Mokele

They're all corrupt, and all covering up what's really happening. There's only one paper in the world bold enough to expose the truth on the front page:

Totally OT - I wonder if there's a hack for this system that let's you automatically do that "quote by User" thing, rather than manually adding it in. Why is that wrong? Money isn't energy or mass, and doesn't follow the conservation of energy. I bought some Star Wars figures when I was a kid for about $3 each, now most are worth over $40, some over $100, and I didn't do squat. If I find a precious gemstone, it's free money, money that didn't exist before. Alternatively, if I buy stock in a company, and that company goes under, where is my money? Moved to somewhere else? No, it's gone. That's why one of the big roles of the federal government is actually deciding how much money to print or take out of circulation, because money *can* just appear and disappear. There are economic consequences of this, but the point is, it's not thermodynamics by a long shot. Money *does* grow on trees, ask anyone who sells fruit. That's what farmers do: they put in a certain effort, nature does the rest, and they harvest the results. While their efforts are worth something, the profits are from simply harvesting renewable natural resources. It's called taking a train of thought to it's logical conclusion; I see very severe flaws in the ethics and results of such a system, and illustrate them in a hyperbolic manner. As for "scientific", this isn't a scientific discussion. There's ethical aspects (not a science) and economic aspects (not a science, no matter how much they want to pretend otherwise), and that's it. Strawman. I'm talking about food and shelter here; obviously crap like that isn't part of the deal. Secondly, you can get a used Xbox for freaking $50 if you know where to look. Wow, those poor people are living it up! Actually, yes. She's an absolutely terrible writer; I've seen more character development in car ads, and I'm not exaggerating there. For what it's worth, I'm not advocating anything more extreme than the notion that minimum wage is a good thing. That's it. You know, for all your complaints about my tactics, I expected more than this strawman from you. Find where I said that, or even implied it. All I've said is that people should be paid enough to live. Honestly, this is something I don't get. I respect your political opinion immensely, as even when we don't agree, you've clearly got a well-thought out position which you're willing to discuss. But when this sort of subject comes up, it seems, to me at least, that you jump on this "socialism bad, capitalism good" bandwagon, and seem disinclined to hold forth at length. I'll say this: I don't really have an agenda, or an allegiance. I'm sorting this out as I go along, and in part because I've never actually found *any* real discussion, here or anywhere else on socialism and what it even *is*. All I know is that it's constantly demonized and linked to communism, and that the people who seem attracted to it are much cooler than usual. Um, ethics? Nobody *wants* a job that pays low, but they're forced into it because, at that time and in their status, they have no other available options. Employers can, will, and have exploited that in order to pay workers a pittance. Yeah, because it's not like they can cut the $3 million dollar salary of a CEO who does nothing but play golf and make bad decisions all day. Has that ever happened? Wait, what? Forget strawman stuff (it isn't anyway, it's just a hypothetical), I don't even follow this logic. If the cost of labor (and therefore of production) goes down, won't the businesses be making *more* money? So why would they lower the price? So, wait, is the worm moving or not? If the back end of the worm never moves, the worm can't move as a whole. No offense, but I don't think this is a very good analogy. Mokele

