What is your purpose in this thread? After one has read the Bible, studied theology and history, and attempted to follow this or that set of teachings (or not), one is left with the option to believe in God, Jesus, and all the rest--OR NOT.

If you opt to not believe, then much of the teaching by Jesus and his Church are likely not going to make a whole lot of sense to you. If you opt to believe, it isn't that everything will fall into place and make perfect sense. If you believe you are saved from hellfire and damnation by God's grace, and you do the best you can to emulate the life of Jesus, then that's the end of it.

Diane Feinstein is another one who should retire forthwith. I don't think Biden is holding up all that well -- he appears to be aging more rapidly lately. It's one thing to be old and doing reasonably well at home, with nothing much on one's schedule, and something else being a senator, representative, president, or Supreme Court judge.

Can we say "transient ischemic attack"? He's on his way to a major stroke.

Even if I touch your hand with my hand, there are still electrons involved -- though it isn't necessary to talk about electrons in animal to animal touch. On a "common sense" level, objects can touch -- we can see it happen everywhere. But still, how much matter interacts with matter in objects that touch, or animals that touch? That's where electrons come into it.

Is touching possible? It depends. Some animate two-legged objects are very fussy about being touched without giving their express permission. Soccer players may objected to their lips being touched by another pair of lips.

I suppose the touch averse do not want the electrons orbiting their nuclei having commerce with the electrons orbiting somebody else's nuclei, especially if an intermingling of electrons wasn't given prior authorization.

Seriously, though... I am sure that surface atoms (electrons) do touch; when a hammer hits a nail the two objects give every indication of having touched and the force moving the hammer having been transmitted to the nail. How many layers of atoms of hammer and nail come into contact, I don't know, And just guessing, but I assume that the nuclei of atoms do not touch under normal circumstances. Do Plutonium nuclei touch one another when a ball of plutonium is compressed by the shaped explosives in a nuclear bomb?

The bonds that hold solid matter molecules together are very, very strong, so touching is possible but not intermingling of solid matter atoms. The hammer molecules don't interact with the nail molecules.

???? Corrections, anyone ????

Thank you for the good critique. I was raised in a Protestant home and believed in God, Jesus, prayer, etc. I didn't choose my family, Christian doctrine--all that, but on numerous occasions I did choose to maintain those beliefs. I did make a definite, deliberate effort to reject religious belief around the age of 40. It proved quite difficult to accomplish and required a lot of mental effort and time--years.

I also chose political beliefs -- though that was a more gradual process. I was raised with quite conventional political beliefs about government, democracy, taxation, congress, the president, etc. It was not particularly difficult to adopt socialist ideas and believe that they were sound, feasible, and beneficial. What was difficult was to find other people who agreed, or to convince other people to adapt similar beliefs.

So, two big areas of chosen belief -- religion and politics.

That I believe my senses, believe the world is an understandable place, believe that people are generally reliable and predictable, and so on are much determined by experience which itself is not chosen. But on numerous occasions I did choose to maintain those beliefs in terms of social activities, reading, conversations, etc.

Conclusion: My earlier off-the-cuff estimate favors determinism too much.

Can we "choose" what to believe? 95%, no; 5%, yes. — BC

@Hailey My new, revised, and improved off-the-cuff estimate is 60%, no; 40%. yes. -- provided one is endowed with the capacity, time, and energy to undertake voluntary belief changes.

We are not all equally able to revise and edit what we think. How much tolerance we have for ambiguity, cognitive dissonance, opinions or positions outside of dominant social norms, etc. varies from person to person -- and those differences are mostly not voluntary.

It's axiomatic, isn't it, that a large scale operation (40K McDonald outlets) is more efficient than scattered small scale operations (40K coffee shops, diners, cafes, etc.). That doesn't make McDonald's good, from several perspectives, or the small scale operations bad.

