Science and religion are completely opposite ways of thinking

People who believe in science believes in the scientific method.
That's different than people who believe in say, evolution theory alone.

So in both ends you have people who believe in different methods of finding the truth, one from discoveries from physical reality, the other from blind faith.They are really incompatible. You can't admit that you are for empiricism without throwing faith away.

Threatening someone with crippling financial blows won't make them love us forever

Someone posted the question

Marriage is a relic of the past. Threatening someone with crippling financial blows won't make them love us forever.

I've always thought that marriage is never about love, more towards utility - raising children, task specialization in the household, more permanent emotional support (because it has a bit more staying power compared to other social relationships), etc.

The financial blows are more of a matter of retribution. Something like "If one day you stop loving me, or don't want to work things out anymore..."

What Americans think

If no one believed in God

does that mean God will cease to exist?

If humanity never believed in a God or a creator, not only will God be absent in our minds, as we alreadt know, it will be absent in the physical world as well.

It's all in the head. And that's why it is called "faith".

The Pyramids and the Great Wall are monuments of shame

Why do people consider the Pyramids of Gaza and the Great Wall of China to be something of pride? If it was to stand for something, it would be that anything is possible when you are willing to forget about welfare of many milions by subjugating them to cruel labour.

It's a shame that such projects are done in the first place. No one's life is worth any other person's bragging rights, pride, nor vanity.

Ironically, many of these same people are asking the government to scrap multimillion worth mega projects in favor for smaller stimuli that would benefit the poor more. What hypocrites.

Dr. Mahathir bin Mohammad probably spent so much tax-payer's money on building structures that look nice because he thought that in the end, it is these who people are proud and happy with. The sad thing is how popular history has given him this idea - how people have wrote about the greatness of the leaders who built it. Much worse however, is how people attribute such buildings to him in a positive light.

That's simply sad. Anyone knows how to spend. Give me a nation's money and ask me to spend it, I'll spend it anytime of the day, in what ever speed you want it be.

Crime rates and crime insolvency rates statistics do not influence actual crime rates

The title is long, so let me mention it again. This is about how crime rates and crime insolvency rates statistics do not influence actual crime rates.

I have a theory to explain this. But before that let's go a bit into why I'm writing about this.

People often attribute higher crime rates to weakening law enforcement or lower successful prosecution. Because of this, they blame law enforcement agencies for not doing their job and they point out that such incompetence will only worsen the problem by promoting even more crime.

I believe that in most cases, this line of reasoning is wrong.

People will always believe that they have better luck. Although statistics quotes for high divorce rates, newlyweds go into marriages with the idea that theirs will be a happy and lasting one. Have they thought about the scenario of a divorce, of being a single mother, an abusive spouse and all?

People who commit crime will always believe that they are the part of the statistics of not getting caught for their crimes, or not successfully persecuted in court. The reasoning is that there are crime that are caught, just as there are marriages that are broken, but that their crimes will not be caught.

Because of this, they commit crime. People who are bad enough and who thinks like this will commit crime. People who are bad enough but who do not think like this, and rather ponders about the scenario of getting caught will not commit crime.

I believe however, that extreme cases are an exception. In extreme cases, I mean where crime solvency statistics are very high, or very low. That's why you have lawless states where crime rates are high and states where people are so afraid of the enforcement agencies that crime rates are very low. The latter case is not found in liberal democracies with a relatively limited government however.

Are the severity of sentences then an influence to crime rates? I believe not, with the exception again for extreme cases. 20 years in prison is very very long time, heck, a large portion of the population isn't even 20 years old and really no one has the right to claim that 20 years is insufficient for any crime not amounting to murder. But rapists who could potentially land themselves this long behind steel bars have definitely not got scared enough by such punishment. My take is that when they commit the rape, they don't think about the 20 years, they think about getting away with it. So even if it was 30 years or 40 years, rape cases shouldn't drastically decline, except when victims are afraid that their family get in prison for 40 years.

But then again, if parking illegally is punishable by death, no one would park illegally. An example of an extreme case.

