Izzy

*facepalm* Okay, here we go. Again. You can explain something with absolute clarity and it can still NOT MAKE SENSE because I DO NOT UNDERSTAND WHY YOU HOLD THAT OPINION. As an unrelated example, you can say "My favorite color is brown", add a bunch of reasons, and I can still say "I do not understand why your favorite color is brown, brown is an ugly color. What you're saying does not make sense." The difference is what you're arguing for isn't as subjective as favorite colors, so ALTHOUGH YOU HAVE EXPLAINED IT, IT DOESN'T MAKE SENSE BECAUSE YOUR ARGUMENT IS SILLY. I'm not misunderstanding your reasons for choosing why you're against giving money to hospitals, I'm just not understanding why you're against it at all, regardless of those reasons. Another example. Person 1: Oh, I think we should kill the mentally retarded. Person 2: Huh? Why?! Person 1: Oh, they put a strain on society, don't produce anything, get in the way, will never reproduce succesful offspring, drool, etc. Person 2: I don't understand how you could think that! Person 1: I JUST EXPLAINED WHY I THINK THAT. Person 2: ...Chill out broski. Jesus. I was going to drop it. So, no, if we're playing the blame game, you're "it" for holding an insane view most people in this thread can't understand, and, just to be absolutely clear here, understand, as in "I don't understand why person 1 would want to kill those people; how could he think that?"

Oh god, I figured out how to prevent all that. Let me fix the statement that sparked this. If I won the lottery, but it had the stipulation that I had to kill a baby in order to get the money, I would save the baby, even if it meant the money funded a terrorist organization instead. There. Don't take that too seriously. I was trying to get the point across that I think baby > money, and reinforcing that with something harder, like burning, which just turned into terrorists. You missed the point entirely and sparked an unrelated debate (wasting everyone's time) for the sake of doing so. This could have been prevented with a simple "Burning it doesn't get rid of its value because <your thoughts here>", when I would have continued with an "Oh, very well, I see what you mean. Let me change my statement." Go read my three person scenario. That's why we were confused, not because we weren't reading your posts.

I don't have time to reply to the rest right now, but this stood out to me. What part of "Your posts made absolutely no sense" didn't you understand? Thank you for turning what was once a productive thread into pointless arguments about irrelevant things because you couldn't win any of the other arguments. When you're done acting like a child and accept my congratulations, you can come back, but until then, go away, you're wasting everyone's time. (Note, I don't think I can actually make you get out, but you should. I'd hate to waste YOUR time any further.)

Actually, saving you (and eventually myself) the effort. Congratulations, after Unreality clarified and reexplained what you were talking about, I came to the realization that I was in agreement with you. The point you vicariously made through Unreality was correct. While I agreed with that specific point anyway and would have from the beginning if it made any sense, if you combine my disagreement with your first point (the point that was still wrong, but that's not what you were trying to say, so I'll forgive you) with what you actually meant when Unreality explained it several pages later, you were right. Congratz. I think that makes you like 1 for 10 or so. Way to go bro. Print this sh*t and frame it. (Then again, it was about as legit as saying "The sky is black sometimes.", but whatever, you can have your little victory if it means that much to you.)

Hit me up with your miracles. I'm telling you, there's always an explanation. It's not overwhelming proof, because it's impossible to disprove a negative, but if you're really interested and really want answers, read God: The Failed Hypothesis.

And yes, I know WHAT we're arguing about, but whhhyy. Whhhyy the hell do these hypothetical situations matter? This is such a f***ing waste of time.