Operating thousand-cow dairies has downsides for both the cows and the community. 1000 dairy cows are going to spend very little time outdoors grazing and cud-chewing. A small operation (50 cows) can be pastured, and a good share of the cow manure will be deposited on the pasture. Fly larvae will help break it down, as will sun and air. Shifting 50 cows from one grazed pasture to an ungrazed one is doable. Moving 1000+ cows around is a cattle drive,

A thousand cow dairy barn will produce more manure than can practically and usefully be spread on fields -- so it goes into sewage lagoons or tanks where it will produce noxious by-products and likely pollute ground water or streams. 1000 cow dairies are likely to be milking 24 hours a day, each cow being milked 2 or 3 times daily. Maximizing production and profit is the reason for thousand cow dairies, and it's likely the cows will be getting bST (bovine Somatotropin) to increase milk production, which is hard on the cows.

Huge hog operations and massive chicken and egg production facilities are more efficient too -- but at the cost of the animals' quality of life and the quality of the end product. Pigs like to be outside -- they are probably the brightest bulb in the barn yard next to the dog. Chickens are, well, not "smart" but they benefit from movement outside as well -- actually being outside with room to move around and eat whatever is crawling around for an extended period of time.

If you like chocolate, did you CHOOSE to like chocolate? If you hate coffee, did you CHOOSE to hate coffee? If you like raw oysters, did you CHOOSE to like raw oysters? If you consider red headed guys to be the sexiest, did you CHOOSE to prefer red heads>.

It probably isn't possible to easily figure out WHY anybody likes this, dislikes that, or finds something else totally uninteresting.

the ability to practice skepticism may not be possible for some people. — Hailey

That may be true; if it is, they didn't choose to be gullible.

There are countries that raise their people to be dumb and deprieve their ability to be skeptical so that their rule can be secured. — Hailey

IF government requires the consent of the governed, THEN it is the interest of all governments to discourage excessive skepticism about their legitimacy. Besides, gullibility isn't the only handy tool governments have to assure compliance. There's fear, force, secret police, plain-out-in-the-open police, prisons with bad reputations, threats, the convenient airplane crash (recent example), poisoning, smear campaigns, public executions, public relations efforts, charm offensives, bread, circuses, sex, drugs, video games, etc...

A land of stupid people, however, is likely to have a very low GDP.

"How to choose what to believe?"

Can we "choose" what to believe? 95%, no; 5% yes.

"Beliefs" are derived from experience, to start with, "when I was a little bitty baby my mama would rock me in the cradle..." Our first experiences are from adequate and competent nurturing -- or not getting as much good nurturing as we need. We have experiences which confirm or disqualify certain assumptions, some of which might be in-born. For example, a baby presented with a helium balloon that doesn't fall to the floor the way objets are "supposed to" will show surprise. Babies might have an innate grasp of gravity, but not of antigravity.

Babies are immersed in language--good, bad, or indifferent. The more good, positive words they hear from their parents, the better. Hearing too many harsh negative words and commands has a negative effect on the child's developing mind. Interaction with other children and adults shapes personality.

Maybe most children have confidence that the world is a reliable place. Other people are usually friendly. All of the childhood experiences shape the kind of beliefs about the world we are likely to have. As we get older, we start running into contrary experiences, good and bad. We might discover that one could drown in deep water--but didn't.

WHAT WE FIND BELIEVABLE and WHAT WE FIND NOT BELIEVABLE will be largely determined by the multitude of experiences we have had.

Maybe as a mature adult, one will actually decide to reject a previous belief or accept a new belief. An adult raised in a sexually repressive household who discovers he is gay, may have to make an effort as an adult to believe gayness is good and live accordingly. Or a career criminal may decide to go straight.

But mostly we don't decide.

And the government doesn't have that much to do with it.

Fine, but heat is heat and you can't identify which degree of heat is from water vapor, CO2, CH4, N20 (nitrous oxide), Perfluorocarbons, hydroflurocarbons, or sulfur hexafluoride. My point was that it it practically doesn't matter a lot whether the effect of a GH gas kicks in 10 years from today or 200 year from now.

Some people, (not thinking of you) are always looking for an interpretation or 'flaw' or angle that gets us off the hook.

What I want to say to @agree to disagree is that we are on the hook, and we won't be getting off the hook through reinterpretation. Only by altogether stopping greenhouse gas production can we avoid getting cooked.

