Phi for All

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?

I assumed this is what he was on about, but I still can't figure out why it angers him so much, or causes him to label such people "degenerates". Even if you assume these people changed the names they were given by their parents, why does he consider it such deviant behavior? What is it about a last name like James or Kay or Paul that triggers his wrath?

CharonY is right, ydoaPs. That's why you end up on the deck drooling every time something goes wrong with the server.

It's not only about personal empowerment. Ethically, a basic education helps you to keep from making basic misjudgments that could be detrimental to others as well. Learning basic hygiene has cut infant mortality rates in half within just a few years in many undereducated parts of the world. Personally, I think much of extremist Islamic ideology could never have created so many terrorists if a basic secular education had been provided to much of Pakistan, Afghanistan and the surrounding areas. Perhaps ethically it's also preferable to provide opportunities for basic education for others whenever possible (preferably before you bomb them or something).

Don't forget the corollary issue: at what point does "terrorist act" get redefined to catch the next "tier" of terrorists? How broad a brush will eventually be used in revoking citizenship?