Mr Skeptic

What's at issue is whether it's evil in the first place.

 

EDIT: Also, why is this in the religion forum?

He thinks porn is evil for religious reasons?

Given the premises of the OP, it is special pleading to remove God from consideration with the same line of reasoning unless a specific mechanism for doing so is given. No such mechanism has been provided.

I'm not aware that anyone demands causes for eternal things. An eternal God doesn't need a cause for the same reason the cyclic model of the universe does not need a cause -- they don't have a start, no event for which to invoke the law of cause and effect.

Have you guys checked out Wikipedia as a news source? They seem to me to cover major world events extremely thoroughly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_I_nuclear_accidents

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Libyan_uprising

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Egyptian_revolution

What with over 100 references, it seems like a source I can trust.

Well, is it possible that somebody creates an undetectable form of HIV and infects it to people , and you know, it's not detected until the person develops AIDS. and since people don't know they are infected, they easily pass it on to others.

 

Is this kind of scenario possible?

Not really. HIV attacks the body's white blood cells (eg CD4), and any significant quantity of HIV virus will have to kill off those cells to replicate. Thus it will be detectable via lowered cell count in the blood. Perhaps if you modified the virus such that it was slower to kill off our white blood cells and could become infectious before causing serious symptoms (more so than standard HIV which already takes years to become apparent). I suppose then it could infect more people but the virus itself would become more harmless. In fact, without it killing off the white blood cells, it is quite likely the virus looses the battle with the immune system rather than the other way around. Odds are such a virus would function more as a vaccine against HIV than some more deadly virus.

A question sometimes is not only a question but makes a claim. The question, "Who created God?" is equivalent to "Someone created God. Name that person." The premise of that question is considered false by all the monotheists I know. The question itself is invalid/misleading.

Who made God?

Have you stopped beating your wife yet?

It would need some rigorous policies to keep the government from looting their own banks, like they do with so many other pools of money. Other than that, it is definitely a good idea and would put some good old market pressure on other banks to improve their own quality.

Most of the sugar in a potato is a glucose polymer known as starch. Is your question about the flavor of potatoes? I don't really see much other significance for the sucrose content of potatoes.

heard something about "exposed fuel rods on CNN but wasn't able to see the report idk if they ment exposed as in some kind of reactor breach or coolant no longer covering the rods

any one else hear about this?

It seems one of the rods lost sufficient coolant that it overheated and got some damage, which let some of the fission products dissolve in the coolant water. It's not really all that dangerous, but really shouldn't happen. If something else goes wrong then it could be a problem.

Is it possible to create a virus such as Hepatits , influenza or HIV in the laboratory?

It's so easy, you could do it right in your body.

Or is it possible to manipulate or alter the viruses genetically to produce a new type ( cousin virus )?

 

Can this be done in the lab manually?

 

I'm more interested in HIV .

This also happens naturally, given the high mutation rate of viruses. Every flu season you get a different one.

Scriptures are the supreme authority in all the religions. I can't force you to believe. Scriptures are true and are the words of God himself. They have the divine knowledge of everything within them.

Which scriptures are the words of which gods?

A few things to keep in mind... Most colleges if you retake the course you get the grade of the previous try replaced (and that you retook it does not show up on your official transcript). Also, hard classes generally have some sort of help for students, and sometimes the professor offers extra credit. In any case, you should be asking someone at your college, as they will know more specifics about what to do. Don't you have an academic adviser to talk to?

What if in the future it became scientifically proven that God exists?

(By God I mean the famous one, the omnipotent, omnipresent one etc)

 

How would you SFN athiests react in response to this revelation? How would your feelings about God change? Would you love Him or hate him? Would you worship Him or would you be neutral about the situation?

 

What questions would you ask God if you could talk to Him?

You mean Yahweh? I'd ask him why he'd been hiding when so many people claim that he mostly just wants people to believe in him, I'd ask him which of the religions was the correct one, I'd ask him if he really did the immoral things the bible claims he did.