Right, first things first. When I said I'd rather burn my one billion dollar lottery earnings than let a baby die, that was something I was saying on a moral, not economical basis. I was saying I would decline money to save a baby. Because that money never went to me and belong to the government, the government does lose money, because the money is adjusted evenly. So if the government has 10 shells, persons One, Two, Three, Four, and Five all have 1 shell, and because of me the government has to destroy 2 of their shells, we go from this: Gov: 10 1: 1 2: 1 3: 1 4: 1 5: 1 Me: 0 to Gov: 8 1: 1 2: 1 3: 1 4: 1 5: 1 Me: 0 After it gets adjusted, each shell is now worth 2/15 of a shell more, so: Gov: 9.0666 1: 1.33 2: 1.33 3: 1.33 4: 1.33 5: 1.33 Me: 0 The government still LOSES money, even if other peoples' money gains worth. So, suddenly, if health care for our islanders costs 2 shells a person and the government only has 9 shells, someone gets screwed. Like Unreality said, the prices items are bartered at adjust gradually. If person 1 is a shop owner and he sees that most people now have more money, he's going to raise prices. No one was disputing that the net worth of the civilization stays the same. We were just saying the burning money (wasting resources) period is stupid. The specific shells that were destroyed are now valueless, but we understand that their value was transfered. So what I was saying was that I thought a baby was worth more than 1 shell to the government. Btw, I'd consider a 10% lost in wealth "being hurt in a significant way". So again, burning money DOES hurt some people. Then again, so does demolishing things. It works the same way, though. If my house is worth 1 shell and I destroy it, the time/effort to make another house aside, the houses around mine are now worth more because there are now less places to live. While I'd rather have a house than a shell, I'd rather have shells to barter for other things like food. So if presented with this situation: You have 10 shells and a house worth 10 shells. Your job is to gather water, and while you have an infinite supply, water is more easily attained and cleansed than food, so while you make 1 shell/day for selling water, you use about 2 shells/day for food. Eventually, your shells are running low, and you only have enough shells left to buy food for a day or so. You have the following options: a. Raise the price of water, but know someone else will just compete with you, eventually closing your small business. b. Sell your house and prolong the time until you starve. c. Slowly starve to death and hope your neighbors are sympathetic. d. Go hunt for your own food but get killed by the wild boars. e. Steal either food or shells and get fed to the wild boards by the villagers. f. This dude offers that if you destroy your house, he'll give you a job in the food collection guild. g. Prostitution! h. Rent out your house, still not make enough, and go back to the boar thing, getting nommed to death. Let's assume you pick F because it's the only option that allows you to survive, and you're uncomfortable with G. The dude made this offer because if you destroy your house, the value of his house (your house was prettier than his house, but now his house is prettier) goes up more than what he would have gotten from the combined worth of your house + his house. (Money for being the prettiest, and for having one less house. Alternatively, he could have kept your house and destroyed his own, but your house is haunted.) ..There's a point in there somewhere. I sort of forgot where I was going with it and just started having fun. One of the things I don't understand if how you can see how burning money doesn't get rid of society's net wealth, but you're still against the transfer of money from the government to hospitals. Yeah, reread. You were still unclear. You still failed to make the point that Unreality eventually made for you. Drop it. I've admitted I'm wrong in an internet debate once. Not because of pride, because mid debate I actually realized I was completely wrong about something because I hadn't realized it. Then someone explained it to me and I changed my mind. (Lmao, just looked it up. Me: Bah. S**t, I think you guys are right. I'm not happy about it, but, gah. Forumite: LOL WHAT? NO IZZY NO. *tackles* NOOOO.) That because they actually explained something (this was regarding the age of consent) that made changing my mind worth it. You, in your ridiculous quantity of posts failed to do that. Had you been clear the first time (I'm not saying you're at fault), this would have been avoided, and there'd be no need for this continuation of that argument. You can't change what you're saying mid-debate (if you'll notice, I agreed with you when you actually got it out right), and then go "HAH, see, I was right from the beginning, now SUBMIT TO ME." It's uncool. And oh god, I mixed up one page with four pages, don't get your panties in a bundle. Hey, I can use annoyingly enlarged font too, but it doesn't magically make me right. Okay, to your questions. Yeah, you answered them, no need to elaborate there. What you were saying earlier was that burning the money doesn't hurt society whatsoever, and you can see above that it hurts individual people. As someone who isn't a source of infinite money, if _I_ burn the 2.5k that could be used to buy a Mac, I'm just as screwed as I would be if I bought the Mac and dropped it or something. ..But back to what we were saying earlier. Macs can be reproduced as easily as money. Some larger scale projects like houses or space ships would hurt society, but something small like a Mac wouldn't. Question four. As shown above, the government loses about 10% of that money. It is redistributed, but the government loses 10%. If you used the money to buy buildings, again, the value of EVERYTHING IS READJUSTED. The buildings in the vicinity of those buildings are NOW WORTH MORE because the other building was DESTROYED. So, you STILL don't get rid of the value. Person C: Dear Person B, please go get a $1 bill and a lighter. Please set that one dollar bill, physically in your hand, on fire. Do you see how burning that one dollar bill destroyed the value of the one dollar bill you physically burned? Exterminated from existence forever, unless you report your claim to some lost money claim service. Do you see how person c was confused because person b didn't express what he meant? Do you also see how if person B didn't burn that particular dollar, but bought a lego house instead, that dollar would still be in use and have value while the house doesn't? You destroyed the value of the house, not the dollar. Ffs.

