Phi for All

! Moderator Note This is a science DISCUSSION forum. What specifically do you wish to discuss?

Not that the individual level has much to do with the aims of corporate America, but I sold products on commission, and I/we wanted my wife to stay at home for a few years after my daughter was born, so yes, making as much money as I possibly could was my primary goal. I just can't pretend things haven't changed since I entered the workforce. Today's corporate greed is worse than anything we've ever seen. Young people are hamstrung compared to how it was when I was their age, and it keeps getting worse. We can't solve many of The People's problems when We have no political representation, and so many folks are struggling to make the corporations even wealthier while slowly dying themselves. It's time to stop letting them whitewash all the corruption (which they've become so good at, since 93% of all paint and paintbrushes used in the US are made using prison slave labor).

I disagree. Every business model I've ever seen has the goal of "making money by doing/making X". They may also have other goals, but the need to maintain an increasing profit margin overshadows all else. It overshadows any moral or ethical considerations that doesn't revoke their corporate charters, and it practically guarantees that stupid, destructive decisions will be made in the name of profit when the choice between money and doing the right thing inevitably comes up. And who's funding many of the private space ventures? I agree with this wholeheartedly. Again, I disagree. Any modern US examples of "public enterprises" have been so tainted by private concerns that they're unrecognizable from past efforts that didn't rely on them. And I think public endeavors can be more easily designed to remove corruption and greed from the process, as long as we can keep politicians and lobbyists in check.

Exploring the space around us is going to require a better motive than naked greed and profit. Find me a corporation that puts anything above profit and we can talk about them. OTOH, when the focus is on exploration and advancement, and all the actors are using the same basic script to regulate their behavior, then perhaps we can avoid taking all our bad habits into space. Greece just signed on to The Artemis Accords, dedicated to the peaceful uses of outer space. Hopefully the world as a whole can realize that in space, cooperation and reason beats competition and aggression.

I think allowing anything offplanet that has as little compassion for humans as a corporation is a big mistake. We need to be able to trust them not to hold the whole planet hostage, and right now I sure don't. Ruthless business practices are so common on Earth, with corporations killing millions for profit, in "well thought out" campaigns of slavery, torture, and corruption. If they get offplanet and are allowed to keep those practices, there's nothing to stop them from gaining the upper hand for all time, nothing except their own altruism.

Not if we wake up and realize the private sector only needs to fool us one last time to get all the marbles. In the words of Grand Moff Tarkin, you're far too trusting.

I don't know what this means. I understand, and I'm asking where did you get the number for support services? Did you look it up independently, or was the contact number/link/email conveniently included in the email you received?

Was the number for "their support service" in the same email as the offer?

! Moderator Note Try this again, in the Speculations section, without religious references. As is, we aren't going to discuss this here, not at all.

OK. Thanks for just yawning instead of insulting me. I get the message either way.

Since we aren't aligned politically, are you implying none of our definitions have any meaning at all? By this reasoning, we'll never be able to define anything meaningfully. Are you sure about requiring our politics to align? Maybe our definition of "align" is different too. So how do you think making decisions for others has any meaning? My stance is that you can influence MigL's choices, you can berate him for things that make you uncomfortable, you can even work towards legislation that will force him to make more typical choices, but ultimately the decision to behave in a way that feels right is his, and his alone.

I hope you don't mind me isolating this sentiment. It sort of points out that "fit" isn't determined by anyone other than the wearer of the shoe. Style, color, and other aspects of the shoe can be judged by society, but how well the shoe fits the person is purely subjective. Perhaps one day we can view people going through a gender transformation the same way we view somebody walking around a shoe store trying on shoes to get the best fit possible. We don't assign some ulterior motives to those folks, we don't become convinced they're abnormal because they didn't choose the wingtips, and we don't assume they have some agenda wrt why their footwear choices diverge from the norm so much. On a side note, "If the shoe fits, wear it" is a specious phrase I'm going to make an effort to avoid from now on, like "Rule of thumb".

I think this is the whole point. You can "rely" on cues from society to show you what it considers normal or acceptable, but the decision to behave that way or not is completely up to the individual. It HAS to be, otherwise we're utterly dependent on the judgement of others. We have laws to keep folks away from some of the extremes, and mores to make things work better (like queuing up in lines), but some people have taken their judgement too far. They want to tell us what's acceptable for someone who looks like us to wear or eat or claim as an identity. I think there's a huge difference between keeping quiet while facing the front of the elevator, and accepting society's horrible attitude towards divergent personalities. And there's a LOT of evidence that clinging to somebody else's ideal of human behavior is harmful to the rest of us. Especially when those ideals are weaponized by ultra-conservatives with their various agendas. And none of this is new. The Jim Crow era taught us how to stigmatize black people with various stereotypes, and that model also works well with transgendered humans. Paint them all as confused or perverted or immoral and you let the whole society know that these less-than-people aren't to be tolerated.

All the Abrahamic religions are heavily patriarchal, with a skewed hierarchy that places God above Man and Man above Nature, which seems to give most followers a free pass when it comes to environmental responsibility. Just like Christianity and Judaism, Islam preaches that the balance Allah created shouldn't be tampered with, and the Hadiths contain many admonitions about misusing natural resources and protecting our environment. Unfortunately, politically these religions have a horrible track record with environmental causes. I'm not sure what causes this hypocrisy, but I suspect many Muslims consider protecting Earth to be a waste of time compared to getting into Heaven.

