lemur

I think you're both misinterpreting the thesis. Let me give a simple example: 1) 100 people make and spend $10,000/year. 2) 50 people each collect $10,000/year from two spending $10,000/year, which gives them incomes of $20,000/year. 3) 25 people each collect $20,000/year from two spending $20,000/year, which makes their income $40,000/year. 4) 12 people . . . $40k/year . . . their income = $80,000/year. 5) 6 people . . . $80k . . . their income = $160k. 6) 3 people . . . $160k . . . their income = $320k. 7) 1 lucky winner gets $960k/year from the three spending $320k. Ok, this model is obviously unrealistic for various reasons, but the point is that money can "snowball" as it "trickles up" from lower-revenue businesses and incomes to higher revenue/incomes. Then, as incomes increase, people spend larger amounts for similar products such as housing, insurance, cars, clothes, electronics, etc. So as the average expenditure for a middle-class person goes from, say, $50k/year to $100k/year; that also means that such a person has to squeeze more revenue out of their business(es) to meet their income expectations. This in turn means that her/his clients must also come up with more money, which requires extracting more from their clients, and so forth. The point is that increasing revenues and incomes generate greater expectations for revenue and income, which causes businesses to either raise prices or sales-quotas. Likewise, individuals raise their threshold for how much income they are willing to work for. All this revenue/income 'demand' tightens the squeeze on everyone, but especially lower income people, because they are the ones struggling hardest to keep up culturally, and whose incomes go up the least as a result of GDP growth. I suppose you could sum all this up as inflation, but I think it goes beyond that because we're talking about spending producing income for others that snowballs and drives competition for ever-greater income, which may result in price-inflation, increasing product-marketing, and/or other business methods designed to extract maximum spending from clientele. Marat, btw, what do you think happens to everyone else's incomes/revenues when the top earning people/businesses get taxed to increase the spending of the lowest income people? If someone's income goes from $30k to $60k, they also spend more pushing someone else's income from $60k to $120k, etc. Then, how much more do all those people squeeze each other to maintain their higher income-expectations? Higher incomes require higher spending to maintain them. That translates into more work, more energy-usage, and more resource-exploitation, doesn't it? And for what? More material consumption?

Most dream imagery I experience involves some composite images of recognizable entities or places. I'm sure it's the same with faces. The problem with the OP is that it assumes that every face is perceived as a totally independent image. I think it is far more likely that all new faces are perceived as variations of known faces combined with relatively new or less familiar elements. The best proof of this I can think of involves seeing a new type of animal and having a sense of what that animal's personality is from its facial structure and/or expression. E.g. I couldn't remember the name of proboscis monkeys but all I had to do was google, "jimmy durante monkey," and I immediately got links to proboscis monkeys. If I had known this type of monkey before learning about jimmy durante, I would probably think of him as "the proboscis monkey actor" instead of the reverse. Cognition/perception works through associations.

Heat and cold are a pretty good analogy, I must admit, where heat represents more energy/life and cold represents less/loss thereof. Yes, I think you could say that cold is trying to draw energy away from warmer systems and that heat struggles to warm cooler media while being drained by them. You could be onto a fruitful metaphor for metaphysical philosophizing. Misery requires living. Death is cessation of life. Living is resisting dying, though dying is an unavoidable process of living flesh. Cultural differences aside, Ayn Rand comes to mind as the writer who notes that will-to-life is innate in all living beings. Actually, I think it is another author who discusses this but the book is The Virtue of Selfishness. Before you go branding and possibly stigmatizing me as an Ayn Rand follower, this is the only book I've read by her and although I like her stance on individualism and power (she's like Nietzche meets Ben Franklin), I don't necessarily believe that she's a natural ally of libertarianism, though I don't understand entirely what that political philosophy entails.

How can the force connecting the electrons and nucleus be less than inelastic if energy is to be transferred from one atom to another in collisions? Do the electrons somehow contain all or most of the momentum of the atom and only drag the nucleus along as a solid afterthought of vector-changes? If so, does that mean the electrons' force on the nucleus pulls the nucleus from all points simultaneously? Is it at all analogous to compare it to the gaseous part of Jupiter somehow violently shifting direction and pulling the solid core along as a whole without exerting any shift in the cohesion-forces of that core?

I wonder what people would think of the following approach to viewing economics: all people contribute money to GDP when they spend it or give it to others. The effect is like a food-chain where the amounts of money changing hands snow-ball into ever larger sums. If you look at economics in this way, it would seem that the faster money concentrates (snow-balls) into larger amounts, the less people can participate in higher-class pricing/exchanges. In the simplest economy, there could be just two classes: 1) the masses who make and spend very small amounts of money and 2) the elite who serve the masses and concentrate the income they receive into very high expenditures. For example, these two classes could have separate currencies where one unit of the masses' currency is valued at a tiny fraction of the value of one unit of the elite currency. Obviously, actual economics is much more complex than this but I think this simplified model describes the basic 'trickle-up' of spending. The interesting issue it raises, imo, is whether price-growth and revenue/income-expectations among higher-classes can produce feelings of recessionary-lack simply because elites are depriving each other due to the level of value-concentration produced by their "snow-balling" of currency from the lower-classes.

