It's just from breathing Google's hot air for too long. Don't worry, I've quit.

Like usual: anytime your credit card is involved: use a good password!

That's all there is to this.

The rest is just fear mothering and click bait.

I think the poster may be referring to stuff like this. Granted, that's an extreme case--more often it's just plain misinformation about how effective condoms are, but I think it's pretty reasonable to say that the church hasn't been helping.

I guess you haven't tried to actually use a Google product from the inside. Fundamentally broken, obvious and repeatable bugs have gone unfixed for years, but as they tell us: "they're working on it." (cough[Shopping]cough)

If it's in a Google car, they'll claim it isn't evil, while being really underhanded (cough[IP rights]cough), but it won't work right (cough[Shopping]cough), and just as you you commit a significant amount of resources to it, they'll either discontinue it (cough[cough]cough) or sideline it. Or never, ever add the features that would make it something actually reasonable (cough[Gmail]cough) Or simply blow out the decent features (cough[Maps]cough) Or never bother to bring it to a level of performance that is even moderately reasonable (cough[Google+]cough)

Unless it never becomes popular. In that case, it might hang around forever. But still under-performing / broken / evil, etc.

No, I'm not bitter. I love when a company wastes my time as if it's worth nothing. Finally I realized that trying to work with Google was making my time worth nothing. So in a way, they had the right idea from the start.

The only car analogy I can come up with is the insufficiently Humvees the government gave our soldiers to drive over IEDs in.

Not a tech dinosaur.

A tech prokaryote-like organism from the Archean.

Of course, none of those things are among the criteria for what causes something to be classified as a religion, ...

That depends on what set of criteria one is using to classify something as religion, doesn't it? B-)

I'm all for making real motivations more apparent, but I think you are not quite living in reality if you believe that getting rid of religion will suddenly put an end to concocting flimsy excuses to go to war. All the evidence suggests they will just find another excuse to whip up the hoi polloi to go fight their wars for them.

I just don't understand it. Make a relatively straightforward point that X frequently causes Y and doing away with X will eliminate some instances of Y and you're immediately innundated with arguments about the fact that Y will not be eliminated and you're foolish to say so. Yes, there will still be wars. Yes, people will still do stupid things. That doesn't mean that checking one stupid reason for people to do stupid things off the checklist isn't a positive step. I'm also a fan of healthy diet and exercise even though it doesn't solve all medical problems, and I support using good quality insulation in homes even though it won't eliminate all wasted energy.

Most of the time I gripe about press releases that massively overpromise, and don't contain enough real information to figure out what was actually done.

In this case they at least put the word "could" rather than "will" in the headline. And while the barrage of jargon that followed is incomprehensible to me, it's at least pretty clear that it's real work rather than science-by-press-release.

Now I'd appreciate it if somebody would come along and dumb it down to my level, which is still considerably higher than the fourth-grade education they usually target. So, in all seriousness: thanks to the PR team.

Actually, this is not what I am reading into your comments, but part of what I was initially addressing when you responded. So I guess you completely missed the context.

Reading back, I don't see anybody advocating any sort of suppression in this thread. Just a general approval of the reduction in religious affiliation. The post you responded did only mention the negative side, but I didn't see any policy recommendations. So I guess I did completely miss the context somehow.

My initial response to you was just a narrow one about the single point I quoted. Nobody is blaming religion for all of our problems as far as I can tell. Just noting that it is a cause of a lot of problems (for which the definition of "cause" and "a lot" is subject to discussion).

There is really no evidence that absent religion we would have been better off and less very bad things would have occurred, and there are cases to be make that we have advanced faster because of a religious structure in society.

I don't think there is a lot of evidence that doing away with all of religion throughout all of history would have been a net win. If I had to bet, I'd bet yes, but I wouldn't bet much. I do think that the argument from history is not a strong one for the present. Horses helped build our modern society, but they're not a centerpiece of how we operate anymore. Things change.

I'd still be interested to know if there is any aspect of religion that you have any positive appreciation for?

I think in modern societies, religion's biggest positive contribution is probably social networking and bonding. The local religious group creates personal bonds with neighbors and a sense of community. There are other ways of fostering those bonds, but common religion and ritual is one of the more effective ones. One problem is that the lines between "culture" and "religion" often blur and religion gets credit for some of the good things that shared culture enables--we can do a lot of these things without religious dogma specifically. But going to a building with your nearest neighbors and weekly sharing a positive-feeling ritual together has value.

Specifically, does the belief in the supernatural or, more specifically, the strong belief in particular properties of the supernatural (what it wants, how its truth may conflict with things we observe) provide a benefit? I doubt it provides one that we couldn't get elsewhere with less probelmatic baggage.

It seems short sighted to just want it to go away without knowing what society needs to take its place.

I'm curious about the things you think religion provides to us currently that can't be provided some other way. The existence of perfectly normal atheists who integrate happily in our society seems to be strong evidence that it can be done in the same way that vegetarian athletes make the claim, "We just don't know whether a person can be healthy without meat," obviously suspect. Is it a case of, "Sure, one person can do it, but what happens if everybody does it?"

You are doing what I see quite often. "I have rationalized that there is no god, therefore I am smarter than those who haven't and we're better off without religion".

