Delta1212

A liver donor has approximately a 1 in 500 chance of dying as the result of the donation. (And the mortality rate in the US for women undergoing childbirth in 2015 was close to 1 in 5,000 for comparison's sake). Could you source where you are getting reports of people's experiences getting an abortion?

This is trivially true and easy to demonstrate, actually. Pi has an infinite number of digits and does not repeat. To know every digit of pi would require knowledge of an infinite sequence of digits. So just in that one extremely narrow subject, there is an infinite amount of potential knowledge to be had. Even if all other possible knowledge were finite, that would still mean potential knowledge as a whole was infinite.

What?

Also, apparently Steve Bannon overruled the original draft by the DHS and added green card holders to the ban.

He means the secular pro-life argument. The pro-life movement is very bound up with religion, but there is not complete overlap in either direction. The majority of the pro-life movement is religious, but it is a majority not a totality.

This only does anything if you already own the stock. By buying it, you drive the price up, and the by selling it you drop it back down. At most you're going to slightly increase the volatility of the stock and open up some opportunities for day traders to make money at your expense. In all likelihood, unless you're reading in serious bulk, you won't even register as a blip in the overall stock price. And this is before you get into the fact that most of his assets were already in private companies before he was elected. He has since claimed to have divested himself of all publicly traded stocks, and while he hasn't released documentation confirming this, sans such documentation or something similar like his tax returns, there is no real way to tell what, if anything, he still owns a stake in.

I was going to write up a post about how, while I am pro-choice, I understand the perspective of both sides based on some fundamental differences in perception of how the world works rather than even a difference in values or goals. However, I've posted that before and I think I'll throw up a thought experiment instead. This is meant to be food for thought more than it is a definitive argument meant to change anyone's mind. I've found that the more angles I look at this issue from, the better equipped I am to talk about it reasonably, and this is mostly meant to help with that: Let's say that you hit a pedestrian with your car. You are both taken to a local hospital. The person you hit sustained severe damage to their liver and will soon die without a transplant. They have a rare blood type and, by coincidence, the only match that can be and that is likely to be found in time to save them is you. Should the government legally require you to donate part of your liver to save their life?

There are also animals such as moths that use the moon as a convenient point of reference for navigation purposes. I wouldn't be quick to dismiss the moon as being influential in various ways, but certainly not in any mystical way, obviously.

We don't have the answer to "what is X?" where X is anything fundamental. And we only have the answer to "What is Y?" where Y is anything else because we can describe Y in terms of a configuration of somethings or things X, which we don't have an answer to. So, fundamentally, we don't know what anything is at all.

Point of interest: The Bible doesn't at any point state that the world is 6k years old. That's an approximation made by various creationists by attempting to build a timeline of events based on the ages of all of the people listed in the Bible and the few provided relative dates of events.

The answer to that middle question is "no."

That's an easy lie that does a great job of keeping people from asking questions about why things are the way they are. If your life is shit, at least you aren't a loser for questioning it, and if your life isn't shit, you can safely dismiss anyone who complains about their own lot because they're obviously just losers.

And not that anecdotes are reliable indicators of broad trends, but that general conclusion jives with my personal experience on the subject, as well.

I don't understand how that question relates to the preceding statement. Also, it seems like you are on the cusp of grasping that "stuff" does not behave in the way that daily life teaches us "solid" things behave, but you seem to be getting caught up on the idea that this must mean that it is converted to something else when in superposition like EM radiation rather than just being something entirely apart from anything in your mental model of the world on a fundamental level. The whole wave-particle duality thing is well trod by physics and seems to resolve all of the issues you have, except that it looks like you're insisting that particles are really particles but get converted to EM waves in order to explain their wavelike behavior. This is both unnecessary and not supported by evidence, whereas it's much simpler once you recognize that fundamental particles are not miniature billiard balls and don not behave nor "look" like anything you have experience with in everyday life.

Humans Really, though, tracking footprints in the snow only seems like a great way of tracking because we are effectively noseblind. Like a visually impaired animal with sensitive whiskers asking why anyone would bother looking at something to figure out it's shape when you can just walk over and touch it. Much more useful and you get a better idea of what it's like than you would through sight. Unless, of course, you have really good eyesight and can therefore distinguish fine detail at a distance. Similarly, why look for tracks on the ground when you already have a glowing neon sign pointing you down a path you can literally follow with your eyes closed?

The town I grew up in in New Jersey had it's own power, rather than being supplied by PSE&G. It's in New Jersey. During Sandy, the power went out for about two minutes. The following week, you could tell exactly where the borders of the town were by where the lights went out. That was pretty typical, and the difference was noticeable between the frequency and duration of power outages at my house and at those of my friends in other towns, although I didn't realize why when I was a kid. Needless to say, my experience with having electric as a public utility has been pretty positive.

The "extraneous human stuff" is very much a part of survival. Most of it has to do with social cohesion and maneuvering. Social groups have allowed a degree of cooperation that has allowed humanity to survive and thrive in ways and places that we would not be remotely successful in as lone individuals. Being able to form and navigate such groups is a critical component of our success as a species.

