Phi for All

Knowledge is a tool, and can therefore be used for either ethical or unethical purposes. The need of society is for its members to use knowledge ethically and when they don't, they are working outside of that society. This is one of the things that define a society. the tree asked in post #21 if there was value in learning beyond personal empowerment. I responded with an example of benefiting society and the rebuttals have all been about behavior that is considered outside those boundaries. I think you have to be willing to suggest that criminal behavior, while realistic in our world, is also acceptable behavior within our society to make those arguments work. If I learn how to be a good locksmith and I use the knowledge to help people protect their homes from criminals, I benefit society and am a functioning part of it. If I use that knowledge to break into people's homes then I become a criminal and am functioning outside of that society. I am being sought by the police, my liberties are curtailed, my business is even threatened.

I don't rhyme all the time. He keeps posting the same hate-filled stuff under new memberships about every week or two. We throw most of it away, but sometimes we keep threads like this to show how silly such attempts are. He does this all over the web. I don't think he reads anything but his own stuff. Yes, we sometimes modify threads like these as part of an attempt to show the futility of this kind of hateful preaching. We call it "sparfing".

I suppose there are many subtleties, but by definition a society allows certain freedoms to participating, contributing members, and restricts those freedoms when members act in a manner the society deems inappropriate. In essence, when you commit a crime, you now have the police looking for you and your freedoms are restricted. When you're caught and convicted, you are removed from society for the time you spend in prison. When your debt to society is paid, you're allowed to rejoin it. So a person who learns about the world learns more about his society and how to act within it. The more you learn, the more value society places upon you, and the more valuable you are to your society. So it's not just for personal endowment that learning is the ethical choice. Your society benefits from your learning as well.

But criminals who don't benefit society are removed from it, for a time. Those who don't commit crimes are allowed the full benefits of society, while those who do have limitations placed on them.

He does tend to cling to the bottom of one's shoe, yes.

It does, but isn't that inherent in the concept of "society"? Are people who don't work to better society part of that society?

To extend Obama's recent metaphor (the "toll" part of your title reminded me of it), we're realizing we need to take the keys away from the drivers who keep putting us in the ditch. Or maybe stop giving licenses to those from certain schools of driving. There's too many of them out there riding the brakes, not using signals and texting behind the wheel.

Ethically, you're also more valuable to your society if you learn as much as you're able to. You'll make fewer errors in judgment that might result in danger to everyone else. Learning makes you a more efficient cog in the bigger machine.

1, 4, 6, 7, 14, and 16 all apply in this case. #6 is probably the best. I'm sure waratheist really wubs all this attention.

Wub makes the world go around. All you need is wub. Wub is a many splendored thing. Don't make me write you a wub song....

I just deleted the duplicate of your Help needed making 20kv sparkgap thread in Other Sciences. Does that solve the problem?

LOL *snort*

Mr Skeptic can correct me, but I'm pretty sure he was talking about what a legal drug market would do to advertise their new products. I'm for decriminalizing drugs, but I don't want them hyped like the pharmaceuticals are doing with other drugs.

I told him if he rubbed those sticks together long enough he'd get something, but fusion?! I'll vote "mistaken".

Old people like you nap a lot though, don't they?

I think that's a whole different question, and not one required to answer the OP. Having a basic understanding about how your world works may take away blissful ignorance, but ask the guy who leaned over to look into the geyser if he'd be happier now if he'd known boiling water and steam was about to shoot out. Ask the new mother whose child is dead if she'd be happier now to have known that keeping her infant clean is good, and bathing it upstream from where the animals drink is even better.

Has she tried the recirc button? You're supposed to get the cabin to the temperature you want, then press the recirculation button so it re-uses the air in the cabin so you don't have to keep heating and cooling outside air. If the air in the cabin is odor-free to begin with, it just recirculates that same air. I try to use it if I see a vehicle ahead of me belching exhaust, but if you wait until you can smell something bad, it's too late to recirculate the air. Your mom needs to turn the fan on low and use recirculation before she hits the methane zone. Why go to the expense of filtering outside air when you can just block it for a while?

I wondered, when Glenn Beck started talking about legalizing pot, if FOX wasn't trying to bait Obama into tackling drugs during his first administration to entangle him in months of debate and so they could set up conservative leadership with a prime talking point for next election. It's one thing to talk about how ineffective the War on Drugs is, and a whole other thing to talk about legalizing them. I admit that this thinking stemmed from the fact that FOX started talking about "Obama and his Czars" without ever mentioning that it was Ronald Reagan who started the practice.

I think it's rather a problem of how the government decided to intervene in this instance, not in government intervention in general. Portugal's government has been offering counseling instead of incarceration for almost a decade now and it seems to be having a positive effect. This is the twitchy part. If you make them legal, you open them for market exploitation. If they remain illegal, you have people crowding prisons who really don't deserve to be there and criminals profit at our expense. Can we meet in the middle somewhere, with government controlled licensing for manufacture/distribution/taxation of drugs so their purity can be assured and the criminal element removed, while at the same time requiring their sale to be free of advertising and marketing pressure? Education regarding the effects of various drugs would be much more effective than incarceration, imo.

I'll do a better job next time.

This time it seems different....

Thanks for posting this, elas. In the past when you've expended so much effort on a concept, you've had a tendency to bring it up in threads outside of Speculations. Please be reminded that this speculation needs to stay contained in this thread alone.

I only changed two letters to get atheistwank.

A simpler fix is to use the air recirculation feature. It's the button among your fan/air conditioner/heater controls that has a car with an arrow like this: The recirculation setting uses the air already in the car and is normally used to give your AC a break. Another benefit is to reduce stinky outside smells. Just make sure she pushes the button BEFORE she enters the bovine zone. If it's still bad, any convenience store, parts store or pro car wash will have air fresheners galore. Much less expensive than any kind of special filtration system, I would imagine.

How about I just change a couple of letters?