Phi for All

! Moderator Note I'm going to steer you away from conspiracy arguments really early here. We don't like them, because science. And please don't make slurs against large groups of people, we don't care for that either. You have a couple more posts on your first day before the anti-spam measures kick in.

! Moderator Note It's not a proper speculation if you don't bother to search for supportive evidence. It's a WAG, and not what we're looking for. Pony up, or this gets shut down quick.

Khan Academy: https://www.khanacademy.org/

I don't think it makes sense to bury anything of value with its former owner in a society that has so little. Were they appeasing the spirits of their ancestors, or possibly a superstition had grown up around using things that belonged to someone unlucky enough to die?

Oh, me too.

... and then you agonized about how to stop it because it's inevitable. Oh, and you pointed out several times how LOGICAL this all was. I don't think you think about what you write before you write it. That's how fear works, in a way. Because you wrote this: swansont corrected your physics misconceptions. It was YOUR JOB to relate that to your fears, not his. Why doesn't it make a difference to you that you've misunderstood so many things? Why do you persist on imaging the worst?

Of course! Hopefully you feel the site has become better since you joined over a decade ago, and if you stay it should continue to improve.

I don't LOL that often lately, but this struck a chord. I got the part of a newscaster in a high school play because I used my incredibly accurate Ted Baxter impression. Years later I tried out for the voice of the judge in a local production of Twelve Angry Men and my Judge Smails was less well received.

Or you can assume this is exactly what happens in each applicable instance. I don't want any more paperwork to do. Remember we're already spending the time backstage discussing whether someone is just venting and do they use fallacies a lot? and that's not very civil and they need to answer the questions and is this a sockpuppet? and that's bad science and wow that's a sneaky way of getting your homework answered.

If you put a potato in your trousers, you may not need the phone. -- Groucho Marx, I think

Because without that paralyzing fear, comprehension could just all of a sudden strike a person, and they'd have to completely change for the better. Good heavens, man, what a suggestion!

I understand. I'm perhaps overly sensitive to the concept of working against one's best interests lately. People I know have been duped since Reagan into thinking taxpayer help for the billionaires will help the working and middle classes. None of them understand why I think they're patsies to believe the wealthy need so much help.

May arise?! The opportunities happen every day. It's always a temptation when it seems so efficient (I see the spider, capture it, and toss it out of the house), and I know my intentions are good, but we all know how fallible we are alone. Most of our rules don't require us to separate these roles. We've reduced the number of judgement calls significantly over the years. In some instances, we even feel free to participate in threads we've moderated (for instance, if a thread needed to be moved to a different section). In most cases though, we try to keep moderation and participation in discussion separate. In very few instances are mods allowed to call out an infraction and punish it all on their own. We do that if we get a drive-by troll, or if somebody flips out during an off time, but most times when we ban or suspend or even give a warning point there have been 3-4 staff members conferring about it behind the scenes. Honestly, I think some folks get bent out of shape here because they don't understand their own ideas enough to recognize the difference between the membership scientifically refuting it and being told (again) that it simply won't work. The leeway our rules give us helps compensate for that, I think.

Of course the counter to that is that mom & pop were barely making ends meet because minimum wage workers couldn't afford to eat at their place. Raise the wages and more people have the power to participate in their own economy. Yet mom & pop regularly vote down wage increases, hoping for new blood from old turnips. If US healthcare costs were more aligned with the rest of the world, people would have even more disposable income. I've long felt that part of the reason why we won't even vote to give our own children better healthcare, education, and wage opportunities is because SOME folks don't think everyone deserves it. They'll cut off their own noses to keep immigrants and other undesirables from benefiting from public largess.

The idea isn't irrational. The way you torture yourself by focusing on this explanation alone is irrational. The way you phrase it, you're creating a problem in such a way that it can't be resolved. You're an unending skeptic, which is NOT the way to be in science. Either decide one way or the other based on the preponderance of evidence, or simply admit you can't know. You're in a loop of illogic. You've painted yourself into a corner with no escape. You're doing all this to yourself.

