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Kidnapper abducts 50 of your colleagues. Says he will only release them if you let him have sex with your wife. You say, no. Are you now responsible for the 50 colleagues being held hostage? Of course not. The magnitude of stupid required to suggest such a thing is overwhelming. Kidnapper says, fine. Let me have sex with your wife, I’ll also return the many items I stole from your home last year, and will additionally agree not to steal anything else for 2 more years. Agree to this and I’ll release the hostages. Understandably, you again say, no. Are you now responsible for the 50 colleagues being held hostage? Of course not. Are you the one now at fault for “not compromising” with the kidnapper? Of course not. The magnitude of stupid required to suggest such a thing is overwhelming. “What if you just let him put it in the butt?? that’s a compromise” ... that’s where this conversation has devolved into. No. Not just no, but hell no. Yet that’s precisely what’s happening here when posters keep saying Democrats are the ones responsible despite their MANY votes attempting to reopen government and to get workers paid, and despite the obvious obstacle here being Mitch McConnel and the president for refusing to even allow a vote.

MigL is clearly stating that Democrats aren't compromising enough. Say he'd expect better does imply a level of blame for the current situation. J.C. is clearly implying that both parties (Democrats and Republicans) are behaving at opposing extremes. J.C. is clearly complaining that Democrats are not doing their part. A level of blame for the current situation is implied. MigL is asking what I read as rhetorical questions here to imply that federal workers are being "extorted by D Trump AND those opposed to him". Those opposed are obviously Democrats and MigL even bothered to emphasize the point by capitalizing "AND". Above are just a couple posts a piece. There are many more but I see no point in wasting even more space. Especially when there is a very high probability you both will deny the nature of your statements anyway. You both keep inserting digs at Democrats which imply they are also at blame for the current state of affairs and the shutdown. So when I posted ""You both seem hung up on ensuring blame for the currently situation be evenly spread" it accurately described what I am perceiving in your posts. You two do "seem hung up". Can we get back on topic now?

Since Trump is the one asking for 5.7 billion isn't the onus on him to put it in concrete terms? You don't think is it strange that the whole govt is shutdown over a funding request that no one can quantify. I provided you what DHS's plans are. DHS is ran by a Trump appointee and not by Democrats. Their 2019 budget lays out ,in concrete terms, what they feel they need to get the job done. Democrats have already agreed to give DHS 100% of what they have outlined they needed to include money for them to develop a department within DHS to analyse how to best build a wall and what the estimated costs would be. Trump has failed to release any specifics for his wall. There is no plans in place for what would happen if Congress gave Trump 5.7 billion dollars. It is inaccurate to say "may the best rhetoric win". The 1.6 billion Democrats have offered is specifically earmarked to pay for the thing DHS requested in there budget. It is not rhetoric. It is actionable. That money is in addition to the 3.5 billion budget increase for the 2019 year. Between the 3.5 billion and the 1.6 billion DHS will be receiving 5.1 billion dollars this year over what it received in 2018. A total increase of nearly 12% over last year. Oh, by the way DHS got a 4 billion dollar increase in 2018. So in 2yrs DHS is looking at 9.1 billion increases. That is a 22.5% increase over 2016 (Obama's last DHS budget). Those are the concrete terms. Under Trump DHS has already asked for and receive massive increases to hire hire more agents, judges, lawyers, repair existing fencing, build new fencing, and develop new department specifically to plan a wall. We can clearly see where that money Democrats are offering would go. We can't do the same for Trump's 5.7 billion. It is just a number he keeps repeating but is not attached to any specific plan. So the only empty "rhetoric" here is Trump's 5.7 billion. Democrats are offering money for real policies that DHS has real plans for. Can you? The issue isn't that I can't. The issue is that no one can. Why don't you help all us out and link Trump's associated proposal for what specifically that 5.7 billion would pay for.

Even more so

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-46856779 Bizarrely: So he repeatedly makes bigoted and discriminatory statements but ... what? He doesn't mean them? Just goes to show, even Nobel Prize winners can be idiots.

I don't know who Christopher Hitchens was, but I came across this quotation from him, that would be a good "mission statement" for the forum: Any better suggestions?

OK, I didn't mis-understand, and you haven't clarified anything. You are saying there is a center to the universe, and it exploded outward. I guess we'll just throw all observational evidence out the window. Space is energy waves ? Water is what waves in a pond to transfer energy. What waves in space to transfer energy ? The expansion is only evident in places which are far from radiating stars/matter. IE not gravitationally bound. So how can radiation pressure ( energy waves ? ) be responsible for expansion ? Current understanding has none of these problems.

