lemur

But there's no "sucking." The higher energy/vibration particles are colliding with cooler air particles surrounding the material, transferring motion to those particles, which sends them off as convection to the rest of the refrigerator. The glass is also radiating black body emissions according to its temperature. The only sense in which the cold surroundings are "sucking heat" is that a temperature differential is required for black-body emissions to be absorbed; i.e. a warmer material cannot absorb emissions from a cooler material, or rather it can actually, I think, but the warmer material will just emit more toward the cooler material than vice-versa.

Actually, I think blasphemy of the holy spirit is the one unforgivable sin. I have tried to figure out what this means and why and the best I can come up with is that "holy spirit" means acting/believing in good faith as a opposed to insincerely or with malintention. So if people intentionally pervert Christian teachings, strawmanning Jesus as being unforgiving, etc. I think that might be a product of blaspheming holy spirit. I think Jesus forgiveness comes with honest mistakes but not with intentional trickery, although theoretically someone could confess their past blasphemy and become redeemed from insincerity, I think.

Here's what I don't understand about nuclear power: Isn't the heat generated by the core essentially the result of nuclear fission? If so, why not use core heat to generate electricity instead of going through all the steps of mining, controlling, and disposing ofradioactive material? Politically, geothermal energy is less likely to attract public criticism than nuclear even though they rely on the same fuel ultimately.

(split from another thread): In practice, there are people who call themselves 'Christian' who wield shame and unforgiveness and judge just as their are non-Christians who forgive and refuse to judge. Really, this topic deserves its own thread because you can get into all sorts of topics such as how to forgive without legitimating sin and how things like anti-Semitic persecution have been caused by Christians who blamed and refused to forgive Jews for the crucifixion. I have to admit I've also wondered if Judaism also teaches forgiveness.

Well, technically I'm a "believer" who doesn't reject atheism as being in opposition to theism/Christianity because I think you can believe in the ideas and meanings of theology without necessarily thinking of the entities involved as material instead of spiritual. I see materialism as its own branch of thought and spiritualism as broader, though you could also speak of "the spirit of materialism." Anyway, if you believe in forgiveness I would say you are practicing Christian ethics even if you don't attribute them to Christianity. There is a certain logic to forgiving others and experiencing forgiveness (from God) in Christianity that I'm sure is possible for anyone to experience regardless of what religion they attribute their beliefs to. However, there is also unforgiveness that people put on themselves and others that causes them to live in shame and shame others. It also causes people to reject each other and themselves without hope of redemption. My post was just a superficial play on the idea that Christianity teaches forgiveness so non-Christians wouldn't forgive Christianity for things the Christianity would them. In practice, there are people who call themselves 'Christian' who wield shame and unforgiveness and judge just as their are non-Christians who forgive and refuse to judge. Really, this topic deserves its own thread because you can get into all sorts of topics such as how to forgive without legitimating sin and how things like anti-Semitic persecution have been caused by Christians who blamed and refused to forgive Jews for the crucifixion. I have to admit I've also wondered if Judaism also teaches forgiveness. Yes, I think I'll repost this paragraph in a new thread. Thanks Missichem

I was just giving the reason for prohibition of alcohol during the temperance movement. I do, however, recognize that alcohol often facilitates abuse, though it obviously can't be the root cause. No, I don't think ppl always drink to excess and I think we should start another thread if you want to discuss the nuances of alcohol ethics and legality. Right, so that means that people also have the right to pursue social control over others in the form of law (formal) and non-legal (informal) means. People also have the right to dissent from each other and engage in civil conflict. Democracy = checks and balance among conflicting powers. Yes, it concerns me that some people are able to have happy lives while others are unhappy and I wonder what can be done to facilitate better access to happiness for more people. That doesn't necessarily mean forbidding things, but I don't exclude it as a potential means. I think you have to allow people to make a case for things instead of just brushing them off as having ancient/primitive ideas. Punishment for adultery is, for example, now ridiculed as a primitive exercise of jealousy and marital ownership/slavery, but what about the right to invest in your spouse's future without someone else taking that future away for their own benefit? I dislike the idea of a nanny state, but I also dislike a government that protects exploiters/abusers. Maybe the solution is to go back to duels as a means of conflict-resolution.

