Phi for All

No, it's just hard to grasp sometimes, and many people find what they think is an inconsistency, throw their hands up and use that as a good excuse to stop studying it and start claiming it's wrong.

False. It's a very low probability, at best. Does this coincide with the world ending in December? Good question mark.

Proszę bardzo.

As long as you didn't lie about it afterward.

I mentioned it before, but you guys are ignoring the fact that the shooter was the only person there who knew he was doing this alone. If multiple conceal/carry heroes start firing in the dark with all that smoke, aren't they just as likely to assume everyone firing a gun is the enemy and start aiming at all the muzzle flashes? In that situation, I think it's the firing of the weapons and not the gear you are or aren't wearing that would determine who you turn your gun on. The only way that scenario gets any better is if there's only one other person with a gun besides the shooter.

A bargaining chip for religious hostages.

Whoa, two lies a day puts you in the red. The average person couldn't handle that, so imagine how many nuns were former politicians!

It MUST be subjective, determined by culture. Further, I think it's right that it is. Looking for universal right and wrong obviously led you to believe that religion must be the answer, and personally, I think trying to impose your religious views on others is wrong. To base morality on religious faith is to open yourself to tens of thousands of interpretations of that faith, so where is your morality now? And people have crises of faith all the time. Does this mean they can feel free to stop being moral when they stop having faith? And what kind of morality is something like the Bible really going to teach us? That it's OK to stone prostitutes? Or kill your teenager if he curses you? I much prefer morality modeled by the society I'm an active part of, at least that gives me the ability to move if I disagree that strongly with it.

My suggestion would be to first find some kind of mass media not controlled by those with vested interests in disharmony. If enough people know that they aren't alone, that harmony is sought by the vast majority of the world, it will give us all the courage, determination and spirit to stop letting the warmongers control everything.

I agree with CaptainPanic, this is more normal than we're led to believe. People want to know your name, smile at you, have a laugh and sing and dance with you on this pale blue dot in the Milky Way. Extremists get the attention of the press 24/7 and we end up thinking the world is full of hate. Yet when you talk to most people, they want peace. I think we should look for ways to remove the profit from disharmony. War$ are such a poor way to get peace, because it makes a lot of money for some and they'll always look for more war$ instead of more peace. And let's have more dancing, dancing is a pretty good international language of happiness.

I think you miss the point, at least my point. I'm not against US companies offshoring jobs, I'm against also giving them further taxpayer subsidies and incentives while they save money on their workforce. If you're not going to contribute to your own economic system fully, you shouldn't be able to get such assistance from it. Having your cake + eating it2 = our present economy.

Well, my jello would be GONE.

Car/home/life insurance are based on insurable values. Even life insurance is purchased this way, with the insuree deciding how much they need in coverage. Health insurance is intangible in this regard. You know how much your car or house is worth, but you have no idea how your health is going to play out. Health insurance used to be based on actuarials that were quite accurate. You paid based on your age, and the sooner you got it, the less you paid throughout your life. But managed healthcare changed all that in favor of the privilege of changing insurers as often as you liked. And when the insurers kept losing customers, they came up with the "pre-existing condition" scare to stop people jumping ship. At least H.R. 3200 stops that atrocity. Is it really, or is it because that's the way doctors practice? iNow will tell you that a cure for his Type I diabetes would stop him having to buy insulin and testing equipment and syringes and all the other stuff he has to buy, in addition to constant monitoring and injections. Can you honestly say that a cure for high blood pressure, one that you took once to actually cure you, is a better for-profit product for a business to sell than what you're taking now? Poor quality is a general market concern. My public health insurance option would compete alongside private insurers, it would simply be cheaper since it doesn't need to profit shareholders. And you're mixing the arguments. I'm saying medicine in general is a poor for-profit business for the consumer, but at least we could make it more cost-efficient if we took the profit motive out of the insurance part of it. Poor quality is not so much the issue as the conflict between focusing on profit and focusing on health. No, not really. I suppose doctors have to stay private businesspeople, it's too difficult to change that. I'm just saying that the government could model an insurance product after the best of the private insurers, but with no need for shareholder profits and ludicrous C-level salaries and bonuses, and let it compete in the market like any other insurer. And you can stop him from being too cheap if your contract says you can. He can't substitute cheaper fixtures if you've paid him for better ones, and he certainly can't tell you he's not going to include the garage in the agreed upon price because your car is a pre-existing condition.

Yeah, like you'd ever just leave it at that. Give it a few days and you'd have it hooked up to a backpack compressor dishing up insect death at 150psi. You'd be a Drosophila melanogangster! EXTREME MEASURES CAUSE SALTY PHYSICIST IN A PINCH TO REMOVE DASH!

Not at all. Most product-oriented businesses are perfect for the normal market models. Make something people will pay enough for so you make a profit. Simple. No conflict, especially because we all know what's on the table. How can you know what your health will be like for the rest of your life? But in those instances, what you as the consumer wants is perfectly aligned with what the business wants to do. You want a home, they make you one and sell it to you at a profit. You're hungry and the restaurant fixes that, and it's in the nature of hunger for it to happen on a recurring basis. Is it in the nature of health for you to keep getting sick? Blood pressure meds are a GREAT example. Do you think much effort goes into figuring out a way to fix your blood pressure problems permanently, the way you'd really like? Why would they when you'll have to take their meds for the rest of your life? That's the conflict. What you want is to fix your blood pressure without the constant costs and restrictions, and what they want is a customer for life. Of course, your doctor could insist that you stop doing the unhealthy things that are really causing your blood pressure to rise. But I understand that most people aren't willing to give up what's really causing the problems. And the doctors businessmen are smart enough to ease you into their model. Can you imagine your doctor telling you in a single consult that suddenly you need blood pressure meds, which will raise your cholesterol, so you'll need meds for that too, and you'll likely have some anxiety so you should take some of these, which will make you susceptible to arrhythmia, and the meds for that often cause seizures, so we've got another pill for that. I'll bet most people in THAT situation would start hitting the club and eating salads pretty quick. Throw a frog into boiling water.... Except health insurance through a public risk pool keeps you healthy more cost-effectively and is more motivated to fix you truly as opposed to spending the least amount possible on you.

