Not so much. Have you seen any other country's immigration policies?

And yet the Earth continues to warm.

Thank you,

S.

Yep, that's exactly what was being discussed.
I believe that remark would more apply to 'are currently'.
And if the ACA is a taste, I'd like some more.

S.

Ir is not. I have been trolled.

S.

Um, actually, that's exactly what I did just do.

S.

If there is a place of such truly cosmic perfection then I should go there.

That some places have flaws does not imply that others don't have worse. Acting to correct those flaws does not imply that it's always better somewhere else.

Absolutism like "love it or leave it" is not an argument.

S.

I suppose it's better than marketing that improves nobody's life except today's Don Drapers.

S.

(What, you thought that was a historical drama? *snort*)

Most well-developed countries pay rather less for their health care than we do here in the USA, and moreover, they get better results, in terms of longevity, quality of life, et cetera.

With a single-payer program.

Granted, this means that the health care companies would make less profit. I guess that's where the money's coming from.

Note further that less profit is not the same as no profit - Doctors in Scandinavia live quite well and their health care systems have no problem purchasing drugs.

Yeah, someone's going to have to give up obscene profits for merely reasonable pay for reasonable work done. Wouldn't that be a terrible shame.

S.

There is a bit of a "No True Scotsman" fallacy here.

"What is REAL love?" "It is love that never dies."
"How do you know it's REAL love?" "Because it never died".

How can you tell REAL love before death?
How can you tell REAL love apart from death?
Do you only know what you had when it's gone?
If it died what was it before?

The endless pursuit of perfection is the enemy of the now. Nobody's ferpect - Get oevr ti.

S.

Thank you, but that was not entirely helpful.

I had the funny idea that 'near me' as the default was close by. Apparently not.

Furthermore, it's not nearly sensitive enough. 400 miles is nothing up the western interstates, but 4,000 miles is just a little pushing it.

It gives you a few specific 'block people like this', but for a more fine-grained response? Not so much.

Grant 'em points for trying, but their blurb 'new people near you' is akin to what is generally emitted from the south end of a northbound bovine.

'ta,

S.

I believe Mr. RockGnome lives in a world where all laws are perfectly fair and enforced without delay and equitably among everyone.

There would be no injustice in such a world.

I would ask if any cop has ever let him go with a warning.

Or if statistics show how much more minorities are incarcerated for the same crimes that others get merely a ticket for. How bail is set for a variety of defendants. And where judges don't get bribed to send certain kids to jail.

I would like to hear of such a world, as I believe it would be equally likely that there unicorns grew on trees.

It is practically an axiom that those who believe that laws should be equally enforced are those who have benefited from unequal enforcement.

Read 'Three Felonies A Day' (google it) and then report yourself for your 20-year to life stint.

Thank you,

S.

Indeed, an oncoming ice age has been predicted.

Now I'm going to ask 'who predicted it, and has their evidence been examined by a third party (preferably unbiased)'.

The end of the world has regularly been predicted by a bunch of religious zealots and let's just say that their evidence (as were those who predicted another ice age were) has been so completely shown flawed that it is beyond a reasonable doubt that they were wrong.

On sea level rise, it's true that for the city of Denver, Colorado, the sea level could rise 500 feet, and the city wouldn't even notice. Except for the massive flood of refugees and the total collapse of civil order as Miami, New York City, something like 90% of the major population centers on this planet and half of LA get wet. The San Fernando Valley would be fine (It's at roughly 800-1000 feet above sea level).

It is also true that the Earth has been warmer and it has been colder in the past. There are two major differences here, one being that in the past the climate changed much slower, and all the organisms had time to evolve into new niches (or go extinct) and the second being that there wasn't a highly stationary civilization on the Earth at the time.

It's easy to walk away from being submerged by a rising tide. It's a lot harder to walk away from your house being submerged by a rising tide. Or your entire country - The President of the Maldives had a council meeting in SCUBA outfits because if sea level rise continued, they'd better practice it.

And finally, climate change. It might be nice to grow pineapples in Calgary, but that won't help if Nebraska and Kansas look like the Sahara Desert. When the breadbasket goes away, there will be lots of unhappy starving people. Some will have guns. It's not just sea level rise that's the problem (incidentally, most of sea level rise comes not from melting ice, but from things getting hotter getting larger, and sea water is no exception) it's crop failure.

