If you are a Verizon Wireless customer like me, the number to call to opt out is given in the actual legal document, here:

http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/globalText?contentType=Legal%20Notice&textId=181

It takes about two minutes.

~Ben

I didn't mean to imply that it was. I was trying to say quite the opposite--since they are not mutually exclusive, people could simultaneously become more religious but reject the brand of religious fundamentalism that tries to play the role of science since it fails to produce useful results.

~Ben

I agree that people are likely to become more religious in the tumultous future ahead of us, but I simultaneously expect their influence in terms of science to decline. I believe that they became more influential in the last couple of decades mostly because the enormous surpluses allowed inefficient ideas to survive on the dime of a few religious think tanks. The fact that there is precisely zero demand for flood geologists or creationist antibiotics coupled with reduced tithing from congregations is likely to silence the religious lobby very quickly.

Again, I am far more optimistic about the US scientific workforce. My view here may be skewed from being a graduate student in a school full of brilliant and ambitious young scientists, but I personally know several who went on to start new business in recent years. Myself and a friend are currently in the process of starting one of our own. I would cast the recession in a different light as an opportunity to get better deals from suppliers, hire workers for relatively low wages, and to eat the lunch of much larger companies that have failed. An interesting note is that our department's number of applicants shrinks during economic boom times, and grows during busts. In fact, according to our department head, the number of applicants spikes two or three years in advance of a recession. This may be an artifact of my note above: when efficiency is not at a premium, the market is a lot less interested in advanced science.

So yes, I have looked around--and I understand that your opinion is an artifact of what you see every day. I hope it gives you some encouragement that while many people are losing their jobs, new work is already springing up in the ashes of the old.

~Ben

While I agree that hard times do push people towards being more religious, I'm a somewhat more hopeful for the prospects of science in the US. While I know very little about the history leading up to the Dark Ages (Roman Empire Collapses->???->Renaissance), and I've never been to anywhere ending in "stan", the key difference between the US today and those situations is that in the latter there is very little in terms of science providing useful and immediate answers. We have an infrastructure of research labs in place as well a world-class population of scientists and engineers here and now that can give people a viable alternative to fundamentalism, and I am convinced that in the event of a "put up or shut up" situation that Biblical literalists will be unable to compete.

Just a for-instance that I found amusing:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090303/ap_on_re_as/as_afghan_iphone_mullah

~Ben

On the plus side, the resolution isn't forbidding that Dawkins speak. Unfortunately, it is a thinly veiled threat to the president of the university that funding or job could be on the line if he lets Dawkins speak.

"Whereas the University of Oklahoma is a publicly funded university..."

I read that the US has lost 650,000 jobs in the last month. Maybe enough bad debt, cold and hunger will finally get people to realize that real science can be a vehicle to productive jobs and accept that their 6000 year old Earth hypothesis doesn't hold water.

~Ben

They really shit the jackpot.

All my friends at the department use Notepad in Windows and emacs in *nix.

I knew that the Slashdot hive mind would understand that modal editing is where it's at. vim for life!

~Ben

The most energetic particle that the LHC can create is 574 TeV/particle lead nuclei. Nature has been bombarding our solar system with a significant flux of particles as powerful as 100 million TeV for as long as it's been around. If it was possible to spawn a black hole capable of consuming a planet from a collision with a particle a mere thousand TeV in energy, then it is all but certain that we would have seen every large body in our solar system converted from billions of years of bombardment from cosmics ray 100,000 times more energetic (caveat: much more energy is available for consumption into a black hole should two particles collide "head-on" with opposing momenta versus a fast particle with a stationary target).

Though, the above reasoning does not exclude the possibility that black holes that may last minutes but yet not consume planets.

~Ben

I see that your point of view is largely based on the basis of ensuring fair treatment of people, and so your solutions are perfectly sensible from that angle. There was a time when I would have said the same thing, but it was these observations that led me to believe that government interference in the economy is a very expensive placebo:

First, the United States had a lassiez-faire economy until the 1920s. From the data I have seen, we still had recessions at roughly the same frequency. Further, the regulation did little in terms of preventing larger companies to act as de-facto monopolies and brutalize the competition. It would appear that regulation has done very little to prevent the rise and fall of bubbles, which were very costly to those who participated. Historically, I don't see any big change from before and after we started regulating the economy. Being that in the US, regulation is a 80-year experiment in progress I would say that at least in a US context it would in fact be the regulationists' responsibility to justify their existence.

Second, I observe that most people I know who are in a bad financial situation are there because of poor or outright irresponsible choices that they've made and would have made the same choices regardless of any regulations (or did, in spite of them). I believe that in a world where people understand that there is no government safety net for them, they would be more likely to make decisions that would keep them from going broke.

I am intrigued by the point you make about deregulation leading to rising prices and decreases in wages and quality, however, so I'll have to study that more carefully.

Anyway, thanks for your feedback.

~Ben

Maybe it's the Crazy Libertarian Fantasy Land talking, but I would say that to point the finger at financial institutions and oversight committees is a gross oversimplification of a much bigger picture. A bubble popped, and because most people were massively in debt when this happened the banks were left holding the bag. This phenomenon has been documented for centuries. Perhaps you can legislate away human nature in the "real" world?

You are correct about finance voodoo, however. Nonetheless, I do not trust the government to make decisions on which financial institutions are sound for me--they can't even get their own finances in order! On what grounds do you base your belief that they can effectively oversee the finance industry?

There is an excellent series that covers bubbles, the workings of the finance industry, and some of the finance voodoo that you speak of (including the government's own) here: http://www.chrismartenson.com/crashcourse. It's only a few hours long, but a great watch.

~Ben

"Accountable and elected"? I would sincerely like to move to your wonderful country.

On a more serious note, I disagree with regulation as a cure to economic woes. The government cannot legislate wealth or efficiency. Any attempt to interfere with the market's natural equilibrium will only generate inefficiency and as such should only be done when the externalities of a behavior are so serious as to cause material harm to bystanders. That contingency aside, it should be independent individuals' and entities responsibility to ensure that they are entering into mutually beneficial contracts with a trustworthy partner.

I might be swayed if you could give some examples of when regulation materially helped an economic situation, but in all cases and in fact some of the most dramatic cases (for instance the TVA, Drug Prohibition, or Farm Subsidies) I have read about it has only made things worse.

~Ben

Recessions don't scare me. I see it as an opportunity to "buy low" in terms of labor and raw materials, and to start new business in the ashes of the old and inefficient.

What my government is doing to try to stem the recession scares me. It seems like they're willing to risk a currency or even government collapse in order to preserve the status quo for just a short time longer. I have come to see the dollar itself as a sort of Ponzi scheme: dollars are backed by government bonds paying interest in dollars. Thus, the dollar supply is constrained to increase at the prevailing interest rate. Being that the supply of physical goods in the world cannot increase at that rate during a recession, you can only give so many handouts until people start feeling this economic force.

Hyperinflation, famine, government collapse. That scares me. Please, Washington. Let the tide go out. It'll come back.

~Ben

I thought there was no way that Y2K9 would affect me, then the girlfriend asked me to check on a flight for her--and I found that United Airlines' website returns 2008 flight data if you search for flight information for Jan. 1 or Jan. 2 2009! How amateur is that?

~Ben