Phi for All

Is this macho loner stuff, or are you also talking about homesteading off-grid?

Ethanol has problems, mostly because it involves hideous amounts of synthetic fertilizers and herbicides. Also, any cornfields that aren't producing food to eat means there are people somewhere down the line who die from starvation. We've tracked this for years. Ethanol isn't magic.

! Moderator Note Thread closed.

It does none of these things. What it does is give you a way to claim you know more than people who've studied this their entire lives. It gives you the ability to sit on the fence about any bit of science you refuse to study rigorously. It gives you an excuse to claim the giants who went before you don't have broad enough shoulders to stand on. It gives you an unearned reason to question without understanding. You'll probably just keep throwing things at the wall, hoping something sticks, wasting the time you might have spent studying more than popular science on the internet. You have a good mind, you should at least try to formally study the knowledge humans have accumulated over centuries.

ImplicitDemands has been banned. We discuss science, and they need to seek answers elsewhere, for the sake of everybody's health.

Mass measures how much matter is in an object, while weight measures how gravity affects the mass. Gravity gives the same mass a different weight on planets with differing gravity.

My apologies, I thought others had persuaded you that your definitions were non-standard and ill-conceived.

That's when the sun burns up most of its hydrogen. Long before it does that, it will be so bright with energy that Earth will dry out. Earth and Mars might even survive as planets as the sun goes red giant, but they'll be dry rocks, and they won't be habitable.

But you said that intelligence might be the defining line between living and non-living. Then you double-down right afterwards: As others have said, if you're claiming that plants have intelligence, you've broadened the definition so far that it's now useless. No definition of life I've come across would exclude plants, and no definition of intelligence would include them. I have noted before that life is generally better at absorbing and dissipating energy from the sun than inorganic matter is. That's mostly due to movement, not whether they have a brain or mind.

You mad the claim that intelligence "may be the defining line between non-living and living". I took that to mean... well, what you wrote:

You have the kinds of fears that are helped by education. You don't have the kind of education to help you know what you don't know. Your gut tells you something is wrong, but it doesn't tell you that you're the problem, that it's wrong to make things up to fill the gaps in your knowledge. If you want to pursue your WAGs, there are plenty of discussion forums for you, but not here. The problem with them is that everyone is like you, convinced they've solved a problem science doesn't really have, so they tend not to really listen to other people's WAGs. If you want to pursue science, I suggest you take some science courses so the discussions here make more sense to you. You're not dumb, you can lean this stuff, but it's not always intuitive. You have to stick with it to see the predictive power of the methodology. You can't give up and start making up things that make more sense to you in your ignorance.

So sorry for all those unintelligent plants and organisms that just lost their "live" status. It breaks the heart!

! Moderator Note Not you, someone else. Taken care of, move along.

Terrorists are usually state funded. Prophets over profits.

But it's not. "Distance" is already being used by spatial dimensions. Your nomenclature is confusing. If I show up at the Eiffel Tower's restaurant tomorrow for lunch, I've used two spatial dimensions to get me to the right place on the surface of the planet, a third spatial dimension to go up to the right altitude, and a temporal dimension (time) to be there when they're serving lunch. I can't hand you a bag of time (or any dimension, for that matter), but it's an observable phenomenon so it's definitely "real". And it certainly has an earthly existence, that's why we measure it and use it in most of our calculations. A PDF should be safe enough to download, but I'm reluctant if your paper is based on some of the claims you've made already. Time is not an easy concept, but it seems like you threw it overboard as soon as it became difficult, and decided to make up something that makes more sense (to you, at most). You should stop messing with the font size and bolding most of your posts, as that's a total crackpot move. Thank goodness we caught you before you added color. Can you answer some of the questions and replies you've already gotten? Otherwise, it seems like you're just pushing us to accept what you've said, and that's not discussion, it's soapboxing or preaching.

At some point, the cost of the disasters should outweigh the cost of the training that's being neglected. For some reason, in the last few decades, training employees correctly has become a bad practice. Too many employers don't want to spend the resources up front because the employee MIGHT leave for a better job after training.

Are you responding to what I posted?! It doesn't seem like it. I commented on your post because you claimed the majority are focused on making things bad for the talented people. I think they are focused on making things better for themselves. If that makes things bad for you, it's a consequence, not a focus. I don't know how this ties to what you posted above. It's like you're having multiple conversations and randomly switching questions and answers.

Or they aren't thinking about that in the least, and simply do things for themselves that you resent a great deal.

This is always a big red flag for me. Theory is the strongest explanatory mechanism science has. Are you looking for "proof"? Proof is for maths, but you don't want to do the maths. Rejecting the foundations of spacetime is going to be an uphill battle all the way. Astrodynamics uses those foundations to land a spacecraft on an asteroid millions of miles away. Without them we miss. How does this match up with your observation that time doesn't exist?

Do you remember what this thread is about? Shall we close this one so you can pursue this new problem?

This is totally inappropriate for a hard science topic. True? Reality? Science isn't interested in either of those subjective descriptions. This also highlights my objection with your methods. You get to claim ad infinitum that we don't understand X because you're skeptical of the actual science that's gone on before, of how investigations you've never studied may have been handled poorly. Your incredulity means you're always right, never wrong. It's truly frustrating trying to have a conversation where consensus is in one person's hands rather than among peers. Are we done here, or do you want to start a different thread in Philosophy?

1-3 are the same things. We can definitely do better. This is a capitalist problem though, manufacturers not wanting waste to cost them profits. Remove capitalism and there are suddenly great reasons to clean up our environment. 4-6 are similarly related. Remove the need for capitalist profit and increase education availability to make these vanish. 7-10 also mostly go away when there's no reason or profit in them. Better social investment also reduces these drastically, helping us move away from basic tribal conflicts. 11-13 are yet more examples of problems that mostly go away when we allow pressures OTHER THAN profit to influence our decisions. More capitalism is making these problems worse, so the answer seems obvious. 14-16 are humans forgetting that we have intelligent brains, and that we can overcome animal behavior by actually using them. These are really the only "shortcomings" on your list, since the rest can be fixed by removing the desperate need for more and more profit in our economies. We CAN be ignorant and selfish and greedy like many animals, or we can realize that cooperation and communication gets everybody what they need so greed and selfishness have no firm ground to grow in.

This might be the perfect time for a candidate opposing big corporate influence. Republicans are pretending to dislike corporations so they can favor the big businesses that favor them and denounce the businesses that object to their voting restrictions, but much of their base is old enough not to like the fascist signals coming off of leadership. Most (all?) of the age-appropriate Democratic candidates are all corporate sympathizers banking on populism AND negative reactions to populism. The best that can be said about them is that they won't spend any time dismantling our democracy. I think there are a LOT of People who want to spend less time worrying about political leadership. They'd like to know that their numbers count for something, that We the People are worth the big investment other countries make every day, and that the current corruption brought on by the lack of corporate regulations and restrictions can be stopped.

OTOH, this would really help with 5-9, 13-16.

Absolutely NOT the worst thing about abortion and birth control! Simplistic overgeneralization. Birth control has always been needed, because not all births are wanted. Shine some light on this with calculations, please, because it seems like you pulled this from someplace dark. And in the 20s it was said that by now people would have flying cars. Reality has that affect on science fiction. Specious argument. We also could have spent our space exploration funds on taking care of so many people. Great example of logic failing us when applied outside maths and philosophy.