Phi for All

! Moderator Note rbwinn, it's clear your assumptions are keeping you from understanding what everyone else in the thread is trying to explain to you. Seven pages later and the same assumptions are still being used despite numerous varied attempts to help you understand. At this point I don't see how it could be explained any better. You have demonstrated that you won't be swayed by the explanations given here or the reality of functioning technology. Your arguments have been refuted and you have given no further evidence (repetition doesn't count). By the rules of the Speculations section, I'm closing the thread. Do NOT open the subject again.

Genetically, there are no "races" within the human population. Environmental pressures, mutations and natural selection account for many of the differences in skin color and other things you might identify as "racial" qualities. But something like 85% of genetic variations are individual variations; only 15% are differences between populations. Humans are actually much more homogenous than most other animal species.

Would you please note the statements you're referring to, and include the parts you find confusing so we know exactly where to start the discussion? Any further information you can give us is greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Please clarify this phrase, "...raising meat in such tight confines as artificial meat factories". Are you referring to the tight confines of factory farming as being unnatural or artificial, or are you referring to meat grown "artificially" in vitro? The greatest thing about exploring space, imo, is all the innovation we come up with that helps us here at home. Learning to feed ourselves off-planet more efficiently is bound to help us on Earth as well. We don't necessarily have to look at colonizing as a way to relieve our population pressures. We can look at space exploration as a means to stretch our resources further, or at least not use the planet's resources to work off-planet. As long as we have people we can't feed adequately, it's either a problem of overpopulation, underproduction or poor distribution. I think we're capable of producing food to feed everyone, but without incentive to do so we can't count on standard business models to reach the poorest and most needy. I didn't vote because none of the options gave enough leeway to adequately represent the way I feel on the issue. I can make a fairly good case for each response, so I'm torn on which to choose.

I sure hope you aren't serious about this. That rocks back the clock on our development by a few millenia. We have the kind of society we do because we left the hunter/gatherer process quite some time ago in favor of agriculture and animal husbandry. This frees up people to do more than just survive. If we have to kill our own meals, we won't have time for anything else like art or music or expanding our minds discussing ethics over the internet. I agree that non-food animals like wolves need our help, but when you look at this rationally, animals like pigs and cows we raise in protected environments as food sources have a much less stressful life on the whole than any animal in the wild does. We've bred them that way and it's too late to change that unless we're willing to set them loose (which might be giving the wolves too much help), or slaughter them all to save them from being kept for our consumption.

! Moderator Note rbwinn, the rules of our Speculation section state you need to respond to calls for evidence. Looking back over the whole thread, you've been shown several suggestions that would help you comply with those rules, or admit that you may be mistaken. We need to break this impasse for the discussion to be productive. The thread can't stay open much longer without some evidence in support of your position. Please don't respond to this modnote. If you object, please use the Report Post function instead of discussing it here.

What are we doing with all those animals we've bred for consumption? Are we setting them free, letting them die naturally from predators they're not equipped to deal with? Are we killing them off all at once so nobody will be tempted? Why is the land more valuable for farming and animal habitats than it is for our habitats? I'm not trying to be anthropocentric about this, but I think we're just as important.

No offense, but if you're confused about the Nebular Hypothesis, wouldn't it be more practical to identify your confusion about the model first before amending anything?

I have read your posts. I think you have some ideal population in mind, and I think you have our best interests at heart, but reducing our population by the factors you want would also cripple one of our greatest strengths, our diversity. Our numbers, combined with an incredible capability for both communication and cooperation and our high intelligence, means we have people at many levels to fill all the needs of our society. Mix in our curiosity and our tool-making flair and we should have everything we need to overcome problems even at our current population. I wish our high intelligence would allow for more respect for the planet we live on. I think that should be taught in the schools. I grew up with First Lady Johnson's "Keep America Beautiful" program, and to this day I can't stand littering, even the thought of it. I get the feeling you want us to go back to a simpler time, and I don't think it's our destiny to go backwards. We know our star isn't going to last forever, so reverting back to a tiny population means we live out our lives here until something destroys the planet or the system, and then it won't matter how many of us there used to be.

And lovely to see you ignoring what was really said so you can perpetuate more misinformation.

It sounds like your opinion has no mechanism for change. You'll always be able to say a solution is impractical because you think there is a "correct" population. There are way more variables to human population than just the number of people, resources and current consumption. We find ways to conserve and make our tools more efficient all the time. Miniaturization, which seems to be an ongoing process, helps conserve a great deal. I'm hoping our tools get so good that they'll take us offworld. Perhaps resources and population won't be so much of a problem.

