WasatchMan

I definitely get this point, and would welcome the LHC getting all of its funding pulled tomorrow and sold off for scrap metal. However, these are the cards we are dealt. I can't change the way science is currently funded, but I can still appreciate the intrinsic value of achievements and breakthroughs in the realm of understanding the fundamentals of reality. Regardless of the funding mechanisim, the Standard Model of Particles Physics is being validated as true, and this is pretty awesome as fact in and of itself.

The power of wishing? Are you channeling a teenage girl or something? EDIT: Is the FDR Board now into The Secret or something? Not sure why a little ribbing on the question of "the power of wishing" would be viewed negatively on a philosophy board.

I think the best point to be made in this situation would be one Stef has made, and that is not whether or not you should or should not be do something, but what is the best something you could be spending your time on doing. I would recommend looking up the discussions about the efficacy of supporting Ron Paul (objectively the best republican of our time) that Stef did back during those times.

I get that. My point was, why do you expect your single vote to change any of that?

If your goal in supporting the republican party is to better your immediate situation, then I don't see a problem with it. I don't know why you would be concerned about your particular vote since I don't understand why you think it has any real world consequence, but as long as you are not expecting the solution to statism to come through republicans there is no issue with trying to improve your situation when options are limited.

If you can't appreciate the achievements of the human mind in the realm of understanding reality and derive pride and joy from that, that is perfectly fine. However, I don't see why you need to try to bring down people who can and do appreciate this.

No, I do not agree that a full-on military offensive is justified against ISIS by a state on the other side of the world. This is not an American problem to deal with and Americans cannot solve it. This can only be solved by the people who have to live with ISIS in their back yard. If they do not have the fortitude to stop this insanity themselves how are they going to sustain it after the Americans leave and the next rats nest of Islamist develop?

I find Sam Harris's perspective on "intentions" that he was trying to have a discussion about on one hand true, and simplistic on the other. It is true because of course someone who intends to hurt someone is evil, whereas someone who accidentally hurts someone is not evil. Very basic stuff, and the left seems to not understand this as it applies to Islam. People who use the teaching of Islam to hurt and kill other people are evil, and in my mind 100% morally responsible. I also get his point that Islam tells people to go and harm non-believers, which is evil, whereas the U.S. governments intention are not to kill people over their beliefs (if you believe that the U.S. intentions are to try to stabilize the world and make it more peaceful - not much evidence of this but it is their stated "intention"). However, even taking for granted that the US intentions are good or neutral, intentions are not the only factor when determining the "right" or "wrong" (aka morality) of a situation. Western common law has had a long tradition of "criminal negligence". If I have a large pit-bull who I know has a terrible temperament, and I just release it into my neighborhood so "it can get some fresh air", my intentions are not evil. However when it starts mauling people in my neighborhood, would anyone say "well he didn't intend to hurt anyone, so all is well." Of course not. They would say "what the hell were you thinking, anyone could look at that dog and know it cannot be trusted to be loose in a neighborhood, and you are the owner, didn't you know this was a possibility?" Well when the US government unleashes the dogs of war on whole region, with the intention of stabilizing and bring peace to it, shouldn't people say "Wait a minute. Did you not know what this will likely lead to? Hasn't history demonstrated this mistake time and time again? How did you expect your goals to be achieved with this methodology?". It would be like trying to justify putting out an apartment fire with a tsunami. While the intention of murder is worse than murder by negligence, criminally, I would put forward there is a point were the magnitude of the negligence becomes a morally worse than a lesser magnitude crime by intention. Compare a stick-up man robbing 7-11s for the money in the cash register to a scientist who is building a nuclear reactor in his basement who knows there is a 50/50 chance that he won't be able to contain the reactor from blowing up the whole city and everyone in it. While I would want both in jail, I would consider the scientist much worse even though his intentions were not evil while the stick-up mans intentions were evil. To me this is like Isis and the US government. Sure Isis is evil, and their intentions are evil. However, the scope at which US has unleashed the dogs of war on the world, expecting good results, is morally worse in my mind due to the shear magnitude of the destruction that resulted. Destruction which should have been easily predicted.

