lemur

I also see work-sharing as a solution that promotes economic equality without the problem that some people feel like they are paying for others. You would think employed people would embrace this idea as a way to get more free time and pay less for others' social welfare. Yet people I've discussed this idea with tend to view it as unfairly taking away their work hours and thus reducing their income. This seems irrational, considering that it is likely that they're going to get stuck with providing some level of social welfare for unemployed people, but I suppose they think that they can just keep supporting politicians who do everything possible to take away social benefits and extract money from higher tax brackets to pay for what they can't eliminate. This is so detrimental because it concentrates paid-labor in the fewest possible jobs, which in turn promotes leisure-class activities as an escape from work.

Maybe because she thinks that if he's spending time with her, at least he's interested in her as a person beyond just a mere sex object. I.e. if he just pays for sex directly, she feels no validation for her value except as a sexual performer. If he takes her out and spends time with her, getting to know her, it may turn out that they have more in common than physical attraction. Maybe part of the problem is that women seek validation from men; although some don't and just seem to want to be left alone to go spend time with their girlfriends instead of having to be around their man all the time. I think you're right in general, though, that relationships tend to be prostitution-like except that the exchange becomes more complex than simply money for sex. I don't think there are many people who do things out of love, sex or otherwise, unfortunately. In fact, I think many women have been culturally programmed to view love as a commodity to seek from men and wear like a status symbol. They also learn to fetishize the feeling associated with being "in love" which is really just unrestricted affection, imo. Actual love, i.e. deep concern with someone's well-being and happiness, is practically always overshadowed by self-interest and egoism, imo.

Sure it does. People who make golf equipment, own golf courses, make, sell, maintain, and dock yachts, etc. invest and spend the money they make to pump GDP up to levels that sustain high incomes for those who have high income. If all doctors ever spent their money on was minimum wage labor and people who buy minimum wage labor; and if no one made any money on managing minimum wage labor except by making minimum wage themselves, then no one would be able to afford health care except as a fraction of their minimum wage disposable income. Or, otherwise said, higher income individuals maintain each other's privileged position by spending more money on each other than other people get paid or can afford. Idk what you mean here. See my response to the previous quote. In other words, income gaps decrease but class-stratification continues by means of status and cultural differentiation. People no longer pay more for a more expensive party but they still have exclusive parties where certain people are welcome and others aren't on the basis of class-status. People still prefer to date, marry, and have friendships within their social class. I think even more so because social mobility within less socially-controlled economies allows people to change classes, albeit there is sometimes a distinction made between 'old money' and 'new money.' It's a question. It means that I don't think these social patterns have faded and surrendered to egalitarianism. I think social superiority persists in various forms, especially in the form of national comparison. I.e. people with more social governments tend to be 'socialism snobs' who look down on people whose governments are less social. It's really mean because it is basically like saying, "haha, your rich people and governments don't love you and ours do. . . and don't think ours are going to love you either because we just take care of our own." They also fail to acknowledge that the least social economies make the best markets to invest in and exploit to get more money to up GDP in the socialist paradises.

The only way I can see that the universe can be self-creating and self-organizing would be for it to be cyclical. Since energy is not created or destroyed, that seems feasible. What I don't get is how a universe that dies in heat-death and eternal expansion can somehow recycle into a new big bang. Entropy seems to be a one-way process but on one hand you have the eternal expansion and whatever causes that; and on the other you have gravity and the tendency for all matter to eventually collect into a single point if it didn't all escape from each other through motion and expansion. If gravitational contraction didn't form the energetic point that began expanding with the big bang, then you're left with the question of what did. In that case, I think some "creative force" would be required other than gravity and the other natural forces. Of course, even if the universe was cyclical, you could still ask why forces and energy exist and behave as they do and how is it that humans have managed to develop the ability to understand them as well as some have.

I try to come up with ideas for more productive things to do with my time, which leads me into complex pondering about the nature and purpose of productivity, whether all activities popularly viewed as 'productive' in fact are, and what life would be like if everyone engaged in only productive activities or activities that reduced the use of material resources and labor. My main finding is that people would gain a lot of spare time, but they would have to use it in ways that didn't use up extra resources or require other people to give up more of their spare time to produce extra goods and services for them to consume.

I don't understand. Electrons in a conductor can theoretically alternate without losing energy to resistance up to a certain point, but at some point the electrons cannot behave as inertia-less anymore, right, so they emit energy as photons (maybe I'm mixing too many things here). Just at the most simplistic level of photons vs. particles with mass, photons can reflect without decelerating and accelerating but can electrons or any other particles with mass?