That's new. They used to say the lag was a century or more. :up: — frank

"Greenhouse gas" isn't a single substance; methane, CO2, CFCs, and other gasses all have varying periods of time before they are broken down. A cubic foot of methane gas lasts about 12 years but absorbs much more heat than the much longer lasting CO2. CFC gas lasts a long time because it is non-reactive. However, it is very good at absorbing heat.

We are not adding a lot of CFCs to the atmosphere, but what we have added lingers a long time.

SO, if we cut methane pollution -- which we can and should do immediately, the benefit would show up relatively quickly -- 10 years. But that would not solve the whole problem.

Masshole — Mikie

Interesting neologism. Question: Did you make it up (kudos if you did) or is it in common usage? I lived in Massachusetts for 2 years -- 68-70 -- and I thought it a pretty decent place. Of course, things change over time -- it's probably still a pretty decent place.

I read in today's NYT that Connecticut is having problems with bears. Bears? There?

@T Clark, have you ever in the past, do you now, and might you in the future think of yourself as a "masshole"?

So, is it worth a shot? — Mikie

The practical problem of sortition at the federal level is that congress is elected "by the people" so to speak for the purpose of protecting wealthy interests groups. In order to randomly select for congress and the presidency we'd have to neuter the wealthy interest groups. Fine by me, but the wealthy would object strenuously.

Jury pools are selected sort of randomly, but then are pruned by the two sides of the case during pretrial procedures.

While the idea of random selection for local civic affairs is attractive from several perspectives, there is the problem of selecting from a pool of citizens, many of whom seem quite ignorant of local, regional or world affairs (or local and world geography), basic science, or are functionally innumerate and illiterate. They may be quite intelligent (giving a generous estimation) but aren't well prepared.

That said, there is a substantial proportion of the population who are intelligent, literate, reasonably well informed, and generally cognizant of what's going on in the world. So, how does one separate the wheat from the chaff before you do a sortition?

An interesting discovery about babies is that seem to be born with a few innate expectations about the physical world. Other animal babies also. Kittens, for instance, won't crawl on a surface printed with th optical illusion of a drop off. Adult cats might not either, at least without cautious investigating.

But back to baby humans. The seem to understand this much about gravity: things fall. All their early experiences indicate that. So, if you show a baby a helium filled ballon (the baby, of course, doesn't know anything about helium) and you let go of it, it rises to the ceiling. This is a shocking revelation to the baby; you can see it on their faces.

Dogs, lacking pretensions to sentience (most of the time) are frank in their expression of surprise. Dogs shown magic tricks are shocked and appalled.

What am I missing? — Benkei

I'm not a hydrogen booster. Namibia is planning a hydrogen production facility driven by wind and solar. If steel and lime can be made with electricity, then use that instead of making a fuel with electricity first. I don't see H being a major form of energy.

I used hydrogen as an example -- if we were going to make a lot of hydrogen for all sorts of purposes, it would probably take 40 years (+/-) to get production, transportation, and consumption facilities built.

40 years of warning about the next 10 years. Right. Too bad we weren't paying attention.

In this world, very little ever happens quickly. Long lead times are needed to effect major changes in production, transportation, construction, energy generation, medicine, and so forth. Rule of thumb: it takes 40 years to introduce and build out new technology. Electric cars are a good example: Tesla made its first car in 2008. 15 years after the first car, Tesla is now building out a nationwide charging system. Various companies and agencies are working on this area. Meanwhile, non-carbon-fueled electricity generation is still far from dominant. It's price competitive, but it still amounts to only about 20% of the total electricity production in the US.

We haven't run into global shortages of lithium and cobalt for batteries yet; the same goes for neodymium, samarium, terbium. dysprosium, lanthanum and cerium which are used in various parts of electric motors -- then there is copper. Lots of copper. The metals are produced by fairly dirty extraction and refining, It's isn't that they are so rare. So, we don't have enough of all this stuff on hand to suddenly field 30 million electric autos, even if that was. good idea. Again, 40 years.