You're reading a lot more into what I'm writing than what I'm writing. There are plenty of very smart religious people out there. I do think we'd be better off without religion, but it has nothing to do with being "smart."

You completely oversimplify things, ignoring the role religion has played in our societal development and not even attempting to think why the balance shifts as it does between religion and secular.

I didn't address history because we're not living in the past. The needs of today are different from the needs of ancient cultures. Before we had access to tons of information about how the world works and before everybody had the opportunity to learn how to come to conclusions based on data, it was probably really useful to have rules that were set in stone that everybody was afraid of breaking. If those rules were terrible, the culture and religion probably died out. If they were useful, they probably helped society flourish. "Because I said so," is also a perfectly good reason for your kid not to touch a hot stove.

The problem now is that we're grown ups. Human societies aren't small children any more. We know more about the world than we did when religion was the only thing keeping us from touching the hot stove. If you raise an adult who doesn't touch a hot stove for reasons he doesn't understand (or worse, won't touch any stoves, hot or cold), you've failed, and I think that's where we are with religion. Superstition may have kept us from touching the hot stove, but if we cling to it, a lot of us will never learn how to cook.

And then you ignore very modern examples of how societies that suppress religion suffer and those that support religious freedom flourish.

Whoa there. Suppress? I applaud us becoming less religious because we're becoming more aware of its terrible limitations and starting to trust our own ability to reason. Bad ideas die on their own, but only if the marketplace of ideas is open and free. The fact that repressive societies that squelch ideas of any sort are generally backward and unhealthy shouldn't surprise anybody. In fact, the fact that religious fundamentalism is less common in places that don't suppress ideas is pretty good evidence that religious fundamentalism itself isn't a winner in the marketplace of ideas. It only seems to thrive in places where ideas are kept down by force.

You are looking at religion as the fundamental cause of things you don't like in the world.

I can't resist the temptation to trot out the word oversimplifying here. I see religion as a cause of many bad things in the world. That one is pretty hard to dispute. I don't think there is a fundamental cause of everything bad, an if you made me come up with something, I'd probably come up with something like selfishness or lack of empathy for others.

The fact that sometimes believing things that are not true makes us do good things is nice, but at this point, we're just better off not believing things that aren't true and starting from there. A mature, educated society with access to all of the information we have access to should not want for places to start reasoning about the world around them. Making up nonsense and stirring it into the mix isn't helpful. I'm pleased to see that people are slowly realizing this (consciously or not) and making religion less and less a part of their day to day decision making process. I think the trend will continue on its own without any suppression or totalitarianism or anything else you're reading into my comments.

Now of course all those people who are not really interested in religion but in reasons to kill other people take this as a good excuse for murder.

I strongly question this. Do you really think the world is full of people who are desperate to kill other people but won't because they don't have an absurdly thin excuse like "he drew my guy"? And that those people largely just happen to have certain relgious backgrounds in common? Doesn't it seem a little more likely that they're killing those people for the reasons they say that they're killing those people?

All of these arguments seem to boil down to, "People do what people are going to do. Religion doesn't make them do anything (except the good stuff-we'll take credit for that!)." If that were true, we'd be talking about enormous philosophical systems that people build buildings for and sink huge portions of their lives into that have zero bearing on their decision making and actual behavior. Like, if you were to drop populations on different deserted islands with the Koran, the Bible and the Vedas and told the "These texts describe the world and how to live," and came back after 1000 years, wouldn't you be surprised if they were all doing the same thing? I'd expect at least some of that to have taken root as laws--or at least behavioral norms.

A solar offgrid (or grid-tied with standalone capabilities) would provide power locally until too much stuff failed.

Lead acid batteries last for several years, recent lithium probably for a couple decades. Nickel-Iron batteries are more lossy, but last for centuries, if provided with water to replace evaporation, potentially decades if they have catalytic fill caps to recombine lost hydrox or, say, a reservoir-based automatic watering system. (If their chemistry has a long-term unavoidable failure mode I'm not aware of it.)

Even with the batteries dead (NiFe or otherwise) the system will have power when the sun is out until at least one panel in every series substring is too degraded, shaded, or smashed to provide adequate power.

Semiconductor controllers might go for a decade to centuries, depending mainly on whether the conductive interconnects of the semiconductors are sized to avoid electromigration at the current levels used and what they're using for large capacitors.

Wind generaors have several moving parts to screw up - how many depends on the design. For a simple homebrew one you have the main bearings, yaw bearing, and tail furling-system bearing. Any one of them failing will take it out. (Even the furling bearing: Once that screws up it doesn't furl right and tears apart in the next storm.) There's also the get-the-power-past-the-yawing mechanism (typically a long cable being twisted and manually "unwound" every few years, or a brush mechanism.) Call it a decade without maintenance at the outside.

So some of 'em may run until a nearby lightning strike fries something.

I think the point is, what transgression would you be protecting him from by punishing him infinitely harshely for all eternity?

I guess it would make some sense if you had two kids you loved unconditionally and were willing to make an example of one of them for the benfit of the other, but only if the surviving kid could verify what you did to the first kid...

There's a very good reason for metastudies, though, especially with a topic like this one.