I disagree. As CharonY mentioned, empowering women with knowledge of their own bodies, sex education including birth control, and education in general to give everyone more choices than childbearing can help control population. I know there was a study done in Mali where women with a secondary level of education had an average of 3 children while women without such education had an average of 7. Practical solution? Instead of foreign aid in the form of money, why not offer to build schools and pay teachers instead?

! Moderator Note Since this concept isn't part of Relativity and also seems to have some speculative, questionable aspects to it, I'm moving this to Speculations so we don't confuse any test-takers out there.

As long as the media continues to adopt this fake impartiality, this "both sides of all arguments are automatically equal" approach to journalism, we'll keep having citizens who are misled and misinformed. Also we've treated our health and education like they're privileges instead of rights, and now we're suffering with a sick and ignorant population that makes unhealthy and stupid choices.

What's really sad is you calling "lie" without educating yourself. We've already incurred the debt through spending legislation, bills that passed and got signed into law. The debt ceiling is a pro forma process (meaning "for form", or as a matter of principle) that promises our creditors that we will pay those debts, THE DEBTS CONGRESS HAS ALREADY VOTED ON! Where were you the last time this happened? Once again, our credit rating is going to get trashed for NOTHING, costing us even more to pay back the debt, all because of extremists exploiting ignorant fear. Yay, Tea Party, the American Taliban!

I'm not big on the idea of a supermajority, but in this case I think it's the best thing that could happen. Science could flourish once again! We could continue to undo the damage of the Bush years. We really need to put the teeth back in banking regulations without being blocked at every turn. We might actually see some value for our money when we're not spending as much to NOT work a program as we are to making it work. And all the while we watch for evidence that it's either working or not. I think it's pretty clear that what the current Republicans want is NOT working. I really don't see how compromise is possible with the Republican party as it is. It's being led by lying, manipulative fanatics who've proven they can't be trusted to do their job and represent the will of the People over the will of the "special" people. Every time I think about the hypocrisy of PLANNING all the steps to shutting the country down, including blocking any chance that cooler, wiser heads may prevail, and then hand-over-heart lying about it, waving pocket Constitutions around while pissing on the spirit of the document, I feel the need to shower. I miss Ike.

Not in hindsight.

I wonder if this "education" thing you speak of could help out with any of our other problems....

I don't know. They've been working hard on "doublethink" ever since 1984, so now they can slip a Cruz into Congress pretty easily. When you hold two contradictory beliefs in your mind simultaneously, and accept both of them, then you get to tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, and you don't have to remember any fact that has become inconvenient.

The President pro tempore of the Senate, Patrick Leahy.

Isn't that what House Republicans have wanted all along? To abuse the system and force a bargain they couldn't achieve legitimately? To get the Senate to cave in to economic terrorism and concede some hard-won goals? To block the Democrats ability to end the shutdown via traditional rules while lying about wanting a shutdown in the first place? I know how you feel about the government in general, but I also know you think blame is spread evenly, and that's where I think you need to take a good hard look. Things may very well be as you describe them, with conspiracies and world domination in the offing, but in this particular instance, the one thing I'm pretty sure of is that allowing the Republicans to crap all over our Constitution while waving pocket versions of it over their heads is wrong and needs to be stopped immediately. We DON'T know that the ACA is going to be bad (overall it's looking pretty good), and we DO know that this brain shutdown the Tea Party has engineered is bad. And we DO know that austerity just when we're starting to do better is also bad. How can anyone feel they're being conservative by supporting the Tea Party's radical speculations when we have history and tradition to support more sane choices?

You want to give "people in power" a way to deter crime before it happens, based on the writings of people in jail, is that right? But then you want to discharge them if they write something about stabbing someone? Why are they being discharged into foreign environments if the system is global? I can't tell if you're ideas are so hard to understand because you make up a lot of your own terminology as you go, or you're just very bad at starting from the beginning of an idea and progressing through it. Are you starting off where some other thread of yours ended? Does "discharge" mean something besides "release"?

The phosphor is the white coating on the inside of the glass tube of a fluorescent lamp. It reacts as swansont mentioned, and so it blocks UV light as well. On an ultraviolet lamp, or a black light, there's usually a dark purple filter that eliminates most of the visible spectrum and lets the UV light through. The color is usually part of the glass tube or is part of an inner glass tube (not sealed) within a clear tube (sealed).

There was something about doctors. And jail. And vice. It's about separating things until they integrate. Prematurely and significantly. And if we do it all at the same time we learn more, and I think we should since I haven't learned anything so far.

! Moderator Note Please read the rules regarding civility, our number one rule here. Attack the argument, not the person making it. Do not make these discussions personal; you know nothing personal about any of these people. If you feel this modnote is in error, use the Report Post function; do NOT derail the thread by discussing your objections in the thread.