Phi for All

What lies are the radical left spreading about McCain? Or do they really need to lie since the McCain = Bush equation solves most problems? Would things be different if McCain were up by this much? Would we be hearing about McCain's ties to the Nazis?

The lies are what stands out most to me. I've had scores of costly glossy pamphlets mailed to me that were completely wrong in what they claimed. Not just spun, but out-and-out lies. A little fact checking debunked them all and left me with a really bad feeling. Then when I see people claiming Obama is a communist or a Muslim, it makes me wonder how many people don't really want to check the facts.

No, we're evil capitalists. Prisons make a lot of money in the US.

We also voted for our individual state Senate and House, some county positions and some judges for both district and state Supreme courts. And there are usually some amendments and referendums to vote on, things that can change the state constitutions. Some of it is just clearing up archaic language, but some of it is an attempt by special interests to create markets to exploit. In Colorado, we have a zealous family focus group who is trying to get an amendment passed to define life from the moment of conception. You can't afford to let these things slip by because the focused groups often have a bunch of manpower that can canvas on the state level.

I know printer ink is expensive; industry standards favor selling the printer barely above cost and making your profit on the regular purchases of ink. This would be similar to buying a car for half the normal price, but paying four times the cost for gas and oil to fill it. It works for video games too. Nintendo marketing. I'm talking about how ethical it is to deceive your customer base, the people who are paying your price, by telling them they are out of ink when they're not. How ethical is it to build in an alarm to encourage your current clients to resubscribe to your service now even though their subscription doesn't expire for three months? Industry models shouldn't be ethically disrespectful to the people who are purchasing the products, but I want to make sure this really is a question of ethics and not just accepted practice.

Please put a link to your site in your signature. Just go to My Account --> Edit Signature. We don't allow offsite linking in discussion threads since that might be seen as an endorsement. Just make sure all your stars have their clothes on and all will be well.

I also voted Obama and Udall, but I wrote my own name in for everything else. I found eliminating the state tax credit on oil and gas particularly satisfying, but only because of the insulting campaign the industry ran against the amendment. One ad highlighted the opening to the amendment ("Shall the state taxes be increased $321M....") and conveniently forgot to mention that the tax increase only applies to those who extract oil from our ground, and is actually just a repeal of a tax credit they've been getting for 30 years. They also imply, in another ad, that eliminating the credit will hurt everyone because oil and gas will increase in price to compensate. In a 4-color pamphlet I got, they show a mother with a newborn on the verge of tears, paid for by the companies that will jack up the price if you vote to eliminate the subsidy. The whole campaign felt like a Mafia shakedown. "I'm sure you wouldn't want anyone to get hurt, God forbid." ParanoiA is going to have a fit, a fit I say!

Faith mayo may not be the answer, but science asks a different question.

Do religion and science mix? I believe they can, but there's never been any evidence of it.

There were a couple of moments when it may have hurt him to lash back, like when McCain asked him why he didn't run for president four years ago. But I was a bit disappointed that Obama's reticence when poked came off as tacit acceptance, at least to me. I think Joe Plumber would have liked to see him scrap it up a bit too, but as bascule points out, Obama didn't need to be aggressive.

My Dell printer told me it was low on black ink a while back. It gave me a little gauge showing that this was true. Then it told me my color cartridge was low as well (along with an identical gauge). I didn't really believe it, so I decided to test it out. I've printed just over 100 pages since then, and neither the black nor the color has dropped a single pixel. I like the printer and the extra pages since it started urging me to replace the cartridges have been just as consistently well-printed as any others. I will continue to print until I see signs of missing ink. But how many people just trust the manufacturer’s recommendations? How many people would have changed the cartridges when their printer recommended it, throwing away perfectly good ink, which I’m told is priced at seven times the cost of Dom Perignon champagne? My virus protection service is up in December, yet the service sends me alerts implying that it would be best to sign up for another year *now*, two months early. Since they aren’t pro-rating my payment, I have to wonder why they would openly seek to screw me out of two months of service I’ve already paid for. I think this all goes beyond caveat emptor. These specific manufacturers are implying that I may be harming my equipment if I don’t act on their recommendations. Besides being deceitful, I think it’s harmful because it makes me question expiration dates on other products, products where expiration dates may be much more important. I can use my nose to confirm if my milk has expired, but what about that big bottle of ibuprofen I couldn’t pass up at Costco last year? Will it hurt me to keep taking them, or will they just not be as effective? Or is the infamously greedy pharmaceutical company just trying to get me to buy more quickly? I get the feeling in some instances that manufacturers are hiding behind an expiration “shield” that lets them warn us in overly strong terms about something that is merely a slight probability. Does anyone have any facts about expiration ethics or products where expiration awareness is either terribly important or not remotely applicable? Does anyone have any anecdotes or studies about other instances of expiration ethics?

Hi carl. I removed the email link because it doesn't help anyone else who reads this if we take it offboard. Just ask the questions you're having a hard time with, along with any answers you have or think you have, and the membership will try to guide you along. Think of SFN not as a life preserver, but rather as a swimming instructor showing you how to kick your legs and swing your arms to keep your head above water.

