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Messages - Turkey

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4171
Serious / Re: Prohibition didn't work, so why do we keep banning things?
« on: October 26, 2015, 03:05:27 PM »
Maybe Turkey.

I'm not against legalization of drugs, but I do think we need to carefully evaluate the effects of legalizing certain ones. If cocaine hadn't been criminalized in the 80s, billions of dollars would have made their way to drug lords in South America, on top of what they were already raking in. Drug money fuels war in impoverished nations, not to mention here in the U.S., and laissez-faire legalization only vindicates them. Prohibition was a failure, yes, but that's not comparable to drugs; that was criminalizing legitimate domestic producers, and driven largely by religious zealotry (morality laws) and discrimination, seeing drunk European migrants as a cause of social degradation.

I'm for legalization of many drugs, but I'm also in favor of making sure we're doing it smartly. Should prostitution also be legal? I really don't know; there are arguments on both sides of gender equality that say it's both empowering and incredibly oppressive of women. It's also important to realize that the sex business is the largest source of slaves in the modern world, even in America, so the same issues I raised above are valid to me. Of course regulation might make it harder, but it also legitimizes the criminals that are involved. Look at all the marginalized illegal immigrants working for shit pay and in meager conditions in the southern states, or back in history (and still today) with Asian immigrants being used as prostitutes and slaves, effectively.


4172
What doesn't give you cancer these days?
Plant-based whole foods.

A lot of plants contain high amounts of estrogen, which is also known to be a human carcinogen.

4173
What is Arts Administration? Sounds like a fluff degree.

4174
The Flood / Re: Part 4: Rename my dog you fucks
« on: October 26, 2015, 12:39:15 PM »
Call him faggot.

Then I'd get him mixed up with Cheat.

4175
The Flood / Re: Part 4: Rename my dog you fucks
« on: October 26, 2015, 12:30:37 PM »
1. Why is your wife's nickname for you Charlie? I feel like there is an interesting story behind this. I'm thinking you guys have a Vietnam war sex RP.

Good idea. She's Asian, so it'll work out well.

But really it's stupid. It's because of that 'Charlie bit me' video. She thought it was hilarious and started calling me Charlie as a joke, and it stuck.

4176
The Flood / Re: Part 4: Rename my dog you fucks
« on: October 26, 2015, 12:27:53 PM »
Sartre is such a good dog name.

Too highbrow. I like it, though.

4177
The Flood / Part 4: Rename my dog you fucks
« on: October 26, 2015, 12:24:39 PM »
The name he came with is Charlie. My wife's main nickname for me is Charlie, for reasons. In just one night it's already gotten really confusing having her calling for him all the time.

Anyways, Hitler's off the list apparently (lame wife), so come up with some alternatives.


4178
Gaming / Re: I have Halo 5. Screw this thread :^) | Halo 5 mega thread
« on: October 26, 2015, 12:14:29 PM »
Does anyone else feel the same as I do, or am I just wrong?... Are people as excited for this game as they were for Halo 3?

I'm pretty apathetic about it. I bought it and I'll play it because the multiplayer looks pretty fun and I like the story of Halo, but it sure as hell isn't hyped like Halo 3.

4179
Seems like a pretty small increase to the risk... miniscule enough to not worry me in the slightest.

Yeah, it's important to realize that it's increased percentage of risk...a percentage of a percentage. So if you have a .1% risk of colon cancer and eat a ton of red meat, you effectively have a .117% risk.

4180
Gaming / Re: I have Halo 5. Screw this thread :^) | Halo 5 mega thread
« on: October 26, 2015, 10:37:36 AM »
Still blows my mind that they included characters for your team but eliminated local co-op.

4181
The Flood / Re: I'm no longer le ebin STEM master race
« on: October 26, 2015, 10:29:27 AM »
Why?
I was getting 0 enjoyment out of computer science and the thought of spending the rest of my life coding was beginning to make me sick to my stomach. Politics is about the only thing in life I'm genuinely interested in and get any enjoyment out of. I suppose the pushing factor was how much my Uni's poli sci department helps their graduates get jobs, that being said its not nearly as limited of a career field as I once thought.

I hated programming, too, and while I stayed in engineering, switching majors when I learned I hated what I was on was a great decision. I hope you really enjoy your new major.

What kind of field are you thinking of working in?

4182
The Flood / Re: I'm no longer le ebin STEM master race
« on: October 26, 2015, 10:22:53 AM »
Why?

4183
http://www.wsj.com/articles/red-meats-potentially-cause-cancer-group-says-1445860101?mod=e2fb

Quote
The determination, published by a panel of researchers for the International Agency for Research on Cancer in a medical journal Monday, classifies processed meat products like salami and bacon carcinogenic to humans, the strongest level of risk for cancer, and a category shared with tobacco smoke and diesel engine exhaust.