I believe the temperance movement that advocated prohibition did so because it was thought that men would be better husbands and fathers if they weren't out at bars drunk. When behavior has a social effect, it affects people beyond the person engaging in the specific actions in question, no? Evaluation of the consequences and assessment whether they are good or harmful. But then maybe prostitutes and their clients would never question engaging in prostitution if it was a legal activity. Look how many people never question other legal activities that have detrimental effects.

It's a reference to the fact that Christianity preaches forgiveness and atheists reject Christianity.

ok, might as well counting syllables is nice mindless thing to do well actually you do have to think about syllables per line

Where did you get that I was comparing short-term dating with prostitution? Because I introduced the thread topic with reference to the thread on pornography/prostitution? That was just a humorous way of suggesting that there are other directions to channel one's libidinal energies in than prostitution/pornography. You make it sound so painless to break up. "Owner of a lonely heart = much better than the owner of a broken heart" - yes it's Yes. Cheating is another issue altogether. But don't you think it's just as painful to get dumped because someone else meets someone that they haven't cheated with yet but want to date? Besides that, what are the chances really that once you're in a comfortable relationship with someone you get along with reasonably well that you're going to care enough about fishing or whatever to break it off to start something new with someone who might turn out to be incompatible in other ways than the fishing? Realistically, in dating possession is 9/10 of the law until the relationship is falling apart on its own, no? I'm only familiar with those in theory. As far as I know, everyone who does that in practice keeps it a secret.

It must be hard for atheists to understand how Christians could forgive their atheism.

I wasn't saying it was similar. I was saying more that these are all parts of the same underlying desire for human relations beyond pure intellect. I don't know how else to explain it. If we were talking psychology, I think you'd immediately understand that dating and sex are related libidinal desires even when sex isn't the prime purpose of dating. It has to do with libidinal satisfaction, which doesn't necessarily entail (only) sexual gratification or sexual gratification at all. But wouldn't you both really be lying to yourselves and each other if you entered into a potentially heart-breaking situation by ignoring the likelihood that whatever emotional bond you build up will be violently broken at the moment a good fishing-partner comes along?

I guess that means your aren't worried about the effect on your house value of having a nuclear power plant next door.

Thanks. For some reason I had the idea that Jupiter isn't that far from having star-potential. So much for that mix-up. edit: but what about introducing some kind of artificial black-hole into it to initiate fusion? That may be too far-sought to even fuel an interesting discussion, though.

This topic might be an interesting spin-off of the prostitution/pornography thread. What are the ethics of dating when you know that your partner doesn't fulfill all your expectations/wishes for someone you would want to declare your partner for life? E.g. say you have a certain hobby that you love, like fishing, and you find someone you really like but who hates fishing. What are the ethics of dating that person with the knowledge that if you ever meet anyone else with potential who also likes fishing, you would be happier with that person? Is it unethical to set someone up for rejection if you know there's a potential for future rejection in a relationship?

No, "making Jupiter a star" doesn't have anything to do with Roman divinity and Hollywood movies. I am wondering if devoting energy and effort to transforming Jupiter into a star would be a viable means of extending the life of Earth as the sun and Earth's core cool. I realize that at some point, the sun is predicted to supernova, at which point it won't really matter to anyone on Earth what Jupiter is doing, but would it be beneficial to ignite Jupiter at some point between now and the end of the sun?

If you have a large cloud of gas of uniform density far from any gravity well, how much density would be required for gravity-well formation to begin? Presumably the cloud condenses under its own gravity as it cools, but is it possible that some part of it could condense more and begin forming a gravity-well that pulls in other particles from the cloud? Also, if a cloud of hydrogen has to cool to condense to a density where fusion can ignite creating a star, how is there enough energy to ignite the fusion? If this post too much resembles my other post on cooling and gravity, apologies. I'm exploring these issues in slightly different ways. If this post can better be added to the other thread, that's fine too.

