LanceD

Why does insider trading need to be stopped? If your buddy's company is about to do something really awesome and become more valuable why is it illegal for him to tell you to get you to invest? Investing based on information available to you seems like a smart thing to do, not an illegal act. So before I tell you how to enforce the rules, I expect you to first tell me why your rules should exist.

I am glad to see you've reconsidered! As an unschooling parent your original post was somewhat concerning to me, though I very much understand your attitude towards unschooling. Many people seem to think that unschooling means your child is not learning. This could not be further from the truth. When caring and involved parents unschool it simply means that the child is free to explore and learn what they want when they want, while growing an even deeper bond with their parents! You said your child is 3 1/2, so I assume your child has already spent a lot of time with you and your wife learning all sorts of things. Whether its words, colors, shapes or whatever your kid has been learning from day 1. Why does this experience suddenly need to change to a "formal" setting involving compulsion or bribery? Why can't you continue the same pattern that comes naturally to the child? Long ago with my son we abandoned the idea that we needed to teach him subjects or a curriculum. We instead just take him everywhere with us, give him plenty of free time to do whatever he wants, and engage him with projects or activities we think may interest him or expose him to new things. What exactly do you remember from your compulsory education? Think back on all of the things you learned because you had to, not because you wanted to. What do you remember from them? What do you use in your daily life from these subjects? I bet its not a whole heck of a lot! Children who are forced to learn things don't typically absorb and hold onto the information for very long. Why do you want to do this to your child? Why do you want to waste their time? I'm sure you love and respect your child, so why show a complete disrespect for them by forcing them to waste so much time and effort when they could instead be doing something they enjoy? My son can recite so many of the things he's learned that relate to topics he cares about. Whether it's how a star is born, how to play some song on the piano or some nonsense related to his favorite game. Wanna guess how much he remembers from the old compulsory lessons he got before we started doing this the way we do it now? I suggest you stop planning for a formal college education and concentrate on today. Find things your child loves and expose them to things they may love even more. Use everyday experiences as opportunity to teach. Ask questions and engage your child, find out what they think and why they think it. This will help them learn to rationalize and analyze, and a person who can do that can learn anything whenever they want.

I don't understand, why are you unschooling and then creating a school environment at home with a curriculum and minimum standards? It appears you are falling into the trap that many of us unschooling parents fall into and trying to replace a state run school with a parent run school. When what many of us have come to realize is that you need to replace the state run school with no school at all. When we first started home schooling we purchased a curriculum. It had lesson plans, a schedule, a teacher to review lessons, and even had tests to track progress. However this simply created an adversarial relationship between us and our son. Instead of having fun guiding him through learning all the things he is interested in we were put into a situation where we were having to coerce him into doing lessons he had no interest in. This caused a lot of misery in the household and did not go very well with peaceful parenting, because not only does cercion go against peaceful parenting, but in order to gain compliance you have to employ punishments and other forms of "discipline" and move even further away from peaceful parenting! If a child does not want to learn something they will not, and trying to force them too just results in you becoming a shitty person and doing things that only serve to hurt your child. We quickly realized the errors in our ways and my wife started doing research into a better method. This led her to interesting bloggers on Facebook, such as "The Libertarian Homeschooler" and "Free Your Kids", and plenty of other sources for useful information and experiences. We then moved towards a method that from the outside would appear to be no method at all as we don't really do any formal teaching unless it's something he specifically asks to learn about. Instead of schooling he just spends the days doing whatever it is he wants to do and as his parents we attempt to find opportunities for learning in daily life. Example, right this very moment Drake is playing Skylanders Swap Force on my Playstation. I'm really impressed by how good he is getting at solving the puzzles in the game and really happy I bought it because not only does he think it's the most fun thing ever but the game has created many opportunities for learning. One of the big ones is reading, my son HATES reading. He hates it like I hate income taxes, yet he loves this game and there is plenty of ways being able to read helps him in this game. This incentive is actually serving to make him interested in reading and making him happy to do it! And after all of the horrible experiences we all had back when we thought we needed to force him to learn to read on a schedule we determined, it's truly thrilling to see him just doing this stuff on his own. Another example is the day my son looked at a map of the the planet Earth and said that it was a circle. This was true that it looked like a circle on the map, but as we know the Earth is a sphere. I took this opportunity to first teach my son what a sphere is, and attempted to teach him the difference between 2D shapes and 3D shapes. He had recently watched an episode of The Magic School Bus that taught him about stars, so he started to ask other questions related to the Solar System. So we ended up finding every sphere in the house and setting up a makeshift solar system in the living room, complete with me running around in circles trying to teach him about the way the planets orbit the sun. With all the interest he showed we then planned a trip to the planetarium where he got to learn even more about everything relating to space and the universe. When I see your lesson plan it makes me think about our experiences with our son and wonder, "would we be better off with defined lessons?" amd "would the great experiences we have had where he learned X have happened had we followed a lesson plan?". Experience shows me that many, if not all, of the really positive learning experiences would not have happened had we attempted to coerce him into learning these things when we wanted him too. "Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind" -Plato

Now that pledge of allegiance one is pretty awesome

He is the head of a multi-national child sex abuse ring. Who fucking cares what he has to say?

