Phi for All

The need for some sort of legal definition of when life begins is necessary when considering abortion, but that's more of a political discussion. I'd like to know if your religious (or simply moral) views allow for abortion at any time after conception. When does life begin according to your beliefs and can that ever be reconciled with the laws that need to exist to allow for abortion? And if your spiritual answer is, "Life begins at conception," then how can we deal with that legally when, under that definition, any miscarriage of a pregnancy might potentially be investigated as a murder?

Our understanding is currently incomplete, we have no complete TOE yet, but we're certain that the Laws of Thermodynamics can't be broken. Omnipotence suggests that God could circumvent those laws by a mere act of will. I'm suggesting that perhaps the whole concept of omnipotence is misunderstood. Early man, with a limited understanding of the laws, might have considered space-faring aliens omnipotent, so perhaps God does exist but works within the laws as He understands them, and we're simply calling it omnipotence.

The way I see it, if God can do anything, even perform acts that are outside the laws of the physical universe He may even have created, it destroys most chances of meaningful scientific discussion about Him. If, however, God merely has a complete knowledge of the universe and operates within its laws, then we can actually have a decent dialogue that's not destined to end with, "Well, He's all-powerful, sooooo...." God still doesn't seem to desire direct observation, but with omnipotence removed He is less supernatural. What if He has been working with the Laws of Everything (all interactions unified with gravity and completely understood) for billions of years (with the current universe, at least)? Is a God like this any more believable? Any less worthy?

It's simple. The government wouldn't have to take as much out of my healthcare dollar for administration, nor does it take a cut for profit, or for 7-figure executive bonuses. Doctors would benefit because the government pays on a 30-45 day cycle, as opposed to insurance companies who take 90-120 days while they spend even more of my money checking to see if I filled out my applications incorrectly, or if the doctors might have used some kind of experimental drug to save my life that they won't have to pay for. You've may not have heard of these kinds of things, because FOX News doesn't criticize insurance companies (to keep on topic). Again, you're using the current restrictions of the IRS for a non-existent socialized healthcare program. It could easily be set up with a right to recourse, much as the IRS has Tax Advocacy available. And if you had a problem with your medical procedures, I'm sure you'd be taking it up with the doctors involved, not the feds. I don't see us taking away the capitalist side of medicine, but I'd love to take away the idea of medical insurance. I'd rather pay my $850/month to someone who isn't skimming profit so they can turn me down when I need them most.

That's not true. When you join a branch of the US Armed Forces, you are joining a federally funded program. The defense of the country is not a state matter, it's a federal one. Can you imagine the disparity and chaos if defense of the country was left up to individual states? This is a horrible argument, mainly because it has nothing to do with my position. I'm arguing that I don't want the insurance company between me and my healthcare in the first place. Insurance for my car or home, even my life (which is a quantized value upon my death, for insurance purposes) are things I can objectively assess since they have a value that can be ascribed to them. But my health is subject to too many variables and can't be easily quantized. But the argument is for socialized medicine, something that hasn't been established. You are placing current restrictions for a service that has yet to be determined.

Gotta have this one from The Big Bang Theory posted here: A physicist goes to an ice cream parlor every week and orders an ice cream for himself and offers an ice cream for the empty stool sitting next to him. This goes on for a while until the owner asks him what he is doing. The man says “Well, I’m a physicist and Quantum Mechanics teaches us that it's possible for the matter above this stool to spontaneously turn into a beautiful woman who might accept my offer and fall in love with me.” The owner says, "There are a lot of single beautiful women who come in here every day, so why don’t you buy an ice cream for one of them and they might fall in love with you." And the physicist says “Yeah, but what are the odds of that happening?”

Who exactly is complaining? Those people should be tied to a post on the coastline the next time there is a warning. What a ridiculous criticism of a system we are lucky to have in the first place!

But before it was agreed, the argument about it started somewhere, and the decision to make it a socialist, federally funded program was at least partially based on not wanting our military in the hands of private interests. This is the biggest part of my argument for socialized medicine; the insurance companies have a private profit interest that's in direct opposition to the reason I pay them for my healthcare. They also use part of my money to find ways to deny my claims for many reasons. Would you want the military in the hands of private corporations, to have our security decided by how good our contract was? I guess we'd need some lawyers as part of a socialist, federally funded task force designed to make sure our contacts with a private military could stand up to *their* lawyers (and we'd be paying tax dollars for our lawyers AND theirs). These are the arguments those like Glenn Beck fail to acknowledge in their cherry-picking of what constitutes socialism.

Shimmer Royalties?

Steel rebar is relatively inexpensive, and has the added benefit of a similar expansion coefficient. It can also be bent and welded together for internal integrity. If the concrete used is good quality and the environment is not too hostile, there is little to no corrosion since the steel is embedded and protected by the concrete. Offhand I can't think of anything cheaper that would be as easy to work with. There are fiber reinforced plastics, but I don't think they are as cost-effective or durable as steel. They also can't be bent or welded once they are pultruded. They are mostly used where there is a high risk of corrosion.