Various technologies (like hydrogen) would be far less polluting than even natural gas, but we are a long ways from having the infrastructure to produce, distribute, and use enough H to make a difference, Again, think 40 years.

Ten years is a good stretch of time to talk about. 100 years is way too long to think about meaningfully, and 1 year is way too short.

I favor a slow move away from fossil fuels. But not so fast that it creates big problems. — Agree to Disagree

You will be happy to discover that is precisely the policy of most countries. However, if the change doesn't happen fast enough then global heating may scuttle all of our plans.

I mean, the very notion that people would sit around arguing about cows seems crazy to me. — frank

Amen, brother. Can we please stop discussing the god damned cows!

I think that there is something that we might be able to do about global warming long-term. — Agree to Disagree

By my definition of long term (a century, say) we don't have a long term. We have a short term which 30 years ago was maybe 40 years into the future. We've pissed away the last 30 years, and now have about 10 years left.

Do we all drop dead in 10 years? No. People are already dropping dead from global heating, In 10 years, we may not have any options left which we can apply to the problem. In other words, the planet will continue to get hotter as we struggle to meet the standards for 1.5ºC of global warming, which goal will have been left in the dust.

How did you start the heater? Did you use lighter fluid? — frank

No, we used a small wood fire to get the coal going. During the winter, the fire was maintained by the regular addition of more coal (done by hand). At night, the coal would burn down and almost nothing left in the morning, so around 6:00 more coal had to be added.

A lot of people heated with coal. Until the late 60s the only alternative in the upper midwest was oil. Unless they were buying gravel coal (ground up to the size of gravel that could be loaded into the furnace by an auger) they had to add the coal with a shovel or a bucket. You opened the stove's door and threw the coal in.

The other source of heat for the house was a large cast iron wood burning cooking stove that had been converted to oil--kerosene. The stove was supplied from a 5 gallon tank that had to be refilled once a day from a bigger tank in the barn. Quite a few times a day, the stove's tank would make a "glug-glug-glug" sound as air filled the emptying space in the tank. It was especially noticeable in the night's quiet. This stove also was on all winter. (Our house was an old, uninsulated leaky frame building).

8 billion+ people, a billion cattle, a billion cars, a petroleum-dependent world economy, cement production (cooking limestone to make lime), metal production, airlines, a mindless garbage problem -- it is ALL the problem.

The "cure" may be as unpalatable as the "disease".

Agree to Disagree is not being substantially more recalcitrant than a billion car owners that do not want to give up their private vehicles, or give up good roads to drive on, or a few billion carnivores who do not want to replace meat with beans and greens.

Our ways of living are unsustainable, and we are in trouble and heading for worse. Sure, some individuals don't see the problem, but entire governments can't seem to actually do very much either--never mind the corporate sector. Either very few or no G20 governments have managed to act effectively on carbon dioxide/methane gas reduction. Sure, spotty progress is being made here and there, but critical decades have passed where nothing got done.

Meat produced through rotating grassland grazing (without a finishing program of grain feed) is quite possibly sustainable. I generally buy grass-fed ground beef. What isn't sustainable and good for the earth are very high levels of beef production.

Most of the beef sold is NOT grass-fed -- it's grass for-a-while then grain-finished. I discussed the increased CO2 load from grain production above.

True enough, methane is much shorter-lived than CO2--12 years, +/- as you said. The problem is that we are loading the atmosphere with more and more methane -- much of it from natural gas and oil production. The increased load of methane is the problem -- not that it takes a long time to break down, like CO2. Belching cattle are one source. There are a lot of cattle on the planet, about a billion.

There are also about a billion automobiles in the world, which produce various noxious chemicals and which we can't eat.

Plants do take up CO2, of course. Unfortunately, we are reducing the planets best carbon sinks -- rain forests. Grass lands can absorb CO2 also, as can crop land. Both grazing and crop production can be managed to maximize CO2 uptake. This requires minimum tillage, and rotating the grazers so that they don't "clear cut" the pasturage. This method of meat production takes more labor and attention than the other method.

We should be planting more trees, and restoring crop and grazing land so that more CO2 could be captured and sequestered in soil.

