The fuck are you on about?

The idea behind "one man one vote" principles is EXACTLY equality of speech. Nobody is supposed to have more or less say.
Right now the rich have far more power - hell, there was a study posted just the other week about that. You know, the metastudy that concluded that the policy records of the government correlated with the will of the top couple percent quite strongly, and with the will of everybody else quite poorly? Yeah.

The "problem" with advertising is human nature. It works on you. It works on me. The more you think it doesn't work on you the better it works! It's horrifying, but it's true. The way to deal with it is at the source.

Except because that rich guy can pay more than 90% of the population put together, he's got more say than that 90%. That's kind of antithetical to the basic tenets of democracy.

Even if you want to say that the politicians are unswayed by huge donations (ha!) it would still be a problem. It's well known that if you don't advertise you aren't going to win anything. So the politicians who are likely to win are all the ones who agree with one rich guy or another. You have to see why this introduces a rather frightening bias to even an uncorrupted system.

Or possibly they don't yet have the economies of scale to match industrial food farming.

You're aggressive and not particularly helpful. Since you seem to think that insulting me is more important than convincing me, this will be my last post on this.

Measles. Polio. Meningitis. Hepatitis. Whooping cough. Rubella. Chicken pox. Diphtheria. Tetanus. Mumps. Smallpox. These are a few of the diseases that we've massively reduced via the use of vaccines. Many of them were fatal or horribly crippling. Before the polio vaccine there were something like 15,000 reported cases of paralysis per year in the US due to the disease. Smallpox had a fatality rate of somewhere around 30% and no treatment. You seriously think things were better?

One of the great things about science is that the burden of proof falls on the people challenging the status quo. See, it's fairly easy to make up a theory. If we had to investigate every single theory that anybody ever came up with we wouldn't get anything done. Instead, you've got to give some kind of evidence that you're correct.

If you're not willing to try and even explain what you're talking about, it's certainly not worth my time to try and figure it out. I'm sure you'll go and froth a bit about how I'm a horrible person, but frankly you've used up all the fucks I had to give. Have a good life, I hope that your hatred of science doesn't burn you too badly. Even more, I hope it doesn't burn the rest of us.

Are you a troll? You sound like a troll.

For the sake of being clear to others who might wander past here:

DNA is wonderful stuff. We've sequenced a LOT of critters. We can actually place the evolutionary relationships of different species by seeing what has mutated and to what degree. We can say when dogs and foxes split off from some common ancestor. We can watch as bacteria mutate at furious pace due to having little in the way of error correction mechanisms and the wholesale incorporation of exterior DNA. That's actually how a whole class of genetic engineering is done - with viruses that incorporate random DNA into themselves. When they splice themself into the target cell the DNA gets included. Imprecise, but cool.

Theories are explanations of events. Laws are relationships that are observed. The law of gravity says that masses attract with a given relationship between distance and masses and universal constants. The theory of Relativity describes why that happens. It's *gasp* "just a theory" and yet if it were incorrect your GPS wouldn't work.

Zero evidence for everything coming from one point, eh? Hey, do you know what the temperature of the universe is? Do you know why there is so much hydrogen in the universe? Oh look, these observations (and lots of other ones) are explained by the Big Bang theory.

This guy is arguing against science when he hasn't actually read up on any of it.

The hell are you on?

We can make any theory more complicated than necessary. I can propose that quarks are in fact made up of two tiny, orbiting teapots. These teapots are far to small to be seen, and have no effect on any of the interactions that we can see.

Do we say that there are teapots? No! Just because you -could- make the theory more complicated, doesn't mean you should. We use the simplest theory that fits all the data that we have. And since we have seen no evidence for god, we cut him out of the model. The universe makes far more sense that way.

I like this comment. It's a microcosm of the problem with trying to argue with people who refuse to accept any scientific findings.

You want studies about the safety of vaccines?
http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php...
http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php...
http://www.collectionscanada.g...

And even if they DID cause some harm, the lives saved by their use is still worth it.

As for your Expanding Vacuum thingy, because I don't know about it I'm somehow wrong? Instead of trying to explain to me why it's right you insult me? When I try and guess what the hell it is (based on the results of some quick googling) you try and take it as an insult? I don't know if your theory has any testable hypothesis. I said IF it is a variant of string theory, it probably suffers from the same problem as most string theories and isn't taken seriously because it's not testable.

You ain't challenging my beliefs in the slightest. I don't 'believe' in the big bang, or evolution, or that light travels in waves. I've seen evidence for them, studied them some and accept that the best way to describe and interact with the world is set out in the theories we have constructed. These theories are subject to change and improvement. God is absolute, unchanging, and very wrong. Hawking is old, crippled and has a chance of being right, or at least capable of making brilliant observations. I'll take my way any day.