Marat, I agree with you partially about the professions you mention yet I also think each of those professions allows the worker to go home and have a sexual relationship with their partner without being literally drained from doing it at work. Of course this is true of other kinds of paid work as well. I suppose if people didn't put such central value on sex as a special aspect of intimate relationships, it would not be such a big deal to do it for money. On the other hand, though, there is also the issue that people, women more than men mostly perhaps, have trouble separating sex and the reproductive function. So while women can divorce themselves from emotional attachment to the idea of a fetus becoming a baby, I think many may still associate sex with potential children at some basic level that makes casual sex for money or not a dramatic issue. If you even for a moment think, "I could be having this person's genes in a baby" while having sex, it could be a pretty intense thought - more so maybe then when you're building a skyscraper for Donald Trump thinking, "billions of dollars will change hands in these offices I'm building." Idk.

You should really start a new thread on this issue because it is a very complex subject that has to be broken down to the concrete level to be digested. A service can function as a substitute for a good or it can be a means to dissipate surplus human capital. If you can produce 3000 meals/day for 1000 people using 100 workers, that leaves 900 fed-workers available to do other things. It is in this context that you can begin to contemplate how a service-based economy utilizes surplus human labor as a means of leveraging control over the means of producing the basic necessities that facilitate all the surplus labor in the first place. You seem to be one of those nationalist economists who always talk as if everyone with the same nationality is part of the same economic corporation. That is simply not the case. Corporations utilize different currencies and markets to increase THEIR corporate exports and reduce the cost of their imports. Why do people expect these businesses to put national interests above private interests? It depends if you mean GDP or material productivity and/or total happiness. Wealthy economies can have large GDP growth without raising the standard of living for people beyond the privileged classes. Providing a person with little to no income with affordable shelter, food, and health care doesn't raise GDP much unless you drastically subsidize providers, which makes the services unaffordable except via government gatekeeping. Simply getting some volunteers together and building housing with donated materials does nothing to raise GDP but it drastically increases the standard of living for the homeless person who no longer has to sleep in a tent outdoors. People don't get that costs of living aren't fixed. You always talk as if the poor are haplessly at the mercy of landlords, retailers, etc. That mentality needs to change. It is unacceptable for businesses to refuse to budge on prices in order to squeeze money out of people who don't have it. Stop robbing the rich to feed the poor and start demanding that the people with food make it accessible to everyone without extorting the rich. Sorry to sound a bit politically adamant in this post. It just seems like the simplest way to communicate these ideas at this moment.

If working class culture valued intelligence and intellect, things would be much different. What currently occurs a lot in western culture is that working class culture is dismissive of intelligentsia as pretense and ignorance about what they believe life is truly about, submitting to economic authoritarianism and getting paid for obedience. Many think that university 'types' are just privileged rich kids who are exempted from what they see as "real life," i.e. unquestioning obedience within a management hierarchy. This is why people are skeptical of education and democracy generally. They see it as a diversion from the authoritarianism they see as controlling "the real world." Solidarity with everyone who cannot be excluded from the system. No social professionals want to increase their workload without a corresponding pay raise, so I don't see how that culture is practically any different from a more capitalist one in which clients are excluded by how much they are willing to pay for services. In one system, the provider/government chooses who receives services and who doesn't whereas in the other, anyone can opt for services if they are willing to deal with the bill that comes afterward. In that case, what would probably happen is that no one would want to get stuck with a low-paying managerial job and those that did would be ridiculed for doing so out of laziness. Further, workers would likely vie to exclude each other from their specialty industries in hopes of sharing the higher-wage positions among fewer people, hence increasing the scarcity and therefore elite status of their positions. If, as under communism, labor was celebrated as heroic, there would also be much egoism and machismo among the laborers with the hardest jobs. How would that result in equality? Actually, distributing bountiful wealth causes materialism to become wider-spread. What you are referring to is more what happens among people of any class-status who, for whatever reason, experience some spiritual awakening due to trauma or other life-changing revelation. Such people may reject materialism since they come to see it as superficial nonsense compared to the deep spiritual satisfaction they have come to appreciate from the most basic aspects of human experience. I haven't read any Hegel first-hand, and very little Kant. Thanks for the tip.