Is it appropriate to discuss what is meant by different types of orgasms in this thread or should another be started? I think "fake orgasm" should be limited to describing dramatic behavior with the intent of simulating orgasm to partners and/or observers (and maybe even oneself) purely for purposes of erotic stimulation or signification of satisfaction. In other words, "fake orgasm" should only refer to an intentionally acted-out behavior and not to an experiential response to stimulus. If the OP wants to claim that certain experiences can be mistaken to be orgasms but are not really true orgasms, that should be termed something else, though I can't figure out a succinct term that could describe such a thing. . . maybe "alter-orgasm?"

This thread seems to be geared toward discussing differentiations between feelings of love-interactions and pornographic arousal/ejaculation/orgasm. The OP seems to be trying to make some point about women emphasizing love-feelings over arousal-driven sexuality, but it's not clear exactly what or why.

I know this, but logically I would think that the electrons' pull form an equal and opposite reaction to the protons' pull on them. I know that sounds very classical and Bohr-ish, but equal-and-opposite force is a physical law I have a hard time ignoring. So either through momentum or some other force-impetus, I would think the electrons have to be pulling on the protons, since the protons seem to be pulling on them. If that's the case, then why wouldn't force-changes occurring with the electrons transfer to the protons in the nucleus?

Democracy is when conflicting points-of-view are able to work out their differences without resorting to domination or elimination. Freedom is the ability of individuals to decide for themselves how to negotiate their conflicts and to self-govern by reason to the extent it doesn't harm others. To the extent hate speech harms or promotes harm against others, it could be argued that governments with stronger approaches to dealing with hate-speech promote greater freedom than those that protect it as freedom of expression. On the other hand, it may also be that by allowing such speech to be expressed and responded to, freedom to negotiate and self-govern is promoted. In my impression, something that happens in continental political expression is that people tend to find approaches to speech that put others in a corner, e.g. the way Nazism treated any transethnic activity as Jewish and thus a contamination/threat of national solidarity and belonging. So when the only function people use free speech for is to harass and bully people into submission or eviction, free speech becomes nothing more than a means to suppress individual freedom. In that case, it makes sense to regulate free speech whereas in a situation where there is adequate diversity of political opinion/will, it makes sense to allow free speech as a means of letting people work out their differences in a democratic way. Some humans are able to respect each other and individuals despite cultural differences. Many others continue to cling to groupism as a means of avoiding dealing with diversity at the individual level. Various forms of groupism and collectivism will always be present in a social situations from the smallest nuclear family to the global level; but that doesn't mean that there will not always be resistance to it in various forms. As much as it is possible to repress human individuality in subordination to grouping ideologies, individuals always resist subordination as well because it is contrary to the fact of their innate ability to think and act at the individual level despite what social restrictions may be imposed on them. Your claim that there is something like a pendulum that swings between favoring one ethnicity or another only addresses the level of groupist discourse. At another level, people of all ethnicities are questioning it when they're regarded as just part of a larger group by other individuals. These people are less concerned with whether a pendulum is swinging toward or away from their group as they are with being viewed, treated, and allowed to live as individuals whose ethnic identity/ies are not the primary determinant of their lives.

So as nuclei grow, the electrostatic repulsion of the protons gains significance relative to the ability of the nuclear force to hold them together? If this is the case, I would think that the electrons would be significant in that the protons are attracted to them and so tidal forces would result from the pull of the electrons on the protons. Why wouldn't this be the case?

The existence of subjective things is based on imagination and the ability to believe (faith). What I am pointing out is that some subjective/imagined things are more powerful in their influence on the human experience. "God" is one of those.

Many of these approaches sound clever, imo, but I have to admit that cold climates are probably the biggest challenge where energy-conservation is concerned. What is strange to me is that while you are usually promoting how great life would be with less economic stratification, you can suddenly be talking about how much you prefer energy-abundance to conservation. Do you think that given enough money-redistribution, everyone living in a cold climate could enjoy the same level of energy-abundance you do?

I have read and heard accounts of supposedly different types of orgasms in females. My first response is the same as yours, to question how people can have trouble being able to describe exactly what they are feeling. That was when it occurred to me that there might be cultural issues at work preventing them from reporting exactly what they feel and think regarding sexual matters. This is not just the case for women but for men also, I think. Still, the idea that it is possible that the sexes experience different sexual responses intrigues and baffles me since their physiology seems practically the same.

Can that be achieved by people with higher income conserving their spending more? I.e. if everyone would spend and consume at approximately the same level despite income differences, what would the problem be with inequality in (unspent) wealth/savings? After all, if wealth is conserved/saves and thus taken out of circulation, someone has to save it. Imo, the problem with income differences is that bigger spenders set the bar high for what is perceived as a respectable lifestyle. Whereas a poor person who keeps themselves and their things in good condition would not be disdained among people who spend conservatively, among more liberal spenders such people are viewed as quaint, anachronistic, or even pathetic and worthy of pity. This is, imo, the cruelest aspect of social-economic differentiation. When people talk about remedying it by allowing poor people more consumption opportunities, I don't think that would help because I think the market just stratifies people according to different brand-names, etc. There is great dignity in maintaining old things and living well on a very tight budget that deserves more respect/love than it is afforded for the most part in contemporary socio-economic cultures.

