Phi for All

So yoga and meditation are only religions if you are studying them from a religious point of view? I could say that tennis (or anything) is a religion if I am studying it from a religious point of view. I have no idea why you think you're being scientific. I also have no idea why you mentioned plumbers and welders. This also is completely incomprehensible. What do you mean here? Your first post mentions "the author of the text" but does not name him, nor does it give a source (such as a link to where I can read if for myself). It's not very scientific if we just take your word for it.

It hasn't stopped Kender. You must be thinking of an honest determined person.

When has that ever stopped a determined person?

This is an ad hominem attack. His name is just that, and your claims regarding it are based on false assumptions. Please try to be respectful here. Citations with no source. Where did you get them? "Very often" does not equal "all the time". This is a Begging the Question fallacy. You can't prove the author is right by quoting the author. Can you prove meditation or yoga is a religion in any other way? They don't seem to fit any definition of religion I'm aware of. Please provide a link to this article. Again, it's just his name. Personal attacks are not allowed here.

Disgusting. You'd think some fair and balanced news organization would be blasting this all over the TV. Have any of the liberal organizations (MoveOn.org, etc) done an infomercial on this? I don't watch much commercial TV.

These posts seem to say, "If you're going to prove this is a scam by any other means than the ones I'm prepared to discuss, I'm going home". How is that scientific? Shouldn't science look at *all* the evidence? If the OP hadn't directly mentioned an investment then I could see neonsignal's list of shell companies as an attempt to Poison the Well, but it definitely seems to be relevant to the thread. What's stopping anyone from continuing to discuss the feasibility of the physics and engineering of the Kender device?

I'm not sure I would count a propane leak as senseless violence. Do you know something about this the press doesn't?

And consumers need to be re-educated about convenience and instant gratification. If people would just realize that a high-quality version of a product might cost three times more but lasts six times longer, we could stop importing cheap crap and maybe rekindle an interest in craftsmanship. And let's not forget the delicious pleasure you get from using something that was really really well-made.

Sweetest words on the net, free shipping! w00t!

Quantum magnetic resonant crystal pyramids, placed on a ley line. Feel the Power.™ Marketing is ready to roll this out as soon as Sisyphus' check clears.

... under a pyramid.

Exactly. And a very good point about the guy's family. We tend to think of greedy people as selfish and alone, but that's rarely the case. Even under a communist utopia, someone has to authorize the use of resources for research and development of specific ideas. Even if the whole world were united in this socialist or communist society, there would have to be a governing body that said yes to certain expenditures and no to others. Resources are still going to be limited to what your work force can bring in. Someone still has to "pay" for everything, even if you don't use money. It's pretty refreshing to see someone with a mind sharp enough to see beyond criticism and glean what they need from a discussion. You've proven in this thread that you can defend your ideas without letting your passion override your common sense and courtesy. You have the spark of curiosity and intelligence. The rest is just learned methodology, experience and hard work. Good job. I hope your utopia can actually happen someday. As I said before, there are times when I think free market capitalism keeps us spinning our wheels making the same old cars and toasters because they're profitable but not necessarily better or as good as they could be.

Camouflage is probably the most practical method. You would need to think about where you want this invisibility to take place, the background, light sources and your audience. Your camouflage needs to break up the normal recognizable pattern of your head and torso. The human eye is always looking for patterns so you can use makeup and mottled coloring in your clothing to make yourself blend into a different recognizable pattern. Dark grays mixed with black are better than all black at night.

If you don't really need the portability of a laptop, you can get more muscle from a desktop for the same money, or the same muscle for less. I love my laptops but for most things I use a computer for, I could just as easily stay at a fixed station. But since I have laptops, I move around a lot.

We frequently get spammers who join just to boost the hits for certain websites and sell products they pretend to shop for. You passed the test by replying and not just doing a "hit and run". Looks like a nice machine for the price. It's even got a fingerprint reader. You may want to upgrade the battery to a 9 cell if they have it available, but only if you tend to roam the house like I do with my laptop. I'm not a big power gamer, so I can't tell you much about that, but it looks like it's got the right stuff. The Aspire is sort of an entry level model with Acer, but that price is pretty tempting. 2.2G is not the fastest processor by any means, but it should be fine for what you want it for. The Acer Aspire looks a lot like the HP Pavillion, so you might want to compare prices on a Pavillion.

