lemur

It is actually interesting to account for the reasons why Jesus was persecuted and killed. You could easily make the argument that he wouldn't have been if he would have been more submissive toward the authorities that became angered at him. On the other hand, you could also say that he was devoutly pursuing the Jewish laws and that he did not resist the Roman authorities either. So then you might say that he was just too zealous in his mission and he should have just chilled out and then he wouldn't have been persecuted/killed. If I understand typical anti-Christian disdain, it centers around the idea that Christians think they are supposed to go around saving the world instead of just minding their own business. If you subscribe to that belief, then I could imagine you saying that Jesus earned his fate and that he shouldn't have gone around preaching his beliefs and inspiring people because that interfered with the ability of religious and state authorities to dominate and subdue them.

Thanks, H 'gravimotion' Salles, for complimenting my open (critical) mind. What you should realize is that most people feel the need to place their consciousness into a subordinate position relative to authority. I don't find this necessary and I can contemplate different ideas about gravity whether they are attributed to Newton, Einstein, or someone without a recognizable name posting on an internet discussion forum. My interest is in critically discussing the content of ideas, not worshipping or disdaining them based on (truth) status. What I would like to discuss more about the idea of gravimotion is whether motion in and of itself is treated as sufficient to produce the effects commonly attributed to gravity as a force (field). In other words, are you proposing that simply by moving and interacting, matter emerges in the forms typically attributed to gravitational attraction?

I find this kind of metaphysical philosophy interesting to read and attempt to interpret. Posting this in a science forum should mean that you initiate a discussion of what it means to distinguish consciousness into different levels. E.g. what defines a single level of consciousness as being a single level and not multiple levels or a part of another broader level? What does the process of moving from one level of consciousness to another entail? etc. etc. I think you could reasonably raise these kinds of discussion in either the philosophy or religion section. My vote would be for religion since you're not so much dealing with substantive philosophical issues as states of consciousness/being, which also transcends more 'worldly' psychological questions.

Yes, I know you mentioned that. What I was meaning more, though, is that if elements would continue to fuse exothermically and lose mass beyond iron, for example, that stars would burn out more quickly maybe. Or maybe they would continue fusing until all matter was fused into a single atom, and this atom would immediate fuse with any incoming matter immediately due to gravity. I suppose none of this would violate conservation laws but it would make for a very different universe, I think.

Could this have to do with the conservation of energy/mass laws? After all, if elements would continue to fuse exothermically past iron, wouldn't stars be able to grow and release increasing energy infinitely? edit: please not this is not an attempt to hijack the thread with a side-topic. It's an approach to exploring the OP question by considering what reality would be like if elements heavier than iron would fuse exothermically instead of endothermically. I.e. would it violate energy/mass conservation?

Could this re-open the discussion about moonlight madness. Could air-pressure be part of the cause?

I really wish people globally would make a serious effort to incorporate at least one second language into their lives in a thorough way. Imo, it is a waste of the internet to have unlimited global point-to-point transmission capabilities and yet so many people are limited in consuming the majority of media available to them due to language barriers. The problem with language-learning is that it requires a community of speakers so either people have to go to where the speakers are or there needs to emerge multiple communities of speakers for each language in various regions. I think the most effective way to do this would be for all schools globally to select a primary second language for the school. That way, students, teachers, and staff could all practice using this language in everyday life outside of critical instructional areas. Newcomers to the school would learn the language the only way that really works, imo, by practical immersion.

I just posted the question in another thread whether there are any non-living processes that create hydrocarbons (or carbohydrates or any other fuel). If not, I would say that plants are the mothers from which all life and even non-living machines "nurse." Actually, I am forgetting about those deep-sea organisms that utilize geothermal heat, though I don't know how that works. Many animals and plants use water and wind power to assist them in various ways but I don't think there's such a thing as a living organism that can convert these forms of energy into consumable sugars the way photosynthesis does with sunlight. This all seems very simple in my mind, so maybe I am forgetting about something.

I like the way you say this. Hopefully not too much of an aside, but do you know of any non-organic (i.e. non-living) processes that create hydrocarbons? I can't think of any.

Your reasoning makes sense. Have you considered, though, that while doing something like ditch-digging might be a good exercise in discipline, strength-training, endurance, etc. and could give the digger a sense of accomplishment and joy in labor, if the person was subject to doing it all the time for a job, it might lose the allure, become a health-risk, and spoil the work of ditch digging for them outside of work. Sex is something that can be "saved" for situations in which one truly desires it and the pleasure of it being special can add a lot to the enjoyment. I would think prostitution would take much of the joy and magic of sex out of prostitute's experience of sex and turn it into something mechanistic, a set of recipes to follow that produce a given outcome. For this reason, I could see some value in choosing some other job than prostitution and saving sex for purely a voluntary leisure activity.