Given all of the bad press and hysteria over the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), I feel it is important to point out the achievements to particle physics that the LHC has been able to provide. The “Standard Model of Particle Physics” created a system of tiny sub atomic particles to predict results in reality. I believe most physicists would agree that this model violated Occam ’s razor to the extreme. In other words, if you think circles in circles sounds overly complicated, try looking into particle physics. Particle physics most of the time sounds like an alternate reality sounding like ramblings of a mad man. However, due to the experimental evidence produced by the LHC, we now know that particles such as the Higgs, and maybe even now anti-matter and Bs mesons, is an observable fact no longer restricted to a theoretical model in someone’s head. This means that one of the most fundamental models produced by humanity accurately represents reality, and is therefore likely true. This is important. I know we all understand the ethical issues in stealing billions of dollars to work on your own pet projects presents (i.e. it is evil), there is an opportunity here to bask in the intrinsic value provided by the LHC’s continued validation of the predictions of the Standard Model of Particle Physics. This should be celebrated by all as a triumph of humanity, and our ability to understand and predict the reality we live in, even when it goes against what we would expect. This is better than Einstein's Theory of Relativity being validated by light bending around an eclipse. I would recommend all to do some research into this great scientific achievement of our time, the validation of the Standard Model of Particle Physics. Humanity is awesome.

I think you are taking what I said to an extreme that I wasn't trying to connote. I wasn't trying to say fitness is not important or anything of that matter. I myself do support clean eating and healthy living with my own lifestyle. I was talking about my opinions (key word opinion, please feel free to have your own) around the motivations of someone upset about the standard of fitness being eroded. Not whether it is good or bad to have a high standard of fitness. All I was trying to point out in my second statement was that there is a difference in an aesthetic appreciation for fitness vs. an ethical understanding of good and evil.

I don't think my original statement is opposed to your analogy. All I was doing is pointing to the motivation in the agitation to "dad bods", not saying he didn't have the right to be agitated. Both scenarios can cause agitation. However, there are fundamental differences between the two scenarios: When you invest in philosophy, self-knowledge, and virtue, and therefore discover the truth that the society you live in is caged by an inherently evil and predatory system run by wrong philosophy and worse parenting, it is a pretty perspective altering event that should change how you view and react to every single situation you find yourself in from that moment on. When you invest in waste size biceps to attract women, and discover that some women are actually not attracted to that, you....???? I don't know, pick up the next blonde that does?

Sounds like a guy that is pissed because he put most of his identity into having a ripped and chiseled body and is worried that the value of this decision is going to be eroded by "dad bod" (whatever the hell that really is and means) I don't think there is any reason to fear that women are going to decide that they are attracted to non-intelligent jelly fish, ever.

Well, you heard wrong my friend. The only possible way there is evidence for creationism is if you accept that the creator made reality look like creationism is false as a test of peoples faith. All you have to do is look out at the night sky to prove that the universe is older than 6000 years given that we can see stars more than 6000 light years away and much greater than that.

You are right. I just find it important for anarchists to be clear that our end isn't to destroy the state, our end is for the state to become irrelevant. We are aiming at a moral ideal, not a pragmatic resolution.

This statement is true. Just like Stef, if someone gave me the button to end the state overnight, I would not press it.

As a materialist, the philosophy of life is opportunity.

I would say there are no alternatives being "alternative" means one choice being exclusionary of all other choices.

Yes, of course there is a range in price, just like everything. This case is not about the margins we are talking about people who were making $30K a year being raised to $70K a year based on the whim of the CEO. This is more than doubling of a yearly salary not $20 to $25/hour, and therefore is enough of an outlier that we don't have to talk about the fuzziness of price, this is a whole magnitude jump.