This is true, but remember that the potential is given by:

 

[math]U=\frac{1}{4\pi \epsilon_0}\frac{q_1 q_2}{r}[/math]

 

where [imath]q_1[/imath] is the electric charge creating the field and [imath]q_2[/imath] the charge experiencing the field, and [imath]r[/imath] is the distance between them. The increase in potential decreases the farther away you get, if that makes sense, and eventually it's negligible.

And, that's without the funny stuff that happens when you connect the two via a conductor. If you confine almost all the electric field in a 1 dimensional object, force won't decrease with distance along the wire (thus the electric field induced in a wire by a voltage difference is essentially the same along its length, which helps explain formulas like V=IR, so that the longer wire just has a weaker field along a longer path for the same total potential).

He misses the point. The convention x sin doesn't make understanding trig any easier. The argument is that tau is both more intuitive and more useful than pi. Convention is a bad argument for a reasonable change (ok, other than it would be a costly change).

 

I'm sure there are plenty of these conventions in every scientific (and other) disciplines. For example, labeling the direction of current opposite the flow of electrons in a current, misnaming of dozens of proteins in cell bio because they were named before the complete function was understood, etc.

And like his teacher said... we keep those conventions despite their problems, as changing them would cause a lot of confusion.

I would think that shaking the earth vigorously (a magnitude 8.9 earthquake) was plenty tsunami warning for the Japanese. I suppose the earthquake could have been detected closer to the source and provided a few seconds/minutes extra warning time (because electromagnetic waves travel faster than earthquake vibrations).

Consider Asimov's Three_Laws_of_Robotics

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Almost all of Asimov's many stories result in very bad things happening to humans by robots following these laws. Note that we haven't agreed on what life, human, person, etc mean (we have threads discussing those definitions), which is part of the problem. And how do you even communicate these concepts to an AI? We don't have an AI that can understand language yet. In any event, an AI that is the moral equivalent of Mother Teresa would be of little value to its creators as it would not want to work for profit. Don't get me wrong, an AI could be the best thing to ever happen to humanity -- but such a powerful thing will be dangerous. And more so because we humans will abuse it first.

What's with the pessimism about AI? It is like the Terminator movies are getting elevated to sacred status. Is it because people think AI would eschew human interests over other forms of rationality? That is an old philosophical argument. Why can't AI simply be programmed with ethical interest constraints?

Strong AI would be far superior to us in just about every respect. It won't be like the Terminator movies; we wouldn't stand a chance. The robots would have tougher bodies, better technology, better accuracy, better senses, better teamwork, better strategy, shorter reproductive times, total unity, the element of surprise, and the ability to use biological weapons, starvation, or genetically engineered diseases against us. Furthermore, the robots would probably have no empathy and no need for us even as slaves. They might wipe us out simply for being in the way, like we kill off the animals in our farms.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/libya/8378392/Libya-Arab-League-calls-for-United-Nations-no-fly-zone.html

The Arab League has voted to impose a no-fly zone over Libya to prevent Gaddafi's airstrikes on the rebels. Furthermore, the League refused to allow envoys from Gaddafi's regime but instead allowed representatives from the rebel movement.

Also, it seems that without us outsiders interfering Gaddafi would win due to superior military hardware. This complicates ethical choice for us.

I'm just curious how many others have the same opinion of our species' future as I do; what do you think the chances are that the human race will still be around come the 3rd millennium? I personally think there's virtually zero chance of that given how we're destroying our planet, eradicating the diseases that keep our population in check, sweeping all new energy technologies that could replace oil/gas under the rug, wasting tens of trillions of dollars on designing new weapons, and other similar acts.

 

In my opinion, our species has a very bleak future, indeed.

I think by then we would be well on our way to colonizing other stars, or perhaps already have done so. And we'd probably have beaten all of the biggest mass extinctinos by far. And I think we wouldn't be genetically compatible with the year 2000 population, due to massive genetic engineering, or perhaps no longer have biological bodies anymore.

If you are wondering about this, consider the technological advancement in the last 200 years compared to in the past 20,000 years. Or ask your grandparents to tell you about the first cars and TVs.

Fairly pessimistic, due to the existential risk of strong AI (in addition to the forementioned ones). However, I suspect space travel will mitigate much of percieved, present day global existential risks.

That would be one of the few things that could really kill us off.

