Delta1212

A union's job is to try to get the best deal for its members in terms of working conditions and compensation. If it's someone's job to negotiate a favorable contract, negotiating for a favorable contract isn't the same thing as conflating the desired terms of that contract with a civil right.

Or nothing else?

That it is populated with and run by humans.

Temperature isn't a great analogy, but let's see if I can run with it anyway. First, understand that we're never talking about "autoclave temperature" strength antibiotics. Antibiotics are essentially poisons that kill off bacteria without doing too much damage to the person taking them. If they are too "effective" you're going to wind up causing serious problems for the patient. It's more like finding that bacteria mostly die off at 45 C but people do relatively ok at that temperature. So the bacteria have an optimal temperature of 25 C with, let's say, 10% doing ok at 40C and 1% doing ok at 45C. If you crank the temperature up to 45C, pretty much everything does off and, especially in a patient, whatever is left is at low enough levels for the immune system to deal with. If you crank it up to 40C, a lot more are left, and if that batch regrows into a full colony, their temperature resistance is going to be derived from that initial batch that all did ok at 40C. So from that start and just from natural mutations that are likely to result in both higher and lower temperature tolerances in the descendants of that colony, you get a range spreading out from 40C upper tolerances as the norm rather than the upper 10%. So 45C tolerance maybe goes from 1% of the population to 25% or 50% of the population, which is a real problem when you try to use that temperature to cure somebody. And you can't just keep cranking the temperature higher because eventually you'll be cooking your patient along with the infection. Our antibiotic treatments have been exploiting the fact that bacteria have had no need to resist them, rather than the fact that they are inherently deadly to come into contact with them. We have swords that bacteria haven't bothered developing armor to defend against. We don't have nukes. If we always killed off every bacterium every time we came into conflict with them, the effect would be the same as having nukes, but by having programs that are effectively equivalent to just cutting bacteria and then letting them escape over and over, we give them enough time and experience to figure out how to defend against said swords and wind up facing armored veterans rather than always being able to face a new batch that have never heard of swords before.

Assuming, for a moment, that you could travel back in time. Why would you be sent back to where you were when that time originally happened? That seems more like a time rewinder than a typically envisioned time machine, which would be fine if there was a mechanism for making such a machine that seemed more feasible than a normal time machine, but if anything I think the opposite is true.

Yes, which is also the value system I subscribe to for determining things like that, but not everyone does, including about half the Supreme Court at present.

Lots of people have certain rights denied to them, especially felons and the mentally ill. It's easy to say that you are for equal rights and much harder to define what qualifies as a right and whether there are circumstances where that right shouldn't apply. I was simply pointing out that where Kennedy stood on that issue as it pertains to the rights of gay people has been pretty apparent for a long time. And to be clear, I think that's a good thing.

Kennedy is fairly conservative, but he did come out of the Ninth Circuit and has always had something of a pro-gay rights bent. There's a reason he's usually the swing vote that breaks with other four conservative justices, especially on this issue.

If I write a poem and then make a photocopy of it, there are now twice as many pages, but still only one poem,

Or like a literary scholar stumbling on a cache of rough drafts of every Shakespeare play, all of which differ in some ways from the versions we know. The reaction is not going to be "Aw, now I have to re-read all of these plays?!"

Why would finding out that there is some area where basically all of physics as we currently understand it fails make anyone angry? That sounds rather exciting to me.

I'm pretty sure that was life that used arsenic in place of phosphorous for some metabolic processes rather than being arsenic-based instead of carbon-based. But yeah, on review I think there were some serious flaws found with those results.

That's an arbitrarily specific piece of evidence. Like asking someone to prove their identity by providing the envelop from the first cable bill they ever received in their own name.

No, that would be silly. I think about all sorts of things that aren't real. Why wouldn't I? Heck, if people were even physically capable of doing that, most of the system of scientific scrutiny that has been developed to thoroughly vett ideas for testability and scientific rigor would be entirely superfluous. Why in the world would you think science would be the death of creativity? Scientists aren't automatons.

So... Scientific nihilism is the rejection of the existence of unscientific things?

What if you can't breathe?

Could you explain what exactly you think nihilism is? Because I've gotten the distinct impression from your posts so far that you don't really know.

I agree with your spoilered point and also that "Gravity can cross the dimensions, including time" was probably the worst line in the entire movie. But then both of those are required for the end of the movie to make sense, so I think they ultimately bowed to the needs of the plot over the science at those points. Similarly, the model they developed of the black hole was further refined to make it more accurate but they stuck with a slightly earlier version because it looked cooler. Overall, still more accurate on the whole than your average summer blockbuster, but I'll admit it's far more impressive if that hasn't been hyped to you a lot before you see it. Go in with low expectations and the accuracy is impressive. Go in expecting strict accuracy and it falls a bit short.

I think that's better, and agree with the sentiment in the general sense that I know plenty of people who are unhappy and think getting "this one thing" will make it all better, even when that becomes a pattern that never pans out, but there are demonstrably situations where getting more of something may help a person who is not content become so. Some of that is very basic, like food and water, and some isn't, but it varies on an individual basis. I do think there is value in recognizing that a contentment is often an attitude rather than a state of prosperity, but I've spent just enough time struggling just enough to know what it feels like when you don't know how you're going to pay next month's rent without asking to borrow money (answer, in my case: Land a pretty good job pretty much at the last possible moment before my bank account went into the negatives) and how much the stress from that can eat at your sense of contentment. I can imagine that quite a few of the many, many people with less than I ever had (an education, no debt and a safety net I could fall back on if I absolutely had to) might find it a bit easier to be content if they had a little more than they do.

Science and religion are both attempts to answer humanity's questions about the world around us, but science shows its work.

Yeah. If you threw a tennis ball at a wall, would it just stop and fall straight to the ground? Would it blow a hole in the wall as the ball just kept going with no force pushing back from the wall? Would the wall start moving? Would there be no friction or significantly more friction? It's like asking how much faster a car could go if you lightened its load by removing the engine. The only answers are either "It doesn't" or "It depends on what you replace the engine with."

It's called a photon sphere. You should be able to find relevant equations on Google if you're interested.

A few points, natural selection isn't about "the weak die and the strong live." It's about differential reproductive success. There is still a lot of that going on, and it doesn't always match our normal preconceptions of who is strong/successful/whatever. Also, even in a state where humans are "perfectly adapted" there is still genetic drift. Absent a very strong selection pressure that very quickly kills off anything deviating from the mean, genetic drift is going to result in a consistent, semi-random change in the gene pool of humanity. There's really no way to remain the same without very consistently and rapidly killing off anything new and different that crops up, which is actually the opposite of the process that you bring up and touch upon in your post about how more and more people who would not have been able to survive in the past can now be kept in the gene pool.

I'm hesitant to draw a conclusion on this subject without solid data to provide some indication one way or another beforehand. It's far too easy to fall into self-congratulatory assumptions about results that don't yet exist based on the belief that "your kind of people" have virtues lacking in other people that must be what lead to their downfall. It's the exact kind of thinking that lead to the experiment in the first place and that made its results so shocking.

Why can't that be tested?