I don’t “know”, it was just one strategy I came up with off the top of my head on how I would compete for his customers if we were competing for the same customers and I had the knowledge about his new wage plan. Nobody can “know” these things with any certainty. All we can do is make educated guesses based on previous experience, and an understanding of certain characteristics of a market. Sure there are micro mitigation issues around quality, branding, etc. as in the Whole Foods and Walmart example, however I am not trying to do a micro economic analysis, just a macro analysis on how significantly raising wages above the market rate will impact the success of a business. We do know that price is a huge factor in consumer choices, so I would personally take the risk in my prediction that I could attract a portion of his current customers by offering lower prices. It is a big “if” (“his investment in employees helps the company gain more clients and market share“), given that is untried and goes against basic market economic principles. I didn’t make a claim to this point and I am not trying to put forth an opinion on why anyone should start a business. All I am predicting is failure of a business that artificially raises its production costs significantly above market rates. Well I would say market rates are “suppose” to pay the highest the market can sustain, but I am a glass half full kinda guy. Market rates really aren’t “suppose” to be anything, they are a result of a billion correlated inputs predicting the previous relationships between supply and demand. The Federal Reserve could print money and pay everyone in the U.S. a million dollars a year, do you think that would end poverty? I wouldn’t say that. I am sure there are positions in the company that don’t only make that much in revenue but make three times that (and therefore earn that pay). However there are also positions in that kind of operation that don’t earn that level of compensation. You also have to think of the secretary, or non skilled employee, that decides NOT to make further investments in their skill set to get a job that actually would earn the $70K because they are currently getting the signal from the market that they already command that level capital and are content with that.

Competition is tough stuff, especially when it comes to running a business directly facing the public. If I was his competition, I would undercut his business by using part of my 2 million in profits to lower the cost of my product for anyone that wanted to switch from his company to mine. In order to compete with this move, he would in turn have to offer a competing price, which if I played my cards right would mean operating at a loss. Profit is what allows a business to grow and compete. It is their seed stock. Sure you may be able to maintain a small foothold in a market by making significantly less profits than your competition, but it usually doesn't work out that way for long. This idea that you can just raise wages, I believe, comes from someone with a pretty hateful opinion of your fellow man. I have never had a employer that didn't want to pay everyone that did good work more money. Most employers celebrate the ability to give their employees raises just as much as the employee. The premise behind the idea that you can just pay people more money, is the premise that greed and a willingness to exploit others is the core character of a significant number of other employers, because it asserts that it is not reality that sets labor rates, but the whim of the employer to grub money. Which believe me, it is not - a billion calculations are happening all around us which results in the market rate of labor.

A CEO in Seattle has raised his labor costs significantly above market rates, making himself unable to compete while creating unrealistic future expectations for his employers (don't buy that house!!)... Predictions? Sorry, trick question. Math will sink this battleship.

Advertising? Internet? Mail? Megaphone? Skywriting? All of these don't require a master-slave relationship, so I would say they would have to think of ways that don't involve using guns.

UPB has a foundation strongly built on the law of non-contradiction, which has been a fundamental axiom of ethics for millennia. The law of non-contradiction would say that if you would not like people to take your wallet if misplaced, than you should be against taking other peoples wallets if they misplaced it. Ethics is, somewhat unfortunately, reliant on empathy, and therefore empathy is a requirement for the practical implementation of morality. This is why we must raise more empathetic people, for the practical implementation of philosophy.

You would not potentially save many in the zero probability hypothetical that you would someday be faced with the decision to go back in time and kill Hitler. You would save many lives, and you would know this. The NAP allows for defense, even in the case you are defending someone else against aggression. So this would seem to fall under the category of defense. However, the NAP would not say you should go back in time and kill Hitler, all it would say is that it would not be immoral if you did.

Libertarianism asks "Does it [insert proposed action] initiate force against others? If not than we are good - if so than we have a problem". This is all. Libertarianism is a political philosophy, and does not get into aesthetic and/or pragmatic questions regarding "what is best for ME, children, etc." all it is concerned with is the NAP applied to society.