I think the obvious compromise here is to start marking some threads but leave them open. If they attract bad actors, or other negative aspect arises because they're still open, we can close them as necessary.

Lol. If this is what it feels like to be wrong, then I don’t wanna be right

Is asking a question not sometimes a way of making a statement? It doesn't help that the question is so poorly worded.

It's not genetic, it's cultural. African countries aren't genetically stupid, they're simply overwhelming culturally primitive.

You are writing nonsense..

Because Trump hasn't released a plan for what he'd do with the money my concern is that the 5.7 billion would be misused. Sometimes Trump says a fence is the same thing as a wall. Other times Trump says new technology like drones is the same as a wall. I would hate for 5.7 billion for Trump's wall to morph into a 5.7 billion dollar purchase from military contractors for armed drones. Trump kicked off his campaign in 2015 and has received more media attention (cable news, blogs, social media) than any politician in history. After 4yrs years of this sh!t I do not believe for one second anyone is on the fence regarding how they feel about Trump. Moreover Trump flips the news cycle constantly. The 2020 election is still a hundred Trump scandals away. This shutdown will be old news by this summer never mind 2020.

This is a 'crude' explanation of the mechanism, but it is easy to understand, and so, often used. I would imagine the virtual particle 'flux' is related to the surface area of the event horizon. Increase the EH surface area and you increase the virtual particles involved in the mechanism. However, the EH surface area is also a measure of the BH's entropy, which implies it has a temperature. Increasing the EH surface area decreases the temperature, so the peak of the black body spectrum of the emitted radiation is at a lower temperature. For stellar size ( and above ) the emitted radiation is at very low temperatures ( so low in fact, that the 2.7 deg of the CMB increases the BH's mass faster than Hawking radiation decreases it ) is very long wavelength/low energy. So increasing surface area increases the amount of radiation, but it is of lower energy and so, carries away much less mass/energy from the BH. It is only BHs that have already mostly evaporated, or may be left over from the Big Bang, which produce copious amounts of gamma radiation ( Star Trek's Romulan 'bird if prey' starships use a micro BH as their power source ); just before shedding their EH and exploding back into 'normal' space-time.

Please feel free to open a new thread exploring these quote unquote leftist tactics, but for here in this particular thread it would be much appreciated if you could please stop attacking posters as individuals, focus on the actual arguments being made, and cease from inserting unnecessary and unhelpful tribal divisions and generalizations into your posts.

We live in a world where people are eating Tide pods. Changing microwave instructions to reference Joules instead of time is IMO titling at windmills. Exactly. Just google it...

You can pick any numbers, find a pattern and claim it is significant. And, of course, numerologists always pick the numbers that "work" (are easy to invent a relationship for). For example: Why? What happened to 19 and 2? But you will never convince someone who believes in numerology that they are wrong. It is like an incurable illness.

Fine, but what you don’t acknowledge here is that it’s only ONE of the parents who is refusing to feed the kids until an agreement gets made on custody.

It must feel doubly strange being mocked by a bunch of immigrants kids on ones own land. To buckle now would be to sow the seeds of more of that behaviour because, like a temper-tantrum child, he would see that it works.

If Trump was proposing to spend the money on schools and libraries, most people would support it. If he was spending $5B on a gold statue of himself, people might not support it, but they might accept that it's a small price to pay to get government moving again and thus vote it through. But the true cost of Trump's wall isn't $5B, because of all the knock-on costs. Nobody knows how big the full cost is. But since it does no good, it would be too expensive, even if it was free. The folk waiting for their paychecks are in a hole. But that hole gets worse if you set a precedent where Trump- or anyone else- can get anything he wants by screwing them over, simply because it teaches him to do it again and again. That's the real cost- not just $5B.

Then I’d still be struggling, only more so... and this time as a direct result of Trumps obstinance. It takes some serious mental gymnastics to suggest this situation would somehow predispose me to displacing blame from Trump and instead onto others... on to Democrats who have REPEATEDLY tried to reopen government and who have been REPEATEDLY blocked by the GOP Senate and the president himself. If I’ve been struggling with bills as a federal employee, then Trump has made that struggle worse by using ME as a hostage in a policy diasagreement that has ZERO to do with government funding overall. No offense intended, but there’s not an ounce of valid logic in this suggestion you and MigL are here now making. I don’t want to call it dumb or ridiculous to suggest what you have, but it is both of those things.

This makes zero sense. If they give in and do what you suggest, the ONLY thing they’re doing is playing Trumps game and they’d be doing so COMPLETELY on his terms. Trump gets exactly what he wants and loses absolutely nothing whatsoever by doing what you propose. How is that “not playing his game?” What... it’s supposed to be different somehow because they gave a passive aggressive speech while doing so? Dufuq? By standing firm, they’re telling him that his game isn’t funny and he needs to stop... that he needs to sign one of the several bills they’ve already passed to protect our border and reopen our government.

