" posts for valid reasons, like when people keep talking about everything BUT the science. They show up gray for us, and we can toggle them back into view if another Mod thinks it's unfair. No posts have been hidden in this thread. If you posted in this thread and it's not here now, I would fire your computer guru today. A reconstruction of what you lost would be more constructive than talking about losing it, at this point, please.

I have such a hard time with people who didn't study science, but now find they have the ability to redefine it in such a way that it makes sense to them, and nobody else. They cherry-pick what they think makes sense, ignore the rest, and consider themselves very clever. Does this happen in other fields of study, or does science get a disproportionate amount? "Bridges need to be rigid for strength, yet flexible when storms bring wind and rain. That's why the ONLY bridge-building material that should be used is pasta." "I've never taken any dance classes, but I know you have to have a lot of rope to spin yourself that fast." "It's clear to me that making food look good makes people fat, so my low calorie recipes are covered in dead bugs." Again, the problem isn't not knowing the science. It's being so incredibly certain your wrongness is right that you assert things without checking.

I find it incredibly intellectually dishonest that you have to change my words to refute them. That you think this is acceptable is unacceptable. If you continue to strawman and redefine and obfuscate, what do you hope to learn?

This seems like punditry. This is the kind of statement made by a talking head that gets other heads nodding. Somehow, the nodding stops a LOT of those heads from thinking about the statement, to see how utterly silly it really is. Can you imagine politics not being influenced by science?! It's bad enough that the ignorance runs this deep. Without some voice of reason, the voice of profit is the only one heard. The prior attempts to deflect from pertinent questions are also media tactics. We're talking about an objective consilience about a global dilemma, while you're trying to make everything anecdotal and subjective. That's not science.

! Moderator Note Via the Report feature, the OP has suggested that this work MUST be viewed as a whole, without picking at the individual threads in the process. This would require each participant in the discussion to have read the OP's book, from which our members have requested to be spared (Rule 2.7). Further, this is not how even loose peer review works. You can't expect scientists in any field to let you get away with "Read the whole thing in its entirety or you won't understand" when you start out with something like "First mix the cement with adequate amounts of milk". Picking at inconsistencies and errors, especially early on in an idea, is what makes a scientific hypothesis strong, or shows it's wrong. We require a synopsis of this idea. We're here to discuss the science of it, but we aren't here to broaden your readership, or listen to you gripe about past treatment. We want to discuss any viable science in your idea. We don't want to spend any more of this year or next on hearing how stupid scientists are, or how any bull-headed/curmudgeonly/stuck-in-the-mud stereotype you dream up keeps you from being able to discuss the science. We're waiting to discuss the science. Again, if you have problems with this post (or my "methodology"?), Report it rather than waste further Unified Theory discussion time on it.

Bomb Conservativia!

Merry Christmas to all.

! Moderator Note Kalopin, it seems clear you aren't ready to defend this idea with the minimum rigor we expect in our Speculations section. I'm closing this, so please don't open the subject again unless you can dig a bit deeper to support the conclusions you've made.

It's a cynical, negative opinion, also based on anecdotes from within the industry. I couched it that way, it's the way I feel, and it certainly isn't aimed at anyone farther down the industry ladder than the decision-makers at the top who spent so much on misinformation, and suppression of related technology that threatened profits. I ask the question of the young people here involved because I find many such are ignoring the science because it clashes with what they were raised to believe by parents in the industry. It's a valid line of questioning, imo, since it could help explain so much of the denial. And lastly, please don't strawman me, Ophi. I never said I was anti-oil, don't believe in plastic. I'm anti-sleazy practices. Oil isn't alone in this, but they are a big part of the topic here. You had to really go out of your way to deny me a voice in this, but I don't for one second believe my use of oil products means I'm not allowed to criticize their questionable practices. Shame on you for suggesting that. Should I stop criticizing President Clinton for the 1996 Telecommunications Act? I voted for him, after all.

We established from your first post that you hadn't read the whole thread. Has that changed significantly? If it had happened, it would be unacceptable. We're pretty clear here about attacking ideas, and not the people who have them. If you detect some kind of smear campaign, know that I certainly haven't seen it, but you should feel free to Report Posts that attack you personally. Again, much of the frustration comes from you still calling yourself a skeptic after supposedly reading this whole thread and learning why a consilience on a particular model is the most trustworthy form of evidential support, no matter if it's a point of history, law, or science. Skeptics don't take any single source's word for anything, but they due their diligence and when they come across a consilience like they do with AGW, any person who still calls themselves "skeptical" is what we simply call a "denier". Do your parents or friends work in oil? You have the most messed up, caricature-driven, biased view of science I've ever seen. It causes you to blend fact with conjecture and wishful thinking to form a very stubborn, ignorance-enabling, manipulatable perspective on intelligence. You disparage efforts to clean up smog during the Carter administration, but neglect to consider that much of those clean air efforts continued, despite active Republican efforts to downplay the need (like Ronnie removing Jimmy's White House solar). You don't stop to consider that if we'd done nothing back then, it would be SO MUCH WORSE NOW. We did the same things in Denver, and our once famous "brown cloud" is less than it was before we acted to do things about it. How can you ignore that?! How can you claim it's all science climbing on a "gravy train" of funding, when it's done so much good? How can you ignore the fact that if we didn't have so much pushback from the very people who want to keep polluting, things would probably (historically supported, at least) be even better? I've gotten to the point where it seems anyone who claims to be skeptical after really learning about the consilience, or outright denies AGW, is most likely working for big oil and its subsidiary industries, or has friends and family who do. Or they're lying and they haven't read the evidence.

The way supernatural is defined here at SFN, it's more about whether an explanation is measurable by normal scientific processes. Many folks believe in ghosts, but there's no evidence that conclusively shows there's no natural explanation for each piece of "evidence" presented. None of the events are repeatable, so they have no predictive power. Science has no meat to sink its teeth into without those, and since we're interested in describing the natural world, these lacking explanations are deemed "supernatural", problems for which science is the wrong tool, or perhaps they're just... imagination. As far as the circle being natural, I call stretching the definition into unrecognizability, or maybe the No True Scotsman fallacy. Circles certainly exist everywhere, but adding the word "perfect" to almost anything renders it suspect. "Circles don't exist in nature." "Sure they do, and here's a list of 100 of them off the top of my..." "No PERFECT circles exist in nature."