I don't see how liberalism could have "become" Libertarianism. I believe in change because systems become easy to scam when they don't grow and get better along the way, so I consider myself liberal in that regard. But I also believe in governmental controls and regulations, especially with regard to business where profit motives often override what's good for the populace as a whole. I am nowhere near being a libertarian. Furthermore, I also think progressive and liberal are basically the same thing, especially since conservatives have done such a great job of making liberal synonymous with anti-freedom commie soldier-haters. I regard progressive as a movement towards keeping up with fast-changing times and not letting ourselves get bogged down in 50's nostalgia and bygone days seen through rose lenses.

We so rarely think like this these days, and it's a shame. We make everything more complicated than it has to be, often requiring experts paid to untangle these Gordian knots (*cough* IRS tax codes *cough*). I always think back to all the expensive hydroelectric dams the US has built in third world countries that not only become obsolete soon after, but give us a bad name due to the corruption and pollution they caused. We could have spent a fraction of the dam money by buying every household some energy efficient refrigerators, washers and dryers. Then they wouldn't need more power and everyone would love us.

We also don't know what the replacement factors are. What's the longevity of a Bloom Box? Do its internal elements decay or need replenishing, similar to photovoltaic encapsulation degradation? I just don't see how they arrive at those numbers for investment recovery.

It seems like more than that to me: The corporate boxes cost about $700,000 to $800,000. Ebay installed five Bloom Boxes nine months ago, and they fuel about 15 percent of its San Jose campus, said CEO John Donahoe in the 60 Minutes interview. “It’s been very successful thus far,” Mr. Donahoe says, adding that the company has saved $100,000 in electricity costs already. For an investment of $3.75M, it will take a year for eBay to save $0.13M. Is electric energy expected to triple in price in the next 6-10 years?

I have to agree with this. Too much is happening that benefits big business, going (at least) all the way back to Clinton giving away television and radio to mega-concerns, through Bush and the no-bid military contracts, oil and big-pharma concessions, and now Obama with the continuation of the wars, the bailouts and the botched efforts at healthcare reform. We don't seem to have learned anything, and big businesses just keep getting bigger at our expense, insinuating themselves between our tax dollars and effective spending. We had the chance to experiment with allowing just one business sector to fail so we could see what the impact would be, but we chose to bail them all out, some with absolutely no direct financial benefit to the taxpayer. We should have learned that a war on terror can't be fought with military might, but we blew that too, even when it can be shown that in Islamic areas of central Asia where schools were built to offset the fundamentalist teachings of the madrasahs, anti-western sentiment becomes almost non-existent. Things will never get any better until the people learn to make themselves heard over the big business lobbyists.

When Santa doesn't give you lemons....

I think it would be a very dangerous thing to have private armies attached to megacorporate concerns. It could be argued that big business owns the government, and the government runs the military, so big business already owns the military, but giving big business the legal right to field their own troops is just insanity, imo. Something about absolute power comes to mind.... Much of the war services in Iraq (except the actual fighting) traditionally done by the military themselves is privatized to just one company, and while you might think that would offer some cost savings, it really doesn't. If it's not more efficient and cost-effective, why do it other than to add a stratum of profit for a megacorporation?

Well, they're doing it through a civilian business, but personally I don't think it's right to have an "exclusive contractor of the Defense Reutilization and Marketing Service (DRMS) for the sale of surplus and scrap assets of the United States Department of Defense (DOD)." How does one company get an exclusive on something as big as this? This is not how the politics of capitalism should work. I remember reading about what Haliburton did with broken down Humvees used by our ground forces in Iraq. They claimed that sand in the internal workings made it too difficult to repair broken units so they were decommissioned and sold as scrap assets (I've checked and I can't find the original article I read, tbh). Apparently, if the vehicle wouldn't start, they just ordered a new one instead of even trying to fix it. I'd love to know how much it took to fix these decommissioned vehicles once they were sold for scrap.

Possibly a bot on drugs. Like crack. Crackbot.

How can you "go down in history" without going public? Is this some kind of private history? Also, it skews your results to hold a "smartest man on the planet" competition without actually inviting the rest of the planet.

I was looking for that piece of the puzzle. Thank you.

It's too bad we can't turn the constant pressure of the deepest parts of the ocean into efficient energy. Wave power has the same ecological danger to marine inhabitants that wind power has for avians.

We do ourselves such a disservice with these liberal/conservative labels. Who wouldn't agree that our society is evolving over time and needs healthy change in some areas? And who wouldn't agree that some aspects are working well, and don't need to change? Yet we insist on painting everyone with one of two brushes. So in that vein, FOX News is a one brush painter, and that shouldn't be the only way people see the world.

Wind has a big NIMBY objection with lots of folks, and I think that's why it scores lower. Maybe if they could make the turbines look like huge trees with lots of small fan blades that looked like leaves, people wouldn't mind having them on the horizon.

I'm not convinced that government != efficiency, I just think it ends up being manipulated that way. Mechanisms that keep a private business changing in response to market pressures surely could be applied to government programs, but they often aren't. There almost seems to be a desire to keep the programs from changing to make it easier to figure out how to scam them. Putting the power to update the programs in the hands of those who might profit from letting them stagnate is where a lot of government inefficiency exists, imo. Maybe we need another cabinet position, like the Secretary of Integrity, someone to keep Congress from corrupting their own work. Unfortunately, that office would probably attract the most scumbags.