I wrote out a very, very long post that I realized was getting more complex than I intended and that was resulting in a breakdown of how I was explaining things such that even I was having trouble following it, so I'm going to start over from scratch and with a better idea of what I'm trying to communicate: I'm with swansont on this. Let's say that a system loses heat at a rate of x. The amount of heat energy lost during time t is then xt. Now, as a system's temperature drops toward ambient, the rate at which it loses heat decreases. Given the above, a system where the heater is turned off and then later back on consists of three stages: cooling toward ambient, at ambient, and heating back up to target. A system that is dropped to a lower maintained temperature also has three stages: cooling to the lower temperature, remaining at the lower temperature, and heating back up to target. The first and last period of an unheated system will always take longer than the corresponding periods of a system where temperature is being maintained. So, t1 is the time it takes for the low temperature system to cool to the maintained temperature. t2 is the additional time it takes for the unheated system to reach ambient temperature. t3 is the time the unheated system remains at ambient temperature. t4 is the time it takes the unheated system to heat back up to the maintained temperature of the low temp system. t5 is the time it takes to heat back up from the maintained lower temperature to the normal target temperature. So the whole period of time under discussion for both system is made up of t1+t2+t3+t4+t5 Now, for t1, x is the same for both systems because both are cooling from the target temperature for the same amount of time, and other than what we are doing as far as turning the heat down or off, the systems are identical. So we'll call this initial rate x1. For t2, the the rate of loss is going to be lower for the unheated system, because it's temperature drops below that of the maintained system. So we're going to call the unheated system's rate of loss during this period x2a and the maintained system's x2b. For t3, the unheated system has reached ambient temperature and is no longer losing heat. The maintained system is still at the maintained temperature and is therefore still losing heat at a rate of x2b. For t4, the unheated system's temperature is raising. Since it is being raised to the maintained temperature during this period, it's average temperature is lower than the maintained system's and therefore so is its rate of loss. We'll call this rate x3 which is less than x2b. For t5, both systems are being raised from the maintained temperature to the target temperature, so their temperatures are the same and so is their corresponding heat loss. So, now obviously in the above situation, the amount of heat that is lost by the unheated system during each period of time is less than or equal to the amount of heat lost by the maintained system, which on the face of it seems like it means you're going to be paying more since you're paying to generate all of that lost heat energy, but let's look at what the actual difference is. No, the only times that the heater is actually on for the unheated system are t4 and t5. Meanwhile, the heater is on for t2, t3, t4 and t5. However, we can't just add up xt for each of those times because we don't just need to maintain the current temperature at each of those times, but raise the temperature back up to target, which requires adding energy back in. But how much. For the unheated system, you need to maintain temperature during t4 and t5 plus add back in all of the energy lost during t1 and t2. For the maintained system, you need to maintain the system during t3, t4 and t5 plus add back in the energy lost during t1. So, the unheated system's total energy expenditure during time t is equal to: x1t1+x2at2+x3t4+x4t5 The maintained system's is given by: x1t1+x2bt2+x2bt3+x2bt4+x4t5 If you subtract those out, you get a difference of: (x2bt2-x2at2) +x2bt3+(x2bt4-x3t4) And since, per above, x2b is always greater than both x2a and also x3, this expression always yields a positive number, which means that the maintained system always uses more energy than an identical system that simply has the heat turned off. You can vary the amount by changing conditions such as the temperature and insulation and overall duration of time t, but as swansont said, this will simply change the magnitude of the effect, it will never render the above a negative number and as such will never result in the same system using more energy with the heating turned off completely than with the thermostat simply set to a lower temperature. The only possible scenario where this is not the case is if you add an energy cost to turn on the system that does not exist for raising the temperature. If that cost is large enough, it could push the number negative over short enough durations, but this is rather unlikely to be more than a negligible effect in any realistic set up, and the best action in a case where it isn't negligible would then still be to turn the thermostat down to the lowest possible temperature that does not involve shutting the heating off completely.

Do you think that maybe, just perhaps, the people who felt motivated enough to go travel, mostly across state lines, to spend a day marching in order to voice their political opinion just maybe kinda sorta might be over-represented among the portion of the population that bothered to go to their local polling station on Election Day?

Also, because they have to treat people without guarantee of remuneration for services rendered and resources used, it drives the cost up overall because those who can pay then have to cover the hospital costs for those who can't. Meanwhile, the hospital cuts its losses by writing off non-payments for tax purposes and selling the debt to collections agencies for pennies on the dollar. So we wind up with all of what people consider to be the downsides of "socialized medicine" in long wait times and having to subsidize the healthcare of people who can't afford it, but we get the added benefits of punishing those people by effectively bankrupting them and doing all of that in the confines of a system that isn't designed to handle it so everything gets gummed up and we all receive worse care for it. Literally the only thing going for the US healthcare system is that if you have enough money you can effectively skip the line by going to an exclusive specialist that will give you some of the best care in the world. If you can't afford that, though, you're pretty much screwed if you get hit with anything really serious.

There are quantum processes that are probabilistically random and apparently without a proximate cause. We don't live in a clockwork universe, just one that usually approximates a clockwork universe at classical scales.

Ah. I haven't hijacked anything and I'm not casting doubt on Wikileaks. I said that I don't trust Assange to provide, without corroborating evidence, an objective and accurate accounting of who provided the information to Wikileaks. I said absolutely nothing about the accuracy of the information itself.

It has much less to do with what Wikileaks has released than the way Julian Assange himself has conducted himself over the last few years. My opinion of him soured well before any actions relating to the DNC over this past summer. Proof that what occurred? I'm having trouble finding the antecedent to "this" here and would appreciate some clarification. I'm not sure exactly what you're saying so I don't know whether or not I agree with it.

Ambulance rides are murder in terms of expense, and God forbid they take you to an out of network hospital while you're unconscious.