jryan

ex-post, perhaps. Was the decision making process largely a public forum, or were they just informed about it afterwards?

It's always been a public as far as I can remember. There usually is news about these Texas meetings due to the overall effect their decisions have on the aggregate national curriculum. The hearings themselves are carried on Texas public access television as it is really a state issue that just happens to effect other states to the extent that those other state's apathy allows.

As Cap'n pointed out, there is public response time for these hearings.

Well the game is still rather buggy, though that should be no surprise for an alpha version. They have funny physics that allows for perpetual motion machines, for example.

Well, yeah. It's a game, after all. But as a game goes, the ability to simulate individuals and personalities is second to none.

The next release is coming out in a few day to weeks. It will change the game considerably and add a lot of content. It will most assuredly be buggy on release, but most of the bugginess will at least be new.

The two persistent bugs in the current version that will be fixed, and make the game much more fun, is the Reclaim bug and "resident creature bug".

In the current version you can reclaim a lost fort in the site finder (type capital R), you embark with an army that varies with the size and value of the fort you are reclaiming. The problem is that reclaiming caused magma to "move" so none of the foundries or smelters that are powered by magma work anymore.

The second bug made embark a lot less fun because if you embarked on an enemy settlement that settlement turned friendly and you could no longer attack it. I used to have great fun attacking goblin black towers and claiming the large obsidian fortresses as my own (assuming I could defeat the demon lord).

The new release fixes both of these problems, supposedly. So I will be starting my first fortress on the grounds of some unfortunate goblin settlement.

Later on the programmer will be tacking game physics to make it a little more realistic, but a lot of his early work in that area had to be scrapped when he moved from a 2D game world to 3D.

I had that happen once but the dwarf made a leather thong instead of gauntlets.

I've been having bad luck with moods recently, though. They always want to use materials that I don't have. I have just started walling them in their workshops while they mutter about needing silk thread or shells.

Though I have solved the shell problem though as I now bring a wagon full of turtles to every fort.

This is why it seems to me that faith is quantifiable, and that the extreme end of the scale is the most desirable, what a religion would hope for as the default for its practitioners.

Again, you just asked them about faith with regard to their religion. How many times must I make this distinction?

Now ask them what is their percentage of faith in God, and how they arived at that percentage.

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I think you underestimate the idea of "extreme" there is no limit to extreme no way it can loose meaning since it is an endless dive. what appears extreme today might seem mild compared to what extreme means 50 years from now. At one time killing another person because you disagreed with their religion was extreme, now airplanes are flown into buildings killing thousands over religion. At some point we might blow up stars to kill entire solar systems over religion. Extreme has no limits, no way it can loose meaning.

You are not discussing a binary system then, which is what I was discussing.

Is it 12:00 noon? ... if it is actually 3:00pm is "No" an "extreme" answer?

"Almost an atheist" is like "somewhat pregnant"

Such a process (and other important government services) needs to be far more open to public scrutiny -- before/during/after.

I find this statement to be a bit silly. The fact that we are discussing the topic based on news coverage about the process is clear evidence that the process is open to public scrutiny.

No. The issue is that this change is being driven to try to shoe-horn one ideological view of history into all future children's minds. It is trying to manipulate and contort what is and what is not presented to children to more closely align with their religious and ideological beliefs.

 

If they were trying to make these changes to offer a more realistic and accurate view of history to children, then there would be no problem. However, that is not what is happening here. They are trying to engage in revisionist history so it more closely reinforces their personal worldviews and belief systems. This is nothing new with the ideological Texas State Board of Education who seems to care very little about educating children... They seem to care more about indoctrinating them.

 

For more on this history, this is a great site: http://ncse.com/

And I am pointing out that Aquinas WAS important to the Enlightenment ideas that contributed to revolutions from 1750 to present. Both in his making Aristotle relevant again, and in starting the scholastic movement which lead to Renaissance Humanism and the Age of Enlightenment starting in 1650 and sprouting all over Europe.

Mentioning that fact is not revisionist history, but previous exclusion of those facts could indeed have been.

Feel free to argue a contrary view to the one being asserted, and explain why that is more correct then the proposed inclusion of Aquinas, or that reducing Jefferson and elevating Aquinas "and others" is inappropriate.

