Delta1212

Not after the first round. That'll slip your bottom range to 94.7%.

Wiffle ball is baseball, except with a light plastic ball and bat. The ball has holes in it to cut down on the problem of air resistance encountered by the much lighter hollow plastic.

XP was a great operating system. Windows 7 basically covered the bare sheet metal of XP with an exterior facade of colorful plastic. Windows 8 was the result of saying "Wow, this looks great, let's build the whole thing out of plastic!"

ROI may be your focus in investing, but it's clearly not the only thing you care about or you wouldn't be asking this question. What this boils down to is, and it's something you have to consider for yourself as it pertains to each company or sector of the market that you are investing in, considering everything that a business does, both beneficial and detrimental to other people, are you ok with paying somebody to do those things if it makes you money. If you invest in a (hypothetical) companies that produces food for impoverished regions of the world but increases the risk of cancer for local farmers through the types of pesticides they use, you are both paying them to feed some people and give cancer to others. So you have to decide how much it is worth to you to fund every aspect of any given business and where the line rests for you as far as being uncomfortable underwriting a given practice no matter how much it makes you, or whether such a line even exists. There's no one-size fits all set of ethical guidelines here, but you also can't go in with blinders on about what you are doing.

I can double your money in a week, but to do it, I will have to kill someone for every million dollars I receive. You'll never know who they are, no one will ever know they didn't die of natural causes and I already have a number of investors lined up, so a modest investment probably won't affect whether anyone lives or dies, anyway. Do you invest with me?

Are we the same person?

Yes, it is. It's a logically necessary consequence of any system of patterns that reproduce with variation for this exact reason.

This was heartening enough that I'm going to make a good faith effort to help you out. As a teenager, I got involved in a lot of evolution debates and, frankly, I owe most of my own knowledge of the subject to those debates. That said, I think most people who get involved in said debates online (present forum excluded because there are a lot of people here who do know their stuff) simply do not understand how evolution works at all, but think they do. And I do not say this in a "Oh, you'd believe it if only you just understood it" way. I mean that in an "Evolution is actually a pretty straightforward theory, but I've run into way more people who have no idea how it's actually supposed to work than the reverse" way, and that includes people who are on the evolution side in debates. There were a few times I actually switched sides mid-debate because some of the other people who were ostensibly on my side clearly had no idea what the heck they were talking about, and I have little patience for the spread of misinformation even if it's in support of my "side." So, I have a question for you that I think is going to be critical to doing well in any debate about evolution regardless of which side you are on: How do you think evolution is actually supposed to work according to the theory (in as much detail as you can come up with)? Because it's much easier to debate a subject (any subject) when you have as in-depth of an understanding of that subject as possible. That let's you anticipate potential arguments from the other side and let's you improvise arguments as needed. A well prepared debater will be able to debate a subject from either side and do it as well as it can be done.

But the government is stealing my money and giving me back nothing in return!

This honestly just makes me feel very sad.

Well, there shouldn't be, but there certainly are. Obviously, or we wouldn't be talking about this right now.

I'm sure they probably can, but just because humans largely tell each other apart by faces doesn't mean animals all use the same strategy. There are smells, sounds, patterns and so forth that are also available to them, plus features other than those in the face. I'm not saying that no animals uses faces at all, but humans have a number of reasons why we're especially well suited to focus on the face in particular, and animals are not necessarily constrained to having to use the same strategy for identification.

No, it is considered to possess a value between 3.14 and 3.15, which last time so checked, infinity does not fall between. It possesses an infinite number of decimal places when written in decimal notation, but that's really an arbitrary choice for how to write numbers. It can be more accurately expressed as π which involves no infinity of places whatsoever. Either way, pi does not equal infinity and you cannot pretend that it does.

Some things are so colossally stupid that they can only be conceived of by someone with a great deal of intelligence.

You are literally saying that to an atomic physicist.

We do actually have fairly low genetic variation compared to other animals, just not any other animal, and not for the reasons he seems to be claiming.

I think animals have ways of distinguishing individuals, but they are dependent upon species. Humans aren't the only ones that use faces as one manner of identification, but that's very far from the only strategy employed in the animal kingdom, and humans do actually have better than average vision during the day (and are comparatively weaker in e.g. our sense of smell) so for us a visual means of distinguishing individuals makes sense. Smell, sound and touch are all equally valid, and even for animals that identify individuals by sight, it doesn't necessarily have to be localized to to facial features. So if I had to guess (because I don't remember what articles I've read on the subject well enough to find them) I'd say humans are particularly well adapted to recognizing faces (though not necessarily uniquely adapted for it) and that our facial features have probably at least someone adapted to make this easier to do, since there is an obvious social payoff in being easily recognizable when people are more likely to mistrust strangers.

Humans have evolved to have and to recognize distinct faces as a means of identification. It's entirely possible that a larger share of our genetic diversity goes into facial structure than for most animals. Humans overall, though, are among the least genetically diverse animals on the planet having gone through a relatively recent (on geological and evolutionary time scales) population bottleneck.

Then the question becomes, does the conscious mind need to be in complete control in order for free will to exist?

I think humans do have some adaptations to living and working in and around water, but I think the AAH overreaches a bit and attempts to explain a lot of traits that are better explained by other selection pressures.

That's a bit like saying that you and your sister are different people so why do you have the same parents. Things came from where they came from, and Christianity and Islam share some common roots.

The other possible point to contend with, if I just go along with this for the moment. How aware are you of what is going on with individual cells in your own brain, and how able to intervene would you be even if you were aware of what was going on?

The argument basically boils down to "if we assume that it is impossible for life to arise by chance, then life cannot have arisen by chance."

I think it's also worth looking at the quality of jobs replaced with those that replace them. If the economy loses 10 jobs working in a coal mine and gains 9 desk jobs, is that a good thing or a bad thing?

You're treating the interactions as if they were solely between two parties. Humans being the social animals we are, there is almost always going to be an audience. Harsh punishment may wind up angering relatives and friends of the punished, even if it renders that individual or group incapable of personally retaliating. And groups who need to deal with you in the future or fear they may someday find themselves at your mercy may resist cooperating with you or actively work against you, essentially creating more enemies for yourself than you are eliminating. Of course, harsh punishment can also act as a deterrent to resistance by other potential threats just as mercy can be perceived as weakness to be exploited by new enemies. There are pros and cons to both behaviors, which makes sense since if there was one behavior that always got the best results over the other one, humans would probably just do that one instead of having an on-going conflict between the two strategies in how we treat others.