So you prefer everything happening to be perfectly coordinated, meaning your entire life is predetermined, including your death, natural disasters, etc.? I'll check out Fatima later. There's this chart I cba to find, but after the big bang, there was a certain amount of entropy in the universe, and this entropy has always been increasing. But as time goes on, the room for order in the universes increases faster then the entropy, so we gain the appearance of being orderly. We are more ordered than we were at the beginning, but still wholly chaotic. Actually.. lemme find it. Here: You do realize that even if God created the Big Bang and then sort of went away afterwards allowing evolution to take its course, there's still less than .00000000...1 of a chance that if repeated, we would still be here? The chances are just as unlikely as the entire universe just coming into existence, yet it happened. You realize that, right? *edit* Checked out Fatima. Have you ever stared at the sun? "Professor Auguste Meessen of the Institute of Physics, Catholic University of Leuven, has stated that the reported observations were optical effects caused by prolonged staring at the sun. Meessen contends that retinal after-images produced after brief periods of sun gazing are a likely cause of the observed dancing effects. Similarly Meessen states that the colour changes witnessed were most likely caused by the bleaching of photosensitive retinal cells.[25] Meessen observes that Sun Miracles have been witnessed in many places where religiously charged pilgrims have been encouraged to stare at the sun. He cites the apparitions at Heroldsbach, Germany (1949) as an example, where exactly the same optical effects as at Fatima were witnessed by more than 10,000 people.[25] Meessen also cites a British Journal of Ophthalmology article that discusses some modern examples of Sun Miracles[26] Nickell also suggests that the dancing effects witnessed at Fatima may have been due to optical effects resulting from temporary retinal distortion caused by staring at such an intense light.[23]"

The world is the way it is because of the conditions we have. Had there have been different conditions, all that means is that everything would have been different. Yes, it is by extreme luck that we're here, but you have to realize that evolution and the world aren't geared toward us, and it really just is a happen chance. It's highly probabilistic that something would have been different, and then there'd be some other species here or elsewhere nothing like us asking the same questions. THAT species isn't here right now, they didn't get the .000000....1 that they needed. We did. It's less magical if some sky fairy did it. We can explain almost exactly how we got here post-Big Bang, and pre-Big Bang theories are coming along nicely. They work without a creator, so I don't see the need to invent something superfluous. There's nothing to suggest he's here, and we can get exactly where we are without him. Think about it with a card pack. A standard deck of cards has 52 cards. That means if I shuffle them and then lay them down on the table in a certain order, there's a 1:52! (1: 8.06581752 × 10^67) chance they landed the way they did. If I add in more cards, the chances decrease. But the point is that they get into an order whatsoever, not a specific order. People just assume God had to make the cards fall a certain way (so to say) so that we'd be here, but that's far from the case. They fell, we're here.

Okay, don't get ahead of yourself. The people on this forum, myself included, don't go around blindly agreeing and disagreeing with each other. I disagreed with you because you didn't elaborate on your view whatsoever and from the one sentence explanation you gave of "burning money doesn't destroy its value" didn't clarify what you meant. So the discussion went on longer than necessary because of your own inability to articulate your meaning, not because we didn't understand you. We understand what you were saying - you just weren't saying what you meant to say. By "burning money doesn't destroy its value", the it seemed to refer to that specific money, hence the confusion. Until a page ago, you didn't clarify on that, so of course we're going to disagree because money > ashes. Even Dawh, who I'll consider the standard of forum excellence (he has a way of seemingly understanding everything with absolute clarity and making everything he says sound appealing ), was confused. So don't pin this on me and expect an admission of wrongness because you weren't clear. I think one minor error you're making is that the government doesn't know when money is lost or burned. It's not really something you report, so there's no way to adjust it. If there was a way, false reports would get flagged all the time just to make the money a person has worth more. ....Right. What was the point to all that again?