For the umpteenth time, the argument is not whether to protect lives, but whether there are lives to protect. Your argument that there are is that those lives begin at an unambiguous, non-arbitrary point that can be identified. This has been demonstrated not to be the case. Hence, there is no longer an argument.

There is no ambiguity, Sisyphus, and you and others have done nothing to change that fact. I have argued that the zygote is a living human being (or human organism), and the closest you can get to dissolving that unambiguous assertion is that it may become two or more human beings on a rare occasion, but never less than one.

So the argument of protecting life (or living human organism) from conception is unaffected by the claims of potential twins or chimeras as neither changes the fact that protecting the life as it exists in the womb is still protecting that life regardless of it's potential to be more than one.

When fraternal twins fuse they go from two lives to one, when identical twins split they go from one life to two. There is no ambiguity and you have failed to make a compelling case that there is sufficient ambiguity to invalidate the one life due to the possibility it may become two.

You don't think one can claim extremes in binary because there is only extremes and no middle?

No I don't. Otherwise you have a system in which everything is extreme... at which point the word extreme loses meaning.

Jefferson is at least an Enlightenment thinker, and was one of the primary thinkers in interpretting Enlightenment ideas for the practical goal of founding a country. Like Madison, Franklin, Hamilton, Adams. Thomas of Aquinas was hundreds of years prior to anything that could be called the Enlightenment, and was very much an ancient philosopher in outlook. (He would have to be, since his primary goal was reconciling Aristotleanism with medieval Christianity.) The American revolution was born out of the philosophical revolution of modernist philosophers. I suppose you could say that medieval theologians were a precursor in that they were studying philosophy beforehand, but what Enlightenment thinkers had in common was a break with such traditions.

But go back and read the article that people are huffing and puffing about. It makes no charge that Jefferson is being removed from the importance of the founding of the United States, simply from the Age of Enlightenment Ideas that lead to revolutions from 1750 to today, which were well established before his contributions.

Aquinas is important for many reasons, both in his own philosophy, and in the simple fact that Aquinas rescued Aristotle's philosophy from the dark ages dust bin and gave it new purpose. Aquinas is one of the primary reasons that Aristotle plays an important role in Western philosophy.

Also, I notice that HuffPo doesn't seem to care enough about the issue to spell out who the "and others" refers to in the blog post. I would guess that nobody would object if those "others" were John Locke (the real father of Liberalism/Libertarianism), Thomas Paine, and others who truly laid the groundwork for the American revolution decades before Jefferson was even born.

Why all the fuss about Thomas Aquinas? Is it simply because he is a religious figure as well as a philosopher? Is this a "separation of church and state" issue for people?

I still can't think of any situation where your distinction holds true. Children obviously assume God is real if their parents talk about Him that way, but anyone past the age of reason who questions God's existence and later comes back to a firm belief has not simply flipped a switch; they have questioned their faith, torn it down and analyzed it, and then built it back up again to the point where it is now usually stronger than before. I can point to several examples of that in my own experience, but I don't know anyone who ever switched it on and off like you describe.

But you are speaking of religious faith which is as different from faith in God as Catholicism is from Agnosticism. You can also have a child raised Christian question his faith (either in the tenets of their faith or that base belief in God) and come out the other side as a faithful Muslim, a faithful Christian, and Agnostic or atheist. Three have no change to the existence of God and one does, and in the three cases the reason for the change is due to what tenets of the individual religions they hold as true or false.

As a personal example, I was raised Catholic, and during my young questioning phase I spent time believing there was no God, but still finding value in Catholic morality, then entering a variable phase of dedication to Catholicism but with a new-found belief in God, leading to a slow, but I see inevitable, return the the Catholic Faith. But in that whole process God either existed or he didn't for me.

If you insist that faith in God is binary, then 100% is, by default, the extreme positive choice.

I don't think you can claim extremes in a binary system as there is no middle.

Of course you can't answer a numerical question without numbers. Not even with your binary system -- you still answer with numbers (1 or 0 in that case, or 100% and 0% if you prefer). Show me a number that isn't a fraction or a percent.

