dwar0123

The bad idea is to think that buying local will help save the Earth from climate change. As that isn't under the list of reasons you do it, doesn't really apply.

You are restating Barmars actual points, almost point by point as an explanation of your quibble about word choice. Word choice on the topic of physics on a bridge forum that draws an international audience. I actually agree with you, obsolete is to strong a word, but the word obsolete wasn't the point.

Do I really believe that science works? Absolutely. Do you really believe it doesn't? Does science answer questions as inerrant absolute truths? Only someone who doesn't understand science could make the mistake of thinking that is a mistake that science could make. Science is a process of arriving to a better truth through incremental improvements. Improvements that are made when errors are discovered, and errors will be discovered. Which makes the question of do I believe our current knowledge will stand the test of time laughable. The only way our current knowledge could stand the test of time is if we abandoned science.

The definition of faith is to believe without proof which proves* you don't understand how science works. *Ok it only suggests it, we should devise an experiment to test this hypothesis.

Shi, er stuff like this falls so far down the list of things so unlikely as to be not worth thinking about. It is just as likely that everyone in the world can fly by their minds power alone but they are all successfully hiding it from me. Planes are just part of a really elaborate hoax to convince me I'm not the only sad sac that can't fly. You can always invent some wild implausible scenario to rationalize the irrational, but to what end. What does it gain you. Science on the other hand... http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/science.jpg Source: http://xkcd.com/54/

If I didn't believe in extra-terrestrial intelligence then I would have to believe in a religious creation myth. If intelligence has happened once by chance, then the chance of it happening is non zero. I believe that in a Universe this big the probability that the non zero chance is so small that it still only occurred once is trivially insignificant. The Universe is freakishly large, it may even be infinite. On the other hand, if intelligence didn't occur by chance, if it were created by design and the designer decided to create it only once... Well then the ego centric creation myths may have a point, creating a Universe this large for just us seems like a shockingly massive waste of space and it would be hard to not feel a little ego centric about it. Don't confuse my belief in extra-terrestrial intelligence with a belief in UFO's, don't even confuse it with the notion that I seriously believe we will ever have contact with another intelligence during the existence of our species. The Universe is huge, it is so absurdly huge that billions of different stars in the night sky could have planets orbiting them each with their own intelligent species and we will never know it because the Universe is just that freaking big.

Not being able to sell bonds is like not being able to breath. Fairly harmless over the short term...

The city sells bonds to cover the cost of capital projects. The bonds promise to give so much money after so much time. Investors buy the bonds. Small risk and small profit. The investors are going to get burned, small risk isn't the same thing as no risk. Also, pensions are being threatened but historically they are left mostly intact.

It may be a theory to you, but tell that to the guys living on the edge of the disk dropping down under to see what they can see. They can SEE the turtle. And the 4 elephants too.

I would think that largely depended on the regulations? No one is suggesting that random regulations, made for no reason, are a solution to anything; an absurd statement. Just as absurd as your point of view, that all regulations, made for any reason, has never solved anything.

Do you agree with Democracy only when people agree with you?

There is no irony here in me poking fun at a moderator for making a silly claim of non ownership of their own statement while getting a reply from someone trying to fear monger me into believing that I should respect the moderator's humor least we naively give into the fear?

What is it with Columbia and child killers.

You are the messenger? Who asked you to relay that message? I can't quite get my head around why anyone would do that, much less why you would oblige them. Well, take a message back to them for me. If they want to write jokes, they should come up with some more original ones, that one is 70 years old and isn't worth writing again.

How to win internet arguments 101. I'm wrong. But you are wrong for pointing it out!

Lets not worry about it, the future and its technology will save us! Sager words have never before been spoken. Let's not worry about necessities other child. Failure is something that has never occurred in the history of the entire world, when ever necessity has raised her ugly head, it has always been success that has triumphed through her child invention. It is a wonder we even have words for these things that have never occurred. What madman dreamed up these nightmarish concepts and shared them so successfully that they joined our collective knowledge so well that we can even contemplate failure. Good thing about keeping the government out of it too, I can't think of a single thing that the government has helped develop. It is almost as if I am willfully ignorant about it.

BullSh!t Marriage was invented long before the US existed as a state, true but don't give religion any credit. They might have co-opted it before the US existed as a state, but they did not invent it. You are treating language in absolute terms. When people say laws are independent of religion they mean relative to what ever they are implicitly comparing it too. Not in an absolute sense, as that is of course preposterous and thus not what they meant!

if you only look at heads you know nothing about tails. 32 heads out of 32 examinations tells you nothing, using that data to suggest the coin is biased towards heads is stupid. I stand by my analogy.

You really don't see how investigating something for bias by only looking at one side is intrinsically biased? It's like trying to determine if a coin flip is truly 50/50 by only counting the results from when it turns up heads.

Given that the current tax load is about the lowest it has been in my lifetime, your cynicism doesn't match reality. Taxes can be reduced and as funds are the definition of a fungible resource, it doesn't matter how they are reduced, an increase in tax revenue can be returned to the consumer by a decrease in another area. Maybe it would. Maybe it wouldn't, more likely it would take longer for the decrease to occur than either you or I would ideally like, but to suggest that taxes never decrease, which is what you are suggesting, is stupid.

Ron Paul is a nitwit and so are you for thinking this is an actual possibility. In what Universe would the US government try to kill Snowden AFTER the damage is already done. Before, maybe, but after? The only people who might try to kill him are crazed lunatics looking for ever lasting fame or someone who wants to frame the US Government and who thinks like you. Thinking that A. The US government has actual motive. and B. That it would be insanely stupid for the US government to do it. Two ideas that are so mutually exclusive that it is a wonder your head doesn't explode for thinking them at the same time. P.S. You are right about treason, it would be very hard to argue convincingly that he committed treason under the constitution.

I was wondering the same when the news hit, so I googled it and apparently breaching a trust can be considered treason. This would specifically include the intentional dissemination of top secret documents that you signed an oath to protect.

I would tend to agree, but I have come around to thinking that giving al_u_card and his ilk the dignity of respecting their opinion is damaging. They abuse that respect and this contributes to their success in propagating their poisonous ideas. I do not suggest censorship nor do I really suggest mere name calling, but I likewise no longer feel any need to express my contempt for his ideas in a civil manner.

2013-1963=50 Who ever you presume is speaking for the US in condoning the use of torture does not actually speak for the US and sadly the use of torture isn't new. As to Gitmo, a very disturbing issue to which I strongly oppose, it however doesn't restrict any liberties of any citizens of this country. I am not entirely sure what the NSA is collecting, the most believable reports suggest it is limited to meta-data, but I am pretty sure they would have collected it, and far more, 50 years ago under J. Edgar Hoover. What changed here is not so much about what the government is collecting but what technology is allowing it to collect. Canada is not the USA. Considering the state of voting rights in the 1960's, I wouldn't really advance the notion that the suggested voting right changes are really an infringement on civil liberties that tarnish the glorious 1960's.

What are the things you can't do now that you could in 1963? Among those things, what are the things you believe you should still be able to do? Fill this out for me. First list: Smoke in restaurants States outlawing interracial marriage Discriminate based on sexual orientation (add more examples) Second list: (add more examples)