While I can only make judgements based on partial information and a lot of me filling in the blanks, it seems like you may be moving towards divorce a bit too early. While my wife and I agree on the subject of religion there are many issues we both have from childhood. Instead of allowing those problems to drive us apart we have instead turned towards each other and with the help of things we have learned here on FDR and other places we are both working to help each other improve ourselves, and thus our relationship. I definitely agree that a marriage between a rational athiest and a devout christian cannot survive, however I wonder if you have really tried to help your spouse "see the light" so to speak. If you love him the correct course of action would be to do what is best for him, and divorcing him probably isn't the best thing for him. So as long as he is not actively abusing you verbally or physically I think divorce could be seen as more of an escape for you, a taking the easy road kind of thing and abandoning your spouse because with everything you describe about him he doesn't sound like a bad guy! If I were you I would be trying to expose him to rational thought and philosophy, I wouldn't even be trying to tackle the subject of his religious beliefs. If you can get him thinking rationally and lead him on the path of self knowledge and investigating what actually happened to him as a child then doubts about his religion will happen on their own. Actually trying to convert him without first making him doubt his parents righteousness will just result in a defensive response. I also suggest you investigate why you think divorce is the best option. Why give up so early? At one point you thought this man was your mate for life, and you seem to think your vows and promises were important. Well there are parts in them about how you are supposed to stick around when things are hard. This is one of those times, but you want to run away?

His consequence really is quite hilarious. Again it comes down to one simple thing, the purpose of the state is to separate criminals from consequences and this is a prime example.

Honestly who cares if the government is collecting fingerprints of students? If the kids are in the school they are already the property of the government and being propagandized for the state. So what's it really matter if the state also gets a copy of their fingerprints?

You're preaching to the choir here. Social Security and Medicare are further examples of this and the new Obamacare system is yet another scheme designed to pull wealth from the young and healthy and give it to the old and sick.

I agree xelent. The dollar won't be soon to crash because it exists in a system created by those who want it to work. It would require a legitimate loss of faith in the currency by a significant portion of the population, or by enough of the major players in the global political system. However without something else to turn too such a decision would hurt a lot more then just suffering through the inflation.

Even without paying taxes directly you're still feeding the economy and helping to prop up the state. So if that's okay with you keep on doin it. I mean I'm paying taxes to feed the US police state and all of the killing our government does around the world. So who am I to judge you? The Islamic states are pretty despicable but no other country compares to us when it comes to negative impact on the world. I guess it's just a pick your poison kind of thing.

This idea is ridiculous. For one, poor people tend to buy cheap low end goods that are primarily involve minimum wage workers in their path to the consumer. Increasing the MW will make these things more expensive, and thusly eat up all the extra cash these MW people have. For two, you don't become wealthy by hoarding money. You become wealthy by investing money, investment grows economies, employs workers and drives progress as well as granting potential returns to the investor. Hoarding just results in bath tubs full of money you can bathe in but continuously lose value and make you poorer due to inflation.

Wouldn't the potential solution be nuclear proliferation? Seems to me nukes are only a real problem when one group has them and another doesn't. If everyone has nukes then any use of such a weapon will most likely guarantee many uses of the weapons and after enough of them go off we will ruin our atmosphere and make Earth uninhabitable by us. That is pretty good incentive to not actually go use them. After that its just a matter of allowing the markets to guide people towards producing goods that benefit people and not pouring countless resources into arms races and I think we will all be okay.

Your brother sounds like a typical socialist. He believes humans are inherently bad and need a strong centralized power to prevent them from being the evil douche bags they were born to be. It's the same irrational nonsense that guides the hard line Christians, the only difference is one chooses a mystical sky god to be their guiding power and the other picks the State. Debating with your brother will never get you anywhere. His problems are ones that need to be taken care of with a therapist, where he can hopefully resolve his obvious issues and then learn how to use and apply rational thought. Any true rational thinker will decide that freedom > the state, so anyone who cannot be convinced has other problems.

The 90's are called the "Lost Decade" for Japan due to their extensive economic issues. They luckily had the US paying for their Defense and buying their shit to help them get through it. That last bit is what everyone forgets whenever they compare the US economy to the rest of the world. The European and Asian economies are all propped up by the USA. Everyone depends on us, whether its our Dollar as the reserve currency or our middle class spending buying all their stuff among other things. So any comparison is completely invalid because there is no country propping the US up like it is for the rest of the world. A further decline of US economic power could have unprecedented and unpredictable impacts on the global economies, but who knows how long it will take.