The history of alcohol legality basically involves the government giving up fighting bootlegging in the 1920s. Presumably if the bootleggers, mafia, and speakeasies would have given up first, alcohol would be as illegal as cannabis. From what I read, cannabis supporters are pushing equally hard for legalization as was done for alcohol so they may get their way soon. That does not mean they are morally right. Maybe there is something specifically sadistic about directly offering someone enough money to have sex against their wishes just because they can't stand to refuse the money. I read recently that Pippa was offered a porn contract for some ridiculous sum, which would be hard to turn down, but somehow that seems less offensive than directly approaching a woman that you want to have sex with her and to name her price. I don't understand when people say that laws shouldn't be based on morality. What other basis is there for laws except morality. If you weren't morally opposed to total mayhem, exploitation, and sadism of anyone by anyone else, what purpose would laws serve in the first place? Job creation? What would be the purpose of that even if you didn't have a moral value that it was better for people to have jobs than be unemployed or perform labor in other forms? You're comparing apples and oranges on a very abstract level. The issue was that prostitution was commerce and pornography was expression/speech. So the question becomes whether pornography is more like a commodified good/service or more like an informational medium. Sure, you can get pleasure from reading a newspaper, but it has the function of informing and facilitating public discourse. What democratic discourse does pornography facilitate? It is more like art than speech. But then is prostitution art? I think prostitution is more like selling sex as a drug, as is pornography to a lesser extent, to the extent it causes physical arousal, like viagra. Pimps regulate and control the prostitute and her activities and take a cut of the money. Government would do the same thing. If a legal prostitute wanted to hire a legal security guard, manager, and/or talent agent, how would that be different than a pimp?

If climate control was abandoned, relatively little power would be needed at night. Efficient modern light bulbs and flat screen TVs/monitors draw so little electricity and devices like refrigerators and water-heaters can be well-insulated. I think the small amount of batter-power needed to keep these few things running at night would pale as an environmental harm compared with nuclear waste, plus it is easier and cheaper to recycle batteries than radioactive materials. Nuclear power is only interesting because it offers an approach to energy that is practically infinite. However, global social-economic patterns lean more toward restriction and limitation than toward total liberation of all with infinite power, so renewable sources and conservation fit better with that economic paradigm than infinitely abundant atomic energy, imo.

How so? Lots of non-consensual things go on all the time that don't carry the emotional weight of sexual activities that circumvent consent or otherwise play with power (e.g. harassment). Isn't the distinction made between sexual harassment and teasing someone about their office habits part of the "artificial value that society puts on sex?" What about mandatory professional social attendance at parties, dinners, etc. Why shouldn't managers be able to require their employees to perform mandatory sexual favors for others as part of maintaining good collegiality? If people can assent to authoritarian mandates and expect the same of others in non-sexual matters, why can't they overcome the "artificial value that society puts on sex" and extend the same authoritarianism to sexual activities? Would it be too much like prostitution?

Everyone who is comparing sex with casual everyday activities may be right in theory, but I wonder if anyone would dare to tell a victim of sexual harassment that she should just look at unwanted sexual advances as she would view an offer of undesired food. Who would tell a rape victim that what she experienced shouldn't be any more traumatic than a force-feeding session? Who would tell a spouse who was ending their marriage due to adultery that s/he is over-reacting? I can understand saying that in theory, any of these examples could be viewed much differently in a cultural context where sex was viewed as comparable to any other basic biological activity. However, the fact is that prostitution and pornography only exist because of the high cultural barriers to sexual access and the ethics/laws regarding prostitution/pornography may address the allure created by the social-restrictions surrounding sex itself. Stealing the Mona Lisa wouldn't be such a big crime if its value was $10 because everyone could paint one for themselves in a couple hours. When sex is as accessible as home art-kits, prostitution/pornography would have entirely different meanings and values but in the meantime, I think commodified sex should be considered as a powerful addictive drug, maybe just because of the level at which people control access to it. There is no way to eliminate this access-control effect, either, unless practically anyone was willing to have sex with anyone else who wanted it with them. In that case, prostitution/pornography would be valueless because if someone told you no you could just move on to someone else who was willing. If you wanted to see people naked or having sex, you could just watch it on youtube. It wouldn't be commercially viable, in other words.

And yet there is nothing causing collective inertia besides the actions of individuals. Isn't it ironic? edit: btw, please don't think that somehow only people with US citizenship cause the US to be the way it is.