Because you have a basic ethical obligation that if you're going to expect someone to give you full time work, you'd better give them enough to live off. Exploiting the desperation of those who will work for less and try to scrape by is no different morally than employing sweatshop labor: you're taking advantage of someone's bad position for your own financial gain at their expense. I do, which is why I support laws mandating that when your business fails and you need another job, employers can't take unfair advantage of your bad situation to pay you pathetically small amounts of money. I'm also all for measures that all you to go bankrupt as a business but not as an individual, so you lose the business' assets and such, but your own stuff is untouched. IIRC, you can do this by incorporating the business. I think they deserve to be able to live. Minimum wage hasn't risen in 30-something years, while inflation has steadily increased the cost of living. It's only logical that the two should keep pace. And what if you don't have enough options to say 'screw him'? If there's a hundred other workers who are willing to work for less than you, they'll all get hired and you'll be getting evicted for not making rent. You know, here I was thinking we were a sentient race, with ethics, morals, and the ability to act in ways beyond biological necessity. Silly me, I thought humanity aspired to something *more* than "nature, red in tooth and claw" So I guess it's OK with you if I murder you and your family, take all your stuff, and roast and eat your corpses? After all, according to you, there's no right to exist, and I should just do what I can. Clearly, therefore, you don't have a right to exist either, therefore killing people, taking their stuff and eating them is ethically sound and how we'll run society. Exucse me, I have to on a killing spree, erm, 'grocery shopping'.... It's better than letting them starve. Oh, right, you're an anarchist who wants legalized murder, I remember now... I'll introduce you to a friend of mine sometime. She graduated with a degree in astrophysics and a 3.9 GPA. Then she got sick. VERY sick. She spent 4 years in near-constant agony, often unable to leave bed for days at a time, while the doctors tried to find what was wrong with her. But I'm sure she just didn't *really* want a job, and wasn't *really* a hard worker. Because hard workers don't get sick, ever, do they? Factually incorrect. Most homeless are in that state because they're mentally ill. The drugs and alcohol are merely self-medication; their *real* problems are things like PTSD, depression, schizophrenia, etc. You're right, I'm sure they're *choosing* to get sick. What about people like you were, who are just starting out? Everyone has to start somewhere. Because they had the kids before they wound up working minimum wage? Because in the US, you NEED a car to have a job (most cities have nowhere near the public transport to make a car optional, even large ones)? Because you're working this crappy minimum wage job while going to college or trade school? You're ****ing kidding, right? "Oh, sorry Billy, I can't afford to keep you anymore, so I'm gonna just ship you off like an unwanted pet goldfish." So you have no moral qualms about saying people have no inherent right to live? In a society where the basic requirements for life cost money, either you have a right to life (and therefore the money to get those things) or you don't, period. Yeah, Interstate highways are the opposite of freedom. Public education is the opposite of freedom. The Rural Electrification Project was the opposite of freedom. ------------------ Am I *seriously* the only one here who covered the Industrial Revolution in school? Am I the only one who remembers the workers being reduced to slaves, no weekends or holidays, dangerous work environment, child labor, miserable wages, and 16 hour workdays? We *tried* the market-based solution, lasiez faire capitalism, and it FAILED. It produced a few exceptionally rich people and millions who toiled in abject poverty. It produced a system where if the cost of replacing a worker was less than the safety equipment to keep them from being killed, then their life was considered not worth protecting with even basic safety measures. You know why we don't have that today? One reason: because we realized that someone had to step in and mandate rights for the workers, rights to safety, to decent work hours, to a living wage. The right to a life as something more than an expendable slave to a corporation. Seriously, give me one reason why we should ignore the previous utter failure of a market-based solution to wages and job conditions. Enjoy your Weekend, brought to you by Labor Unions. Mokele

Honestly, something like that would worry me in the extreme, due to the possible implications of a mis-step, not to mention the questionable ethics of the whole thing. I *definitely* would not proceed without *explicit* directions, in writing, from the VP you asked. Because I'm no good at this sort of social stuff, let me recommend something: You know your 'to-do' pile? The one everyone else, with articles you've had for 2 years and still haven't gotten around to reading? You could always just so happen to sort this to the bottom of that pile, and then send an innocent email off around, oh, May-ish, asking if they still want it. Absent-mindedness and laziness can be just as effective as open defiance, with the benefit of seeming accidental. Mokele

I actually heard of something similar about a year ago. Some very geeky people made Super Mario style blocks (some with coins popping out, etc) and put them up around town. The city called the bomb squad. The people responsible were absolved of all charges, fortunately, but it was touchy for a while. Mokele

Tried it lately? Sure, it can be budgeted for...until you get sick. Or your car needs $3000 worth of repairs. And the landlord raises the rent every year but your wage remains the same. Tried raising kids on it? What happens when they get sick? I mean *really* sick, meaning $20,000+ hospital bills. What happens if *you* get sick, enough that you can't work? No health insurance to pay the bills, and you can't work when you're sick, but you still need shelter and food. Poor people get cancer too, you know. So you'd rather support them on welfare? Because your choices are either that jobs *are* a right, that welfare is a right, or that people don't have a right to live. Those are the only options, because last time I checked, food and shelter cost money. Mokele

If extinction would be inevitable without human intervention, i guess so. After all, it's not a dead end if it goes extinct; it's just plain dead. I don't think it's actually a legitimate scientific term, so no, not that I know of. Mokele

No other animals have evolved from rodents, so are they a dead-end? No other animals have evolved from birds, so are they a dead end?