How is patent protection not collusion? What is any form of monopoly except an agreement of non-competition among all parties with the ability to produce something? You have a good point that the argument against patent protection shouldn't be limited to pharmaceuticals, but I'm not as interested in arguing against patent-protection (since I know I'll get buried under piles of reasons why it is beneficial). My point is that it is a temporary suspension of free market competition for the sake of allowing a special incentive for R&D of new products.

I understand that earthworms can self-inseminate. I think you're right about vertebrates all differentiating. Humans that are identified as hermaphroditic or intersexed cannot have both ovaries and testes, as I understand it.

Mainly I just think it's interesting that when people are talking about letting free-market dynamics rule, they rarely want to fully implement all free market parameters such as expanding competition and limiting monopolistic/oligopolistic control mechanisms to the maximum. People tend to like the free market when they can harness its profit-generating value by essentially colluding instead of competing. As you mention, when it comes to repressive effects on R&D people argue that temporary monopoly is a good way to allow market-control and collusion with science to generate new products. "Forcing prices down" is not force in an authoritarian sense. It is the whole basis for claiming that free market economics is good for consumers as well as producers. Without price competition, or when price-competition is insufficient, market-freedom becomes nothing more than a means for the supply-side (management and labor) to collude in extracting as much money as possible from consumers. "The cost of doing business," as you describe it, is really just the maintenance of a certain culture of spending among business people. Yes, certain processes cannot be eliminated or substituted with cheaper alternatives, but most can and the points of resistance in cutting budgets are usually social instead of physical, imo. Right, you hear this a lot; that older drugs are cheaper because the companies use sales of newer drugs to fund R&D and other aspects of business. This may be good or bad but the point is that it is again a form of business collusion that shields competition. I don't mind have it debated that competition or collusion (market freedom vs. market control) results in a better economy; after all that's the classical debate between capitalism and socialism. What bothers me is that we constantly hear how everything is the result of a free market when there's all kinds of relative control mechanisms being traded as part of the supposedly 'free' market.

It's like by putting faith and hope in a person, you put yourself in a position to be betrayed by them if/when they fail to live up to your expectations. Then you're left with either hatred or forgiveness for the 'betrayal,' depending on how you choose to approach it. You could be indifferent if you were in no way emotionally dependent, but then you would probably be emotionally dependent on someone/something else and your indifference would probably be tied to some level of relationship-avoidance, which is a form of hate or just caution?

What about turning Jewish into an antonym for Christian and then replacing Christian with German and Jewish with Semitic? Could it be that recoding commonality as antithesis and religion as race are both symptoms of a more general cultural trend?

Maybe such fluids can be frictionless up to a certain point, but think about what has to happen to particles as something moves through them. If there is momentum transfer between the object pushing through the fluid and the particles of the fluid, those particles are going to run into other particles, etc. Each collision of two particles with mass requires a corresponding deceleration and acceleration, which is force that adds up to friction. So AT SOME LEVEL any substance with mass has to have potential friction unless the particles can somehow miss each other and not collide during fluid displacement, right?

It sounds like the Iranian sexuality you describe works against sexual repression and tries to stimulate at least some level of social responsibility into ephemeral sexual relationships by having month-marriages. If nothing else, you could think of prostitution and pornography as isolating sex from other aspects of human relations. You could call a prostitute, have sex the same afternoon, and never see the person again by sundown. Pornography completely eliminates any personal contact from the exchange as the medium becomes the intermediary instead of the sex worker herself (or himself). At least if you're married to someone for a month, you might have some other forms of companionship that just the proverbial, "wham, bam, thank you ma'am."

How exactly does "distance spread faster than light?"

Or why not eliminate or shorten the temporary monopoly provided by patent protection? That way generic competition could immediately drive drug prices down to the minimum possible? I still haven't figured out why global competition isn't allowed since there are so many stories about cheap drugs and healthcare elsewhere.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWYXIuuI-Rg and if you have red/cyan 3D glasses: www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9M8XsI_8jc and just think how low the probability was that this pop song would ever discover life on SFN!