What the hell will 7 billion hunter gatherers hunt and eat? I mean, there are a lot of deer around the United States but it seems that without agriculture and farm raised animals we would be in a lot of trouble. Also wouldn't hunting an animal be murder? Wouldn't gathering berries be murder? So if we can't hunt animals, we can't gather berries and we can't cut down trees to make shelter how will we live? We all have to live in naturally formed caves and eat what exactly? If trees are protected I assume insects are protected so they are out too. So really your philosophy is that we should all commit very slow suicide by starvation? But if I keep this thought process going I think the dying will happen much quicker then starvation. Water is necessary for all of the things in nature to survive, so us drinking water could be seen as an attack on the inhabitants of said source of water or even the plants around said water source. So based on your philosophy we obviously cannot drink water. So forget the slow death by starvation, you'll have a world polluted by 7 billion rotting corpses in just a few short days!

And many would say we need a government to prevent all this. What say you? Oh and what's a pram?

I believe you are correct.

How long until TZM violently overthrows a country and slowly kills a few million people?

Why do you expect me to argue Stef's position? I'm not Stefan and I wouldn't even attempt to respond for him. As far as this talk about animals having self ownership, I still believe you have a motive. It does not appear that you are simply discussing but are attempting to lead the conversation to a particular place so you can reaffirm your already made conclusions. Despite it all I will state my view on the topic. Animals aren't people, they are all sorts of different species and I am firmly on the side of people. So the same principles that guide how I treat other people are not the same as those I use to guide how I treat animals. Animals are not protected by NAP simply because they are animals. The second one of them can understand and practice NAP themselves ill reconsider this position. However until then I will continue to keep dogs are family pets, chickens for their eggs and eat whatever neat pleases me. All with the understanding that sadistic treatment of animals is wrong because they are living things after all and any human being with a healthy sense of empathy should know this without need of some "principle".

David I don't really see what your post has to do with Atheism. You don't seem to hold a belief in a sky god like described in the major religions so it appears to me you are indeed an Atheist. As to the actual content of the post, you rambled a lot and didn't in my opinion do a very good job if putting your thoughts out there. Though I think the ideas are very interesting. I think you'd be very interested in Dr. Amit Goswami. He is a physicist that has gone a bit off the beaten path and has some really cool theories involving remote consciousness. It's an interesting blend of science and spirituality and I'm sure it would be right up your alley.

Something I've mentioned in other related threads is that I think we have a shortage of good terminology. As far as the big three religions and their definition if a God I'm a hard line atheist. As far as I'm concerned those beliefs are a joke and I feel terrible for anyone trapped in that mind set. However my atheism doesn't prevent me from considering ideas that are spiritual or religious in nature. Ideas proposed that can be supported with rational arguments really interest me. Two examples are Dr. Amit Goswami's ideas on remote consciousness and Some of the shamanism from the Amazon. Neither is a religion but both touch upon things outside the physical to varying degrees and they hold much interest to me. So where does this put me on the spectrum of atheism?

I first tried E cigs a few years ago and the Njoy disposable I had was terrible. Then a while back I picked up one of the Njoy King disposables and that thing was fucking glorious! It led me into researching which brand I wanted to stick with long term, I chose Bull Smoke, and I'm now a dedicated E cig smoker. So much so that the last tobacco cig I had almost made me throw up. So don't be afraid of the cost of some of the starter kit costs, even though my Bull Smoke kit only cost $30, because the new Njoy disposables are cheap and awesome ways to see if an E cig may be enjoyable for you.

Nature isn't separate from us, we are a part of it. As a part of nature we eat animals and/or plants, same as every other creature in nature. However us eating animals shouldn't turn in to us treating them like shit and torturing them. Doesn't seem like that is all that hard to understand. I would go so far as to say your misunderstanding and need for clarification is intentional and used simply as a vehicle to push your anti capitalist beliefs. So try being more honest in your next post please.

Your concerns are well founded, even more so if you live in a southern state like I do where Christisnity is everywhere and an accepted part of all things However for a child whose parents are deeply involved in their lives, and I assume this applies to you, I think it can be a good thing. I don't want to propagandize my child into my atheism, I want to teach him to think and consider the possibilities and decide for himself. So allowing him exposure to believers has created many opportunities for very fruitful discussions on all things religion, and also chances to teach him tolerance. This added on to the really cool things Scouts get to do has in my eyes made it a completely positive experience. After all when you're teaching how to think and not what to think you should have no need to hide things from your children. It's only those parents who are filling their children's heads with ignorance and superstition who need to shield them from reality.