lemur

Yes, and corporate expenditures to external contractors should also be included, but that would begin to undermine the simplicity of modeling the economy as a single corporation. You could conceive of shares as being sold to people according to their wages, as a form of savings. It just adds to the issue of people wanting to increase their income and that income requiring either increased revenue/GDP OR budget cuts in other incomes.

Often we discuss economic inequality and the possibility of re-distribution to solve it. But how often do we consider the causes of inequality to begin with? Consider a simplified example of an economic society in the form of a single corporate, e.g. Walmart. In that corporation, you have numerous positions with different pay-levels. Since there is only one corporation in this economy, people can only spend their income at the store they work for. Thus, spending = GDP and GDP = corporate revenue. So, if anyone wants to make more money, either GDP/revenue has to increase or others have to take pay cuts, correct? Yet, for GDP/revenue to grow, people have to spend more money, which means that they either have to buy more or prices of their current shopping cart have to increase. So now extend this logic to the broad economy as we know it: Most people are trying to increase their personal income and that of their businesses. Yet people are also trying to reduce their budgets and save more of their income. So if GDP is going down and people are still trying to increase their income, doesn't that put pressure to cut income for other people? If these cuts are controlled by taxation to be taken from the wealthiest people and corporations, don't those people and corporations have to make cuts to their expenditures, resulting in lost income for their employees and other beneficiaries? If so, how far should this be allowed to go? What happens when/if everyone is brought to the same income level? Will people then suddenly be satisfied with their incomes and stop trying to generate more revenue to be able to have raises and save money for the future/retirement? What will limit the will of the people to always increase the level of their material consumption and thus make, spend, and save more money?

What if instead of thinking of the early universe of the big bang as expanding spacetime in some abstract sense, you just thought of it as a small, dense ball of matter? Then, think of the expansion of that ball as a process of stretching the contents out despite a limited amount of space between them. So instead of the contents "expanding into" space, they are actually stretching space between them like trying to expand a vacuum within the atmosphere. Another way to describe this would be to say that gravity originated as perfectly contracted spacetime and henceforth began expanding to allow more distance between particles/objects, yes some areas remain(ed) less expanded (e.g. galaxies, stars, planets, interstellar clouds, etc.) In this way, would it be necessary to view gravity as a force, or could it be viewed as simply varying degrees of expansion of spacetime? Also, could it be that the expansion was caused not by a "bang," i.e. pushing force from the center, but rather a "pull" as its surroundings were drawn outward for some reason?

But what about the fact that so many luxuries are currently available to even the poorest people in highly developed economies? Whereas refined sugar and processed foods were luxury prior to industrialism, they are the staples of modern poor and working class diets. These luxuries have depleted people's health, along with the replacement of manual labor practices with automation and greater centralization in larger factories. E.g. local foundries required the labor of many people and horses to cut and haul timber to the foundries for fuel. This gave people something to keep them moving and thus warm in the winter and it was probably quite nice to be at the foundry when it was running to enjoy the waste heat. I'm not sure what women and children did to keep warm but presumably, school houses were partially warmed by having lots of bodies in the same room. Anyway, I don't know that eliminating all luxury-consumption would liberate sufficient energy to keep everyone warm in cold climates. There are simply fuel limitations that have nothing to do with fiscal distribution. If the masses don't conserve, the fuel runs out that much faster. The upper classes provide a means of taking money out of circulation from the masses, which pushes them to conserve consumption because they can barely afford it. If you started liberating that consumption, they would quickly multiply resource-consumption and end up using up their own resources that much fast, imo. If you want to help the masses, the best way to do it imo is to come up with technologies and lifestyles that produce the highest level of happiness with the lowest level of resource-consumption per capital, since this promises the longest possible duration for growth.

Why couldn't the collective force of the expanding hot areas be sufficient to cause compression of the cooling areas? The entropy of heat is what I'm struggling with - i.e. if there is some way the heat could radiate away from the cooling/condensing area into the expanding hot surroundings. Maybe this could be facilitated by the inertia of the expansion as a whole, i.e. creating a vacuum force in the center as the outer portions of the cloud collectively move away from the center? edit: upon re-reading this, the creation of a vacuum in the center due to expansion contradicts the idea that pressure could be the cause for compression in the center. I wonder if it would make a difference if the particles of the cloud were subject to some other strong attractive force, such as nuclear force, i.e. if the amount of heat-energy was so high that the particles were all completely ionized.

Say there's a giant expanding cloud with a certain amount of energy. That energy would be dissipating as kinetic heat, volumetric expansion, radiation, and also friction among various currents within the cloud, right? So is it possible for the cloud to continue expanding indefinitely while its energy is being dissipated in other forms than expansion? If the particles were freely in motion, unobstructed, in a vacuum I would say yes. But since there is friction and energy-loss via radiation, I think no. Therefore, as warmer areas of the cloud expand more, I would think they would exert more energy (pressure) on the cooler areas. Thus, as the cooler areas condensed more, they additional heat generated by friction could radiate out into the hotter areas causing increasing temperature/density differential. What's confusing me now is that I would expect entropy of heat from the warmer parts to the cooler ones, but if the pressure from outside the cool area was great, I don't see why the condensation couldn't squeeze heat out of the compressing gas thus perpetuating the condensation process.

That's the way I would look at it in a relatively small cloud, but if you were dealing with a much larger gas-system, I wonder if very large pockets begin condensing, if the heat can convect as easily to surrounding areas that are warmer to start with. The ironic aspect of this scenario, which I'm questioning even as I think about it, is whether gas could condense due to relative cooling while at the same time generating heat due to friction caused by the condensation. Thanks for this info though I'm not sure what I could really do with it. The part I wonder about is what would prevent the cloud from dissipating completely if there was no force gravity to hold it together. Assuming electrostatics were sufficient, then I can imagine the condensation generating heat that is not sufficient to prevent further condensation and thus it radiates out into the surrounding gas. I'm relying on the idea that energy in a gas cloud dissipates among colliding particles so if condensation is usurping the ability of particles to expand away from each other, they would contract due to friction among the particles.