Mixed feelings. Personally, I find any institution of religious worship a waste of land, effort, and money. (Fundamentalism? Forget that rock n' roll.) However, since I don't see us disposing of our churches any time soon, just build the thing. Muslims are entitled to the same rights as other believers, and some were indisputably killed in the terrorist attack and deserve to be commemorated in some way. "Wouldn't religious tolerance and acceptance be a far greater legacy for that site than one that perpetuates the kind of wholesale hatred and intolerance that was at the root of the very attacks themselves?" is the best I've heard it put. People that oppose this are just as bad as the terrorists that carried out the attacks in the first place by idiotically hating or fearing something they don't understand. Contrary to popular belief, Islam isn't violent, doesn't promote suicide bombings, and actively opposes terrorist attacks. ..It's Christianity + another prophet. Wtf's the big deal? So, it depends on who's financing it. If it's some private religious organization, be my guest, build away. If it's tax payer money (I haven't looked into it, but I doubt it is), then hell nooo, that's my money you're spending on sky fairies (but the same holds true for Christian churches, so if the question were instead "Should a church be built on Ground Zero?", I would elicit the same response).

Yeah, but, let's pretend we paid the $1 billion to save the baby. So $1 billion goes from the government to the hospital, to the hospital employees. Eventually, all the money is dispersed. I just googled some income tax percentages, and since it's anywhere between 10% to 35%, let's say the government automatically gets 25% of that money back, just from taxes. Now, anything these people buy with the money that made ($750 million worth), the government also gets back at 7% per dollar. So if all that money is spent, the government now has an additional $52.5 million, giving them just over $300 million. What was actually a $1 billion operation ended up only costing $700 million. Had anyone else paid for the operation, they lose the full $1 billion. The government paying for it sounds pretty cost-effective if you ask me. From taxes alone (this is all guesswork), I think the government has about 25% of the nation's money at any given time (like the actual money, not including the value houses and stuff have). So even as it "loses" money when it pays for things like billion dollar holes, it.. doesn't really, because it gains it back in other ways and is continuously getting money from other places. Money is just moved around, and it can still be used to buy $1 billion dollars worth of food when in other hands. In fact, it probably is, eventually, because the paychecks that the hospital workers get are used in part to buy food, and the other things they spend money on pays the paychecks of other people, who, I'm sure, also eat food.

Adding to what Unreality just said; humans are as irreplaceable as the Mona Lisa, so when it comes to destroying buildings that can be rebuilt or killing a person that can never be reborn, it makes more sense to choose the former, regardless of the inconvenience it causes at the time.

Haha, wait, *I* missed your point? No, let me break down what just happened. UtF: *attempts to make a point about some jobs, such as digging a hole and refilling it, being pointless, a waste of money, resources, and effort. Such senseless jobs are clearly in vain and hold back society as a hole* Izzy: *elaborates on what digging and refilling could actually be, giving it meaning and purpose, and points out how tasks that would require holes to be built and filled back in are advantageous to society, especially when uncovering our past or installing something* Evidently, your infinite wisdom is only matched with your incompetence at appreciating the value of things, from material possessions to human beings. Simply because you don't see worth or purpose in <noun> doesn't mean other people don't and doesn't mean these properties don't exist for <noun>. Look, I'll do it again. That dude you're paying to sit in a cage? Yeah, he isn't just sitting there. He's actually being observed by scientists and experts on isolation mechanisms so we can attain a better understanding of the effects temporary quarantine has on the human mind. Such a study will undoubtedly revolutionize time-out and jail systems because if adverse effects are ascertained, new techniques will need to be contrived promptly, for the sake of humanity. Feel free to throw another "pointless" job at me. Humans are innovative, and I assure you everything that people are given payment for doing serves a purpose to *someone*. Whether or not it's for the greater good is beyond me and wholly irrelevant. You were the one arguing for people to have freedom to their own money anyway, lol. You're too busy trying to create your utopia that you lose sight of the rights that get trampled on in the meantime. I realize it's probably inadvertent and that you're not trying to come off as extremist as you sound.. but.. *shrug* We just have different priorities. Yours involve money, most peoples' involve human happiness and peace. You're grossly outnumbered (in the real world, not just from the ten or so person sample we have going on in this thread), come off as insane, and need to realize that occasionally you're not going to get your way and that it's better to give up a losing war than continue on making a fool of yourself in the process; I know, I've been there (*sings* Lost the battle, lost the war / Lost the things worth living for / Lost the will to win the fight / One more pill to kill the pain / Lalalalala / Nanananana / Lalalala / Nanananana / The human (existence), is failing (resistance), essential (the future), written off (the odds are), astronomically against us / Only moron or genius / would fight a losing battle / against a super ego / when giving in is so damn comforting). ..Yeah. Good song. *edit* Something I was discussing with someone today. Command+f this page. Type in 'thus'. Select highlight all. Cringe. http://thesaurus.com/browse/thus Please and thank you.