Climate change is, beyond a reasonable doubt (there's always unreasonable doubts), here, happening fast, and human-caused. There will be effects, many many people will suffer, and it could lead to the total collapse of human civilization.

I dunno about you, but that's something I'd be a little worried about. It may be impossible to fix it all at once - but I'd say that doing just a little here and there even to merely slow it down is a good idea.

Unless you just want to watch the world burn. In that case, I have nothing further to say to you on this matter.

S.

And this is why we do astronomy.

From a strictly capitalist perspective, there ain't no return on that in the next quarterly statements. Or even for the next five hundred years.

It's also a massive stab at the heart of economics, because economics has as a fundamental axiom that nothing happens without some expectation of return on investment. This is why pretty much all economic theories as taught today are bunkum, because their axioms are fundamentally flawed.

It's a bit like giving advice to farmers that starts with 'assume a perfectly spherical cow floating in a vacuum'. You may be able to derive all kinds of logically consistent results from that, but they're all nonsense because spherical cows floating in a vacuum bear no resemblance whatsoever to real cows.

However, if you can cook up an economic theory that those in power see as increasing their own wealth (see: trickle-down (aka voodoo) economics, and the Laffer (aka Laughter) curve) then those who have the power and the money will lavish (a little of) it upon you (See the Nobel Institute's putting up with this bank adding a prize for economics, most of which rewards only the bankers...)

Oop. Sorry, I just went off.

Anyhow. Astronomy. Good fun. Useful to do not for profit, but for exploration. Discovery. Learning new things that won't even get me kissed at a cocktail party; but I'm still happy to know them. That people out there care about just finding things out, and don't mind telling me about it.

I think that's keen.

S.

imho, this should be under 'Science', but hey...

It's worth looking.

Chances are still pretty small. Human beings have only had radio for a mere century so far, and radio telescopes for rather less. The dinosaurs did 260,000,000 years without so much as a Walkman. How long we will last with working radios is another question.

Arguably, the dinosaurs are still here, in the form of birds. But birds don't build radios.

Evolution does not particularly favour intelligence. Those who have the best-adapted children, children adapted to have the most and best adapted children in the race for resources are those who succeed. Also arguably, the ants and the spiders are doing much better than humanity in terms of numbers of offspring, and they don't make radios or radio telescopes either.

When you start putting those terms into the Drake Equation, things start looking pretty grim. Then throw in the vast distances involved, the chance of them emitting radio at the same time (considering lightspeed) that we're listening, et cetera...

Still, it's worth looking. Even if you hear nothing, it's still worth showing 'as far as we can tell, there isn't any'.

S.

PS - A quote from Edward Snowden, of all people, pointed out that intelligent species, of which humanity is dubiously one, would probably encrypt their radio broadcasts, and good encryption is indistinguishable from random noise. Drake didn't have a term for that in his equation. S.

Mine matured.

It would never have worked. She was very musical, and I was in the process of dropping out of performing music. There were dozens of other conflicts (ignored at the time), and yes, it took me awhile to get over her.

I'll never forget her - if she turned up somewhere I'd want to be her friend - but I don't love her anymore.

S.

I'll go with 'marketing'.

As a public corporation they're bound to make the most profit they can - If they don't, they'll get sued by some shareholder or other (some shareholder probably already has, or if not they're buying shares so they can now).

It's not expensive, it builds goodwill, and someone made a few assumptions and calculated the profit would be more than the cost of making the chips and bagging them.

Whether they support the cause or not I believe is basically irrelevant. Someone made a cool ranch calculation and came out with a plus. That it benefits the previously downtrodden is a bonus.

S.

I understand the USA is not the biggest country in the world, but when I get a notification that there's people out there 'near me', well...

I am in California. 'Near me' does not include Georgia, New Jersey, New York City, New Brunswick, nor Capetown. Sydney's right out.

Does anyone else get this?

(And if you're using geolocation IP, stop it. Use where I says I am. Use where they says they are. This is a satellite internet connection. Technically, I'm in geosynchronous orbit here... ;-P

S.

