Phi for All

Probably for the same transparency reasons most people want a paper trail from voting machines. Electronic deception is easier to get away with, in some cases. This may be one of them.

I love that! Perfect blend, gets the job done quickly. I used to do it that way (when it comes to texting, I'm all thumbs), until I discovered voice recording for texts. It's quicker because I don't have to slow my writing down to make it legible. There's another plus for computers: consistency. Nobody has to decipher my handwriting along with everyone else's.

This seems like an awful lot of work just to keep an open cockpit design. I think you need to decide what this vehicle is designed to do. Long-distance travel at high speeds driving practically straight? Enclose the cockpit, no question. Maneuvering and agility? Those don't go together with the kind of speed you're talking about. You've basically got a single rider hover bike here, it has advantages at lower speeds that don't scale up. Why do you need it to go 500 mph while the rider tries to keep his grip on the vehicle?

! Moderator Note Non-mainstream speculations MUST be placed in the Speculations section. Students come here who trust our mainstream sections to help them with their mainstream studies. Moved to Speculations, please take the time to read the special rules governing this section.

! Moderator Note Please calm down. Assuming timo's reply was a "dig" or personal attack against you seems premature. It seems more like a request for the relevant part of the paper to be cited, since timo's initial searches revealed no mention of "testable/untestable" in the paper you provided. This seems like a reasonable request for the future.

Part of the resistance to new technology is having to figure out how it improves our lives. There are always going to be instances where old technology performs just as well if not better than the new, but overall the new tech is usually superior. Our confirmation bias latches onto those instances and tells us that the old tech is still viable. As others have mentioned, there are always holdouts when it comes to technology. These people might prefer vinyl records to CDs for a few specific reasons, and consider those reasons more important than all the rest of the advantages CDs offer. Back when TVs and radios all had gas vacuum tubes in them, the move to solid state electronics was opposed by many. The quality of reception wasn't as good, which made many question why the shift was being made. But reception quickly grew better, and the solid state platform allowed TVs and radios to be made much smaller and with more features. There's a limit to how small you can make a vacuum tube. I still use pen and paper for notetaking sometimes. I have a voice recorder on my phone, and I use that for notes when I'm in the field. If I'm taking notes about plans I'm making, I use pen and paper because I think better when writing or typing as opposed to talking into a recorder. Does that make sense? I collaborate better with others verbally, but when I'm just thinking on my own, writing or typing is a better way for me to formulate my ideas. I think this is just a matter of examining motives more closely. If you're an audiophile who gets enjoyment from music ONLY if it's a true representation of the way the artist recorded it, then buy vinyl and enjoy it. If you love music and want to listen to it anywhere/anytime, digital is probably a better medium. If you have an old 75 watt incandescent light bulb in a closet you turn on for a total of 10 minutes a month, you probably don't need to replace it with an LED, but you really should if that light is on 10 hours a month. And yes, I think there are plenty of reasons why pen and paper will still be around for a long time. You can hardly argue that computers aren't an awesome way to develop the written word. It may seem annoying to have both digital and analog writing, but both have their applications and both have strengths and weaknesses within those applications. Use what works best in context, I guess.

This doesn't increase objectivity, and adds a factor nobody wants in the legal system, miscommunication. Take the above quote and run it through Google Translate into any other language you know, and you'll see what could go wrong. Translation programs don't yet have the sophistication for use in areas full of nuance.

The title and the OP seem aimed differently. Are we talking about accuracy overall or specifically regarding history? The Bible has many technical errors, such as creating plants that need the sun to survive before creating the sun. There are also many contradictions, like Genesis 32:30, "For I have seen God face-to-face, and my life is preserved", and John 1:18, "No man hath seen God at any time...." Both of these statements can't be true.

I didn't want to generalize and accuse all corporations of foul practices, but the worst offenders are some of the biggest corporations, the guys everyone else has to compete with. Many businesses will follow suit just to keep their doors open, especially if it's been made legal through lobbying.

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 gave them the power, and FOX News and The O'Reilly Factor started the same year. The "political pundit" was born, journalism went almost extinct, and informing the public became manipulating the public.

Great example! Seems like a good idea to be around people who like the same things you do, but that does nothing to challenge you to try new things, which is something most people equate with personal happiness (if the documentary Happy can be believed). Apparently, we claim to like safety and surety, but we're often happiest when trying something new. We're explorers at heart but we can be intimidated by fears projected upon us.

Deregulation and lack of transparency go hand in hand these days, leading to rampant corruption. Wasn't there a financial crisis recently where we found this was true of the banking industry?

I've been focused on the former. For me, a logical process is a tool anyone can use to arrive at differing perspectives. It's more of a mind-working-similarly thing as opposed to being like-minded in your opinions. Perhaps it has more to do with my own bias on what kinds of opinions people shouldn't be isolated with. I think there are similarities between people who live in armed survivalist compounds with little outside contact, and those who only associate with people who share their distrusts and fears.

If it includes an emphasis on intellectual stimulation, exploration, and curvy women, count me in.