Isn't medicine itself guilty of that as well? Most of what a general physician does is cure symptoms. It's partially our fault for not being willing to correct negligent lifestyles, but most doctors don't argue when we ask for quick fixes. But yeah, health insurance seems like a no-brainer. Set up a publicly-funded risk pool for health insurance and model it after the best run private insurer. Make sure it's scalable to the whole country and then let the market decide who to go with, the public option or the private one that charges 25% more for the same thing.

I was hoping it could also be used against demons and ghosts, but ideal range is only 2 feet. That's unacceptable against the supernatural. I'm not sure whether the fly or the salt is going to be worse for my jello. And for luck, wouldn't you have to shoot over your shoulder for every fly you kill? For those reasons, and an impending ban on a-salt rifles, I won't be investing.

To me, it boils down to this: Modern medicine is not a good fit for a for-profit business model. We want cures, the business model requires recurring charges. Actually cure a patient, you lose a customer. Not good business. There's no simple fixes for that, though, unless you take the profit motive away and create some sort of "Caregiver Class" that gets special privileges instead of superior wages and I'm not sure I want to pave THAT road anytime soon. Pharma is an even bigger fustercluck. As long as profit is the key motivator, Pharma is going to work harder on maintaining erections than they are on curing lucrative diseases like diabetes. I'm not even sure I like H.R 3200, but it's a step in the right direction. The simplest fix, which is also the easiest, is to provide a government risk-pool for health insurance. Health is not like a car or a house or even a life where the value can be assessed and agreed upon by both parties. We can't put a value on what we don't know will happen. Without the profit motive, the draconian contortions and the slow payments to the actual providers, health insurance would cost less and be more accepted by the medical profession. The only political stumbling block is basically doing away with a whole private sector market, but I say screw 'em. Health insurers have been screwing the public ever since Nixon approved the whole managed healthcare scam. So of course, with the kind of money and consequences involved, outright lies are necessary from those who stand to lose their fortunes. I guess you should ask yourself this, if enough experiments showed that an inexpensive shot of capsaicin administered directly into the pancreas would instantly allow the organ to start producing insulin again, do you think the procedures should begin immediately to cure diabetics, or do you think all those businesses that make a profit from artificially providing insulin and blood sugar testing equipment should be given a few years to adjust to the end of their market?

It's pretty much all outright lies. Here is a link to FactCheck.org listing many of the lies and what the bill really says. For instance, the video claims page 29 says there will be a $5000 limit on yearly individual healthcare ($10k for a family). The truth is that the $5k/$10k limit is a cap on what you'll pay out of pocket if you have the basic package. HUGE difference, right? They take a very good thing and make it sound horrible, and so many people don't check facts like these. Wizard's First Rule: People can be made to believe any lie because they want to believe it's true, or because they're afraid that it's true. (Terry Goodkind) Let me also add, rigney, that although you take a lot of flack around here for some of the things you post, I have to applaud the fact that you're here at all, trying to get differing perspectives. You've got the balls to stick your neck out there and I wish more people on every side would stop only listening to thoe who share their perspective. +1 for you. Edit: crossposted with you, good find, great minds and all....

Older revolvers don't tend to have them. Newer ones probably do because the manufacturers felt there was a demand for, you know, safety. Too many ruined pillows, I'm guessing.

I know where I am. It's a double-action revolver that's NOT fully loaded, and you have the hammer down on an empty chamber. When you pull the trigger or thumb the hammer back, it goes to a live chamber. Quite different from what you first told us, but consistent with your part time job of goalpost moving. Strawmen make great target practice, don't they? AFAICT, the argument was about you keeping the safety off while the gun is loaded but not in your hand.

Fully loaded means just that, no empty chambers, no "should contan a cartridge". Evidently, you are not too well trained in the use of fire arms. And since you obviously have a double-action revolver and not a semi-auto, why would it be quicker for you to pull the trigger over an empty chamber and then have to pull the trigger again to fire a live round than to just keep it fully loaded but with the safety on? Safety is a very important word when using firearms, rigney. Edit to add: Your description could also mean you have a single-action revolver (which probably doesn't have a positive safety lock), or a double-action that you would pull the hammer back on. Either way, I don't see how keeping the safety off gives you enough of an edge to outweigh the concerns. Last edit: Scratch the single-action hypothesis. If you can pull the trigger to engage the hammer, it's double-action.

I wouldn't trust anyone's reflexes to be top drawer coming out of a sound sleep. You take the safety off just before you shoot, no exceptions. I define first dimensional idiots as those who remove the safety from gun safety. Called a positive safety lock, and invented by Colt, iirc. I thought I said that.

I hope rigney isn't a restless sleeper. Without a positive safety lock it doesn't take much of a fall to discharge a pistol if it lands on the hammer. Whoa, Arete didn't even mention the Aurora killings! What the hell, rigney?! Reread what you quoted!

Paranoia about killers makes you go out and buy a gun so you can kill them. It's a Catch-357.