The information on Good Meats isn't wrong, but quantity matters when it comes to CO2 and methane,

Have you ever been through West Virginia and seen the huge bands of coal in the cliffs beside the highway? Awesome. — frank

No, but that would be highly interesting.

I was at Cumberland Falls in Kentucky a few years ago and picked up some pieces of coal that had washed down from up stream. The pieces were rounded and smoothed; quite nice. I've never thought of coal as a rock, either. When I was a child, we heated the house with a coal space heater. Usually the coal was briquettes, but sometimes it was chunk coal, some of the chunks being the size of a small watermelon or cantaloupe.

I suppose, upon your first naive encounter with unprocessed coal one could think of it as a rock. It is rock-like in hardness and weight, but it has very unrocklike features. For instance, if you apply a small torch flame to the surface of unprocessed coal, little jets of gas will ignite; if you apply more heat, the surface will chip off. Apply enough heat and it burns. Rocks don't do that.

The residue of burnt coal is more clearly a mineral. Clinkers formed in the bottom of the stove. They were fairly hard and brittle -- but not a solid mass -- lots of irregular shapes and holes. Coal ash is reddish grey-brown and relatively light in weight. The ash will become toxic when water leaches out the various chemicals native to coal and created by combustion.

So is the idea basically that Democratic Socialism proffers a welfare state with higher taxes, along with a non-profit government? — Leontiskos

More or less.

I am trying to understand the foil to Democratic Socialism. I think everyone agrees that the government should be non-profit, so it probably isn't that. Presumably the foil is a laissez-faire scheme with limited government, low taxes, and no welfare benefits coming from the state? — "Leontiskos

That describes neoliberalism -- weak state, strong corporations, minimal regulation, few benefits, everybody is on their own.

The other thing I often do not understand with respect to socialism or Democratic Socialism is how the change is supposed to be effected. For example, what is the motivation by which a capitalist society would transform itself into a Democratic Socialist society? — "Leontiskos

European countries have had democratic socialism certainly since WWII but before as well.

Why would capitalism convert to any form of democratic socialism? Survival and crudely obvious necessity.

The American economy in the last quarter of the 19th century and into the 20th was "the gilded age" a period of extremely disproportion concentrations of wealth. At the beginning of the 20th century, the Progressives (like Theadore Roosevelt) began reforms which would eventually reduce the disparity of wealth. The New Deal and WWII was financed largely through extremely high taxes on wealth. Between 1929 and 1945 the amount of concentrated wealth was roughly sliced in half -- fewer millionaires by half.

After WWII, there was a consensus formed among government, labor, and the corporations (and their stockholders) to NOT return to conditions of the gilded age. During the years between 1945 and 1974 the US was roughly democratic socialist -- high taxes, very generous benefits, good wages and cooperative labor agreements, and so on. During this time, business, labor, and government all did well. The WWII debt was paid off; FHA, VA, NDEA, and other benefit programs helped working class people achieve greater education, better employment, and better housing. "The common good" won out,

After 1975, there was a reaction during which aspirants for greater private wealth and power effected lower tax rates, reduced benefits, union busting, and lower wages. They had had enough of that "common good" crap. Between 1975 and 2023 there was another extraordinary accumulation of wealth in a relatively small number of hands.

The public which had previously supported and benefitted from a democratic socialist period no longer held together, and they lost out.

And a preferential option for the poor, but let's leave that aside for now because it is more explicitly religious. — Leontiskos

The American ruling class also has a preferential option for the poor, namely, "fuck 'em".

I suppose I am not convinced that the tensions of a hybrid model are ultimately sustainable. — Leontiskos

It has not been sustainable in the USA -- perhaps the least fertile soil for socialism of any kind. Europe has maintained its democratic socialist systems much better. Seems like part of Brexit was an effort to get out from under the democratic socialism of the EU.

Whether the EU can maintain its democratic socialist programs during the more turbulent times ahead--increased pressures from climate refugees, global heating problems at home, war next door, god knows what else, remains to be seen. I hope they can for their sake.

