I don't know how salt water got on your list unless you're concerned with drowning victims, and in any case salt water is the medium that allowed animal life to evolve. Our bloodstream is a fully-enclosed salt water environment. As for the surgeon's knife, this is a tool. Accidents happen with any tool but that does not make them evil.
Oh I get it. This is a poorly disguised rant against the legal right to abortion. All I can do is quote my wife: "I'll give a flying fuck what men think about abortion the first time one of you assholes gets pregnant." So on behalf of our female members, who have an actual personal stake in this issue rather than a philosophical one, and who typically stay away from mental masturbation threads like this one, I suggest that you please stuff your combination Male Chauvinist Pig and Religious Redneck Retard rant up your ass until you grow a uterus.
The figure is typically set at ten million (Allied soldiers alone would have accounted for at least a million) and some say it would have been a hundred million. Others say that the Japanese military leaders could read the handwriting on the wall once they realized that A) The Soviets were opening a new front on their northern frontier, and B) The Germans were going down and soon all the Allied military might would focus on Japan, and would have surrendered within a few weeks anyway.
You're conflating socialism with communism--which is understandable since the Communists encouraged that confusion. Communism is an offshoot of Christianity. Despite his Jewish ancestry Marx was a Christian and, "To each according to his needs, from each according to his ability," is an elaboration of a line in the Book of Acts. Before you object to that, imagine the probability of a self-respecting Confucian, Hindu or Jew suggesting that an economy can survive in which what a man takes from civilization need not correlate with what he gives back. Only Jesus preached economic irrationality.
Not at all. The essence of capitalism is that one creates capital. Rather than merely contributing labor and other resources to the economy and extracting sustenance, security, and the other vital necessities at the bottom levels of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, the organization of a capitalist system permits and (if properly administered) encourages everyone to contribute to the community's surplus. "Capital" is, after all, just a fancy term for "surplus wealth, and "capitalism" is (again, when properly administered) a decentralized, constantly evolving system for managing that surplus heuristically and in real time. The fact that the infrastructure, savings, inventory, luxury goods and services, educational institutions, professional entertainment and other economic factors unknown in the Stone Age have been increasing steadily (if not monotonically) for twelve thousand years is evidence that, in aggregate, we all do indeed contribute more to the planetary economy than we take out.
You're being too kind. We Moderators refer to that as "intellectual dishonesty." In a place of science and scholarship it is the most egregious form of trolling: pretending not to know something in order to pursue a line of reasoning so articulately and passionately that our younger members, who come here expecting to find information and wisdom, may be convinced of something that isn't true.
That is not wrong, but it misses the point. Capitalism is the decentralization of the management of surplus wealth (or "capital"), so that the production of surplus wealth (or "profit") is controlled by those with the greatest familiarity with the processes of that production and the greatest stake in its success (or "capitalists"), and also so that those processes can be adjusted as quickly and efficiently as possible in response to the needs and desires of consumers (or "market forces").
what are the economic statistics for the politicians?
SciForums as a knowledge vault??
The base salary of Senators and Congressmen is $174K but they also bring in income from speaking engagements. The Washington metropolitan area is the most affluent in the country and therefore its cost of living is one of the highest, so that isn't quite as "rich" a life as it may appear. The average household income in Montgomery County, MD, where I live, is $90K and in nearby Loudoun County, VA, it's the highest in the country at $105K. You can't buy a humble townhouse around here for less than $300K, and Senators don't live in humble townhouses. They also have to live closer to the Capitol than I do so their real estate is much more expensive than mine. And of course they also maintain homes in their home states so they can qualify as residents when they run for office.
Probably all of them. Their wives/husbands have heavy social calendars to keep up--appearances at charity events alone can be exhausting--so they're hardly going to be at home hoovering.
As I said, personally I consider most of these people to be at the top of the middle class, not in the bottom of the upper class. America is run by its corporations and it's the leaders of those institutions who make all the money.
And why not? If I'm not mistaken, most of the Moderators of the hard science boards are PhD's. I see to it that my board, Linguistics, is a treasure trove of information. If you Google an arcane topic that doesn't yield a zillion hits, it's quite possible that a SciForums thread will be on the first page. This is why we try to keep the discourse civil, limit trolling, enforce the scientific method to keep the crackpottery under control, and take people who post racist crap and dirty pictures out behind the barn and shoot them: we don't want to be blackballed by any of the well-respected search engines.
seen that..i think its cool to do a search and sciforums pops up..
i was gonna post links to two threads that qualified for that..
there is a fine line..
Let's have a modicum of accuracy please.