Why would you want *our* opinions? You just joined and you don't even know us! I think you just want me to click that link for some reason.

It's gotten us where we are today. We call it greed when it's excessive, but the same driving force is also called ambition, passion, desire and enterprise. Commendable, but hardly something you could force on a society as a whole. Your society may eventually become that praiseworthy and selfless, but how would you survive the first few generations when a majority might just want to sit on their butts and get fed? I think your understanding of science is flawed. Research has always needed a patron with a big purse. And development has always needed a company to pay to bring it to market. And the market has always needed more companies to compete to drive progress and innovation while reducing resource use and costs. This kind of "statement of fact" is what I and others have objected to many times in this thread, and it's what prompted me to object to your "Capitalism kills" stance. You don't know this to be true. It's conjecture and you need to be careful, especially in this forum, how you write it. "If we were socialist we would have been to other planets by now, in my opinion", "If we were socialist we probably would have been to other planets by now", or even "If we were socialist we would have been to other planets by now because of these reasons: ....", are the way you need to phrase conjectures and opinions. Either let us know this is a belief and not a fact, or let us know exactly why we should take this as fact so we can analyze your reasoning. Your chain of statistics still doesn't show that worldwide starvation deaths are directly caused by American capitalism. What you need is solid evidence, like when US farmers sold corn to be used for ethanol instead of food because it was more profitable, thus causing a rise in corn prices that denied that staple to the poorest people in the world and resulted in starvation deaths. Once again, I'm not arguing with what you're saying, it's how you're saying it and the sloppy methodology you're using to hastily draw your conclusions. No offense intended.

If one big event using most if not all of the clubs sounds too daunting (and it would be), perhaps you could have multiple smaller collaborations between two or three clubs. The idea of combining the various groups should help keep them from isolating themselves the way it happens so often with specialty organizations.

Sugar grown in the US has had an abnormally high tariff placed upon it ever since 1816 (which was passed along to the growers as subsidies). Growers in Louisiana and Florida complained that the climate is cooler than more equatorial lands and sugar cane plantations took longer to establish. They continued to complain (once their initial costs were recovered) that reducing the tariffs would reduce the value of the slave labor used on the plantations. Sugar in the US is still highly taxed and the subsidies that helped the growers start out in healthy competition are still given, resulting in sugar that is twice the price of anywhere else in the world. And because of price, many US food manufacturers either locate their plants outside the US or use unhealthy high-fructose corn syrup as a sugar alternative. I don't know if that counts as a non-permanent tax which never expired, but it still steams me.

Will we ever be able to rationalize the money we wasted on the War on Terror 5,000 Extremists?

Not without a major restructuring of the healthcare market, I agree. I'm convinced that nothing will ever be a complete solution. Has there ever been a complete economic solution to anything? That's not the nature of Life, especially one that we keep prolonging with medical advancements. But surely there has to be a better way than placing an industry between us and our doctors that's heavily invested in making sure we get the least care possible. Let's face it, as long as we live long enough to have children and maintain a viable customer base, insurance companies fare better if we don't live long enough to require more expensive treatments. A representative government option whose aim is to cure me no matter what seems to have a better chance of representing my wishes, and is at least a step in a better direction. So yeah, universal healthcare seems totally constitutional to me.

Only if he had some way of spreading his idiocy on a national level.

This is part of what bothered me about rushing to sign the Patriot Act. Did we allow legislation that may curb our right to push for reform in legal ways, thus making force our only option? Will someone in the near future be called a terrorist if they start trying to enact reform that removes those in power or tries to significantly change the corrupt system? Could legal reform be called a breach of current national security?

I think providing universal healthcare is a perfect way to promote the general welfare. Providing health insurance, however, promotes mostly insurance companies. I object to the premise that we can't afford universal healthcare when there are other nations that can. Remove some of the obvious obstacles and we can stop pretending. I'll second that. Insurance is a good thing when you're insuring an object like a car or a home, but putting a profit-oriented company between humans and their health is just stupid imo.

Wasn't part of the solution mandatory population control, which included forced abortion of unplanned pregnancies and a tax of 50% of family income or loss of employment for having more than one child? Those poor people. Breaks the heart.