Point out the fault in this logic:
- Atoms of carbon in the atmosphere are taken up by plants.
- Cows eat the plants.
- The cows release the atoms of carbon back into the atmosphere. — Agree to Disagree

Your picture of the carbon cycle is OK as far as it goes, but 3 things are missing:

a) A small minority of cows are grazed on grass alone. Most cows are fed hay or grass, but are "finished"(weight and fat are added) on grains. Grain requires quite a bit of added energy input in the form of fertilizer and fuel. Carbon dioxide is the by-product of raising corn, wheat, and soybeans for feed.

b) Grass-fed cows digest their food by fermentation; a by-product of this fermentation is methane, which the cows belch in large quantities, Methane is a more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2.

c) The land on which feed for cattle is produced could produce those crops for humans--corn, wheat, soybeans, oats, etc. The ratio of grains to meat (pound for pound) is 6:1 -- it takes 6 pounds of feed to produce one pound of meat. Chicken is much more efficient, 1.5:1--1 1/2 lbs of feed for 1 pound of chicken. Pork is in-between beef and chicken -- 3:1.

I am not a vegetarian, btw. I like meat.

Not sure why you’re muddying the waters on something pretty well understood. No one claimed oil is made from “dead dinosaurs. — Mikie

No one HERE claimed oil is made from dead dinosaurs. Go ask 100 people in Walmart; some of them will say that oil came from dead dinosaurs.

As long as we are talking about fuel, "fossil fuel" is not at all confusing. If people start talking about fossilized animals and plants while they are also talking about fuel, the water turns muddy. If you were to be covered up with a lot of muddy water, the suspended solids would settle on your esteemed carcass and over eons would turn you into a very small glob of petroleum, depending how fat your are. Unfortunately, by the time your are petrol the species will have long since become extinct and the successor species will probably use photosynthesis.

To repeat the point: the term "fossilization" is tricky.

I consider a fossil to be "a plant or animal whose tissue has been completely replaced by mineral substances; no part of the animal remains in the fossil--only the form". Petrified wood, or petrified dinosaur bones are mineral replacements of the original tissue. The original tree or theropod is altogether absent--gone, missing, kaput.

Coal and oil can be called fossils, but in fact the original tissues of the organisms are present, albeit transformed. If they were actual "fossils" they could not be used as fuel.

So, "fossil fuels" are a handy figure of speech, but they do not actually describe coal and oil.,

I asked Google whether coal is a rock or not and got two answers:

Why coal is considered as rock?

Being composed of carbon, coal forms a carbonaceous deposit. Having been transported and accumulated in a single deposit it is sedimentary. Having undergone metamorphosis and petrification it is a rock. Consequently it is reasonable to classify coal as a carbonaceous sedimentary rock.
Oct 12, 2015

Why is coal not a rock?
Coal differs from every other kind of rock in that it is made of organic carbon: the actual remains, not just mineralized fossils, of dead plants. Today, the vast majority of dead plant matter is consumed by fire and decay, returning its carbon to the atmosphere as the gas carbon dioxide.
Jan 23, 2020

Applied topically? Or do you drink it? — frank

"We're sorry; the Turpentine Poison Hot Line is closed during the month of August. Please call back at a time when we might be open."

Fossil fuels are fossilised plants (and some animal remnants).
— @Benkei

I think it's more that under pressure, fossilized organic material produces oil and coal. An actual fossil won't burn because it's made out of rock. — frank

The word "fossil" is leading us astray here. Fossils are plants or animals whose tissues have been replaced by minerals. The original animal is altogether absent (except for insects trapped in fossilized amber).

Coal formed because during the carboniferous period, there were no fungi to break down lignin. So, as the masses of vegetation died, accumulated, sank, were buried deeply, heat and pressure cooked the vegetative mess into coal. Minerals did not replace the vegetative matter: If they did, one would have petrified wood, which is interesting, but can't burn.

The Carboniferous Period came to an end with the rise of fungi which were capable of turning the dead plant matter into soil -- no more coal formation.

"Petroleum, also called crude oil, is formed from the remains of ancient marine organisms, such as plants, algae, and bacteria". All that stuff wasn't fossilized. If it was, it would resemble limestone more than grease.