You really want to get into the autism debate? Nobody denies that autism rates are going up. But the rates among vaccinated and unvaccinated kids is the same. So... yeah. Probably not the cause. There's also people wondering and running studies on whether we're seeing it more simply because we're looking more. You see the same thing in lots of medical fields where there's been a big promotion or scare. Oh look, rates of prostate cancer are way up! Except the rate is probably pretty much the same, but people get checked (thus diagnosed) more but are just as unlikely to die from it.

I've frankly got no idea what you're trying to espouse with the Expanding Vacuum thing. Is it some flavour of String theory? If that's the case, please keep in mind why ST is generally not well accepted: It makes no testable hypothesis. That is the bedrock of science. Your theory must must MUST be testable. Otherwise we stick with the status quo (AKA the null hypothesis). This isn't being hidebound or closed minded, it's avoiding silly arguments that can literally never be answered. Find something to test and science will eventually test it.

You're free say that relativity isn't a refinement of newtonian physics. But it seems like a good term to me. Newtonian physics was great, and the laws of motion are good almost all the time - but it had holes. It didn't explain the weirdness that we see when things are going near the speed of light. So a new theory is created that is better than the last, and covers more cases.

I think you agree with my point, though. The whole thing is a homing in process, where we start with a theory that is a bit correct, then get more correct and more correct with smaller and smaller changes as time goes on. Sometimes we get something big, and it changes a lot - relativity, or the standard model - but even then, the changes are very focused and they don't really invalidate what came before.

We know what a theory is. We know what a fact is. We know that scientific theories are not facts in the absolute sense. We also know that they are phenomenally unlikely to be overturned, only upgraded here and there to home in on reality.

It pisses me off to no end when people like you come along and start crying out that we shouldn't teach scientific consensus because "it might be wrong." Yeah, it might be fucking wrong. And there's a chance that 100,000 years of recorded history with the sun coming up in the east might be wrong - it's entirely possible that all those people were colluding in a grand conspiracy! Teach the controversy!

We teach what we know to the limits of our knowledge. If you don't like it, get to work disproving it. I know you'll never believe me, but if you could actually back any of your opinions with real data you could get published and become famous.

The trick about science is that we refine knowledge. Let's talk about matter. Way back when, people basically thought stuff was stuff. There was no logic to it, so they broke it into four elements. Eventually it was refined - no, it's not four. No, fire isn't an element. Look, we can split this substance out of this compound and it burns like hell! Eventually we figured out that matter is made of many, many elements. Oxygen and nitrogen and carbon and hydrogen and so many others. We said they were made of atoms. The word literally means "indivisible." The world they understood said that atoms were the smallest thing! But again, we refined. There were mysteries that we pried at until we figured out the next thing - atoms could be split! There were electrons and neutrons and protons. And we fiddled and we pried and we figured out that these particles could be broken down! Quarks dancing to a probabalistic tune that hurts to even think about.

Do you see what's happening here? Even if we figure out that our theories about quarks are wrong, it's not going to blow up the theories that depend on electrons and protons and neutrons. Each time we make a new theory, we are refining the old ones. The changes become smaller and more focused.

Sometimes something comes completely out of left field and rewrites a branch of science. But you can't base your life around such a thing happening. You just accept that you might be wrong about a few things so that you can be mostly right about a lot of things. It's better than using no logic at all and being wrong about pretty much everything.

You say you doubt the Big Bang and that's great because "it's just a working theory." If something comes along to re-write that theory, it's not going to make the universe 6000 years old for you. It'll be something small, something that fascinates mathematicians and is completely impenetrable to the rest of us.

This is the joy of science, right? We refine. We get ever closer to being 'correct.' Sure, sometimes we go down a dead end and have to backtrack, but we know that eventually observation and innovation will let us figure it out.

You're kind of an idiot, ain't ya?

Seeing people who are not there is certainly a deviation from the norm. I think my schizophrenic friend would trade that for a more 'normal' brain, though.

The sudden crushing certainty that you're worthless and everything you do makes your life worse is certainly a deviation from the norm. Think my depressed friends would trade that for a more 'normal' brain, though.

That's misrepresenting it again though. Scientists don't doubt the Big Bang or evolution. They are theories that will continue to evolve as we find more evidence. They will modify them to fit the facts. The chances of some revolutionary, completely new method of interpreting the data is very, very slim at this point.

Firefly was good, Serenity was good, Avengers was good. Doctor Horrible wasn't just good, it was wonderful. Dollhouse, as you said had great potential that was wasted.

Cabin in the woods wasn't just marketing. I had heard the name, but knew nothing about it when I watched it. It was awesome. I loved how it twisted all the horror tropes and built something funny and yet still horrifying out of it. It isn't to everybody's taste, and that's okay. But I really don't think it is particularly pretentious or marketing based.