Dr. Rocket, how many posts are you going to criticize me uncritically before explaining why I'm wrong? How can the amount of energy contained in a given amount of radiation change because of the time rate of the receiver? I can see how moving toward a source can add energy to the received radiation because the added energy comes from the motion of the observer. How else can energy amounts vary in the way you're suggesting?

What could Jesus have done to prevent his killing?

I know, but if you control for the time dilation and the speed between source and receiver, the amount of energy must remain the same. You couldn't, for example, use a rocket to reach a speed where you could capture more solar energy than you would be able to capture from Earth orbit. I.e. if you were flying around at high speed with hyper-dilated time, you would capture and store the same amount of energy the sun emitted to a non-dilated receiver that aged longer while you were accelerated, right? Only the light-energy you captured was received at a higher-frequency for a shorter period of time (by your clock).

What if mass is relative the way spacetime dilation causes the yardstick to shrink or expand for length contraction? Could it be that while mass is measured as constant, it is actually changing in different gravitational situations and its stability could ultimately give way as a result, e.g. less radioactive atoms becoming radioactive with half-lives shortening, etc.? Is this along the lines of what this thread is contemplating?

Interesting posts about the possibility of simultaneous bankruptcy of everyone, but the point of the thread is really just to examine the fact that if a minority of people go bankrupt, they are judged as having failed or otherwise deserved it in some way. Yet if a majority of people, companies, banks, etc. go bankrupt, they are viewed as victims of a systemic glitch that can be fixed by reinjecting (bailout) money into the failed businesses and people and just keep going. So presumably, if the same people who get looked down on when they go bankrupt alone would go bankrupt at the same time as everyone else, they would be seen as having failed by no fault of their own - or by "collective mistakes" that no one was expected to avoid because everyone was approaching things the same way. Even now we see the approach to energy/money conservation that no one has to change the way they do things if no one else does, so normativity is somehow believed to erase the material causalities of economic problems. The continuing belief is that as long as there is money, everyone will be able to get more of it and buy more of whatever they want with it, as if money is the only limiting condition of economic production and consumption.

Sexually? I would have no way to answer that without knowing the details of the situation. In a sense, every job is a form of prostitution. Only totally voluntary labor would totally liberate you from the spirit of prostituting your labor/talents for money, but since money is handy for many reasons, I prostitute myself to get it. I still try to keep some sense of reasoning and choice about how I use my labor, though, even if I don't always have as much power or choice as I would like to have in work situations. Why are you asking personal questions?

I think Marxism would use the same principle to explain communitarian altruism as an ideology that serves the beneficiaries of the economic order by pacifying the workers in performing more labor for lower compensation. The only thing Marx really seemed to favor was total communism, where there would be no private property and all workers would contribute all their labor to the common good. Ancient Egyptians would have thus abandoned the pyramids in favor of utilitarian pursuits. Schoolteachers would devote themselves to educating students in utilitarian pursuits and the value of contributing to the common good. Artists would either choose forms of art that promoted communism or create art from trash or in some other way contribute to the common good using their art. Amish would not help each other out of solidarity but for the purpose of increasing the means of production so that everyone would benefit. Free market capitalism was designed to achieve the same good maximization through rationality and efficiency as communism, only the will to maximize production to make more money and the will to reduce consumption to save that money were supposed to be the mechanisms of self-interest that stimulated people to maximize public good. Capitalism would probably indistinguishable from communism by now if the will to save hadn't been replaced with the will to spend and flaunt one's money. Likewise, instead of continuously expanding to provide ever more people with capitalist goods, business strategies have shifted to limiting themselves to the most prosperous markets in order to avoid working for low levels of revenue. Enterprises like Walmart and other low-cost suppliers are the closest thing capitalism knows at this point to expanding to serve ever poorer markets, but these enterprises are attacked and regulated to generate higher dividends, wages, etc. for those who would rather increase the wages of westerners than expand capitalism into poorer economic regions.