I think his point is that if the price of a good fully reflected the ecological costs, people would probably be smarter consumer because things would cost more.

 

I actually think this is an issue of property rights, which I will illustrate with an example.

 

Let say I'm in the wooden furniture business and my neighbor has a really nice spruce forest that would make great deck chairs. I can sneak into his property and steal the wood, though he would probably catch me so that would be dumb. If I buy the lumber from him, I'll have to raise my prices in order to maintain my profit margin, because the trees are not free from my property like I usually have.

 

In the real case, my neighbor's property is the stuff we take from the environment but don't pay for outright.

 

The complication is, we could have carbon taxes and pollution taxes, but how do you price those things in a way that accurately reflects the cost? Carbon trading tries to do this, but I don't think it's been terribly effective (in part because western-style economics and governance is largely built around private property law - so do we treat government as the owner of public property? I have philosophical issues with this.)

Yes, ecoli has a pretty good grasp of what I'm trying to figure.

OK, let's try to see what happens in the real world. As such we probably have to deal with fuzzy definitions, because I don't really know how to define these things properly. This could be considered the same as asking several slightly different questions depending on the definition.

1. Does the price of a product (compared to similar products) correlate fairly well with its resource and environmental costs?

Such a correlation won't be perfect because of externalities. For example, because it will always be cheaper to pollute than not pollute if there is no one charging for the right to pollute, polluting would result in lower costs. However, we do regulate pollution which would help minimize that effect. In some cases, labor costs will make up a large percentage of the cost of a product. However, if you consider the wages of people with different standards of living, I think it would be fair to suggest that lower labor costs correlate to lower use of resources and damage to the environment by the people providing the labor, which can be treated as a component of the product. Then there is the issue of resource depletion. Most resources (not on private land) are owned by the government, which grants license to use those resources to companies. The government is "owned" by the people, but do they have responsibility to the future citizens, to our children and grandchildren? Unless the answer is "yes", our government could and probably will set us on a course for a tragedy of the commons, albeit in slow motion so that "in the long term we're all dead" applies.

As to the part that SMF mentioned about supply and demand, so long as reaction time of the market is short enough the price of the product will shift to meet it's normal production price, or alternately would represent a shift in the valuation of the resources used to produce it. It will be necessary for the market to function that price goes up when demand exceeds supply, so that the market adjusts to increase production.

2. Could changes be made to government policy such that the price of a product much more closely correlates with its resource and environmental costs?

I think the answer to this is yes. I think ensuring externalities are paid for would be important so that the price of a product more closely matches its cost.

3. Would (2) be a good idea?

I think so. If the price of a product doesn't match its cost, we might end up purchasing very costly things at a rate much higher than we would otherwise. The free market can't give an ideal solution under such conditions, and I really don't like regulation because it would be rigid and probably an inefficient solution.

Mr Skeptic, sometimes cost and price are two different things. I think that the resources required to make an object for sale should also include what economists call external costs, or "externalities." It is hard to judge what something really costs us if there are associated costs that are not made apparent.

Yeah, I know what externalities are. However, I'm not really able to put a price to many of them, including pollution of various specific toxins and CO2, or our tendency to use resources now with little concern for the future. The government interference is easier to measure, at least in theory: the externality is the extra tax needed to pay for the subsidies. But then it gets more complicated because the people paying the tax are also using fuel, at different rates and also indirectly and so are not really third parties. I've long thought that the government should ideally stay out of regulation and instead levy tariffs and subsidies to ensure externalities are paid for, so that the free market can solve those problems efficiently. To do that would require knowing the harm that is caused by the externality, although I suppose that to pass regulation would have a similar requirement.

OK, how about a completely theoretical version of the question: If all externalities were paid for, and there was a near-ideal free market, would the price of a product directly correlate with its resource plus environmental costs?

My idea was that an object's price accounts for the resources (material or labor) required to make it, and so the price might be a proxy for the amount of resources used to build it. I'll see if I can figure a way to make the problem more well-defined.

Just be careful you don't get a taste of hydrochloric acid instead.

The direction of the field tells you which way "positive charge" will flow. In the case of an induced electric field, there will be no initial charge separation so you can't do that by charge association.