XYLYL

You don't know why digging holes and filling them back up could be useful. The people could be archaeologists excavating a new site, find nothing, and not want to leave a distubance. They could be treasure hunters. They could be checking for undergroud caves. They could want a sample of the aquifer. They could be installing underground piping, but the process is split between companies, so one digs the hole, another installs the stuff, and the previous one refills the hole. Sounds like a good job to me. Lol, just give them money? The last 30 pages made me think you were entirely against that. Nono, I'm not talking about an Einstein. I mean, the actual dude. Imagine six year old Einstein, still hardly uttering words, has a brain tumor that needs to be removed (and its removal won't damage anything). With it, he'll be mental for the rest of his life, without it, a supergenius. His family can't afford it, so it's up to tax payers, and in this hypothetical situation, you to decide what to do. You are presented this situation twice. When Einstein is actually six, and right now, after knowing full well what Einstein did. What do you do? And I'm not saying every child is going to be an Einstein, I'm saying you have NO way of judging who will and who won't, so the more people you allow to needlessly die, the lower the potential of uncovering another is. Even if someone isn't Einstein, say they're just a cool artist, writer, musician, or scientist. They're "minor" contribuations are just as important to people that have different interests. I can't force someone to enjoy the beauty of special relativity because they might enjoy the genius of Slash (a pot-smoking high school drop out) instead. Neither Slash nor Einstein have made a billion dollars, but if either of them needed some sort of operation, I can't help but people would vehemently enforce it, in either case.

CLERK

What if Einstein needed a heart surgeory you knew he couldn't afford? Would you support tax payers paying for his need? If you say yes, it's only because you can't remove the bias you have for Einstein. Anyone can be an Einstein, hell the dude didn't even talk until he was six and then worked in the post office. *edit* It's also likely the random person that would die to save the buildings would be someone just as cool as Einstein, like Stephen Hawking or Black Francis. Regardless of who it is, they're someone's family, and mean the world to someone. Do you realize how absurd your proposition sounds now/

Wow, seriously? Okay. You just finished high school, right? Go withdraw all the money our parents have saved for uni., create a pretty piece of art work with it, and set it on fire. Be sure to let us know how that went for you.