Given as I started this, I suppose I should carry on.

Allow me to very heavily edit:



[The preceding commenter's quote was not edited}

If there is a substance in willow tree bark that makes a wonderful pain reliever, chemists will poke around and find it (incidentally, aspirin has so many wild side effects, including being a ridiculous blood thinner, that it would have a lot of trouble passing FDA approval today).

If there is any effective substance in red yeast rice, chemists will poke around and find it.

If you put bread on my cut I'd kick you. Yes, penicillin is a yeast. Not all yeasts are the same. Penicillin in my beer is actively dis-invited from the party. Yeast infections in the female attendees are similarly discouraged. It's good that you put "healers" in quotation marks because at the time they were just throwing out whatever seemed to them a good idea, and almost all of it was arrant nonsense. See Samuel Hahnemann.

Yeah, the 'home remedies' that actually work _were investigated and found to work and it was found out why_. There was a whole lot of old wives' tales out there too (Impregnate your horse with the east wind!) that have rightly and justifiably been discarded.

Many home remedies did kinda sorta work. Some just made the matter worse (no baths! The devil's in the bath!) so some were carefully tested, and the ones that worked were kept.

Carefully tested. Well, skin me alive and call me luggage, that sounds like science.

I have put it into perspective. The herbs you get in the grocery store might make your cooking taste better, but for healing? The "herbal cures in a jar" would be better used as fire-starter. Skip the aisle and go to the pharmaceutical window, where you'll get at least what you're supposed to get.

(Don't get me started again on the tests of 'herbal supplements' that didn't actually contain any of the herbs they were supposed to contain - but o lord they contained a lot of other stuff...)

(You'd think the FDA or someone would be on this. But noo, lobbyists made sure they came with no reasonable regulation at all)

It's not that 'most' of the herbal medicine sold to the public is garbage, it's all of it.

Have a nice day.

S.

Actually, while Occam's Razor is definitely on your side, that's a bit of a straw man.

I don't know that God, or any God, for that matter ...

(There's a lot more anecdotal evidence for Zeus and Hera and Athena and all that gang and all the demigod mortals they screwed into unsuspecting humanity than there is in the monotheist Bible where JHWH only knocked up one girl, and that without even taking her virginity! (Medically possible. Hymens (hymena?) in human women are not always impervious to sperm))

... For that matter, does not exist. But the fascinating number of priests, and that they all claim to be of the only and best one, reeks of not so much received gospel as self-serving bovine excrement.

It seems to me a really good idea to live your life as if they did not exist, and that anyone who says any god exists is trying to scam you out of something, be it money or loyalty or just parroting a political line.

So I am an atheist. There are no gods.

S.

PS - You might say that makes me agnostic, but you would be wrong. It's not the actions of the gods (there aren't any) that made up my mind, it's the actions of the priests of the gods that confirmed to me beyond a reasonable doubt that there aren't any gods. S.

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then He is not omnipotent

Is He able, but not willing?
then He is malevolent.

Is He both able and willing?
then why is there evil?

Is He neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?

(attributed to Epicurus)

To that I'd add:

God knows and controls my future, right, so...

Is God aware and able to prevent the evil that will happen to me?
Then why does evil happen to me?

Is God aware of the evil that will happen to me, but chooses to ignore it?
Then why call not call Him an [south end of a northbound donkey]?

Does God control my future?
Then I do not have free will.

Do I have free will?
If so, then God does not control my fate.

Any questions?

S.


I may be goin' to Hell for that one, but I'll do so because I chose to do so. All the Gods, from Marduk to Baal to Amun and Ra and Kali and JHWH and Ronald Reagan can go jump in a lake. I'll go my own way. Keep in mind your Holy Trinity of the Baby Jesus as written in the Bible is only the latest in a long line of many other gods. I have been touched by His Noodly Appendage, in case you were curious... S.


edited to omit filterd swear words. Hullo, this is an adult community, guys, we can say 'bovine excrement' and 'portal into the female reproductive apparatus' and 'the male instrument that evolution has come up with in order to penetrate the preceding item' if we have to.