If it can no longer reproduce, as the example I noted, but otherwise, I don't buy the notion of calling something a dead end until it's actually extinct. Mokele

It just seems like an unnecessary step. Why waste time looking for animals to respond and determining how when you can no doubt design instruments with far superior sensitivity, range, and recording capabilities, which won't be nearly as prone to error as the snakes? Hell, when you factor in the costs of keeping the snakes and buying them and setting up cages, it'd probably be cheaper to use instrumentation, too. Mokele

Neither are actually represents a 'dead end'; they've found a niche that they work well in, and stick with it, like sharks. A 'dead end' would be like a fruit tree whose name I forget in Australia. It has huge fruit, which used to be eaten by megafauna like giant wombats. But now, such species are extinct, and the fruit has no transport, so it just rots. Mokele

Well, biggest by far is that I found an apartment close to school and walk every day (campus parking costs a fortune and there's *never* any spaces by the meters). I also steal, erm, 'recycle' the campus paper into snake cage lining. Mokele

Well, they can climb very well, but also, the foot-spread thing seems to be concerned with the voltage between two isolated points, rather than along a continuous surface of contact. Nope - if you're close enough to the strike to see it's effect on any snakes nearby, you're probably too close to the lightning for safety. Nobody really does fieldwork in lightning storms unless that's specifically what they're looking at, and even then, remote sensing is preferred since, well, you can't publish your results if you're dead. Mokele

I have a tough time believing that an earthquake will generate enough of an electrical effect to shock anything, in part because, well, why don't we feel it? Plenty of humans go barefoot even today, and many more have throughout history. I'd think everyone in a village getting shocked would be noticed. Why would they expect there to be anything interesting in the field? There's no a priori reason to expect any significant electrical activity. If you think there is, go hop some fences with a multimeter and check. True, but an experienced observer could tell the difference between 'odd' and normal. For instance, what if you went to a rural area in British Columbia in the early spring, and found a huge mass of snakes, literally thousands, entwined in a massive, writhing ball. 5 days later, there's an earthquake. An inexperienced observer would associate the snake's behavior with the impending quake. An experienced observer would realize, however, that it was perfectly normal mating behavior for garter snakes. Part of the problem is that this isn't dogs or cows or something else habituated to human presence; snakes are a secretive group of animals who avoid humans whenever possible. This raises the issue that maybe it's not the quake disturbing them, but the observer. Unless the observe knows snakes and how they usually react, they won't be able to tell the difference between "Oh crap, there's a quake coming" and "Oh crap, there's a human here". Let me put it another way: Why am I supposed to submit snakes to painful tests when all I have to go on is anecdotal evidence. On top of that, I'll remind you that snake housing in captivity almost always involves some for of electrical heating. Snakes are routinely exposed to strong electrical fields from wires and such, and in some areas, snakes will even climb along powerlines, and only have a problem when they accidentally close a circuit and get fried. So basically, we know they don't respond to electrical fields like sharks do, because sharks will react to live cables and such, while snakes don't care. That leaves shocks, which I'm skeptical of to begin with. Maybe once electrical activity of the sort that could produce shocks is observed in conjunction with earthquakes, the experiment will be worth it, but until then, the likely benefits don't warrant the suffering the animals would undergo. But you just said that we know the mechanism that generates this current, that we've observed it, and that we've measured it. So why do you need snakes? You already know the mechanism, know what to look for, and have seen it. Snakes wouldn't tell you anything of real value that you couldn't learn far, far better with simple, direct physical measurement equipment placed near an active fault line. As I mentioned earlier, snakes cannot detect the fields from wires or electronic instruments, and display no reaction to such things, in contrast to animals that we *know* are electroreceptive, like knifefish. Why even use snakes? Get some tanks of knifefish, and run a nice big copper wire from a point embedded into the ground to the water of their tank. We know they can sense electricity (they use it to communicate), and they're far more sensitive thans snakes could ever be. Hell, small sharks aren't even that hard to raise, and they can detect the beating heart of their prey from several meters away. It just seems pointless, is all. There are better, more direct ways of answering the questions about electrical activity before and during quakes. Mokele

See the entire thread prior to this. I stopped the arguement because I was sick of dealing with you and it was clearly going nowhere. You're like a creationist; you're wrong, but you've got your head so far up your self-righteous ass that you can't or won't comprehend perfectly valid arguments against your views. Since he can't seem the voluntarily let an issue go, aswokei is going to be taking a little two-week "time-out" now. Thread locked to discourage further trolling.