Fresh meats like steaks and roasts are considered probably cancer-causing, a level of risk shared with the widely used herbicide glyphosate.

The IARC, considered an authority in evaluating evidence on cancer causation cited studies that conclude there is strong evidence to support a link between eating too much meat and the onset of colorectal cancer, the third-most common type world-wide.

It's purportedly linked to a sugar in red meat that causes inflammation which leads to cancer. The report claims that 50g of processed meat or 100g of red meat increase risk of colon cancer by 17-18%, respectively. A lean steak is 25g per ounce.

http://www.bbc.com/news/health-34615621
Quote
Prof Tim Key, from the Cancer Research UK and the University of Oxford, said: "This decision doesn't mean you need to stop eating any red and processed meat, but if you eat lots of it you may want to think about cutting down.
"Eating a bacon bap every once in a while isn't going to do much harm - having a healthy diet is all about moderation."
The industry body the Meat Advisory Panel said "avoiding red meat in the diet is not a protective strategy against cancer" and said the focus should be alcohol, smoking and body weight.

4184
The Flood / Re: So I adopted the dog (Charlie)
« on: October 25, 2015, 07:25:52 PM »
is he obedient?

He hasn't had much training yet. He can sit and he's getting back into being led on a leash, but he needs work.

He's not biting, barking, or pissing over everything, so there's that.

4185
The Flood / Re: courage the cowardly dog writers were low key ripping
« on: October 25, 2015, 07:25:11 PM »
YouTube


This couldn't have been made by a sober man.

4186
The Flood / Re: So I adopted the dog (Charlie)
« on: October 25, 2015, 07:06:27 PM »
His name his Charlie?

Take him out back and put him down.

He hasn't started shitposting yet, but I'm keeping an eye on his browsing history.

4187
The Flood / So I adopted the dog (Charlie)
« on: October 25, 2015, 06:57:22 PM »


He's awesome. Pretty shy right now but he's adjusting alright.

4188
Septagon / Re: I think edits erase likes
« on: October 25, 2015, 04:33:00 PM »
The post was liked, edited, and now there is no like. So something's fucky.

Maybe I'm just retarded or something. That's probably it.

4189
The Flood / Re: We are a monument to Bungie's sins
« on: October 25, 2015, 06:39:21 AM »
The memes of the father, passed to his son.

4190
Septagon / Re: How do I trademark?
« on: October 25, 2015, 12:06:20 AM »
Use a smartphone™

4191
Septagon / Re: I think edits erase likes
« on: October 24, 2015, 09:23:40 PM »
I edited the thread and it's still there. I swear several edited posts I liked aren't showing them, though. I liked almost every post in my dog thread but most don't show it.

4192
Septagon / I think edits erase likes
« on: October 24, 2015, 07:46:25 PM »
Anyone else seeing this? If someone will like this I'll edit it after I see it.

Edit 2

4193
The Flood / Re: Thoughts on Peacoats
« on: October 24, 2015, 04:16:48 PM »
it's hard to not look like a douche in one.
You're the second person to say this. How do they make you look douchey? Are douches wearing them a lot these days?

The Twilight/vampire trend hasn't done them justice. They're an informal coat that should go with anything, but have been styled up to make them seem classy and formal. A peacoat should replace a hoody or a sweater, not a blazer or sports jacket.

4194
Serious / The Myth of Basic Science
« on: October 24, 2015, 04:01:09 PM »
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-myth-of-basic-science-1445613954

If you have any sort of decent attention span, I urge you to stop right now and read the entire article. I've pulled out specific sections that I thought were particularly interesting, but I've copied less than a third of the article. It's very thorough and insightful.

Quote
Innovation is a mysteriously difficult thing to dictate. Technology seems to change by a sort of inexorable, evolutionary progress, which we probably cannot stop—or speed up much either. And it’s not much the product of science. Most technological breakthroughs come from technologists tinkering, not from researchers chasing hypotheses. Heretical as it may sound, “basic science” isn’t nearly as productive of new inventions as we tend to think.

[...]

As Kevin Kelly documents in his book “What Technology Wants,” we know of six different inventors of the thermometer, three of the hypodermic needle, four of vaccination, five of the electric telegraph, four of photography, five of the steamboat, six of the electric railroad. The history of inventions, writes the historian Alfred Kroeber, is “one endless chain of parallel instances.”

It is just as true in science as in technology. Boyle’s law in English-speaking countries is the same thing as Mariotte’s Law in French-speaking countries. Isaac Newton vented paroxysms of fury at Gottfried Leibniz for claiming, correctly, to have invented the calculus independently. Charles Darwin was prodded into publishing his theory at last by Alfred Russel Wallace, who had precisely the same idea after reading precisely the same book, Malthus’s “Essay on Population.”

