Phi for All

What an unbelievably backward, ignorant individual. It's hard to believe even FOX could scrape a barrel's bottom to find such a correspondent. Personally, I wish more women were in leadership positions. I think women, in general, are better big picture, long-range strategists. We have too many leaders focused on short-range goals.

I could understand it being a sin to love your possessions more than your family, friends and neighbors. While being rich usually means you have more possessions, I don't think it means that automatically. I suppose it's a matter of intent. Is a doctor/policeman/lawyer a better doctor/policeman/lawyer if he becomes one to help people instead of just for the money or power it gives him? Are you a better person if, despite being rich, the money is not what's important to you, but how you use that money? If I had $10M handed to me right now, I could tell you that I wouldn't spend very much on possessions, but if I worked for that money and earned it over a 10 year period, I'd probably convince myself along the way that I deserved more stuff. Is it part of being rich that what money can buy for you takes on greater importance?

! Moderator Note hydrogen2oxygen, please reread the OP. You are clearly derailing this thread with your own ideas. If you'd like to start your own thread, please do so, but don't post off-topic concepts in other member's threads. This is against the rules you agreed to when you joined. Do NOT respond to this modnote.

There are no warm areas in my fridge. Your insistence that it's making my food "go off" is ridiculous. As a matter of fact, the foods that are most likely to "go off" (meats, cheeses) are in the upper half of the cooling section. If my fridge was making my food go bad, why wouldn't I get rid of it? Why would I put up with that for ten years? Your arguments have gone beyond the speculative and into the bizarre. You started out arguing against wind farm systems where the atmospheric conditions may be difficult to measure, but now you're arguing against something I've observed in my home every day for the past ten years. I suspect you're simply trolling now. Are you seriously telling me you know more about the day-to-day functions of my appliances than I do?

http://tlc.howstuffw...frigerators.htm http://products.hows...tor-reviews.htm Yes, I do have a fridge like that, why would I need to lie about it? They've been around for quite a while. If you know anything about market economies, you'll know that an inefficient design in refrigerators won't last very long before being rejected by consumers, especially since food represents one of the largest monthly expenses in many households. I think the review you quoted earlier was a cherry-picked anomaly. The basic design is sound.

That's not proof! I've had mine for almost ten years now. I love it, works great and my next fridge will be freezer on the bottom as well. I bought it because I'm 6' 4" tall and use the cooler part more than the freezer. But I've never had any problems with food rotting or poor air circulation.

! Moderator Note jenifer, please include a link as citation (in this case, http://fitnesstip.s-free.com/2012/01/09/capsaicin-health-benefits-useful-facts/) when you copy/paste the work of another person, otherwise it looks like plagiarism, which is against the rules you agreed to when you joined.

This is a weak argument based on a False Dilemma. There are other possible answers. Why would the shortcomings of the French language make any statement in English rhetorical or dishonest? Changing the definition of a word into something easier for you to argue against is a Strawman fallacy. And this is a Begging the Question fallacy. You can't have a discussion with a premise where the conclusion is automatically assumed to be true. This OP is full of fallacious logic and I really don't see any reason why the thread should remain open. It has been reported and other staff members will decide if it has any merit. Greatest I Am, you keep opening threads like this. You need to stop proselytizing and start giving people something to actually discuss. If you really want a good topic, I would LOVE to discuss French politics. I find the French to be much more involved in their democracy than Americans are in theirs, and would enjoy a chance to find out why. But you have to stop making all our decisions for us in your thread openers.

I think the moderation rules we have currently are enough. I would be loathe to add some sort of public trial for any offenses. I've seen heavy-handedness at other forums and I'm convinced it stifles discussion. For every person like you who wants a spotlight placed on their alleged transgressions, there are probably twenty people who would rather move on to more interesting things. Athena, many replies to your posts are like zapatos' above. You seem to have so much to say to us that it all comes bubbling up at once and many of your sentences have little relationship to each other. You jump from passionate rants to out-of-context anecdotes to defense of concepts that few understand. You have a great deal of potential but I think you need to think more about editing yourself (not censoring yourself, but editing for clarity and focus). I don't mean to offend, but looking back over some of your content, there are a lot of people who are telling you they don't know what you're talking about. You can do better; you're intelligent and passionate, and that has a lot of potential for interesting discussions.

First, you're premise is flawed, this is not a democracy, it's a privately owned internet forum. Second, you're basically asking to be treated under a different set of rules than everyone else. Third, I'm not sure why you're suddenly going off on the mods here (in multiple threads, I might add). Has something happened to you recently that I haven't read, something you want a public trial for?