U.S. economy is $1 trillion per year richer as a result of trade

From the Wall Street Journal

Careful studies at our Peterson Institute for International Economics show that the U.S. economy is $1 trillion per year richer as a result of the trade liberalization of the past 60 years, and that we would gain another $500 billion per year if the world could move to totally free trade.

This is exactly the reason why I'm still thinking of not supporting Obama. He's a populist that tells people that free and open trade is bad, thus his stand that NAFTA needs to be renegotiated.

Weapons as deterrents of war

Senthil wrote

For example, if we were to take a peek into history, we would come to a conclusion there have been groups or even nations that have risked possible annihilation by either resisting more powerful armies or even trying to provoke a fight between themselves and a nation with much greater firepower then them. Take for example the terrorists. In pursuing what they are doing, terrorists and nations that harbor terrorists often run the risk of being completely annihilated by the nuclear arms and other high tech weaponry of its more powerful adversaries. And as we have seen, many of these weapons which are supposed to act as deterrents have failed to do its job and have been used in combat and subsequently taken the lives of many terrorists and innocent civilians alike.

So, having said that, we can now realize that having a bigger gun doesn't necessarily mean that it will prevent conflicts between a small power and a bigger power. Which means that more people will end up getting killed by this weapon anyways.

There is a modern example of a nation going to war with an opponent that would almost certainly crush it without much effort - Iraq under Saddam Hussein vs the USA. You probably think this is ammo against the idea that WMDs are effective deterrents of war.

They probably still are (WMDs are deterrents of war), at least when you actually have governments that either genuinely care for its people, or that is duty bound to serve the best interests of its people. When one is democratically elected at the pleasure of the people, one wouldn't commit too many actions that would remove one from office.

Of course it becomes tricky again when you have people that ultimately only cares about themselves. Armies have fought just to keep the political status-quo AKA just because I still want to be king, my subjects shall die defending my political power. Leaders of such description may after all, just let bombs incinerate their people.

So are WMDs a good war deterrent? They sure are when leadership is sane.

If you know you would lose an arm or an eye, rationally you wouldn't get into the fight.
Some of us would just still charge in and lose our lives, these are like Saddam.

Obviously WMDs don't work against terrorists. If they really do care for their people, they would have spared their women and children by not hiding among them after launching a rocket attack. They probably just want these meat shields dead to fuel more hate against their opponents.

McCain's, Clinton's gas tax holiday

Hillary Clinton and John McCain recently proposed the idea of a tax holiday for gas/oil in the States to "help middle and low groups". A tax holiday basically pauses the desired tax.

A reader of the link pointed:

You don’t have to look much further than Central NY to see how disastrous a suspension of a gas tax can be. Oswego County suspended its portion of the gas tax to “help” local residents. The overall impact…gas prices did not go down by the 5 cent tax as the lawmakers fully expected…The savings flowed directly to the pockets of the gas station owners and suppliers.

The legislators were perplexed and taken aback that the gas stations didn’t pass along the savings. Can you imagine that?

Not too hard to figure why.

As prices go down, it stimulates demand
demand goes up
suppliers pay less tax, supposedly they have more incentive to produce more
but supply of oil is inelastic, it doesn't change
so prices go up again.

This is almost the exact same point that I've been trying to make for the Malaysian oil subsidies. Subsidies stimulate demand, demand goes up, we consume more oil than we would otherwise have consumed if subsides were instead abolished to be used to fund tax cuts - where we can buy more food, or maybe DSLRs. It's not equal.

I'm almost convinced however that a lot of lay people will buy Clinton's idea. People simply believe that the idea of free lunch is pretty much alive when it involves the government.

Old women

I just realized,
although I can recognize different faces of young Chinese girls,
the old ones all look the same to me.

I'm not too sure about the other races. Just making this particular observation since I'm ethnic Chinese myself.

Dead

Collected results for General Physics 2 and Organic CHemistry 1...

Worst results and GPA in my life.

I'm dead. I don't know how to tell it to my parents.

I may go into a depression anytime now.