Kerogen is incompletely formed petroleum and makes up shale oil.

The Sinclair Oil Company not withstanding, dead dinosaurs are not the source of crude oil.

Once upon a time, all tar came from pine trees. — frank

In various parts of the world, petroleum has seeped out into pools, which then evaporated, forming thick tars. Think of the LeBrea tar pits in L.A. Ancient people found various uses for these substances. Another source of very sticky resin comes from birch bark. Neanderthals and Homo sapiens both extracted a glue from birch bark. Amber is fossilized pine resin.

Pitch, resin, asphalt, and tar name the same (and different) substances. Yes, confusing. It gets worse: plastics derived from petroleum are also called resins.

The sap of pine trees is called resin.
Pitch, asphalt, and tar are forms of petroleum.

A violinist uses a small block of "rosin" or "resin" to increase the stickiness of the horsehairs on the bow. Use the song, "Rosin the beau" as an mnemonic device to connect resin with horsehair. The "bow" in the song is inconveniently spelled "beau" which spoils the whole thing, but never mind.

Pitch, asphalt, and tar have all been used as sealants for boats, wine barrels, and other leaky things.

Tree-sourced resin (or rosin) is used for skateboards to prevent cracking, chipping, and breakage. Turpentine from certain pine trees has been used medicinally for treatment of cough, gonorrhea, and rheumatism. Tar water, resin steeped in water, used to be recommended by doctors for illnesses such as smallpox, ulcers and syphilis.

If you should get a case of gonorrhea, smallpox, or syphilis, I strongly recommend that you not resort to turpentine as a cure.

thought that 1 billion cows must be causing a huge problem. But then I researched further and found that CO2 and methane from cows are part of the biogenic carbon cycle. There is no overall gain or loss of carbon atoms in the atmosphere due to cows (in the long-run) — Agree to Disagree

The problem with cows is less CO2 and more methane CH4. Cows digest grass/feed through enteric fermentation which produces methane as a by-product--those 4 stomachs... Methane is a much more potent green house gas than CO2 because it absorbs more solar heat. Cows are not the only source of methane: leakage from natural gas operations, rotting vegetation, rotting thawed permafrost soils. Methane also occurs as a hydrate -- water and methane combined in fragile solid deposits in the ocean.

Cows could disappear and methane would still be a significant contributor to global heating,

He can apply his own effort towards nature and maybe do so in voluntary effort with others, or he can sit back and take from those who do. — NOS4A2

Ah, great description of anti-social capitalism!

Hey, NOS4A2, we're not in the same city, let alone the same ball park. We're not going to agree.

Graft and corruption (of the sort that characterized the Chicago political machine for many years, is parasitical. But honest government is lean, efficient, and effective. Government does work that either does not (or should not) make money. Take the disease surveillance activities of public health departments. Controlling transmissible disease requires an agency to actively scan the community for disease -- syphilis, gonorrhea, tuberculosis, West Nile fever, cryptosporidium, and so on. It's not a money maker. Someone needs to measure school performance -- else billions go to waste. Education supervision like public health is not a money maker.

Mining? Agriculture? Transportation? Manufacturing? Warehousing? Retail? Capitalism does these (and others activities) because these are the money makers. In Democratic Socialism, the state DOES NOT take the place of business. If it does, then you end up with state capitalism, which is what the USSR was. Not that great. What happens in Democratic Socialism is that business and workers pay higher taxes (than in the US) to maintain a healthy, productive society. Democratic Socialism is not communism at all, and it's not classic socialism, either, because profit making corporations are a key part of the system -- just not quite as much profit making.

People in at least reasonably decent societies willingly share the necessary resources required to keep that society operating and solvent. Sometimes the resources are gathered in a. purely voluntary manner -- the hat is passed and individuals contribute what they can contribute. Hat-passing works in small groups.

Sometimes people are asked for contributions. Public Radio stations ask for donations about 3 times a year. They'll take any donation, but they generally suggest amounts. The Girl Scouts sell cookies. You get a box of cookies and part of the price goes to the organization. Capitalism in general works that way: you buy stuff and some of the money goes to the organization (like the stockholders).