One more quick thing, because I think it makes your point clearer than destroying New York. If you could see into the future and know that Katrina would destroy New Orleans, or that the hurricane that hit Haiti and the flood that hit Pakistan would do immense amounts of damage, and the only method of prevention would be killing a randomly selected person (quite possibly among the people to die anyway), I still wouldn't do it. These people died natural deaths and were the victims of chance. There's no reason for anyone to play God (it's an analogy - don't go there) and choose who lives and who dies just because the outcome may be better one way or another. Use the Force is your name, after all, let's get a little Jedi-y here. (If you're sith, disregard this, but if you're not, remember as a Jedi it's your responsibility to maintain peace, not shatter. It save people, not kill them - no matter the cost. If you're neither Jedi nor Sith, care to be neither, and think this is silly, you should have picked a different username, because you're not doing it justice.) Emotion, yet peace. I think you've made it clear why, from an emotional standview, the things you're saying make sense to you. You're baffled by everyone's stupidity, and would prefer if people that don't benefit society (and therefore you) didn't exist. This is an emotional response to stimulus I can't even imagine. However, over come whatever you're fighting and struggle for peace. Ignorance, yet knowledge. We can call each other igorant back and forth, and we'll never get anywhere. The second you realize this and that ignorance will always exist, you've transcended your ignorance and have suddenly become a notch more knowledgeable. Simply ignoring facts that do not fit with your viewpoint is foolish. Passion, yet serenity. You're clearly passionate about your position, but you need to control it and chill with the insults. I myself called you an idiot earlier (well, indirectly), and I apolize (the tenets are easy to forget sometimes >_>). Use your emotions, but wisely, lest you act rashly and lose objectivity. Then, instead of a creative discussion, the thread turns into spite and hate, loosely hiding behind the guise of politics. (...The way of the Sith. ) Chaos, yet harmony. Eh, nothing really to elaborate on this one. Death, yet the Force. This goes with what I was saying earlier. Death exists, but none of us should go out and cause it, and honestly, we should try to actively combat it. Killing should only take place when necessary, like to prevent a death the person themself will cause beyond a reasonable doubt (ie, going back in time and assassinating Hitler) or in times of self-defence (Obi-won vs. Darth Maul). So even if sacrificing a random person could stop natural disasters, doing so is as barbaric as what the Aztecs did, and I really think we're at that point in history where we've overcome such primative tribalism.

Are you incapable of reading, or just logically following one from one statement to another? Money > ashes. That's why, had I not burned that money, I would have a new Macbook. But I did, so I'm left with a valueless pile of ashes. The cashier can't accept my payment because the value of what I'm trying to pay with has been entirely destroyed when it was set alight. Adding a little to unreality's example. Farmer: I want someone to build me a house! I'll pay them $9! Builder: Aye sir, I'll gladly do it. Farmer: Hooray, let me pay you in advance. *pays* Farmer: *builds house* Money in play: $9 in the hands of the builder, and a house valued at $9 for the farmer, which he can sell. So, with this exchange, the networth of the country has actually gone up because a new house was created. If the builder burns his money, the farmer still has $9 worth of materials, and vice versa. If both burn the money and house, then it's like nothing ever happend, and the farmer is out $9 and the builder is out several hours of hard labor. My point? The burning of products, be it money or lightsabers, makes them valueless. If I buy a Macbook and then burn it, the money, now in the hands of the Apple Corporation is still in play and can be used to do other things. So.. at everything you said. On to debt. I'm not saying it isn't serious, but I'm saying every sensible person realizes there are more serious things to worry about. It's just /money/. I'm sick of people think everything revolves around money and I'm sick of living in a system that makes things impossible without money. Yeah, it's an awesome way to trade, and I personally can't think of a better system, but it's disgusting. Money should be knocked down a peg and seen as what it is - an item for trading. And then people need to be seen as items that cannot be traded. UtF, how much would you sell your children into slavery for? $1 billion? Two? Okay, maybe not your children, because you love them. Someone else's children? The children at the orphanage? "But Izzy, there labor would never be worth $1 billion." Ah, but what if they're working the cocaine fields down in Colombia? Okay, let's say you find a child, and our magical glass ball allowing us to see in the future shows that where he currently lives, he'll never contribute more than $5000 to society. However, if you sell him into slavery, he'll contribute $499,999, exactly. Do you sell him, knowing full well his new life will suuuck? Or, if he would contribute $5000 to society as he is, would you sell him for $5001? $5002? Just trying to figure out where you stand on all this. That would explain why nothing you say makes sense. I'm sorry, I'm not trying to reinforce my view that, "[my] views as superior to [yours]. that are smarter than [you], that [you] don't know what I'm talking about" (), but.. wtf? Giving people jobs stimulates the economy and keeps the money flowing so it doesn't sit around in banks. It decreases our unemployment rate and makes people self-sustaining so they don't have to rely on government welfare to survive. It boosts the net-worth of our nation. Please go take an economics class and come back when you understand something as basic as the importance of jobs.

Skimmed much of what you just wrote. Bro, on this name-calling thing you've got going on, I'm more than willing to set up a poll and let the users decide which one of us is the bigger idiot. ..Man that makes me feel immature. It needed to be said. Watch yourself. *edit* Will reply to the rest later after I've played with my new lightsaber that just came in the mail. I'm thinking it's a birthday present I wasn't meant to open, but it had /my/ name on it.. so..