Yours is an irrational stance, so I was trying to help in a like manner. I have nothing more constructive to offer you, other than sympathy.

Write a note to yourself that says, "Eternal recurrence is NOT TRUE!", and put it in your pocket. Check your pocket the next day, and if it's still there, you'll know it's not a false statement, because if it was, you would have found that in your pocket the last iteration of the universe. You didn't, so eternal recurrence is not a fact.

The last study I read showed that, in the fast food industry at least, an increase to $15/hr in wages equates to a 4% increase, or an extra forty cents on your $10 combo meal. This would only come out of profit if not passed along to the consumer, so the business owners must have mistakenly convinced themselves that people won't pay it, or there's another reason for them to balk at a higher minimum wage. That industry has done it's best to reduce the training and intellectual requirements of the jobs they produce (remove the numbers from the register keys and replace them with pictures of the food, etc), in order hire more immigrants and young people, and I wonder if that hasn't given the average fast food business owner a jaded perception about what their workers deserve to be paid.

! Moderator Note Moved from Science News.

I can't help if you won't even listen to yourself. One minute you say it might not be true, the next you're convinced it's not. You are NOT behaving like a logical person. If I believed in hell, this is exactly what it would be like, the prisoners torturing themselves in their own minds over imagined sins with no real resolutions. I recommend you spend no more time there.

I would argue this describes fully 95% of the species, and virtually everyone here. It's why I look at these personal preferences as tools to apply to specific situations rather than hats to wear. The right tool for the right job, as opposed to wearing my hammer on my head to declare I'm going to use it for EVERYTHING. This is the power of bias. For years I've avoided direct criticism of the whole group in favor of defining exact behavior I disapprove of, yet you think I regularly use a "wide brush" in generalizing. Very instructional.

You're not an expert in this, so you could be wrong. Nothing like what you describe can be substantiated. It seems like there's no escape, but you're not an expert in this, so you could be wrong. You don't know that for sure, so there is hope, right? It seems like you've destroyed your reason to be depressed. Good reasoning!

I think some of the surreality is caused by trying to stretch that Conservative Republican hat over the heads of the "tourists" you saw as well as these violent radicals. If you think about it, there's little difference between the far right radicals and the far left radicals when both blame the government for their problems, and are willing to break the law and justify hurting people to force their views. I have a long-time friend who supports T----, and identifies as a conservative R---------. I can't talk to him about any of this because his position is, imo, completely manipulated by the right, and totally at odds with his personality. He grew up in a household where his widowed mom took advantage of the social programs she could out of necessity, and also had many ways to pay as little in taxes as she could. He resented the government cheese, got in trouble with the IRS as an adult, and gravitated towards the GOP mostly due to their anti-big-government stance. He's a bit misogynistic, slightly homophobic, but I've never heard him disparage minorities or talk about anybody in a hateful way. He's smoked pot and always chafed at too much authority, definitely not a law-and-order type. He got tired of dealing with his hair one day and decided to shave it off and go bald. In gaming, he's the Leroy Jenkins-type who displays little or no caution, busting and rushing with delight. Yet he identifies with conservative values and leadership, and regularly justifies their actions. When the riot started at the capitol, another friend made the mistake of including him in a text exchange asking if we were seeing what was going on, to which he replied, "Right on!" To be fair, this was before the violence was reported, but so far he's been exactly as contrite about it as T----. I'm still trying to deal with this level of ignorance, and feel there's no good answer as long as these folks can continue to look in the mirror and think the hat they're wearing fits them well. That kind of mindset might sacrifice 40 years of friendship for "the cause" if he thinks I'm helping Biden eat babies. This blow to our democracy sent cracks down deep into our whole society, with trust being the biggest loss next to the loss of lives.

And unfortunately, people who wear their conservatism like a hat are fooled into thinking these are fellow conservatives who support the POTUS and want to uphold the Constitution, instead of radical insurrectionists who want to burn the house down.

! Moderator Note And ANY discussion about it here is OFF-TOPIC, so please stop.