Imo, it is not ultimately necessary to personify "God" or other spirits in order to experience the existential benefits of believing. "Spirit" is an old-fashioned word, but I think it is pretty accurate in describing a particular state-of-mind that seems to inhabit you during particular moments or activities. "The spirit of giving," for example, inhabits people around Christmas and bdays, as well as other times. "God" could simply be thought of as "the spirit of creation," "the spirit of power," or "the spirit of goodness," "enlightenment," etc. I don't have any problem with the personification mythologies because I can easily translate/decode the language into mundane social-psychology, but I don't think personification is essential to the function and/or purpose of the philosophy.

Cultural conformism poses a chicken-egg problem where cultural change is concerned. Individuals resist deviating from the norms they perceive and as a result the behavior they resist deviating from remains widespread and therefore continues to be viewed as normal. The more annoying by-product of cultural conformity is that people tend to assume that somehow if everyone keeps living the same way, no one will really have to change. Maybe they just think that by the time change becomes a true dire necessity, the government will do something to make it easier for them. I don't think people realize that this free-market approach to energy-pricing IS the method for governing energy-usage by creating a financial incentive to conserve and/or seek substitute cultural practices. The problem, imo, is that instead of making serious attempts to save money, people try to make or borrow more instead so they won't have to restrict their consumption. Often it feels like you are failing or even harming your loved ones when you have to be the bearer of restrictions on their comforts and conveniences.

Most constitutions seem to have some basis for arguing that unreasonable restrictions of liberty should be revoked. If someone wants to drive a 4-wheeled motorcycle and can show that she's being discriminated against unfairly relative to 2-wheeled motorcyclists, I'm sure there's a legal basis for defending her rights. Doesn't the constitution say something about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? How does a 4-wheeled motorcycle pose a risk to anyone else's life or liberty more than a 2-wheeled one?

For a given amount of energy? Why is the amount of energy used given? My observation is that western culture is stocked with energy-applications that could either be completely cut or drastically reduced. People simply don't like low-energy applications.

What do you mean "just?" If you would say that unicorns are "just our imagination," I could understand but "God" is a far more powerful aspect of subjectivity. People don't spend a fraction of the energy on unicorns that they do on arguing about God's existence, worrying about how the universe emerged and what their purpose in it is. People don't devote their sundays to unicorns and insist on marrying someone who shares the same unicorn beliefs that they do. People don't post threads on science discussion forums about whether unicorns are "just imagination" as if it would change things or be some great revelation if they were.

While it is true that there are a wide array of public settings where you can use English comfortably, this is true for the most part globally. It is also true that a large number of English speakers in the US (I assume by "America" you mean "US") regard English as having some special territorial right, this is nothing more than a popular desire to define culture in order to exclude other languages than English for social-economic reason, imo. There's no reason why US English speakers couldn't all learn Spanish and use that language just as fluently as English. There are ethnic preferences and territorialism involved with attitudes toward language.

Nazism wants you to believe that there is no deviation from nazism; or that any deviation of nazism is a variation of it. The relationship between freedom and democracy is that people are indeed free to think how they want as long as they don't attempt to dominate each other with authoritarianism/terrorism. The problem for democracy is what to do when people abuse freedom to suppress democracy/freedom. At that point, you have to ask yourself how to intervene so that the oppressed once again feel free to think for themselves and express themselves independently of the will to authoritarian power. How would YOU stop people from bowing to authoritarianism?

How can "nothing" be more than an abstract concept? By definition, you can't empirically observe something that isn't there. "Vacuum," like "cold," is only a relevant concept insofar as it contrasts with something else that causes an effect. Does a shadow disappear when you turn off the light? Was it ever present in the first place, or was it just that light shining on a different surface than the one you were looking at? Cognitively, the mind can organize perceptions into patterns and subsequently recognize deviations from the patterns, but does that mean a pattern-deviation is an empirically observable "thing?" Is a prairie a forest without trees? Is a river a liquid glacier? Is a mountain a lava-less volcano? Is water soda without flavor and carbonation?

Why would I have to admit that? I'm more interested in understanding how learning works than in uncritically re-inforcing assumptions on a dogmatic basis.

idk, something having to do with reasonable definition of a motorcycle? I.e. you would think the plaintiff could show that there's no reasonable basis for distinguishing two motorcycles on the basis of how many wheels they have, and thereby repeal the law.

Describing English and 'American' as different languages is a foreign concept to me. I don't even think of English as having different organized dialects. I just think everyone has their own approach to speaking English. Any individuals' speech patterns may be influenced by a number of factors, though, so attempts to define language diversity according to dialects is overbearing and reductive of diversity at the individual level, imo.