Of course you can. I am asking what the units of measurement for faith are. The answer to that question is not numerical.

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Any quantitative measurement could be boiled down to represent multiple binary elements, but that doesn't make every measurement a binary one. And you yourself said that a definition of God is necessary for every faith, so you are making qualitative judgments about your definition in order to have faith in your god. By making those judgments, you are boiling down the quantitative measurements in order to define your god, and thus you are growing your faith through learning and experience. You add or discard bits to eventually accumulate a definition that you can have faith in.

 

Your god is not that separate from your religion, since different religions define their God in different ways. Even the Abrahamic God has three distinct major definitions, so your faith in the Islamic version isn't as strong as the Christian one (I assume), or the Judaic one. Therefore, faith in your god can't be binary, since it involves much learning, decision-making and experience in the same way elements of a religion do.

As I stated a while ago, there are two separate definitions of faith at play here. If you are talking about a faith in "God" then I argue it is binary. If you are talking about a faith in a given set of religious tenets then that faith is arguably variable with it's measurable units being tenets... which themselves may or may not be binary.

Getting back to the original question I would have to say the answer is still "No" on either definition of Faith.

How can you not, though?

 

You take two women at the same stage of their pregnancy, where the zygote split. You (and medicine) cannot yet determine which one would yield healthy twins and which will yield a chimera. We can't know. It's not yet determined. But the zygote has split already. It's mutliplying, it's growing as *TWO* entities.

 

Is it still one life? If it is, then twins are also not "life" on their own until ..... when? If it is two lives/souls/whatever, then if it fails being twins and transforms to a chimera, a soul/person just died. Lost. Where did it go?

 

 

 

So I understand why it is a tough decision to be consistent in this case, but if you want to make sense, you need to try.

 

~moo

Well, first, so we are clear, chimeras result from a starting state of fraternal twins, not identical. There would be no way of telling if identical twins re-merged as the genetic code is exactly the same.

But I see no compelling argument to not protect the life or lives in the womb based on an overcomplicated consideration of how many lives it is or will end up being after various natural but unlikely scenarios that may happen happen.

Aren't you quite the apologist...

 

Thomas Jefferson had far more to do with the founding of the US than Thomas Aquinas, end of story. Thomas Jefferson is a central figure of America's history and deserves to be recognized as such.

 

C'mon jryan, don't you consider yourself a libertarian, or as you would self-identify, a "classical liberal"? Thomas Jefferson is the primordial libertarian. Why are you defending removing him from the history books?

They aren't talking about the founding of the U.S., Bascule. They are talking about the two men's contributions to the Age of Enlightenment.

And no, Jefferson isn't a "primordial libertarian", that philosophical branch started in the Renaissance with Humanism as it decoupled human morality from theology and introduced the idea of immutable liberties. Jefferson came on the scene a full 100 years after the start of the Age of Enlightenment... hardly a primordial figure there.

Are birth certificates always validated against state records, or are there cases where they're just trusted?

Depends on the circumstance. They are not always trusted, no, and many states have a database available to other states to verify certificates electronically (and had them as early as 1995 as I used one in my work). But even before that we were required to get verification of birth from the state when a higher form of ID (that also verified birth certificates) was provided.

I can only assume that a national ID card, since it would amount to the top tier form of ID, would have an in depth birth verification requirement, as such verification cascades to all other forms of ID.

If it didn't then I would have a problem with it. I know a bit about such "chain of authority" ID systems between fed and state governments, and an unverified ID distributed by the Federal Government would royally screw that agreement.

But I have seen nothing that indicates that these national ID cards would not be subject to such stringent verification processes so I see no need to accuse them of such at this point.

It's funny.. I don't remember my college philosophy courses having a problem with attributing much of the groundwork for the Age of Enlightenment to Aquinas, and his rejuvenation of the Aristotle logic, and the development through the scholastic pursuit of Christianity through logic ("scholastic" being a word used specifically to describe those who studied logical Christianity.. or "schoolmen" in more casual usage).

This lead to Renaissance Humanism which is the father of the Age of Enlightenment.

Jefferson was a student of this history, not an inventor of it, and the fact that he held slaves is a good indication that he was not always a very good student.