I thought so too, until you claimed that "we all do" when asked who decides what it is to be a man for MigL. So which is it? Do people get to be who they think they are, or are "we all" going to manipulate them?

I know a wizard diesel mechanic who would be just as insulted as you are. Some societal pressures are worthwhile, like obeying laws, but I think we're wising up to the fact that trying to tell anybody other than yourself how they should dress, or what pronouns they should be comfortable with, and yes, even which gender they should present, is a hypocritical stance right off the bat. If we don't want the judgement of every ex-sister-in-law with their own ideas of what and how we should be, then we should let everybody else decide for themselves as well.

You haven't decided what being a man is for you? You're too smart not to see why I ask, so I think you're looking a few moves ahead, and have decided not to answer me yet again. I think you know that each of us ultimately defines what it is to be us. We can let society and the opinions of friends and family guide us, but then we must choose to let them decide for us, or to decide for ourselves what all the pieces are supposed to do. IOW, I decide what it means to be a man when it comes to me, nobody else. I don't know about any of this. I just asked a question about people's right to choose for themselves.

I can see you're not defending him. You're deciding how he should behave. So why do you reduce the conversations HERE, between the academically inclined, to nothing more than stand-up videos and obscure jokes and references? And btw, jokes are NOT a way codify meaning. If anything, jokes can show us that conventions don't always hold up. And here, your joking is as useful as some of the popular science explanations we see. It does nothing to make anything clearer for anybody HERE, and obfuscates what the discussion is trying to develop into. Considering that the topic tries to make light of something more serious, your efforts seem very counterproductive.

Right. Private corporations can't handle the R&D necessary. They're weak in that department, extremely weak. They need to show their stockholders that there will absolutely be a return on the investment, and they've almost always fallen down in efforts where they need to pioneer the knowledge and technology available. But look what the government did with the Postal Service! No private company was able to deliver letters to 50 states for the same rate, so the government made it happen. And now private interests want to swoop in and buy it all up for pennies so they can raise the rates like they did when they began taking over our utilities (oh gosh, I shouldn't get started on the stupidity of letting corporations manage our power structure). And NASA managed to take us offplanet in the ultimate pioneering effort. Personally, I think you read about the Challenger disaster and passed judgement on the whole program, which is very naive, imo. NASA has done more to fill in the gaps in our knowledge of space than any private company, and they did it without needing to make a profit. I'm very biased about the program. I'm friends with one of Buzz Aldrin's biographers, and the same guy made me aware of the problems with orbital debris, so I've studied quite a bit about how we deal with outer space as a country and a planet. I think what you're suggesting will be the downfall of our entire species if we don't stop trusting the private sector to regulate themselves. If we allow the private sector to have access to the resources available offplanet, we can expect every evil thing that's ever happened in science fiction. I don't think you understand how ruthless private interests can be if they aren't heavily regulated, and if you give them the ability to bring asteroids close enough to Earth to mine, you give them unfettered control over all of us.

I've asked you this question in two different threads, and twice in this one, and you keep doing a marvelous job of sidestepping it, like you refuse to understand what I'm asking. So here it is again: WHO GETS TO DECIDE WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A MAN FOR YOU? Is it you? Is it other men? Is it society in general? Or someone/thing else? I can't help what you think "my line" makes you sound like. Prejudice isn't the sole province of fascists, but I think anyone who defines how others should behave runs the risk of pre-judging them. And all I'm asking for is clarification. Who is the ultimate authority about how YOU define what being a man is for you?

"Empathy deficit" describes most of the big time CEOs I've ever heard of. Personally, I think the whole corporate structure is modeled after the same hierarchy the Abrahamic religions are modeled after. The CEO is God, and everyone else is below them. "Just good business" is synonymous with "empathy deficit". You aren't supposed to take people's feelings into consideration in business, even when it's a social media company. Can you name any other social media companies where the CEOs are empathetic and care about people's thinking more than profit?

Do you place the blame for Facebook on Zuckerberg's neurodivergence? I've seen other CEOs trying to downplay the gravity of their mistakes, so why is Z different? I also try to keep in mind that "normal" is decided by those who think they're normal, and also that our modern society (in the US at least) is ANYTHING but normal. There are so many mixed messages, hypocritical processes, laws that sound good but are horrible, so much deceit and lying, so many absolutely STUPID behaviors that people willingly embrace, and so much ennui in the same bodies as all our passions that it's a wonder more of us aren't diagnosed with a disorder. What if autism is an evolutionary attempt to save us from the dangers of being "typical"?

It happens less often than two tall people having a short child. Autism is 50-80% heritable, height is about 80%. It helps to take the perspective that autism isn't a disorder (like being tall). I know that's not the current thinking, but the behavior I've observed is more divergent than abnormal.

Why do we treat this particular group differently? Are we unhappy with their definition of man and woman? Again, I ask you who gets to define what being a man is FOR YOU? And if you get to decide, why isn't that courtesy extended to others?

! Moderator Note If you're basing this decision on the replies you quoted, they didn't come from this thread. Not sure where you got them.