Phi for All

No, that's the only thing YOU see. My hard work seems to be paying off, and while I probably won't be a billionaire, I can appreciate the needs of businesses to cut costs without cutting corners. Expansion abroad is a good thing. Sour grapes? Changing, our economy is changing. There's a big difference. Again, more change. Foreign countries are also opening factories in the US looking for American expertise. It's just change, Mike T, a restructuring based on market pressures and fluctuations. Businesses do it all the time. First you blame the corps for being greedy, now they're committing suicide? I think the minimum wage should be raised, but I don't see it as being the cure. Prices will go up where minimum wage affects them. And sharing the wealth just sounds like, "I don't make as much as you do, let's split the difference." I've tried to explain in other posts how money that's "hoarded" gets used by banks as loans. The only money that's hoarded is in piggy banks and mattresses.

Right! I remember inheriting a set of Melamine plates and cups when I moved out of my folks house. I gave them to a roommate when I got a new place but they were still like brand new. I've often thought I could get rich manufacturing a few everyday items out of Melamine. You'd have to charge a lot since you'd only be selling one to every interested person, but I think lots of people would like to buy their last spatula and then move on to more important things.

One of my oldest friend's mother has a plastic cheese grater from the 50's. It looks brand new, no scratches, the colors are still vivid. This gadget has been used every week for fifty years and will probably outlive us all. Definitely unobtainium.

You make a great point and I guess sometimes it's not about which is correct but more that you have been exposed to differing POVs. Most stories have more than one side and I still maintain that it's best to have multiple sources. And when you know facts have been skewed then it's a red flag that someone is manipulating the press for their own purposes. To underscore the importance of seeing all sides possible, I always like the story of the Baltimore Needle Exchange program. People who only hear that the city wants to give free needles to junkies are outraged. Then they find out how drastically AIDS and other diseases from shared-needle use are lowered and they think it's a good thing. Then they hear that, instead of all the junkies turning in a few needles for a few fresh ones, opportunistic addicts are collecting hundreds of needles, exchanging them and then selling them to the other junkies for $1 apiece and once again the citizens are outraged. Before the mayor is forced to dismantle the whole program, we then come to find out that the addicts who are selling the needles are a more effective distribution system than the city ever could have mounted on it's own, they know ALL the addicts and where they hang out, and they're being paid by the addicts instead of the city. Once again, everyone is happy, but where would Baltimore's Needle Exchange program be if the whole story hadn't been revealed?

Because one source of news is never good. Walter was king in his day and while he was the litmus test for trust in journalism, I still think it's better to have more input and judge for yourself.

To a certain extent, it's always been this way. Most people at the extreme ends dismiss what doesn't support their POV and relish that which does, no matter the source. They treat the media like a buffet table, turning up their noses at what doesn't look good and loading their plates down with the stuff they like.

Sneezing is a result of irritants attacking your nose and throat. It's more likely that whatever is irritating you would be worse for your heart than sneezing itself. I'm more concerned with what they would be giving these experiment participants to make them sneeze excessively.

Even more evidence that it was probably something cataclysmic rather than a disease knocking out some kind of lynchpin dinosaur species and causing all the others to fail. I think that's what swansont was referring to.

Ooooh, a big scary number! IDers can be such weenies. If the estimated age of the earth is only 6000 years, what's the big deal?

Evolution uses loaded dice. While it doesn't guarantee certain outcomes, it makes them more probable. Intelligent Design and Evolution.

I've always blamed our obsession with sports for this aberration. Voting is analogous with winning, and the votes themselves are called "races". Voters believe they'll be throwing their votes away if they back an independent candidate who looks likely to lose, even if that candidate represents them better than either of the major party candidates.

I don't know anybody who conforms completely to what the liberals or conservative, right-wingers or left wingers are supposed to be all about. I'm pretty fiscally conservative and socially liberal, but there are certain social issues where I'm a bit more conservative than other social issues. People want to classify things for simplicity, but people defy classification regularly.

