KJW

The printing press? Why are you bringing up this straw man from the 15th century? I never suggested that all technology encroaches on freedom and control. I pointed to particular technology, indicating how they are making us vulnerable to authoritarianism. One technology I didn't mention because, although it poses a substantial risk to our freedom and privacy, it also exposes the evil actions of overlords, is the proliferation of cameras. The thing about a lot of technology is that it provides us with benefits that results in us accepting the technology into our lives only to find that the technology can also be used against us. It perhaps should worry us that we voluntarily carry a tracking device with us wherever we go. And that tracking device could also be a listening device. That may be paranoia, but can any of you say for certain that a mobile phone is not acting as a listening device? That's a problem with much of technology: the users of the technology cannot know exactly how it works. Australia has recently banned under-16-year-olds from accessing social media. Many people support this as social media can be a dangerous place for children. But the consequence of this is that all (adult) Australians now have to somehow identify themselves to use social media. At present, a VPN may be able to get around the age-verification process. But as more countries adopt age-based restrictions on accessing the internet, and as VPN detection becomes more effective, VPNs will become less effective as a means to bypass age-verification. Gradually, we are finding that our ability to use the internet anonymously is being eroded away. I'll admit to some resistance to new technology based on a natural desire to maintain the status quo. But I can see the benefits of particular technology. And I can also see the dangers of particular technology. About 30 years ago, I was a believer of the idea that a fair society should be run by computers. But since then, having experienced glimpses of what such a society would be like, I no longer believe in a society run by computers. The fundamental problem with dealing with computers is that one can't negotiate with them. For example, a few years ago, I wanted to create a new Outlook email account. However, before I could do that, I had to prove that I was not a robot. But due to the arms race between producing tasks that robots can't solve, and producing robots that can solve such tasks, the requirement that ordinary humans are able to solve the tasks was forgotten. Unable to solve the task, I had to abandon creating a new Outlook email account and go with Gmail instead. Subsequently, Microsoft realised their mistake and reverted back to something that doesn't require a savant to solve. Usually, the option of an alternative task is provided (for the visually impaired), but for some reason this didn't work. Whether AI will make computers easier to negotiate with is hard to say, but I suspect that AI will be more idiosyncratic to deal with. Are you mocking me?! Computers were fine, albeit expensive, when only nerds had them. But now that every man and his dog have them, criminals now see computers as a lucrative avenue to rip people off. And now we all have to use security software that we are forced to trust, ensure that all our software has the latest updates (hoping those updates don't crash our system), treat with suspicion all our online (and other) communication, etc. The notion of authoritarianism isn't limited to governments. Private enterprise also has authoritarian tendencies in their quest for increasing profit. And criminals use scare tactics to extract money from people. And it seems that the more technology we have, the more vulnerable we are to people who want to take advantage of us.

I mean, you could, but if there is malice involved, what they will say (and have been saying) is that they suspect it is fake and take you in anyway. I think my broader point is that the mechanism of compliance is largely irrelevant if there is malicious intent involved. I.e. if the system is inherently untrustworthy, any part of it becomes a liability and protections are merely illusion. It might help folks to sleep at night, but it won't offer objective protection. I should point out that I'm not living under a Nazi regime where one has to carry "papers" with them just in case one is stopped in the street by the Gestapo. When I mentioned showing ID, it was for things like opening a bank account rather than proving my entitlement to exist. Having a physical ID is a rigorous proof of identity from my perspective, whereas a digital ID may become unavailable due to some form of technological glitch that I have no control over. In the scenario you mentioned, if the Gestapo consider your physical ID to be fake in the absence of any evidence, then they were always going to take you into custody, and the ID becomes irrelevant. The point of what I said in my original post is that the holder of a physical ID has control over the ID, whereas the holder of a digital ID no longer has control over the ID, that control having been transferred to the administrating body of the digital IDs. While there are scenarios in which a physical ID might not be sufficient, there are more scenarios in which a digital ID might not be sufficient, including every scenario in which a physical ID has been revoked. Bear in mind that this thread is about hidden authoritarianism. The scenario you mentioned seems to me to be about a full-blown dictatorship. But whereas the opening poster seems to be discussing the intrinsic limitations of a democratic system, I am focusing on the way technology is gradually encroaching on freedom and privacy.

Offline papers are just as easily revoked as the respective administrations typically have broad powers about them. At least with a physical ID, even if it is somehow revoked, the person is still in possession of that physical ID and can show it to someone who requests that ID be shown. That the physical ID has been revoked would require the person requesting the ID to check a database, something that isn't done in my experience. And if the rules change to require that a database be checked, then that is effectively a digital ID.

I don't think a solution in terms of radicals includes infinitely nested radicals. However, it is my (possibly incorrect) understanding that all quintic equations can be solved in terms of the Bring radical (an ultraradical).