Which is why we need tax increases, not cuts. If you're so interested in paying off the debt that honestly no one else has the intention of paying off, you should support this. Yeah, we technically owe $13 trillion, but the majority of that we owe China, and because we're political allies, they aren't exactly asking for it. In fact, if we were to make it our primary goal to pay China back, we'd have to stop buying their products in the mean time (so we don't further the debt), and they'd actually lose way more money than they'd get. So, while the situation isn't exactly just, the parties involved don't consider it a big a deal as some other things, like, idk, people /dying/. You really have to consider the debt more of an arbitrary number than anything. Btw, how would we be furthering the national debt is the money stays in the US and is just transferred from tax payers to hospitals? Think that one through? Willful ignorance is generally frowned upon. There's a lot of places a billion dollars shouldn't go that tax payers are forced to fund, the war on drugs and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan being three great examples. These total up to hundreds of billions (possibly trillions, cba to look up the numbers) of dollars and benefit no one. A necessary health operation actually benefits someone and costs considerably less. So yeah, do it. Wtf dude? What's up with your cold outlook on life? Human life is special. It only came about because of an entirely random collision of atoms at certain times combining and evolving just the right way. Had anything been different, it's likely we wouldn't be here. Houses, iPods, and really awesome poi sets are human creations, entirely valueless without humans. We owe our life to the stars, they owe their "life" to us. Something that can easily be recreated (a building for example) is valueless compared to the unique combination of sperm and egg creating a person that, even if cloned, is entirely different from every other person. Life isn't going to last forever. We need to enjoy it and make the best of it while it's here. No matter how you put it, life will always be of more value than money. You should realize how special it is before it's gone. =/ ...Wtf? Izzy: *withdraws $2500 from the bank* Izzy: *burns said money* Izzy: *keeps ashes and walks into Apple store* Izzy: *proceeds to buy a new Macbook pro, whipping out the ashes as currency* Cashier: ...Wtf? Izzy: BURNING IT DOESN'T GET RID OF ITS VALUE. Cashier: ... Uhh. I can't accept that as payment, sorry. Izzy: *cries* Lol, do you read what I write? Jesus Christ child. You have an entire thread of people (well, you did before, they'll come back) telling you life and money cannot be compared. If you disagree, fine, but don't keep coming back and making the exact same points, because frankly it's tiring, not to mention fecking unnecessary.

Why? It doesn't make any sense to have tax payer money pile up and not go to any use. Okay. Again, you aren't really being realistic. If you're going to shove the worth of a billion dollars down our throats, realize that no operation will ever cost a billion dollars. And yes, I value the lives of 100 people over buildings. We can ALWAYS build more. Each life happens once, is special, and this is undisputable. You look at all humans as the same being, and I'm saying they're all different with an inherent right to life. If I won a billion dollars in the lottery but there was some stipulation where I had to randomly go out and kill a baby first, I wouldn't do it. If it meant the money would be burned instead, I still wouldn't do it. The world was surviving before that money came into play and it will continue doing so without it; the life of an innocent baby shouldn't be involved. You consider this crazy, I say I'm a normal person with empathy. You're emotionless and possibly sociopathic (in reference to the lack of empathy, I'm not calling you crazy or anything). ...Though as a sociopath you would have realized it by now and attempt to feign normal feelings, so that gets thrown out, but there are similarities. What I'm trying to convey here is that you shouldn't trade life for money. It's great if money can be used to help people, but it's unfair to jeopardize the lives of other uninvolved people to help other people. I'm not missing your point, I disagree with it. You're not "enlightening" us, you're proposing an alternative viewpoint that most people disagree with. Oh, and your view isn't some exceptional genius political-revolutionizing idea. ...It's half a step away from insanity. I can't really remember if I said it or not (got distracted halfway through, sorry if the flow is weird), but I'd knock down all buildings currently under construction (including part of my school haha) to save the lives of 100 people.

I don't know if you'll accept it as a word, but : http://www.shamafoundation.org/ SHAMA If/when this scores 1, it is from the last a, because the s is eliminated by sleek, the h from theme, the a from roast, and the m from theme.