Which is a good thing. In my opinion, a proper, full-on Republican is a complete lunatic.

I have many things I could say about this, all I'm going to say is that if this doesn't count as a member abusing another, I ask our mods what is?


That's exactly right. We don't pay for them, we just go kill the terrorists. That's a different issue altogether. If they have been kidnaped and we don't know where they are, we can't really go get them. If we already know where they are, then we go and get them, or that's how it is supposed to work.
I'm not understanding your point?

@Jell
Nope. Definitely not Scotland, probably not Catalonia, and I don't know enough about Flanders to make a judgement.

Ninja'd

Seriously, mods? He's just randomly insulting people now.

Actually, there's a referendum on Scotland soon where they can vote for independence.

I have to admit - I stopped reading what you and FlashMarsh wrote to each other because of his tone. Somehow, it didn't strike me to take disciplinary action. Bad Isa.

My point was that there were several instances where the US had tried to get their citizens back to safety, unlike what Shos said.

...your link suggests otherwise, you know.

Maybe I am reading it wrong, but I take "released" as released as a result of negotiations or similar things. If nothing else, there's some stories there about people taken out by force (Roy Hallums).

http://xkcd.com/1127/large/

No wonder there's difficulties getting the Democrats and Republicans to compromise, when not just Republicans but also Democrats are far from the center.  

There is going to be a referendum in Scotland, but it is highly unlikely they will vote for separation. Perhaps they will become a bit more autonomous, but it is unlikely they will become independent.
At the moment the majority of the Catalonians want independence. However, Madrid is blocking any attempt. If they lose Catalonia, not only will they lose much of their income, but the region will also become far more instable. Spain is in enough trouble as it is. So they probably won't allow a referendum or something.
As for Flanders, the unrest is growing but at the moment there haven't been any serious discussions about splitting up yet. But the conflict between the two parts is growing pretty fast, so serious steps towards splitting up might be taken in a couple of years.



I am fairly sure Isa prefers the Greens over the Democrats and I personally disagree with the Greens the least out of all the parties. I agree with the Democrats the most about the ecological issues, somewhat with the Libertarians about personal freedom and security, but I mostly agree with the Greens about the social and economical issues. I do disagree with the Republicans about most things, though.
I am a socialist democrat and out of the four major parties in the US the Greens come closest to this. I just disagree with their green policies.

How can you agree with the Democrats on ecological issues when Obama keeps talking about "clean coal", something that doesn't even exist?

He's better than the Republicans, but it's not good.

I don't agree with their coal policies, but I disagree with the Greens' nuclear policies even less.
I care more about sustainability than about the climate. The climate will definitely change, but that change is slow and I have enough faith in technology to cope with it. Perhaps it is because I'm Dutch and we figured out how to deal with water over 2000 years ago, but the rising sea levels don't scare me much. The biggest problem here is sustainability. Unless we change the way we life and actually change in the proper way, we will run out of resources in a few decades and that is a bit trickier to fix.
Take for instance electrical cars. Very sustainable, but because of its reliance on lithium ion batteries we won't even be able to replace every existing car with an electrical variant.
Many clean energy sources require neodynium, such as wind energy or hydro energy. Unfortunately, neodynium is pretty rare and the very few reserves we do have are located in China. So these energy sources aren't exactly as sustainable as the Greens would have you believe.
The only reliable and sustainable energy sources currently available are solar and nuclear power. Solar power just has the disadvantage that it requires a lot of space and is pretty expensive. You need to cover a third of the Netherlands with solar panels and spend about 50 billion Euros to provide the Netherlands with its current energy consumption.
And don't even get me started on biofuels or biological foods.

The Greens aren't saving our planet. They are just postponing the collapse to 50 years from now.

Krotomo gave me an Obama pin. Not kidding.

I wish we would spend money on developing hydrogen fuels. That's renewable and it doesn't pollute (unless you count water vapor as a pollutant). The critics always say "Oh, but hydrogen can explode!" Well, what do you think gasoline in your car does? I don't know much about what hydrogen fuels require (in terms of materials for the equipment) but I do know that our army plans to outfit all of our tanks with hydrogen engines asap.
So what do you guys think about hydrogen fuels?

I know absolutely nothing about it, so I will refrain from commenting further.

I know less than Isa, but the way you described it sounds pretty cool. I remember when we learned about different forms of energy in middle school, they talked about future alternatives and they said hydrogen's only weakness was its ability to explode.

Hydrogen fuels... It rings a bell, but I can't quite put my finger on what I've read about it...

I know less than yaya! never heard of the term. However it reminds me, has anyone heard of the National Ignition Facility?

The problem is that you need to produce the hydrogen. You can get some as a waste product from the chemical industry, but that isn't nearly enough for large scale fuel use. And if you produce the hydrogen through electrolysis of water using normal net electricity, you actually end up creating more CO2 than if you were to use normal gasoline.
The solution to this is obviously to produce energy sustainably, preferably through nuclear or wind energy. But until this groundwork exists, hydrogen simply isn't "green".
Funnily enough, if you take all rare resources and production wastes into account, it actually turns out that gasoline cars are the "greenest" option.

And no, hydrogen cars don't explode if they bump into something. The hydrogen is stored at fairly high pressures, so the tanks they are in are probably the sturdiest part of the entire car. They won't rupture that easily.

Nope. National Ignition Facility? That makes a cool acronym.

NIF

That makes me wonder if you could just use coal power with CO2 sequestration to get the hydrogen.

On a related note, what do we think about government funding for research? I heard this idea where instead of funding projects, you offer a reward for results which seems to have had good success on things like the recent oil spill in the gulf of mexico.

Wouldn't that lead to problems? You'd only do research in areas where you "know" you'll be successful.

The idea is that this uses the free market to produce results so if people waste money on bad research avenues, it's their problem and not the taxpayers'. They used this for that oil spill and found that people really, really like engineering things when there's a million dollar reward for it.
EDIT:
I'm thinking about it and it seems like a good addition but not complete replacement. I think it might be worth a pilot run to see if it works and if it does maybe it could reduce the costs of funding research because everyone has a motivation to do it.

That doesn't really address my fears. It creates less incentive to make research in unexplored/difficult to research areas, making science more of a "solver" rather than an "explorer", which is limiting its powers.

I'm not so sure that's true. I mean, science that can't be used to solve any aspect of any problem isn't really worth doing. To me it makes more sense to solve immediate problems immediately and tackle the rest as it comes. This is also where the mixed approach could help, where you have research grants for certain things like Unification theory but you also have a strong incentive for people to focus their skills on pressing matters like a cure for HIV, cheap energy generation, or resilient crops. If we could get a cure for HIV or cancer sooner by pushing back the next break through in theoretical physics, I'm personally ok with that.

There are very few scientific subjects don't have any practical or technical benefits in some way. The CERN invests billions in trying to find particles that are in all likelihood completely useless for technical applications, but out of this research we do get the World Wide Web.
CERN has also greatly improved imaging, which does help to track down and combat cancer.
Einstein's Relativity at first also seemed like little more than theoretical mumbo jumbo without any practical applications. But a few decades later, its use in technology became obvious. Do you think GPS would be possible if we didn't understand Einstein's Relativity?

There are surprisingly little areas in Experimental Physics which don't provide some improvement in technology.

But wouldn't your method make sure that curing cancer or HIV gets pushed back? It's a complicated subject where research is likely to show that their hypothesis won't hold, and so they wouldn't receive grants under your suggestion, since they haven't been successful.

Moreover it's more difficult to start researching if you get your money after you're done because there's simply not enough money to pay for everything needed at all times.

Ninja'd since long.