BC

The crux of the matter is this: How did life happen? Nothing. They don't "want" to reproduce, they just do. For that matter, it isn't entirely clear t...

It seems to me that there is a physical explanation for time appearing to pass faster as one ages. Our brains, like some other animal brains, seem to ...

Time goes by so fast when you are alive.

Christians and Moslems have been trying to convert everyone to their religions all over the world for a combined number of 3400 missionary years, and ...

If Neanderthals and Denisovans had just merged into the Homo sapiens species, it seems to me one would see much higher levels of Neanderthal and Denis...

I'm not interested in mind reading or minds separate from bodies. Have you ever noticed that fortune tellers never predict that one's life is going to...

I liked Peters' post; I'd just hate to see it squelched by one of the less imaginative moderators. Names need not be named. But yes, the sentence you ...

You wrote this (it's not a quote)? If so, nicely done. An elegant howl. You've got good uninhibited momentum. I don't know when the Valkyries will rid...

Right. People don't operate that way. Even professional economists who get raises don't say that. What they say is, "Finally my brilliance has been no...

I'm sure some people are thinking about how big the concentration camps, gas chambers, crematoria, and ash pits will need to be, and where they should...

What you wanted to say and almost did was "Demand for labor which can not be met by reserves of unemployed workers tends to drive up wages." It's soun...

The downside is that whoever runs with even a small chance of success will be a professional politician. "Professional politicians" are not all liars ...

Physical and chemical processes are the means by which bodies and brains operate. It might be an error to suppose that the means and output are the sa...

All shepherds are sheep shaggers. Where men are men and the sheep are nervous.

You are not the first person to use "rhotic" on TPF; that honor goes to andrewk, but you are 1 of the first three. You are the first person to say "I ...

Right. Right (conservative) Right (correct) Right (in the direction of most people's dominant hand) Right (I totally agree) Right (verbal insertion wi...

Good point. The overabundance of 'schwa' sounds and liquefaction of ending consonants makes AAVE difficult for Anglo-Saxons to understand. From all th...

Thanks for that search result. The results for on-line searches should be quite different than appearance in print, since on-line searches represent t...

Ironically irreverent... you have no idea how much energy it takes to maintain that stance. The phonetic difference between "nigger(s)" and "nigga(s)"...

You wouldn't do that, I wouldn't do that, and most people wouldn't do that. The overwhelming majority of people don't. A good share of my work life wa...

Well, class figures in here. While upward mobility has been possible for a lot of people, downward mobility is an ever-present risk. Working people (w...

That's because you are suffering from humorless pedantry. I understand it perfectly well, which is why I am opposed to words being judged "unspeakable...

B-word people (AA err, N word, n word?) use "the n word" in the same way that "c s word" use the "Q word". Ameliorating the term "Q word" or "n word" ...

Blacks (African Americans, err, Negroes... niggers?) use "nigger" in the same way that cock suckers use "queer". Ameliorating the term "queer" or "nig...

What word was that? Cospic? Crutle? Cuckoo? Confus? Christ? Caudal? Oh common, tell us...

The N word problem again. We are all grown up here so we can actually write the word: Niggard! There I wrote it. Watch the ceiling collapse. Peak nigg...

Yes, that's true. The Germans made synthetic gasoline from coal. Many cities in the US (and elsewhere) had coal gas plants up until the 1950s, when na...

Not only is it possible, it is a fact. Yes, we have secret knowledge and we exert influence over human affairs. Any given ordinary individual may not ...

I am willing to talk about population growth. That's easy. It's population reduction that is difficult. I defer the problem of population reduction to...

According to writers like James Howard Kunstler, and others, it is difficult to even imagine a way of living without petroleum and coal and their vari...

I tend to think it is too late; 40 years ago, we would have needed 40-50 years to make significant changes in our relationship to energy and the envir...

"In the long run, we're all dead." John Maynard Keynes

Good point.

On the other hand, didn't our hunter-gatherer ancestors do just fine for 100,000 years of short term thinking? What changed? EDIT: I should add, "pres...

Short term thinking is an excellent candidate for the cause of our doom, don't you think?

And at this point, a lot of people are expecting this quarterly result to be better than last quarter's, or else it's "sell". We've been able to get a...

Oh, heavens, no! What possible advantage could there be in the electorate being more far sighted? Silly you. Obviously, it would be better, but... by ...

Your suggestion is my command. The amount of reward that anyone in a company receives -- wage earners, managers, or stock owners, has to be balanced a...

One says "it is what it is" when no more can be said. I might possibly understand what you are aiming at. How do definitions have any validity when pe...

Communication "works" because words have limited meanings. Buddhism and Judaism, for example, or Hinduism and Christianity have distinct properties th...

I'll make up my percentages and you can make up yours. Works for me. Communication is difficult when people are overly literal. 25% or 2% are guesses,...

This doesn't seem to be the topic of this thread, but... what the hell. Occasionally people run into the problem of using a word for which several peo...

The USSR is the same entity whether you think it was the workers' paradise or the nightmare from hell. The United States is the same entity whether yo...

You can't step into the same river twice. In fact, you can't step into the same river once. Most people find something sufficiently constant about the...

Nothing. I love nuclear as much as I love CO2, pesticides, RoundUp, and PCBs. What's not to love? Why, it's probably powering the very computer I'm us...

Come again?

So I watched it. I wasn't as taken with it as you were. Yes, it's good to recognize that nuclear power presents us with some real, substantial advanta...

OK, so let's track what happened. First came nuclear weapons. They weren't a secret. Hundreds of them (a good sized war's worth) were being exploded i...

I don't seem to be able to find the link. Could you repost it, please. Thanks.

Chernobyl was much worse than it was reported to be. The explosion was very bad bad to start with, and the arrogance and stupidity of the Soviet syste...