OK, but don't breathe any out: http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/mar2010/2010-03-02-091.html

The new models are out. I was going to get one but didn't, so that's how many I have, too.

Actually, you said: ... which is different than "everyone I know in my town". Unless you know everyone in your town, "everyone I know in my town" is a subset of "everyone in my town". And the word is "elect". Strive for precision, please.

! Moderator Note Moved from Suggestions, Comments and Support (which is more for the site itself) to Psychiatry and Psychology. Are you eating the soaps and detergents, or just sniffing them?

Well, Newt feels assaulted by secular, atheistic elitism. He wants to explore a potentially passionate relationship with the evangelical community. I'd say it all depends on how good-looking the preacher's wife is in guitaoist's town.

! Moderator Note Moved from General Philosophy to The Lounge. Probably because our intent is unknown, our posture is relaxed and our vulnerability is high.

To me, this is where the conversation ends. If you see healthcare reform as giving up your beliefs in freedom, nothing anyone could say will ever sway you. You'll always see everything like this in the light of you giving up some sort of mystical freedom, all the while burdening the rest of us with costs that are twice what the rest of the FREE world pays, just so American capitalism gets to pretend it has a free market while pocketing it's unethical, hypocritical, favoritism-based profits.

I wish more people would realize this. Socialism practically requires that pooled resources are conserved and the general welfare (or at least a greater portion of it) takes precedence. Capitalism requires profit to take precedence, even if that profit comes at the expense of the general welfare, as in the case of our healthcare system, or our road maintenance system. Switching to something like Australia's system for healthcare would save us around half of what we currently pay. Switching to something like Germany's system for road maintenance would mean paying a fraction of what we pay now. As long as we favor business over everything else, and allow our government leaders to be overly influenced by business leaders (or actually be both, like Romney), we'll always have these conflicts of interest, where making money subverts the intent behind various programs. Do we want to be healthy or do we want to make more money from healthcare? We can't really have both. Do we want to drive on glass-smooth roads that wear like iron or do we want to make more money for construction companies? We can't do both. Do we want fewer prisons and felons or do we want to make more money from the prison system? We can't have both, their purposes are at odds. We need to find a better hybrid mix of capitalism and socialism if we want to achieve what most Americans want to achieve, which is basically stability, prosperity and security. We've allowed leaders like Gingrich to take us to where we are right now, and I'd say about 99% of us feel we're lacking in stability, prosperity and security.

You have no idea of the kind of spin money spent here to conflate the term "socialist" with "communist". You might have some idea of the kind of spin money spent here in the past to conflate "communist" with "red-eyed, baby-eating demon".

That's what he may have said, but his voting record was always different. Newt's one of the most moderate "conservatives" we've ever seen in this country. And I could never forgive him for his support of that travesty of a prescription drug act Bush passed. Gingrich moves his lips like a Republican, but all that comes out is more big corporate steamrolling of the free market competition that his party is supposed to be all about. guitaoist, I have to say, with all due respect, if you EVER expect to be taken seriously among educated, thoughtful people, you'd better respect your own opinion enough to ditch the textspeak and spell it out correctly. Your lazy-ass approach to communication is an affront to everyone here who cares enough to take the time to talk to you.

Newt Gingrich is one of the worst Republicans I've ever seen. He is so far off-platform I can't believe he took two states. He is the epitome of why the two party system does a crap job of representing such a large and diverse population as the US. I don't know any Republicans who he could hope to represent. He's not really conservative, he's not a very principled person, he's got some strange records on gun control and he would probably grow the federal government bigger than Bush did. Since he doesn't fit the conservative Republican patterns, he strikes me as someone who's in it only for the power it gives him.

Great, he can be president of your town.

"Misuse of commas and title case can throw off your whole aphorhythm."

I wasn't aware that a general practitioner could tell how much junk food you've been eating. Certainly they can track fitness progress, but I think people's metabolisms are so different that it'd be hard to distinguish between the person who could eat just about anything and never gain weight and the person who eats salads but finds it hard to keep fit. Especially when there might be financial penalties involved. This has been tried, in fact it's how the Tea Party came to be, in organized protest against a law to tax non-diet soda. I've had some really good fruit lately, and unfortunately it came from Chile instead of being locally grown. I don't know how any healthcare proposition would be able to affect the quality of crop production.

But the only ways to monitor behavior are way too invasive. This brings us back to taxing the unhealthy food. Or is there a way to encourage exercise, perhaps allowing a write-off for gym or community center membership?