Without science, people don't really know how much they use/waste. Do a general survey of popular articles on energy-usage and see how much confusion there is regarding amounts and equivalencies of energy. Science and technology have indeed facilitated the culture of waste by fueling the dream of automatic comfort that people don't have to think about everything that goes into their lifestyle habits, but science is also the means by which they can gain consciousness about all the things they take for granted and how those work, how much energy they use, etc.

What I get from what he is saying is that from the perspective of the present, the changing numbers in the film-reel are memories and predictions, but that we have to synthesize those cognitively into an image of continuous moments. I don't think he will disagree about the utility of time in measuring defined changes, but from the perspective of any dynamic point in itself, there is only a continuous present. Extrapolating time from movement/change requires the ability to think "outside the present moment." I think this is what he's getting at, anyway, but I will be corrected if I put words in his mouth I'm sure.

But it makes sense what he's saying insofar as the proportion of a complete revolution would be the same regardless of the apparent distances, right? What I don't get is that if the periodicity of the Earth-sun revolution is a common event to the two twins, why can't a decaying atom?

Yes, I know that as long as two clocks use the same moving system as a basis, they will both see the same repetitions in the system but why, then, can't there be separate clocks in each situation that are in sync with the Earth-sun system without directly using that system as their basis for time-measurement?

Is this thread not even worth responding to? I thought it was an interesting concept.

True, but then what about the fact that different clocks of identical construction run at different speeds when moving at different speeds or in different gravity-levels? Why isn't there a way of constructing identical clocks that measure the same time relative to the planetary motion in each context separately?

I'd say respect is about taking someone seriously as a person; i.e. not dismissing them, condescending, etc.

Some Jehovah's witnesses explained it best to me in terms of God needing a human image so that people could experience intimacy with "Him." They basically explained that thinking of "God" as a force or using an impersonal noun, i.e. "god," causes people to feel social distance toward divinity. By thinking of him as a loving father, one who loves you and wants the best for you, it makes it easier for people to embrace religious teachings as having benevolent intentions as opposed to the way some religions present God as an angry punisher (also anthropomorphic btw). Personally, I actually think it can be enlightening to think of God as a force or use various other metaphors in exploring the meaning, but I think the anthropomorphic approach can also be methodologically useful.

But then why don't the twins have a means of measuring the amount of time that has passed for both of them as being the same then?

In terms of creating the greatest good for the greatest number of people, I think more good would be created by redistributing from the largest class, the middle class, to poorer people. This would have the effect of causing middle class people to consume less, which would reduce scarcity thus making more goods and services available for everyone else. People who would be classified as above middle class may be consuming more luxuries but the amount of productive labor and resources they are utilizing is not that significant compared to the amount consumed by the middle class. How many labor hours and materials does it take to build a yacht, for example, compared to how much it takes for every middle-class individual of driving age to have their own car? What's more, every poor person looks at the middle class as their goal for how they wish to live, so if every poor person also wants a car and sufficient gas to drive around and do all the things they want, the overall effect of both classes would leave a much larger footprint (resource AND labor) than does an elite class of super-rich building a few giant mansions and having some yachts and expensive artwork.

Can an asteroid rotate around more than one axis somehow? If not, wouldn't it be possible to shoot it with explosives at an angle that brakes the spin?

If energy scarcification continues, I would expect cities to increasingly densify. Big heavy steel cars are a hazard in dense cities with lots of pedestrian and other small traffic. The mentality that bigger=safer, e.g. SUVs, is a catch 22 as bigger also = harder to stop quickly, more damaging to smaller vehicles in collisions, require more lane and parking width, and of course less fuel efficiency. I don't think big heavy cars will go away because they have high-speed stability advantages, but I expect their use will be increasingly limited to highway traffic as urban traffic grows denser/busier with more smaller vehicles. This is just a logical consequence of energy scarcification over an extended period of time, no?

Generally I agree that it makes no sense that some other aspect of something could arrive at you before you see the cause of it happen; but I think what the OP is postulating is that there is some simultaneity between events that occurs before the light from one reaches the other. I think the OP thinks that, for example, you could discover a supernova by some other signal before seeing it occur.

I didn't get the impression that the thread-premise was that a signal can go faster than causation, just light-causation. I think the assumption is that there is something else that could travel faster than light and cause events even more simultaneously.

It would cause me to wonder why light was so slow relative to the FTL signal.

The following quote is from Swansont's blog: To what extent should income-classes be treated as collectively powerful? It is popular to view the highest income-classes as a resource for redistributive economics, but if there is more economic power distributed among lower classes, doesn't it make more sense to redistribute from those instead of the wealthier/wealthiest?

Do you have a citation? My first thought would be that there are some other feminists who would argue that nurturing is a form of power, but I'm not sure how that relates to the thread topic that total passive reception of benevolence could be a feminine ideal.

Imagine a large cloud of hot gas. If parts of the cloud cool faster than others, those parts should densify relative to their surroundings, correct? Then, if there is no external border constraining the cloud, it could expand freely due to its own heat/pressure, right? So if the condensing parts of the cloud expel more heat due to friction among the particles, couldn't this cause the surrounding gas to warm up and expand more while the condensed particles grow colder and form a heat-sink for surrounding (warmer) particles? In this way, couldn't a body of matter form from the growing disparity between condensation and expanding surroundings and eventually condense to fusion-pressure with sufficient mass? If so, why would gravity have to be something more than a tendency for matter to condense as it loses heat?