Identification is a hard problem. It's all based on birth certificates in the end -- you just bring in your birth certificate and a social security card to prove your ID when getting a license -- and those are ludicrously easy to forge. Making the card itself better won't prevent people from getting one through fraudulent means.

 

Also, if one is to design a "secure" biometric/cryptographic identity card, it had better be a public process with review by independent security experts. Nearly every "secure" identification system, like RFID tags in passports, has had major weaknesses because someone thought it better to keep the details secret.

Well, the certificate itself is easy to forge, but the paper trail of that document isn't easy to forge.

The only birth certificates you find being heavily forged (or at least when I was a social worker) were birth record from OTHER countries. Normally this was done in an attempt to make dependent children younger so as to extend their eligibility for benefits (cut-off usually being 18 years old). This was a common problem with Somalian refugees as we had to accept the Somalian Embassy claim of age, which would change at least once for ever child upon reaching their 18th birthday.'

But the birth records are hard to forge without having someone in the state records bureau willing to implant false records into the state files to validate the birth certificate being provided.

"Invested in solar" by supporting the development of solar projects is not the same thing as "investments in solar" as in owning stocks. That's why this is moving the goal posts, as well as equivocation. You provided the response to a different question than was asked.

 

Do you have evidence that their investment portfolio is invested in AGW-related technology?

 

 

OF COURSE they support solar energy; it's in their mission statement! That's money outflow from their endowment. You've cited examples of them GIVING MONEY AWAY. I'm asking how they are making money off of this!

I'm still tracking down the RBF portfolio in total, buut I printed the full list of solar energy programs to show that they were not merely giving money to solar projects by also providing loans to solar energy companies.

But I'll admit, finding the full list of what RBF actually makes money on is rather difficult. And then their are the individual Rockefellers, and the Rockefeller Group, the Rockefeller Foundation to look up, Rockefeller&CO, and so on.

The national ID card is long past due as far as I am concerned. It was really due in the late 90s as soon as technology was sufficient to create a tamper resistant ID card.

From illegal immigration to voter fraud, the ID card is the only logical starting point for any remedy.

Wait, what? I though GISSTEMP was a model output. You can't evaluate your model by comparing it to itself.

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Consecutive posts merged

Yeah, I worded that wrong. In the emails Reto Rudy is telling the USA Today writer to use HADCrut and NCDC, not GISTemp, for his reporting as temp records are "what they do best" and GISS does "rudimentary analysis" of global observed data.

So I guess my question is this: Then what exactly IS GISTemp?

Side note: Since GISS is using NCDC and HADcrut to check their GISTemp model then it's no surprise that GISTemp, HADCcrut and NCDC look alike, is it? I think the earlier attempt to validate GISTemp by it's agreement with HADcrut fall apart on that revelation.

I wonder what record HADcrut used to validate their temperature model?

A chimera has living cells from two different zygotes. This can happen shortly after the zygote stage, or in the case of transplants and transfusions, well into adulthood. There is no dominant DNA -- the cells from one zygote will have that zygote's DNA and proteins, and the cells from the other zygote will have that other zygote's DNA. In the case of transplants and transfusions, we consider the owner of the brain to be the same person, regardless of what was transplanted where. In the case of natural born chimeras, we sane people never considered them to be separate persons.

I know what a chimera is, and I don't consider them to be two individuals, as I said in my earlier statements. But it is possible for their to be one individual made up of two individuals.

We can also have a person who has multiple personality disorder, and even another person with the physically split brain have two separate personalities, with one dominant but the other capable of controlling extremities on it's own. These cases of multiple personalities are also considered one individual in my way of reasoning.

One has a tenth more faith than the other? You measure faith by the aspects of it that you can see. And if you can't see it, you rely on the person's own declaration of how much faith he has. Just like you would measure someone's, say, love of chocolate.

That's my point. You can't answer that question without resorting to percentages or fractions, which just leads back to my assertion that the percentage is arbitrary as it has no divisible underlying substance.