For the expensive heavy lifting activities that a society needs--bridges, sewers, hospitals, schools, social services--we share resources through taxation. It's sharing, not expropriation. The pharaohs expropriated some grain from the peasants to pay for pyramids that did absolutely nothing for the peasants. Sharing through taxation maintains the quality of the society so that everyone can live a reasonably fulfilling life.

The better the quality of life a society desires, the more sharing of resources that is required. More is required because a very good quality of life for everyone is expensive. It's much cheaper to operate a shit hole society. Where do you want to live? Venezuela or Sweden?

We actually don't know for sure that the pyramids were built with slave labor. Engineering studies indicate that many of the steps in construction were technically very demanding as well as physically difficult. I don't think anyone has demonstrated exactly how the ordinary 2.5 ton stones were maneuvered into place, much less the really big stones at the center of the pyramid (the king's chamber) that weighed between 30 and 80 tons. 8000 tons of granite were brought from distant quarries. Slave labor might well have figured into some phases, but there is also some evidence that at least some workers were skilled wage earners. (The evidence is partly in the existence of construction villages next to the work site.)

But to your point: Funds had to be expropriated from one source or another.

I've also been to the low-tax countries such as Monaco, the Bahamas, and Dubai, and can report that their infrastructure is far superior to the ones I see here. — NOS4A2

I haven't been to these places, so I have no opinion on their infrastructure. But Dubai is 1588 square miles; Monaco has <1 square mile; Bahamas is the giant among the 3 with 5358 square miles, but is spread out over 700 islands. Whatever their assets and liabilities, there isn't much point in comparing them to Canada (3.8 million square miles) or Australia, the latter which is a continent.

Getting rid of the parasite class did France a world of good.

Don't forget the American Civil War. A lot of southern slave owners were reduced to poverty. Wealth was greatly reduced after WWI and lasted until around 1970. What caused it? Progressive legislation! The Progressives started trimming the wealth at the top before 1914. The economic collapse in 1929 wiped out some of the Uber-wealthy, but legislation played a crucial war. The New Deal to turn the depression around was expensive, and it was very high taxes on wealth that paid for it. Then came WWII, and continued high rates of high-wealth taxation. The post-WWII boom was financed partly by government efforts (FHA, VA, NDEA, etc. which, again, were paid for out of high taxation.

Heavily taxing wealth required an agreement among labor, capital, and politics. That agreement held until the early 1970s, when the highest tax levels began to be lowered, and various changes made it possible for the rich to again get much richer at the expense of the working class.

There is nothing inherent in Capitalism to bring about the Gilded Age of the 1880s or the current gilded age of multi-billionaires. It's the cooperation, yea--the facilitation--of government that makes this possible, or not.

one could find a constructive use for mace and the guillotine, but I'm hard-put to imagine what that is — Vera Mont

Guillotines remain the go-to device for severing heads. Much more reliable than a hand held axe. Quicker than hanging. Etc. Now, as for severing heads, there is an abundance of heads which, severed from their bodies, would have beneficial effects on society. I can think of a few dozen right off.

The major drawback of the guillotine is excessive bleeding. The place d'severence was moved periodically, probably because the ground became saturated with varying degrees of noble blood. Now, of course, we would funnel the blood into sanitary sewers.

I'm inclined to say that humanity's troubles are not caused by any particular human invention so much as the fact that humans keep coming up with destructive inventions. — Vera Mont

I'm inclined to say that humanities troubles are caused by our evolution from adaptable but short-sighted primates to overly clever, adaptable, and short sighted primates. We're good at inventing, but not projecting long-term consequences (like, longer than 15 minutes or 15 years). Our short-sightedness isn't a bug, it's a feature. Survival USUALLY is determined in the short run. In the long run, we're all dead. ("‘The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead,’ wrote John Maynard Keynes in his 1923 work, A Tract on Monetary Reform.")

WELCOME TO THE PHILOSOPHY FORUM, even though you joined 4 years ago.