This thread reminds me of the sequence: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, ?

Great insight! Never thought about it from this particular angle, though in retrospect it seems obvious +1 People intuitively accept that the distance between two points in three-dimensional space depends on the path between them. But for whatever reason, this intuition doesn't seem to extend to four-dimensional spacetime, although it is perhaps the notion of spacetime itself that is where the intuition fails. Actually, the failure of ds in the metric to be an exact differential is easier to prove than usual. Usually, one would be considering integrability conditions involving the commutativity of mixed second-order partial derivatives. But in the case of the metric, the proof is algebraic (an invertible matrix cannot be the tensor product of two vectors).

The intrinsic properties of a manifold depend entirely on the manifold itself without any reference to a higher-dimensional embedding manifold (a coordinate transformation is an embedding of a manifold into a manifold of the same dimension). The distance between two points of a manifold depends on the path between the two points. That is, for the expression: (ds)2 = guv dxu dxv ds is not an exact differential (there does not exist a function s(..., xu, ...) for which ds is the differential). This btw is why there is no absolute time in relativity. If ds were an exact differential, then: [math]ds = \dfrac{\partial s}{\partial x^u} dx^u[/math] and therefore: [math](ds)^2 = \dfrac{\partial s}{\partial x^u} \dfrac{\partial s}{\partial x^v} dx^u dx^v[/math] [math]g_{uv} = \dfrac{\partial s}{\partial x^u} \dfrac{\partial s}{\partial x^v}[/math] But the RHS of this expression, as a matrix, has zero determinant, contrary to the requirement that the metric tensor is invertible. [If the above LaTeX doesn't render, please refresh browser.]

When it comes to the "mechanism of hidden authoritarianism in Western countries", there seems to me to be a pushing of society towards a dependence on technology, and away from traditional things such as cash. It bothers me immensely that I am often being forced to have a smartphone and use it online to verify my identity instead of using a password (that should be my choice, not the online platform's imposition which is non-negotiable). It also bothers me that it is society itself that is complicit in the push towards dependence on technology, especially the push towards a cashless society. I recently read an article about the push towards digital licenses and digital IDs in general, with the scary possibility that these can be revoked remotely, thus putting a person at risk of becoming an "unperson".

My own guess - the field equations for torsion in ECT contain no derivatives, and at the same time torsion is completely determined by local matter fields. This implies that torsion vanishes in regions where T=0, and no wave-type equation exists for torsion to “radiate” through vacuum. So it can’t have any propagating degrees of freedom - it’s purely a local phenomenon subject to the local presence of matter. It occurred to me that pure gravitational curvature would have to be free of the torsion tensor in Einstein-Cartan theory just as pure gravitational curvature is free of the Einstein tensor in general relativity. It's actually not clear to me what the equivalent of the Einstein equation is in Einstein-Cartan theory. However, if the gravitational curvature is sourced from the Einstein tensor, because the Einstein tensor contains the torsion tensor, the torsion tensor ought to act as a source for some of the gravitational curvature even if it is somewhat hidden (note that even the covariant differential operator contains the torsion tensor). One could move all instances of the torsion tensor (including its partial derivatives) over to the source term in the standard Einstein equation of general relativity (assuming integrability conditions are satisfied). I find it interesting that general relativity can deal with rotating objects whereas the torsion tensor seems to be required to deal with (quantum mechanical?) spin. Note that I'm not considering the torsion tensor as a propagating field, in the same sense that the Einstein tensor appears not to be a propagating field.

I think @dimreepr is referring to a TV show.

Non-zero torsion tensor. I read somewhere (I don't recall where) that the torsion tensor corresponds to spin density (the dimensions match if considered as an extension to the Einstein equation). However, I've also read that the torsion tensor doesn't have a propagating gravitational field, though it is not clear to me precisely what this means.

I have The Crackpot Index webpage open as I read this. It occurred to me that there should be points for mentioning "E=mc2".

WOW!!! This is what I've been thinking! Instead of telling Trump that Greenland is "not for sale", Denmark should tell Trump that the US can't afford Greenland, then proceed to name a price that is way beyond anything the US could possibly afford. And the price would be specified in something like gold, not US dollars which can't be trusted. And if Trump complains about the price, tell him that he made Greenland much more valuable by his desperate need to have it. I'm pretty sure that stating a desperate need to have something is not a negotiation tactic from "The Art of the Deal".

It should be noted that expansion has units of inverse time, not speed, although it is usually expressed as speed per distance. For a flat (three-dimensional) universe described by the FLRW metric, the recession speed at a particular time is directly proportional to the distance, and therefore there will always be some distance beyond which is receding faster than c. However, it should be noted that when we look outward, we are looking at the past, so the observed recession speed is not necessarily proportional to the observed distance.

Thank you! There is another way, but I don't use it and am not exactly sure of what it is. Ok.