Phi for All

http://www.politico.com/multimedia/video/2012/09/romney-airplane-windows-not-opening-a-real-problem.html Well, if you'd respond to my points, that would be the beginning of the discussion you've been missing. Yeah, CaptainPanic, why can't we just drop the whole political discussion thing, pretend it makes no difference and respect each other as Americans? Why? Why?!

I know there's an awful lot of people out there quoting Mitt and cutting off the remark after "So it's very dangerous..." and adding the ellipses to imply he might be joking. Here's the full quote: It's very doubtful anyone would make a joke, and then go right into the bit about your wife choking and the pilot having enough oxygen to safely land the plane. But don't believe me, watch the actual video of him saying this. HE'S NOT JOKING. I think it's more evidence that Mitt can't really relate to the majority of the people he wants to represent and lead. Anyone who's flown commercially has listened to the cabin pressurization/oxygen masks will fall from the ceiling speech multiple times. If he doesn't realize how much more dangerous it would be to have opening windows on an aircraft, can I trust him to realize how devastating his tax plan will be for the country, or how tipping the scales even more in the favor of businesses that are already sitting on record amounts of cash will harm public confidence and fuel more unemployment?

The sad(der) part is, in order to mittigate the damage done to Romney's campaign, some Republican congressperson will probably tack a rider on a bill to call for a feasibility study on sliding windows aboard aircraft and screen doors on submarines.

And make sure it's a utility patent, not a design patent. Patent attorney's make a ton of money off design patents, which can then be used as an insanely expensive toilet paper substitute.

It's especially important to have a progressive tax rate in light of the corporate personhood movement. Corporations are extremely necessary as an instrument for building commerce, but we can't allow them to enjoy the benefits of the general citizenry while simultaneously having the privilege to do business as an artificial entity and the freedom from general partnership liability. We all have to take the good with the bad, but this current crop of Republicans wants just the good, and they don't care who they take the extra good from or who gets all their bad. This is simply a matter of businesspeople stacking the deck in their favor simply because they have the money to influence the way the laws get written. To say someone deserves to screw other people because they're wealthy is ludicrous. And to even think they got where they are without anyone's help is irresponsible and ungrateful in the extreme. To quote chilled_flourine, "This is a huge problem, admittedly, but we aren't doing anything to resolve it."

As long as more prisons are privatized, and the private prisons are allowed to give the prisoners subsidized drugs to keep them docile, and the US citizens pay per head for prisoners to be kept in these facilities, I think Mitt would approve.

Since you refuse to use the quote system correctly, this is the only part of your post I can respond to properly. I do want to say though that progressive taxation makes sure that those who profit most from our infrastructure pay the most for it. How many of the 47% do you think use airports? Does the guy who works three jobs to keep his family fed plan a lot of road trips, considering he gets around on the bus? American workers don't work hard? Wow, that's a fairly elitist, heavily biased and incredibly naive statement. We have an extremely robust cost of living, it costs us a lot to buy products here, as opposed to what they pay for the basics in Hong Kong. I understand the benefits of arbitrage when applied to labor costs, but I'm talking about demanding US tax breaks so corporations can create US jobs to help the US economy and then using that revenue held back from public funds to create foreign jobs. Do you thinks that's good business for the US? Do you see why our economy is in trouble due to this withholding tax revenue and profoundly unhelpful efforts to help themselves instead of the American workers that helped them build those businesses? Wow, that sounds just like it came from someone's dad. Have you been in the workforce long? I'm glad you said almost. I have no problem with employing foreign workers. Again, that's not what this is about. I'm talking about tax revenue that was supposed to go towards helping US employment that went overseas instead, to help US corporations make more than half their profits overseas while enjoying tax breaks and charter exemptions they could only get from the US government, which is paid for in the majority, last time I checked, by US citizens, all of them.

! Moderator Note darryl88, what is it you hope to discuss that is different from the other three threads you have open on the same subject in March and again in July, and on evolutionary synthesis earlier this month? Non Darwinian evolution theories Has evolution moved beyond neo-darwinism? Extended evolutionary synthesis It's always better to simply bump one thread than to start a whole new discussion. Are you asking anything diffferent in this new thread or should we just merge the threads so all the replies are in a single, easily found and understood place?

Hello sunshaker, and thanks for that envelope stuffed with all that lovely cash! Who needs math when you can obviously count so well already?! Welcome to SFN, and enjoy your parking space right outside the front door.

In 1958, corporate taxes accounted for 27% of the total revenue. Today, they account for less than 9%. When we extended the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy in 2010 because they argued that they would be able create more jobs, the wealthy created only one job for an American for every three jobs they created for foreign workers. And the top 200 companies in the US made 60% of their revenue in the last two years from foreign industry. Yet you say you support stronger immigration laws and are pro-business. Don't you think a business that enjoys an American corporate charter should be more interested in helping the US economy? Especially when they're using tax revenue that should have gone to the public coffers to hire foreign workers? I'm pro-business too but I think they have an obligation to do more to support the economy of their charter nation. Isn't that part of the Republican platform too? It was when I was born.

I'll buy that. If we could also eliminate campaign funding it would help. It's hard to think about these guys spending a billion dollars and not being obligated to SOMEONE. Media time and ad space should be part of the requirements for chartered use of the radio and TV frequencies as well as the internet and paper media. I'm sure there's some kind of government compliance for cable and satellite TV as well. Let's leverage some integrity. How does a security-conscious Republican justify the safety threat of being able to open an airplane window? Who needs a bomb when you can just flip a small latch? It makes the people who still insist on taking his meaning out of context idiots, imo. How does a pro-War-on-Drugs, tough-on-crime Republican justify giving smugglers a way to toss contraband out the windows to bypass Customs and TSA? Or were you hoping to privatize a few more prisons and add to the US corner on the world's prisoners market?