It's so convenient when you get to reap full benefits without investing full responsibility! People don't have those rights, and corporations didn't used to either. But a CorporationPerson gets the power without the transparency. Great overall post, iNow, and let me focus on this bit. Do you think there's a way to reverse the process of economic inequality without it taking forty years to fix? I doubt the top 1% will be happy with any kind of major shift, and it probably wouldn't be good globally to shake things up too much all at once. A frog, at every economic level, will hop out of the pot if you put him in while the water's boiling. But do we have time to start cold and change graduallly?

I hope we're re-evaluating our foundations, asking ourselves what kind of world we're capable of making. I think we all know it's possible to end starvation through cooperation, but there are still places where food is a tool of power. And there are still leaders who don't want all their people to have a secular education, possibly the one thing that would reduce the cultural defenses and allow more robust cooperation between nations. On a more personal level, I hope we can remember that there is a lot less hate out there than the media would have us believe. Boots on the ground, when you're interacting with people honestly rather than ignoring them, we're a fairly consistently friendly species. Our fear of differences evaporates when we're shaking hands with Michael or Michele or Mihail or Miguel or Mikko. Our concepts of commerce add a lot of distrust, stress, and dissatisfaction to our relationships, and modern practices are making this even worse. I hope we can come up with a solution, a truly Renaissance solution, to how we distribute our basic resources among our populations. Poverty shouldn't be an option for humans in this era.

Of course there are. The corporations I'm talking about are the ones who've been practicing this incremental removal of worker's rights and economic power through the use of abusive fear tactics and questionable accounting practices. We're frogs in a pot of water they've been turning up the heat on for over thirty years. We don't realize how much they've boiled us down to nothing, insisting that productivity climbs even if the income doesn't.

I think we've lost the concept of mutual success, where corporations make products and pay their workers enough so they can buy those products, and everyone pays taxes to create infrastructure and programs that help us all. That's the kind of relationship worth paying the military to defend, and the police to protect, and the politicians to represent. Is this just The Tragedy of The Commons being perpetrated by bean counters? Is the middle class income just a common resource they've overused? Would it be all that difficult to start demanding, as consumers/voters/taxpayers, that the corporations we deal with stop skimming so much happiness from our pursuit? We're in this together, which would be easier to see if the CEOs and stockholders took off their greenback-colored glasses and realized that you can't suffocate people and still expect them to be customers. Perhaps your corporation isn't representative of the focus of the OP.

Are you moving your HQ overseas to avoid paying taxes where your corporate charter is issued? Do you hire lobbyists to help pass legislation favorable to you but not your competitors? Has your corporation's wages kept steady with productivity, or has median income diverged like much of the rest of the country?

The last thirty years or so have seen the rise of corporate efficiency expertise. Wealthy firms that need to get even wealthier hired the best penny-pinchers around, and incrementally over the last few decades, the practices they've instituted have grown profits to record levels. But after these financial wizards removed the low-hanging fruit, they turned their sights on other ways to save. They started paying less and made it clear that the workers were lucky to have a job. Over time, we've seen a good deal of money that should have gone to the middle class get reallocated to the execs and shareholders, where tax loopholes and the best attorneys decrease the amount of revenue the government can claim. They discovered they could make an even bigger profit by writing their own legislation and lobbying it through Congress. They lobby for subsidies, no-bid contracts, and other sweetheart deals that corrupt the spirit of a free market. They get to de-regulate themselves and loosen restrictions even more. Now the financial guys are trying to move headquarters to more tax favorable havens so they can make even more money at the expense of taxpayers they still want as customers. I don't think it's a matter of evil corporations, I think it's a matter of smart people taking advantage of ambivalent voters and a poorly monitored system. But how long can we continue to let these mega-corporations suck the life out of our tax revenue and our purchasing power while still enjoying access to our country's infrastructure and all the benefits that entails? At a certain point, don't you think corporations owe their country's more than just job-making? Shouldn't there be a certain allegiance to the country who holds your corporate charter?

From the Center for Disease Control & Prevention: http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/parents/adoptions.html This part is for parents who adopt, but I'm sure the advice holds for anyone whose records have been compromised. There may be more specific advice about immunizations at the CDC site.

! Moderator Note Some posts were split off to here. What started as a valid line of questioning ended up being a discrepancy over terminology. Let's try this topic again.

! Moderator Note These posts were split from a different discussion. Rather than being related to the original topic, they turned out to be a discrepancy over some terms used. The original conversation can be found here.

But are you legitimately scared, or are you just maintaining a bias you got from a fake news story? Thousands of people believed that story, and one of the weirdest hallmarks of confirmation bias is that when people prove you were wrong, it actually makes you more convinced you're right. Based on this, I predict you still secretly think people are being forced to accept surgical implants.

It's not usually infractions of any sort that have zero tolerance. Schools can adopt zero tolerance policies on specific infractions, like firearms, and not with actual violence, like punching someone out. But you're absolutely right about such black and white perspectives. According to a study by the National Association of School Psychologists, 79% of schools have a zero tolerance policy for physical violence, and the same percentage have one for tobacco. The punishments are the same, suspension or expulsion from school, which puts the kids at an even greater risk since you have to be an active student to use after school programs that might help. And it seems plain to me that the motivations and character of a student who sneaks a smoke on school property are quite different from those of a kid who beats a fellow student up.