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I disagree completely. I think most religious people, if you asked them about their faith, would tell you that it has grown over the years, much like trust or convictions. Many people start out supposing something is true, and when it proves itself over time, their belief strengthens. Trust is a great example too. You don't start out trusting someone or something wholeheartedly, you need to build trust through experience.

But you don't gain trust without incremental instances where trust has been shown to be appropriate. I don't gain trust simply as a matter of time, but from actions that I either agree of disagree with, or the ability of the person to meet the requirements for a given action. But that itself, like the faith in a religion still reduces down to smaller Yes/No questions.

As such, I do not see faith in God as reducible, but rather one of the rudimentary Yes/No questions.

Similarly, faith is something that is learned, not switched on or off. As a person learns more about his or her religion, they build faith. It becomes stronger the more they learn, the more they experience what it means, the more they share it with others. This behavior over time has nothing binary about it. People may suddenly declare a belief in a deity, but if you ask them when they're older if their faith was always the way it is now, I doubt you get many people who would say it hadn't changed over time, strengthening or weakening depending on their experiences.

Faith in a religion is that way, yes. But such a faith is a conglomerate of smaller faiths. Faith in God is not that way, as I see it.

You implied that their investment portfolio was in AGW-related businesses. Don't shift the goalposts. Provide evidence or retract the assertion.

I didn't shift the goalposts, I have shown you that they are invested in solar energy markets through their paper titled "Selling Solar". Feel free to show me how all the brokered deals in that document between various financial interests, RBF, and the Solar industry with RBF providing support and capital investment . Here is a list of deals in this one area and one document alone (pardon formatting as it is pulled from a PDF, but if you want the numbers you can find this same list starting on page 9 of the paper):

• A joint venture has been undertaken by the Grameen Trusts, a

pioneer in small-scale community lending in Bangladesh, and

E&Co, a U.S.-based nonprofit whose mission is to encourage

the development of renewable energy enterprises in developing

countries. With RBF support for soft costs, Grameen and

E&Co are forming a stand-alone rural electrification company

that will pair Grameen’s widely decentralized credit operations

(operating in one half of Bangladesh’s villages) with E&Co’s

expertise in renewable energy. Because of Grameen’s stature in

international development circles, its success in distributing

solar systems throughout rural Bangladesh would go far toward

promoting the viability of solar home systems. The pairing of

solar system distribution with Grameen’s credit capability will

not only speed the diffusion of solar units through Bangladesh

but should also help other banks see the potential business

opportunities available in solar financing.

• In a similar effort to pair solar distribution with credit finance,

the Syndicate Bank in southern India, another Pocantico conference

participant, has launched a solar lending program for

rural households in Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh that provides

solar home loans through its , branches. An Indiabased

solar energy service company that is a subsidiary of SELF

supplies and maintains the solar home systems for Syndicate

Bank customers, and is developing a network of solar service

centers to install , systems a year.

• E&Co is now in the final stages of developing a broad-based

solar electrification industry in Morocco. Using a franchise

model it has nicknamed MacSolar, E&Co is building a centralized

acquisition, distribution, and finance entity that will

encourage the development of dealerships by individual solar

entrepreneurs throughout the country. E&Co anticipates that

over , households could be served in the first three years

of MacSolar’s operation. The International Finance Corporation

(part of the World Bank Group) has expressed interest in

providing financing.

• The Solar Electric Light Fund’s industry-creation efforts in

India and in China are expanding rapidly. Both countries now

have well established credit networks and indigenous manufacturing

capability. SELF has also initiated an expansion of

its work in Vietnam, with RBF support. SELF’s partner in this

effort, the Vietnam Womens Union, is the world’s largest national

women’s organization, with over  million members.

Vietnam’s rural population appears to be extremely receptive

to solar systems and this project, like Grameen and E&Co’s

efforts in Bangladesh, could become a case study in large-scale

solar home system diffusion.

• Environmental Enterprises Assistance Fund (EEAF) has established

Corporacion Financiera Ambiental (CFA), a  million

fund for environmental investment in Central America. EEAF

will be the manager of this fund, and hopes to identify several

renewable energy investment opportunities, including “off-thegrid”

SHS companies. Investors in the CFA Fund include the

Multilateral Investment Fund of the InterAmerican Development

Bank, the Swiss government, Citizen’s Energy, and Triodos Bank.