Increasingly, technology is developing the kind of autonomy that hitherto characterized biological entities. The Stanford economist Brian Arthur argues that technology is self-organizing and can, in effect, reproduce and adapt to its environment. It thus qualifies as a living organism, at least in the sense that a coral reef is a living thing. Sure, it could not exist without animals (that is, people) to build and maintain it, but then that is true of a coral reef, too.

[...]

Indeed, the history of technological prohibitions is revealing. The Ming Chinese prohibited large ships; the Shogun Japanese, firearms; the medieval Italians, silk-spinning; Americans in the 1920s, alcohol. Such prohibitions can last a long time—three centuries in the case of the Chinese and Japanese examples—but eventually they come to an end, so long as there is competition. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world, these technologies continued to grow.

[...]

Patents and copyright laws grant too much credit and reward to individuals and imply that technology evolves by jerks. Recall that the original rationale for granting patents was not to reward inventors with monopoly profits but to encourage them to share their inventions. A certain amount of intellectual property law is plainly necessary to achieve this. But it has gone too far. Most patents are now as much about defending monopoly and deterring rivals as about sharing ideas. And that discourages innovation.

Even the most explicit paper or patent application fails to reveal nearly enough to help another to retrace the steps through the maze of possible experiments. One study of lasers found that blueprints and written reports were quite inadequate to help others copy a laser design: You had to go and talk to the people who had done it. So a patent often does not achieve the openness that it is supposed to but instead hinders progress.

[...]

Like most innovation, Portugal’s navigational advances came about by trial and error among sailors, not by speculation among astronomers and cartographers. If anything, the scientists were driven by the needs of the explorers rather than the other way around.

[...]

In 2003, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development published a paper on the “sources of economic growth in OECD countries” between 1971 and 1998 and found, to its surprise, that whereas privately funded research and development stimulated economic growth, publicly funded research had no economic impact whatsoever. None. This earthshaking result has never been challenged or debunked. It is so inconvenient to the argument that science needs public funding that it is ignored.

In 2007, the economist Leo Sveikauskas of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics concluded that returns from many forms of publicly financed R&D are near zero and that “many elements of university and government research have very low returns, overwhelmingly contribute to economic growth only indirectly, if at all.”

I'm not going to tl;dr this, because I think this is a really fantastic essay that anybody with an interest in science, economics, or politics ought to read. What it asserts, however, is that the development of technology is an organic, evolutionary process that drives scientific understanding, not the other way around. We understand more about astrophysics because we went to the moon; we didn't go to the moon because we already knew what it could teach us. The article is chock-full of other historical examples.

It'd be interesting to see further discussion about the implications of this theory for early hominids; did they develop tools and society as a result of higher intelligence and larger brains, or did they evolve larger brains and higher intelligence in response to the development of tools and societies? Maybe I'm mischaracterizing it, but I'd be interested to see the discussion. I think the author's reasoning is flawed, and his credible citations of economic impact of private versus state funding for science don't accurately parallel his theses about the reversed relationship between scientific understanding and tangible innovation.

Anyway, post your thoughts after reading the article.
 

4195
The Flood / Re: what the fuck did you do to the like button
« on: October 24, 2015, 03:40:09 PM »
I thought the like button added a nice little border to the post instead of the big gray gap that's there.

Looks cleaner now, though.

4196
The Flood / Re: Thoughts on Peacoats
« on: October 24, 2015, 03:34:45 PM »
Pretty good for keeping warm because the extra layer over your chest conserves body heat, but it's hard to not look like a douche in one.

4197
The Flood / Re: Thoughts on Cardigans
« on: October 24, 2015, 02:42:08 PM »
Hard to pull off unless you're Mr. Rogers.

4198
Gaming / Re: Halo 5 Story Spoilers (With Images)
« on: October 24, 2015, 02:12:23 PM »
https://vid.me/LziP

since the link youtubez got taken down.

Can't tell if that first part is QTE.

If it is, fucking lol

If not, and we don't get to actually shoot the thing, lol

Even if you can shoot it, it's still a poor excuse for a final encounter.

Take what we get. At least it isn't a Warthog Run 4.0

I liked 'em. It was a cool way to show the immediate effects of what we did at the end without a cutscene.

A big boss fight with a smaller guardian would've been pretty cool, especially if they'd used both teams. I assume there's a big encounter just before the cutscene, though.

4199
Gaming / Re: Halo 5 Story Spoilers (With Images)
« on: October 24, 2015, 01:46:51 PM »
https://vid.me/LziP

since the link youtubez got taken down.

Can't tell if that first part is QTE.

If it is, fucking lol

If not, and we don't get to actually shoot the thing, lol

Even if you can shoot it, it's still a poor excuse for a final encounter.

4200
The Flood / Re: Check out this dog we're thinking of adopting -- 2.0
« on: October 24, 2015, 12:31:49 PM »
Do any of you dog owners (or your parents) buy pet insurance? He's apparently perfectly healthy and he's still young so I don't really see a need, but I'm on the fence.

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