This is what I find interesting. So the particles are "falling" toward the center of gravity that has formed, and that converts gravitational potential into kinetic energy and therefore heat. But at the same time that is occurring, the 'fallen' particles are building up density and thus increasing gravitational potential of further particles. So it's like gravity is increasing as is kinetic energy of 'falling particles,' which is causing the inner particles to both heat and condense simultaneously, and so the heat has to be radiated out and that causes outer gasses to heat up and "boil away" as you put it. It almost sounds like that odd situation where a highly pressurized liquid can become superheated without expanding into a gas.

Why exactly would people be more likely to starve to death in developing economies than in developed? Isn't whole issue with hunger food distribution? And limiting population of 'energy hogs' implies that you're expecting high energy-per-capita 'hogging' to continue. I find energy conservation far more appealing than population control measures, and what's more I wouldn't find it accessible if people started implementing population control measures simply because they didn't feel like making the necessary cultural shifts to better energy conservation. You're ignoring my whole point again that it's not HOW MANY people live, it's HOW they live. Develop energy-efficient cultural lifestyles that make people happy and they will conserve on their own. Market the idea that they will be happier with cars, climate control, and other energy-expensive culture and they'll feel miserable without it. Market energy-efficient IT gadgets powered by solar-panel roofs over well ventilated but screened housing with architectural appeal and people will live happy low-energy lifestyles. It is clear that population is your main concern and energy-consumption is secondary. You just don't like the idea of lots of people living efficiently and happily with low energy-consumption, it seems. Please start another thread on population control so I can avoid it. I don't enjoy the though of imposing limitations on people's right to life and family. I just wanted to point out that you're confounding energy-usage with population by ignoring that conservation reduces energy-usage per capita. Other resource issues such as water, agriculture/food, etc. deserve their own thread.

Before the aether thread was closed, the question emerged for me of whether such a thing as a "frictionless superfluid" is actually possible. My reasoning is that it isn't because particles have inertia and thus resist momentum-exchanges during collisions. Therefore any fluid/gas consisting of particles with mass and thus inertia should have friction. Am I forgetting something? Also, in practice how much fluid/gas friction is due to particle-inertia and how much is due to other things, such as electrostatic force among the particles or maybe the shape of particles causing viscosity. I guess a lot would depend on the particular substance in question.

Limiting population is a political issue that shouldn't be included as an approach to solving energy problems. It's not how many people live that wastes energy; it's how they live. People walking around in homemade clothes in warm climates without want for climate control or many motorized vehicles use much less energy than the same people with personal cars living and working in climate controlled buildings.

Commodity trading is what it is. The commodity can be any object or piece of paper from a jewel to an old vase to a painting to "space bounds." The point is what happens on Earth as a result of money changing hands that depletes resources and exploits people.

Because an entropic system of thermal differentiation emerges from a cloud in apparent thermal equilibrium (though perhaps not gravitational).

Reducing unemployment through job-creation or work-sharing seems to be an important social goal. This reflects a work ethic that the economy supports everyone therefore everyone should support the economy. However, with mass production and other modern industrial efficiencies, trying to incorporate everyone into economically productive endeavors may be less effective than just keeping them out of the way. The problem, however, is that 1) people want to feel important and productive and 2) people who work generally don't like the idea of supporting people who aren't working. The solution that has been pursued in "the post-industrial age" has been to expand service sectors to create unlimited jobs where people serve other people in a variety of ways. This, however, has the drawback that people utilize unnecessary economic resources such as gas and tires to go around performing labor of questionable necessity. Plus, high levels of service expectations and dependency may result in increasing vulnerability to eventual shortages in such services causes by growing demand. Is there a solution or will there just be a continuing conflict between employed people and the unemployed they must work to support?

It amazes me that more people don't question the prices and costs of such things as you are doing. The problem is that so many businesses and jobs are funded by those high prices and the insurance pools that fund them. Cutting funding puts pressure on to reduce prices, but the response is usually to assume that prices/costs are fixed and to blame budget-cutters for not coughing up the money. It would be nice if the BS of so much economic structuring could be eliminated and people would do the simple work needed to help each other and teach each other to do things for themselves. Surely you could use plastic tubing from a hardware store and mold your own nose-fitting if you knew how or knew someone who could help you. Imagine if doctors gave out prescriptions for local craftspeople who made equipment from scratch? Ironically, it would cost LESS than the imported stuff does after it's been marked up to the highest price the market will pay in order to squeeze maximum revenue out of the insurance companies that squeeze maximum revenue out of the workers.

How can any substance with mass be frictionless? Inertia is a fundamental property of matter with mass, and particles with inertia necessarily create friction, don't they?