EEAF, with funding from USAID, has also begun efforts in

Mexico to identify, evaluate, and invest in renewable energy and

other environmental projects throughout the country.

• In response to suggestions made at Pocantico, Solarex (the largest

U.S. manufacturer of solar panels, owned jointly by Amoco

and Enron) has begun to urge its dealers to provide credit to

their customers as a vehicle for expanding sales and is explorPOCANTICO

PAPER NO 2

ing its ability to offer a secure line of credit to its dealers to

encourage these financed purchases.

• The National Renewable Energy Lab in Golden, Colorado, has

decided to serve as a trainer of solar entrepreneurs internationally,

and will provide technical assistance to aid in the creation

of locally based solar industries in developing countries. NREL

has a widely distributed group of partners around the world.

• The World Bank Group and four private foundations (Rockefeller

Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, W. Alton Jones

Foundation, and MacArthur Foundation) are collaborating to

develop a new institutional credit facility—a solar bank—

that could deliver between  million and  million over

the next five years, principally from private financial markets,

for working capital and end-user financing. The collaborative

also hopes to develop a complementary nonprofit corporation

to provide guidance on project preparation, training, marketing,

and government policy.

• The International Finance Corporation (IFC) and the Global

Environment Facility (GEF) are moving through the approval

process for the  million “PV Market Transformation Initiative”

(PVMTI). The PVMTI is designed to significantly

accelerate the commercialization, market penetration, and

financial viability of PV technology in the developing world.

• With RBF support, Environmental Advantage and the National

Renewable Energy Lab have undertaken the financial and legal

research called for by Pocantico participants. EA is actively

seeking investors and lenders to buy receivables from Sudimara

Solar, Soluz, and New World Power, all of which have expressed

a need for working capital to expand their businesses. Working

with bankers at Solomon Brothers, EA is also exploring

the creation of receivables financing as well as equity and debt

fund vehicles in which large insurance companies could invest.

To continue these efforts in the long run, EA is developing

an investment banking subsidiary, called Sun Capital, to

provide financial services for solar companies.

Who are Suzy and Jane? There's only person there. While before (according to the premise that a zygote is a person), there were two. Neither one died, so what happened?

Huh? Are you talking about chimera? How about you tell me which one's genetic code dominates and I'll tell you if one died.

Then why is there a push to reimport drugs from Canada? Why do people go cross the border to get drugs? Are they morons?

Give me an example and I'll tell you whether they are morons. I have shown that on generic medications the US provides the greater savings over Canada, and that roughly 80% of prescription drugs have a generic, and that I can shop around if I don't have insurance for varying levels of deals in the US for my prescriptions that beat the Canadian system.

I am sure their are certain drugs in Canada that can be purchased cheaper, for whatever reason (maybe related to higher demand in Canada leading to large bulk purchases, but I couldn't tell for certain)

I do know from my years as a social worker that there are a lot of people that will simply assume what they are told is true, especially if told enough times, and never do the research themselves... and I would guess some shopping in Canada is driven by that.

On that same line, why do Canadians come to the US for medical treatment?

But you know what? Those 20% represent the newest drugs, or else they wouldn't still have patent protection. Presumably (but unfortunately not always) these are better than the drugs which have generic alternatives. This 80% represents some old drugs.

That is a double edged sword because those big bastard pharmaceutical companies spend billions every year developing those new breakthrough drugs because they are lucrative investments. We have new and innovative drugs because we pay for them.

If the US, the most lucrative pharmaceutical market in the world, suddenly goes on the cheap you will also find that the rate of new pharmaceutical patents and FDA applications will slow.

Does anyone have any stats of per-capital drug research expenditure by country? I'm trying to find it.

Also, while we bemoan the skyrocketing cost of health care, we should also consider that in that same time medical research spending in this country skyrocketed as well. It seems to me that we are now punishing the organizations that invested so much capital in developing the medications and procedures that we now take for granted.

Our health care isn't expensive just because. Also you must consider the cost of medical training (also a factor of the complexity born of new medical discovery).

Would it be a fair trade to grant 5% more people health insurance at the cost of medical research?