Which means we're back to them hearing it again, albeit indirectly.

True, but I'm unaware of any animal using piezoelectric mechanisms to detect electricity. Mokele

Actually, my willingness to kick the intellectual crap out of those making bullshit claims is one of the reasons I was *made* a moderator. Mokele

Not really. Sure, there's a bit more economic impact of the environment these days, but only the bits that are pretty. Swamps aren't exactly the prettiest places to most people, but are probably one of the most important. Yet we drain them without a second thought to make room for houses. Yes, there is some free market effect, but nowhere *near* enough to properly safeguard the environment. Mokele

To be brutally honest, this reeks of "publicity stunt". $5 says the bill is never introduced, or if it is and passes, is never used. Another $5 says this guy is running for a higher office next election cycle in a district that this would play well in. Mokele

The problem is the difference between a reaction at a purely physiological level, such as muscles twitching due to being shocked, and a reaction in the form of motivated behavior, such as detecting an electrical potential and moving away in coherent locomotor mode. It's the difference between your leg twitching from a shock, and walking: one is just a reaction at the physiological level, one is a complex, coordinated series of muscular actions resulting in locomotion away from a detected stimulus. Yes and no. Muscles, like all cellular processes, are dependent upon temperature. As a snake's body temperature declines, muscles react slower and generate less force, resulting in slower locomotion, but they can still actually move. They just can't move very fast. I use that term because shocks don't produce locomotion. Locomotion is a complex, coordinated behavior response to a stimuli. Animals sense electric fields, that's how every electroreceptor yet found in animals works. If snakes *can* sense electricity in any way, it's probably through the same mechanism. "Shocks", to any animal, regardless of whether they can sense fields or not, will produce spasms, not locomotion. Not really; if it's a real phenomenon, one day an experienced observer will be at the right place at the right time. Also, what's the alternative? If we take everyone's opinion at face value, science has to accept Bigfoot and Alien Abductions. People mis-observe; the human memory is tricky, especially if we aren't familiar with the system. No, the experiments should not be performed, and you would *never* get them approved by the lab animal welfare committee at any university. Why? Because it is unethical to torment snakes with electric shocks on the off chance that a highly-unlikely theory will be supported. Step back and look at this: 1) The original observations of this behavior even occuring are dubious. 2) One proposed mechanism has no support; we haven't detected any infrasonic waves that snakes might pick up on. 3) The other proposed mechanism also fails; spasms aren't locomotion, and there is no reason to suspect snakes can detect electricity via sensory receptors like sharks. One of these 3 must be wrong. Maybe 1 is wrong and there is nothing to explain. Maybe 2 is wrong, and something about modern seismographs is just missing the frequencies snakes hear. Or maybe 3 is wrong and snakes can detect electricity. Of these possibilities, 3 is, in my expert opinion, least likely: not only have we never seen electroreceptors on any histological examination of snake tissues, nor found nerves that may innervate undiscovered sensory receptors, but in captivity, snakes are routinely in close contact with electrical devices and yet display NO behavioral response, even to voltages far beyond what they would find in the wild. It is more likely that either seismographs are missing some very, very low frequency sound (out of range in terms of low frequency, or too low intensity to be picked up, or maybe accidentally filtered out during data processing) or the behavior was not correctly observed. Seriously, why are you so wedded to this idea that snakes are picking up something electrical? It's a neat idea, granted, but the evidence doesn't match up. Unless some new evidence arises, why bother with it, why not just chalk it up as a learning experience and move on. It's not like I've never been wrong before. It happens. Beautiful theories are often slain by ugly facts. Mokele

It's the delusion, born of rampant anti-intellectualism, that one person without training or knowledge can somehow figure out something that experts can't.

Honestly, I like the guy from what little I've seen of him. He talks about important shit that gets ignored, like gerrymandering, which wins him points in my book. Mokele

You know, I'm tired of arguing with you. It's abundantly clear to me and everyone else in this thread what you said and what you meant, no matter how much backpedaling and whining you do, and it's clear you think that an unwillingness to actually consider points makes you a good debater. I've made my point, and nothing I can say will make it any clearer. I have better things to do than waste time on your sorry ass. Mokele