Phi for All

"The voucher thing" not only pulls support from public schools, it asks that the public help fund your private schooling. You think that's right? Public education is public. The voucher system is nothing more than privatizing an asset the People should be in control of, NOT the corporations. It's unbelievable to me that people think it's a good idea to privatize things like education, law enforcement, and the prison system. We want every US citizen to have as much education as possible, and privatizing it will automatically mean at least 15-25% of the public monies will go to private profit. And teachers will be hired for their profitability, not their ability. Profit will continue to be the focus, not educating children (I'm sure at some point, like prisons, it will occur to the corporations that kids who graduate and leave are hurting the bottom line). My incredulity at the sheer cumulative stupidity of fearful conservatives being manipulated by big business hasn't helped much, I will admit. I shake my head and nobody hears it rattle.

! Moderator Note After staff review, we've reinstated this thread and moved it to Speculations. Climate Science is a mainstream section where people go for information, so we need to discuss whether comets cause earthquakes elsewhere. I will also ask the OP to give us a brief synopsis of "a lot of information to go through". This will surely create the interest you desire.

Can you do me a favor and start another thread on this? There's a lot of misunderstanding about this subject, and lots of folks see it as either censorship, or political correctness, or over-sensitivity.

The school curriculum problem seems to, again, be exacerbated by conservative agendas. Right wing conservatives don't trust intellectuals, teachers are the epitome of intellectual pursuit, so we end up with overtesting because RWCs don't trust them to do their jobs. People who should be getting applause every time they walk into a room are being underpaid, under-appreciated, and instead of being helped to do their jobs by their governments, the focus becomes all about accountability and false metrics. Religious RWCs are also pushing faith-based teaching onto the system, clearly at odds with the Constitution, while claiming to uphold it. My county is reeling from recalling our school board members, who for the last two years, were pushing a conservative agenda that was clearly aiming at voucher education and privatization, one of the final holdouts for religious RWCs to be able to slip some gospel in with the science. I think America has a broad political problem with courting big business. That's an area where both sides are guilty. Corporations with the money to lobby legally to change the laws to make more types of lobbying legal are corrupting our system from within, and making it look like progress. It's pretty crazy that we know we've allowed lots of banks and other businesses to pillage our public coffers and ruin personal lives, yet far too many people agree with the RWCs that... drumroll please... we have too much regulation already! But for the most part, it seems pretty clear to me that it's one side, the Right-Wing Conservative side, that is fundamentally handicapped from making rational decisions about how we're governed. Something about their general makeup clearly forces them to react emotionally to most situations, and then studiously avoid learning any facts that might disagree with that initial reaction. So we get people who think they can protect their children better if everyone has guns. Clinging to ignorance is what makes people (and politicians) do the inexplicably weird things that make us wonder if the Republican party has lost its collective mind. I am SO done with the modern media tactic of making all arguments equal, to squeeze the most spotlight potential from every news story. It's dangerous to the part of the public that relies more on information, and actually being informed by the news.

The OP uses the word "artificial" as well. We have two words that exclude humans from nature. Why don't we celebrate the fact that we can make poison like a snake, or claws like a cat, or fur like a bear? Why do the animals who are born with these things separately enjoy more celebrity than the one creature who can duplicate most all of them? Why have we become contemptuous of our intelligence? I don't want to go off-topic with this, but it's not about offense. It's about hijacking the definition of words to hurt people. Retarded should only refer to people with clinically diagnosed mental development problems. It's been co-opted to mean stupid or silly, and there is a movement to correct that, one which this site supports. Thanks for your understanding.

This is a very human trait. We've always done this in response to the unknown. Once you THEMs do something we can relate to, you become US. We have a bond that makes US trust you now. I'd like to think our "tests" become more reasonable as we age. The Leidenfrost Effect. Not sure if it would be effective against lighter fluid, though.

If I assume the OP has a genuine interest, I'd tell him what TheGeckomancer said (without the unnecessary emphasis; this is an important enough message on its own). Cancer patients are being offered all kinds of therapy many would classify as "natural", such as massage, accupressure, aroma therapy, etc. These techniques don't have a proven curative effect, but they reduce stress, and that's important in patients recovering from any illness. The thing I dislike most about the whole natural vs unnatural argument is that it strips humans of the very traits that make us special. Nobody wants to take the tiger's teeth or a raptor's talons, but if we humans do anything too smart, it's "unnatural". A snake's venom is natural, but when we figure out how to make it, it becomes unnatural. Why is that? Why have a definition of nature that excludes us? Anything we create as humans has this arbitrary distinction as unnatural because we had a hand in it. That's just wrong, and I accuse popular media over the years for enhancing this distinction in its effort to create fear which creates readers which creates profit. Thank you, Hyper. Without going off-topic, I'd encourage everyone in the New Year to think about the words you use to disparage, and make sure the wrong people aren't caught in your contempt.

Baltimore public schools probably have that in the core curriculum. The technique does assume all the fuel will be burned away before it falls back down on the guy, right? He doesn't do that into the wind, does he?

See, if they taught fire-breathing in public schools, you wouldn't get so many rookie mistakes. The Inhale Beforehand Rule also applies to blowguns.

! Moderator Note I'm happy to split any further off-topic posts to the Trash. This thread is in Quantum Theory.

Not sure what happened there. Combination of spellcheck, googling definitions, and neglectful editing. I was trying to refer to train track dares, jumping in front of a train and jumping away at the last second. Maybe something you do while on heroin, but definitely not called trainspotting. That's not on your resume! I agree though, if it's controlled, and you're using good science practices, the danger is minimal. I'm reminded of the Mythbuster's episode where the guys stuck their hands in molten lead, protected only by wetting them in water first.