I find it strange when people would not want to work in a coal mine, know that people get killed in coal mines, yet they feel perfectly fine with other people doing the job and even have no interest in shifting their own energy consumption to other sources of energy. The thing about sex as a commodity is that it is a highly desired one. So like any other highly desired commodity, demand creates pressure to produce supply. I don't think it is a manipulative appeal to emotion to point out that sexual desire causes people to suspend judgment where sex is concerned. I just spoke with someone recently, for example, who was totally against abortion and viewed it as murder. So when I asked this person whether people should completely abstain from sex unless they are willing to get pregnant and have a baby, they started citing things like birth control and adoption. If 100% protection against pregnancy was available for free simply by abstaining from sex, you would think that someone who views abortion as murder would choose abstinence over risk, so the fact that they don't suggests that people are willing to sacrifice a lot for sex. So when the sacrifice gets shifted from yourself to someone who's working for you, that becomes even more ethically problematic, imo.

That makes sense. My point is that it doesn't matter what frame of reference an observer measures energy from a star, however redshifted or blueshifted, the total amount of energy emitted is what it is. It's only relative to the rate of time. In other words, if you control for the speed of time, the amount of energy, whether blueshifted or redshifted, doesn't change. Is that not correct? That's not a reason I'm wrong. That's not even a reason

The problem is that for market freedom to be limited or abolished, regulators have to transcend their self-interest to exploit their position of relative power/control for their own benefit. In the absence of competition, people tend to try to get more and give less than they would if they knew someone else was willing to give more and take less. Communism holds the ideal view that people will voluntarily commit their labor to maximizing social good, but how many people will actually do this given the privilege/power to gain bargaining leverage instead?

Maybe in terms of measuring it as a specific quantity of energy. But it could still be the case that an object measured as having one quantity of potential energy within a chosen frame will have yet more potential energy to release at the point of maximum entropy within that frame, right? So it's not like you can say that once an object expresses all its potential within a given frame, that its potential energy has reached 'absolute zero.' But doesn't the same amount of energy get emitted by, say, the sun in one Earth year regardless of how much time is measured by a traveling observer? The energy could get blueshifted, but then the amount of time would decrease so that the total amount of energy would be the same as if they were in orbit with Earth. This is my understanding of redshift/blueshift. I.e. that the wave gets expanded or compressed but so does the amount of time elapsed so that conservation of energy doesn't get violated. I don't see how frequency of light can shift in a way that adds or subtracts energy from the total amount emitted +/- the amount the vehicle adds with its own speed. It's like if a train moving in one direction runs into a train going in the opposite direction, except with photons, the speed can't be added to the speed of the receiver so the frequency blueshifts instead - but how can more energy be gained than that of the light plus the speed of reception?

Why? What do you expect?

So potential energy is empirically present or absent, not just frame-relative. Ok, a rocket ship leaves a star and travels to Earth and registers a certain amount of energy from the star en route. Another rocket ship leaves Earth and travels to the star. Both ships depart and arrive simultaneously. The first ship will register the star's energy as redshifted and the second blueshifted, correct? Yet both must register the same amount of energy getting emitted from the star since their departure and arrivals were simultaneous? Because energy decreases as time goes faster? But isn't the total amount of energy the same, only spread out over a longer period or compressed into a shorter one?

I have followed a little of what Geert Wilders (Dutch politician) has said about Islam. He said that it goes beyond being a religion to being a whole lifestyle culture and, for this reason, it takes away people's freedom to live as they choose that is so central to western democracy. I think this view can be criticized by pointing out how various ideologies of national secular culture prescribe everything about how to live from what people eat to how they should dress to what kind of relationships they should have, etc. Western governments can promote freedom but they should not focus on muslims or other cultural ideologies without acknowledging how mainstream conformism undermines freedom as well. Beyond that I think Islamic cultural practices should just be understood and criticized the same as any other culture or religion. Part of the problem, however, is that journalists can be good at overdramatizing things that have shock potential instead of looking for deeper meanings that reduce that shock value. So, for example, even though some women would cover their breasts voluntarily at a beach where it is allowed for women to go topless, those women will not be criticized for being prudish victims of female subjugation whereas women who wear headscarves are. In reality, people could simply accept that headscarves are considered an attractive accessory because of certain fashion traditions instead of focussing on them as a marker of difference. There are many ways in which Islamophobia could be reduced, but the question is whether people really want to normalize European muslims, which I think many people simply don't want to do out of territorialism.

I have the idea that Marx idealistically believed that if everyone would take only what they needed and produced whatever they could to maximize goodness, that factories and farms would all supply each other with the necessary production inputs/ingredients. If they did that, there wouldn't necessarily be any need for a balance sheet, but it is of course an ideal that could easily result in mismanagement and abuse in practice. Still, people who think of money as some kind of essential ingredient to productivity can't grasp how people who have means of production and the skills and labor to use them could simply work to produce and give their products to the next factory in the supply chain to add further value.