Pretty good compared to now. At the time of the 2004 election, they were the highest they'd ever been, and many thought securing Iraq would bring much needed relief. Gas prices were very much a factor in 2004, no matter how much we look back in retrospect. Come on, guys. I know it seems like nothing now, but don't you remember shaking your head when gas went over $2? At least here in Denver, the talk that summer was about how this ex-oil maverick (grin) took office and four years later, after invading an oil producing country, the price at the pump was up almost 80%.

There's only three things wrong with this argument. In the summer before the 2004 election, gas had jumped to a record high. It only looks cheap now (really cheap - *sigh*), but at the time it was more expensive than it had ever been. If you're arguing that gas was still cheap enough to be the most viable fuel source that's one thing, but if you're saying the price didn't affect the 2004 election then I don't think that's right.

It might be good to have a street filled with green lights to get back some regulatory oversight that's been trampled under lately (yes, even before the Bush administration). We have 19th and 20th century policies colliding with 21st century realities, and the last thing we needed was to remove the teeth from our checks and balances. That said, it's never a good thing for one group to hold sway for too long. I just wish that, when stripped of rhetoric and posturing, the two groups didn't look so much alike. But in the end, I guess I wouldn't mind Obama having clear sailing for the first 100 days of his administration where he'll be most effective. I've learned that when the partisan bickering is at its worst, there's a bunch of people who don't want us to look too closely at something else. What would the Dems do to distract us if they couldn't point to the Reps as scapegoats?

I payed my $20K with these bills:

Exactly. And since you don't want to have to fight wanting it, and you'll be around others who are smoking, you need to find a way to not want them. Will power won't work for this; can you imagine, as Sayonara³ puts it, fighting off the temptation for the rest of your life? The temptation needs to be overcome. You said, "Am sick of my smoking habit as it is really having a toll on my health". Start compiling a list of reasons why smoking is no longer an option for you. Besides the shortness of breath, the coughing, the predisposition to other ailments, there's also the smell in your house and car, the ashes everywhere, the burned clothing and furniture, the cost(!), the stains on your smile, the desensitization of your senses of smell and taste, the social stigma, and the danger of fire you present. If you care about that sort of thing, you can also count that you are imposing most of those things on the people around you. I quit 14 years ago. I prepared my list so that smoking was not an option I was comfortable with anymore. That enabled me to not just shut the door on a bad habit, but rip out the jamb and brick up the hole in the wall where the door used to be. Anytime I ever thought about having even one, for old time's sake, I laughed at the notion and felt better for it, no will power necessary. I don't wish you luck; I wish you good health, a clean environment, many friends and a fresh smell and taste to your new life.

No, classical music is immortal. Until you play it backwards.

I don't feel my "race" is part of what makes me unique.

Cool. I do like your suggestion about editing the titles so people who aren't interested don't have to waste their time. I'll start doing that as soon as I identify the whisper tactics.

Thanks very much, but tbh, they practically write themselves. By the time the second guy posts, it's pretty obviously cheerleading, and cheerleaders are the meat and potatoes of comedy. liyon didn't post until yesterday, and I ran the IP addresses last night and discovered this, CaptainPanic. The vB system posts an edit note at the bottom of the post, and I put the reason there. I will start to edit the titles as well. Thanks for the suggestion. Been there, done that. I told you, it doesn't work, they continue to post, and create new accounts when we ban them. But sparfing seems to have gotten rid of those pesky La$ik spammers, so in true scientific tradition, we'll continue to explore what's working.

We get this type of thing so much that we had to develop a counterattack. Removing the posts doesn't work well, they just create more accounts. So we invented sparfing (spoof + morph = sparf). The staff edits the material now, revealing what they are attempting to do with their spamvertising (and poking some fun, I admit). It is hoped that these whisper campaigners will get the message that their message will be tampered with if they waste our time by posting it here.

Well, it seems that edwar.cole and liyon (how appropriate) are sock puppet accounts, trying to scam unwary scientists. But now their posts make sense.

The main difference is the observation, experimentation, and subsequent evidence accumulated by science compared to the "belief" of creationism. Evolution is a scientific theory, creationism is an idea. The two are not even remotely close to one another, theory and idea. Science doesn't rely on belief, but rather on evidence and testing, so it isn't subject to narrow-mindedness. A theory is NOT an idea. A theory has been tested and tested over time, and is capable of being wrong. Creationism can't say the same thing, since it can never be proven to be false. That's a tough concept but an important one. If evolution were refuted, science would be open to a better theory. Evolution isn't an idea. It's a theory. I'm going to keep saying this until you understand that it's not just something Darwin thought of and everyone else is too lazy to refute. There have been hundreds of thousands of people who have tried to refute evolution and they have never convinced a peer review. We have refuted the same creationist claims from virtually every creationist who has ever posted. The evidence is always ignored, and the creationists NEVER bother to read the links we supply, or even to take a biology course where evolution is explained. It IS identical. "Teach the controversy" is a well-known intelligent design slogan. I made a factual observation, no matter how much it might not be your intention.

You are successful at prolonging arguments. It would seem there isn't anyone here who doesn't believe that we descended from apes. Your other question, "What if we are missing something huge over this bickering?" is identical to a well-known creationist ploy, that of questioning one of the most well-founded, thoroughly researched scientific theories EVER, and then claiming there is a controversy. We aren't missing anything, because the "bickering" half of this "controversy" has nothing to back it up. In fact, the bickering half rarely even reads what the other half writes.