It does seem like an influence on behavior that becomes more apparent the smarter the creature is. A matter of degree rather than have-it-or-don't.

Is this suicide, or is it a dare with provisions for putting oneself out? If they fire themselves and then dive in a pool so they can upload it to yootoob, then it's really no different than trainspotting, or bungee jumping, or any other dare that snatches one from potential death at the last second. Ignorance requires challenges too. Just because you don't know any better doesn't mean you don't want to do important things.

This question shows bias is definitely at work here. I think most animals know a situation where survival is on the line. The way I'm using "know" is "to be aware of". If an animal is aware that a situation is potentially deadly, it treats the situation accordingly. It uses tactics to avoid it if the goal isn't worthy. It's more careful and hesitant. Or it may deem that the risk is worth the danger, such as retrieving food from a high tree branch that might not hold its weight, if they were starving. I could argue, in that situation, that the animal has weighed its options, and whatever decision it makes, it's with survival in mind. Doesn't that mean it "wants" to survive? Perhaps I'm not using the same definition of "self-aware", but animals know things about themselves ("This is my paw, I'm making these scratches in the dirt to point out what I did here, so animals that aren't me will know"), and many can recognize themselves in mirrors. I think animals have an awareness of self, commensurate with their intelligence. Human self-awareness seems special because it reflects our intelligence. Maybe an animal's reaction to a lethal situation isn't impaired by a lack of self-awareness, so much as a lack of full understanding of the dangers involved. It may be thinking that if it falls into the water, it can just get back out like always, because it doesn't understand how deep and fast the water really is. Allllllll that said, I do think self-awareness is an evolutionary adaption. I think it helps all us animals create a hierarchy of importance to our actions within our environments, which helps us survive to pass those genes along.

Sorry, holidays and all, someone else was supposed to close this since it's a duplicate of two threads that have been pretty talked out. The OP needs to go back through those threads for the answers he asks for here. There were lots of great posts. So I'm going to close this, even though I'm involved. Probably get coal for this.

The second part of this sentence is based on the lie in the first part. No wonder you don't wonder.

http://grammarist.com/usage/got-gotten/

Yes, he did. It was quite clear that the model is still valid only for a small range of solutions. Like many models, and most analogies, they suffer from being stretched to fit circumstances they weren't meant for. So your answer is, it depends how broadly or deeply you want use the arguments the model covers There are examples of h/g societies that took prisoners and slaves. The ones I remember reading about were native to the US Northwest, and were not an insignificant percentage of the tribe. More people to hunt and gather means the potential for more food, not less. I think you assume they weren't part of the workforce, which isn't what we see with slaves. "Another mouth to feed" almost assumes that mouth isn't doing anything to feed itself. .

It looks like two questions. Can you start new threads on them? This is not the place for them.

Truth?! Out of both threads, 14 pages of discussion, did you get anything you felt supported one argument more than the others? Why are we doing this again, in a new thread? What has changed?

We already have this discussion, which you started, and it went on for 11 pages. For the title question, your first paragraph really doesn't give us much to say. We don't know your father. Why are you restricting the replies to yes or no, like we're hostile witnesses in court? Since there are quantum events that only leave us with one answer to your title question, why are you even asking it this way? Do you just want a poll to show your father, that everybody else says yes?

Like many things in US politics, it's a combination of big business using the People's legislative representation to line their pockets. Since he was barred from the banking industry after the S&L travesty, this is what the youngest Bush son, Neil Bush, has been doing. He and several Bush cronies have been angling for NCLB dollars through their own testing companies, and for some reason they've been pretty successful. It's almost like they had some kind of inside track on how to get that money.

! Moderator Note Please, stop doing this in the mainstream sections. I don't know how to make it any clearer, so I'll give you a warning point. Next time you do it, you're gone. Understand? Good. You should start looking for another forum where they let you speculate any time you want. This is NOT that forum.

You're choosing to misunderstand me. This isn't about Republicans deeming a plan to be unworkable. This is about them introducing a bill, doing everything in their power to get it passed because it's needed, it will be a law that helps the country. This is about them abandoning that bill when it starts to gain bipartisan support. IT WAS A REPUBLICAN-SPONSORED BILL IN THE FIRST PLACE! They've killed their own bills on human trafficking, veteran benefits, decent and good bills that the Democrats agree with, and they suddenly get rethought and abandoned. Clearly a party interested in its own ends, and not trying to really represent the wishes of its constituents. It's been known for quite some time that the biggest abusers of the welfare system are the businesspeople who contract with the system, NOT the recipients of welfare the way the businesspeople would have you believe. Dependence on the system would be much rarer without illegal help from providers.

! Moderator Note Our membership still has us enforce a rule against watching yootube videos as a primary argument about anything. The only reason we might consider leaving it is if a genuine interest in improvement was being sought, but from your response, you aren't prepared for constructive criticism. As the video stands in its present form, it has no discussion value, it violates one of our rules, and it simply appears we're being used to promote your video work on the net, which is also a breach of our science discussion forum rules. We use videos and other links all the time to support arguments we make in discussion, but they're used as evidence. If you can ask your (previously unannounced) questions, start a discussion, and support yourself with parts of your video, this is more in line with the purpose of our forum. We're not trying to chase you away, but it's pretty clear you didn't read the rules you agreed to when you joined. We also frown on those who attack the person rather than their ideas (please, no more "you must be crazy or insane"). I'm closing this, but feel free to take a more rigorous stab at it if you can. Please don't start with the video though, otherwise we're going to have this conversation again. Good luck.