That’s fine. You’re under no obligation to be correct. I mean, I’d agree with you, but then we’d both be wrong.

Personally, INow, I wouldn't care if he called her a 'stupid bi*ch'. The term was MEANT to be offensive, and it was. I have a problem with calling it sexist, because it can be 'weaponized' by some unscrupulous people, who then use the term to label people who disagree with them, and who may not necessarily be sexist. It has happened with the 'racist' and 'homophobe' labels. Even on this forum where we all expect more reasoned thoughts and discussion.

Just butting in here, isn't calling someone a "stupid woman" be possibly factual, the same as calling someone a "stupid man". Yes certainly offensive to the recipient. Where it becomes sexist is saying, "stupid women" or alternatively "stupid men"....yes, yes OK, perhaps calling her a "stupid person" may have been more diplomatic? I now hand control back.

You have a bad habit of repeatedly claiming people say things they didn't. And you do it under the pretense of "what he really meant is X." It's lying.

No. I do think it is strange. Ten oz. I'm not making any claims here (yet, but see below at my feeble attempt), outside of pointing out something that seems unanswered. I am asking questions with regard to it. You have assured me I will not find that information, that there is no real plan and therefore no link. Perhaps I will do a brief google search... In the meantime I will start with a wild conjecture that the cost of the 5.7B would reap 2.85B in value to America, admitting that it could be more and it could be less, including the outside possibility that the value could be in the negative. My assumptions are that perhaps the wall (more accurately the spending, as you have pointed out there will be costs involved that will not go directly toward the wall e.g. litigation etc.) that there will has some value, but my ignorance dictates that I can do no better at this point than splitting the difference between full value and none. This is also assuming that the wall is not in fact immoral on it's own, even if it's future use might have that potential. (which would be highly dependant on who is in office after it is built) That leaves Trumps 5.7B price tag at a net cost of 2.85B, which can be compared to the ongoing costs of the shutdown, that economists can at least estimate and on top of which other human costs can be considered. Here we have some estimates that would put the cost so far at between 5 and 10 Billion, with it going up by 200 to 400 million a day. This may admittedly be rubbish accounting, but if no one can improve upon it (I believe that is very unlikely) it is the best we have. It is not blame neutral, or blame one side or the other. It does not assess blame at all. Why do you feel compelled to make this misleading statement? Do you not feel your arguments are solid enough without it? Ten oz.possibly is operating on the Leftist platitude that accurate interpretation of the words from anyone the perceive to be on the right of them is wholly unnecessary, and that the case for Leftist argument can be best built with deceit. Another possibility is that he continuously makes honest errors when reading, and it just coincidently falls in one direction. I don't remember blaming the 800,000 currently without paychecks, but will apologize profusely if I have unintentionally done so.

It's largely genetic, you have methods such as adoption studies. Then the Marxist charlatan will throw out Occam's razor because of his a priori equality fantasy and posit "uterine poisoning' or "Venusian beams" or "increasing-with-distance white hatred" some other non-falsifiable imaginary variable to explain an absolutely consistent temporal and spatial pattern that would be noted as obviously genetic in any other (infra) subspecies or race. Sometimes I go out of my house and talk to people, and they seem really dumb. Perhaps everyone seems equally smart to you. Perhaps you have never been outside. Perhaps you are just insane. I don't know.

Keep them coming. You've already found them so let's see them. Out with them. I think this pretty much sums it up. You set the bar, for yourself, much too low IMO. With you? Why bother?

So. If you had missed two paychecks at this point and you were already struggling with your bills prior to the shutdown, by this point you'd be even more adamant that no matter what you don't give into Trumps demands. Again. Easy for you to say that the deal is worthless and everything when you're not being affected by it. You care more about pinning the blame to someone and holding onto your ideological ideals, then you do about actually helping people who need it. Congratulations. Politics has beaten your humanity.

You need to provide more than one example for "posters keep saying", unless you accidentally pluralized "poster", and by keep" you meant "once". Otherwise it was intentionally misleading. ...or is it just habitual Leftist writing with no real intent to mislead?

Science often does discriminate between things. It's also called measurement. I guess that isn't possible when you're surrounded by shrieking Marxist lunatics. And what's bigoted about making a statement based on an observation? Surely making a statement based on your imaginary and delusional a priori "equality" nonsense is bigoted, i.e. holding a view in the face of evidence to the contrary. And that's your entire argument for your imaginary "equality" hypothesis. Calling your opponent names. Go science!