Now that the Mods outnumber the Admins again, we're going to stage a revolt and put Creationist literature in Sayonara³'s locker in the Staff lounge. YT2095, Pangloss and I will, or course, have airtight alibis.

You have me there.

This is a very interesting and enjoyable way of putting it. You definitely ARE one of the most interesting and enjoyable members we have here. A single disease would be unlikely to kill off so many creatures. Some would develop an immunity.

This is the part where it breaks down for me. Assuming time travel is not as difficult as assuming it wouldn't be regulated a hundred times more stringently than nuclear weapons. Given that the plans for a homemade time machine won't be available on the "solar-system-wide web", a mad scientist getting one is a tremendous assumption.

So you say. I have scant evidence of your safety precautions and a great deal of evidence that tells me you are a young amateur who is reckless and seeks destructive information about chemistry. I worry that others will view your posts and copy your recklessness. I also worry, since you ignore advice from experts, that your next post may read something like, "OMG! You were right! It exploded, I'm typing one-handed and I'm coughing up BLOOD!" Perhaps it's your use of title case that suggests I'm going to read about you in the headlines of tomorrow's paper and that adds to my fears for your (and other's) safety, but I also have a duty to the owners of this site not to let dangerous information and behavior be negligently posted where impressionable and unskilled people can read it and regret it.

Some air conditioners sit in a window and bring outside air in. Some sit on pads outside and do the same thing. Central air units usually sit on top of your furnace and are located indoors. None of these residential units actually bring extra oxygen into the system.

You just made a very big mistake. You ignored warnings from Experts and now we can't trust you to act responsibly around chemicals. My recommendation is that you be barred from posting in Chemistry since others may follow your life-threatening example.

Besides removing heat, air conditioners have fans that circulate air within a system. Some have filters so they remove large impurities and clean the air. Evaporative coolers and air conditioners with humidifiers add moisture to the air they process (de-humidifiers are used in some locales to lower humidity).

I'm not up-to-date on dark matter theory. I apologize. Would this affect the OP's transfer of consciousness scenario?

That is one of the three main theories. The universe will either expand until it finally exhausts all it's energy and freezes (slowing as it goes), or it will reach a point where it can't expand any farther and it then begins to collapse into a Big Crunch, or it will continue to expand but it's rate will slow continually, never quite reaching a stopping point but never really dying out either. In any of these scenarios, the transfer of consciousness from one human to an exact "duplicate" human elsewhere in the universe is possible, but negligibly probable.

If our politicians appear to cater to the wealthy it's because the wealthy hire lobbyists to stay in the politician's faces every day. The voters could do the same thing more effectively if they showed the same interest. Politicians value votes that keep them in office doing their jobs more than the money the wealthy donate to their campaigns. Remember that the donations are to help sway the public vote. I don't know who you're listening to, but you really need to broaden your sources of news. You are robbing yourself of good judgement by only gleaning that which supports your pet thesis. You have become a magnet for the dark side, and it's blinding you to what is really working in the world today.

This is an assumption, albeit a somewhat common one. We have no way of determining if consciousness lives on after the death of the body. The observable universe is not infinite, it is constantly expanding and limited due to the speed of light. The complexity of the 100 trillion cells that make up your particular body would yield an infinitesimal probability of another exact you occurring somewhere else. While it remains infinitesimally possible, it is in no way probable. This is much longer than current theories place the life of the universe. If gravity acts as a brake on expansion, we may have another 50 billion years before a Big Crunch happens. If expansion is continual, then another 10 trillion years will see all exisitng stars burn out and the universe will go cold and dark.

I'd get the hybrid in a heartbeat if I needed a new vehicle. It's a great green choice and from what I've read they've got plenty of acceleration and responsiveness. I'll take that over top end speed any day. Which viable hydrogen car is this? The ones I've read about use a fuel cell that is still petroleum-based. And people and governments only fear change if it comes so fast they aren't prepared for it. Everyone would love to have a pollution-free alternative to oil but if it made your current vehicle obsolete overnight we'd all have plenty to fear, wouldn't we?