If I had karma, I'd give you some. This is exactly what I was going to say. The world could do with more people who have a basic foundation in how testing hypotheses works.

I wish I had karma for this. You are a model parent and citizen. Keep it up.

Google is your friend: https://www.google.com/?q=salvation+army+turns+away+gays None of what you wrote changes the fact that you named an organization as working for the betterment of all that actively discriminates against a substantial portion of society. For examples of their "work" toward refusing to assist gays, look at any of the results in the above search. The rest of what you wrote is bullshit justification and ignoring the argument. You don't work at Hooters because the goals of a Hooters employee include being eye-candy for patrons. You can't claim that the Salvation Army is primarily a service organization if they maintain an active policy to discriminate against employing gays and lesbians. Why would it be a problem for them to have a gay or lesbian individual on staff unless they were pushing dogma? Supposedly the goals of the organization are to provide service for the less fortunate. Is a homosexual somehow less capable of performing this duty? Why or why not? Does this sound like the Christianity you've portrayed? It's exactly this kind of closed-minded bigotry and the willingness to accept it from people like you that makes the rest of the civilized world look at Christians as hypocrites or worse.

Predictably, you fail to perceive the disparity in your words.

What justification do you have for hating the behavior of another person when that behavior has no effect on you, your family, or society? Before you say it, "perpetuating the behavior" or "making it seem acceptable" are not valid, since they're corollaries to the original argument. That is, you must specify why it's bad to perpetuate or accept the behavior before you can claim so.

For instance, I can say that murder is bad because it takes away from another his ability to live. I have actively affected the life of someone else.

So what does that leave? Because some god said so? Because you think you're entitled to not be grossed out by someone else's actions? And how do you justify enforcing either of those things in the context of a society that emphasizes freedom of religion and freedom of conscience?

I wish I had mod points for you, sir or madam.

It's entirely possible to "give [one's life] to serve others" without perpetuating a dangerous culture. The problem with even the type of Christians you cite is that after adhering to their worldview, they can't be happy with simply having it as their own meaning in life. They actively use it as a weapon against anyone they deem as "different". It's the single most convenient way to justify conflict or discrimination ever invented by man.

I'm sure you'll dismiss this charge as "not what the overall organization is about", but before you do so, I encourage you to consider that a movement is no more than the sum of its parts, regardless of its stated objectives. There's a larger percentage than you're apparently comfortable with acknowledging who would gladly trade someone else's freedom for preservation of their own moral comfort and/or superiority.

This is nothing more than self-righteous fanaticism. Anyone working to perpetuate the organization without understanding that this is what it enables and produces is dangerously naive. That includes you.

Right, because being openly discriminatory in hiring and assistance practices is a shining example of laying aside dogman and helping everyone. You've really enjoyed that Kool-Aid, haven't you?

The problem, then, is that the average American is easily duped into overpaying for limited utility. Going without and not giving the company money sends a much clearer message than letting them soak you and begging for a discount. In case you've not paid attention for the last, I dunno, 50 years, there is no such thing as "loyalty" any more.

Oh come on. You know better than that. Then it'd be "But NASA *paid* you to claim that these were your photos.

Hell, even if they went themselves, they'd claim that it was mirrors dropped by previous unmanned trips. Or swamp gas. Or they never left Earth at all and were in some kind of simulator. Though I suppose there's an easy way to fix that last one: offer to open the airlock.

There was a study a while ago that concluded that drivers of big vehicles tend to drive less safely because of a false perception of greater safety provided by the larger vehicle. Less attentiveness and visibility, not to mention the drawbacks when driving on icy roads. IMHO, if you buy a car because it makes you feel safe and not because you're confident while driving it, then you're probably worse off than a guy in a small car who knows exactly how to get it out of a bad situation. Driving isn't a game. If you can't handle it, might I suggest public transit or carpooling?

Since the summary is direct copypasta of the terrible abstract, does anyone have a tl;dr on this?

I wish I had karma for you, sir.

You realize that there are denizens of the web's seedy underbelly reading these comments, right? Don't come whining to us when 40 pizzas delivered by 20 hookers show up at your door... By the way - your stupid is showing.

I agree with the assertion that you should never whine about "leaving where you've been all your life" because it's rooted in an unreasonable aversion to change. Yes, there's a lot involved, but it's not something that's never been done before.

However, going back to the oil problem, in some cases there is no fitting compensation other than uprooting your fishing business and moving to somewhere completely different - on an ocean instead of the gulf. Is BP going to pay for that expense? Or will they get out of it on the grounds that asking them to move you and your family and your entire business to a different, possibly more expensive area is "unreasonable"?

And how do we properly account for what might amount to irreparable damage to that particular source of food in the near- to mid-future?

If my company has a tanker full of gas, and that tanker explodes outside your store due to my company's negligence, cratering the street and making your store unreachable for months. By your logic, my company shouldn't be liable for monetary damage to your store. How would you feel about this? You can say "adapt! change!" all you want, but the bottom line is, there should be no legal justification for this kind of negligence.