This type of thing is rife in the US. I'm not sure if it's our over-competitiveness, or the blatant "us vs them" attitude we have, or the strong, fear-based conservative message that many find so comforting (or a combination of all those things), but the Republican party in particular seems to have a great deal of people who will vote for a Republican even though he/she may oppose their basic platform issues. Why would a progressive Eisenhower Republican want someone like Mitt Romney as president? Why would a small government, not-the-world's-police Reagan Republican want a neoconservative warmonger like Lindsey Graham in the Senate? And if you just like your guns, but don't mind efforts to keep them out of the hands of known crazies, why is Obama such a horrific choice? Since it costs over a billion dollars to become POTUS now, it's clear that our politics are serving those who can afford to think in those terms, which seems to make them also think that tax revenues shouldn't be spent on the 47%+ of the nation who are just shoulders to stand on. If you really want to swim in a pool, you should find a rich person who has a private one and kiss their ass (skim the leaves off the top before you jump in, will you?). If you want to borrow a book, find someone who has a library in their mansion and be really nice to them (maybe dust those shelves while you're up there). And yes, you should pay a higher tax rate because we all need roads and airports, it's just that wealthy people need them more and we should be more grateful that they do. The mental disconnect in this country is SO BAD that half the country can't figure out why local government services are being cut to the bone while corporations are paying only a third of the tax rate they did in 1958 and millionaires are paying 14% while the dwindling middle class is paying 28% or more. It's SO BAD we donate money so idiots can spend a billion dollars to lie to us. It's SO BAD we can't build up enough steam to give the boot to a Congress that only ONE PERSON IN TEN approves of. Romney - No Pressure. I think he was talking about being able to get some fresh air to breathe into the cabin and let the smoke out. I think he made the mistake of talking before he thought things through, and then compounded his error by criticizing something he didn't understand. One could assume that first-class airline passengers don't have to listen to the flight attendants give the speech about, "In an emergency, should the cabin lose pressure...", and that Mitt must have at some time flown commercially, but I think this speaks more to how out of touch he is with what the majority of the people he wants to govern deal with in life. Not all of us have private corporate jets, or parents we can borrow college funds from.

Not at all. You're obviously not a religious right Republican. Are you a neo-conservative Republican? Or a Reagan Republican? An Eisenhower Republican? You meet so few Republicans these days that endorse scientific efforts, so I'm curious where you stand on the platform.

I think there's also a tendency for people to assume that scientists are so amazingly freaking smart that they might overlook the simplest explanations. Like maybe there's a type of light in the spectrum that we can't see that we don't even know to test for, and if we singled it out and used just that on a photovoltaic cell designed for it it would produce 98% efficient electricity. Or that special relativity is so complicated that it can't be right, and some kind of aether medium is much more simple and elegant as an explanation.

This is what you get when you have businessmen as politicians. CEOs often have no idea about what makes things work. Governing and leadership in a democracy often has conflicts of interest with commerce and modern business models. Maybe we need a separation of corporation and state.

People who need more education don't have the education to realize it. It's like a Catch- um, a Catch-... well, something that involves math.

Ooooh, I just thought of Romney's new campaign slogan: "ROMNEY - The No-Pressure Politician"

Airplane windows not opening is just another example of Big Government regulations stifling the US economy by not providing more opportunities for companies like Bain Capital to realize better returns on investments in medical holdings like Damon, Physio Control and Dade International.

I predict that, at his request of course, they'll install opening windows on Romney's plane. I think, at this point, the GOP would rather have Ryan at the top spot on the ticket anyway.

Forgive me, but this doesn't seem as mature as simply admitting you might have overstated your position. And I'm sorry that answering your question about generalizations seems like nitpicking to you. It's often difficult to admit when we might have been wr... wr... wro... incorrect.

Preserves how? Personally, I always thought pleroma was one of the most insidiously manipulative concepts in the Christian arsenal. The idea that you have to keep believing until the church thinks you're "full" seems, imo, incredibly ambiguous and prone to abuse by Christian authority. Christianity will live forever? More meaninglessness and hypocrisy from the folks who brought you eternal damnation for the sin of being human.

Let's get this thread onto a better footing. ThePolyphasicSleeper, I think it's great that you want to document your experiment and share it with us here. One mistake you're making is assuming your results in an assertive way that makes the science-minded folks here a bit nervous. You should try to remove as much of your own bias as possible, and stop making claims that don't have any evidence (yet?) to back them up. That said, I think you should tell us how you plan to test your hypothesis, how you're going to document the experiment. Many of the parameters you've been mentioning, like feeling great, restful sleep, these are very subjective and vary between individuals. How will you test if polyphasic patterns give you as much of what you need from sleep as normal patterns do? Do you plan on doing some crossword puzzles or something to see if mental focus is impaired? If you're comparing polyphasic sleep to normal sleep patterns, you need to document that too to use as a baseline for comparison. The experiment will be worthless if you don't use the right methodology in your study. Are there any suggestions that ThePolyphasicSleeper could use to make his experiment more successful?

For me, your original statement implied "always". The fittest will dominate (absolute) and being bigger is fitter (absolute). Also, it was pointed out more than once that you were making a pretty broad generalization: ... yet you chose not to respond to those posts and continued to defend the position, rather than amend it, until now.

No, they'd rather no one corrected the misinformation they've been repeating, so they call it flaming.

I think it's clear there is no "proof". If you could even come up with scientifically valid supportive evidence for the existence of any god, that would be more than anyone else has ever accomplished.