npts2020

On 5/26/2023 at 3:00 AM, Genady said:

Yes, backwards relative to the train, but not necessarily relative to the ground when the train goes fast forward relative to the ground.

10 minutes ago, iNow said:

How does Ketanji Brown Jackson fit within this narrative?

Not sure yet. I do know she relieved Boeing and anyone else being sued as a result of the Malaysian Airlines flight 370 crash a few years ago from any accountability in US courts. It seems most of her rulings and activity have been tangential or irrelevant to large corporate interests but I would be happy to be corrected, after all, you have 8-9 years of district and appellate court activity to choose from.

5 hours ago, TheVat said:

The ruling from the court’s conservative majority vastly narrowing the federal government’s authority over marshes and bogs is a win for industries such as homebuilding and oil and gas, which must seek Clean Water Act permits to damage federally protected wetlands. Those industries have fought for decades to limit the law’s reach.

Friendliness to corporate interests has been the primary prerequisite for nomination to SCOTUS for decades, not any views about abortion, guns, drugs etc. Those doing the nominating don't care about any of the latter except that it's useful politically to not solve any of those latter things.

1 hour ago, Peterkin said:

I've got arthritic hands so I recently bought a bread machine.

Those things are fantastic. Dump all of the ingredients in before going to bed, set the timer and when you wake up you have fresh hot bread.

On 5/23/2023 at 8:13 PM, swansont said:

I disagree in the case of fission. One is more difficult; for a high-yield explosion you need to keep the material together for a certain amount of time. Otherwise you get a “fizzle” (and other issues can cause a fizzle as well)

Also, if you are using uranium for the fission device, it needs to be adequately enriched. Reactors can overcome the parasitic losses due to low enrichment by making them bigger to reduced neutron leakage. If you use plutonium someone has to make the plutonium.

I don't care to get in a discussion about building reactors or nuclear bombs and would pretty much agree with all of this but still maintain that if you have the ability to build one you can almost certainly build the other.

10 hours ago, MigL said:

The only difference between a weapon and a reactor is simply the rate of energy release.

Also, the configuration required for slow vs instant energy release but if one has the materiel and know-how to build one they can almost certainly build the other.

On 5/21/2023 at 10:56 AM, MigL said:

Except for the fact that more money in circulation means that more money is competing for a limited amount of goods, and this leads to 'demand-pull' inflation.

How does raising minimum wage increase the amount of money in circulation? Seems to me all it does is redistribute toward the creators, more of the wealth created. I should have clarified that money used to buy real goods rather than buying investments type of circulation. Buying back shares of stock doesn't create jobs, people being able to go out for a movie and dinner does.

21 hours ago, Sensei said:

..seriously.. ? The amount of inaccuracies must be counted in hundreds of percents..

 As evidenced by what? The scientists doing this for over a decade now seem to think it is fairly accurate and their results correspond well with statistics collected via other methods.

21 hours ago, Sensei said:

..except the significant amount of drug addicted people don't live in apartments and don't use toilets at all, as they are homeless etc. from which you can take their piss and analyze it, but on the streets and piss wherever they want ("under a cloud")..

How significant?  Also, keep in mind that urine in the street ends up in the sewage, anyway. 

WRT the OP it makes sense the the more money in circulation, the more jobs will be created.

13 hours ago, Sensei said:

How do you in the US measure rate addiction from narcotics.. ? Do you make survey? By text message? By sending e-mail?

 

Not exactly. It is done by testing sewage effluence. Drug usage can be inferred from the percentages of certain chemicals contained therein.

On 5/14/2023 at 9:54 PM, TheVat said:

Why he paints in the nude, I have no idea.

Probably because the model or artist's paramour showed up when they were doing something besides painting.

Cat litter is a pretty good absorbent and can be powderized if desired. It is used industrially for many things, including sopping up oil spills and radioactive liquids.

7 hours ago, Genady said:

Very good. You got the North Pole and all the points 115.92 north of the South Pole.

However, nobody got +1 yet, because ... there is / are still other possible point / points!

1 hour ago, John Cuthber said:

What's funny is having a town named Dildo in Canada,

Ya, but it's probably better than calling your town "Artificial Stimulation".

11 hours ago, dimreepr said:

AI and associated technology are making that statement less and less true, in all fields of human activities; one day it's perefctly possible that all we can do that a machine can't, is put a hand on someone's shoulder and say "there there"; maybe that's the revolution we need, because when that becomes true, money will have no meaning at all...

This will only be possible when resources are routinely used for the common good rather than individual enrichment.

8 hours ago, TheVat said:

OP answer imho is No.  Because without labor unions, collective bargaining, regulations and laws, you have people working long days at hard job for peanuts while management pushes paper around, barks at secretaries, and takes off at 2pm for golf, and they get millions.  That's the natural trend in capitalism, so you need a lot of structured restrictions to counteract that.  Otherwise the only "moral" imperative is shareholder profits.  

Sure but one has to assume none of that is "moral". Capitalist philosophy says it is perfectly moral to take advantage of others so long as it doesn't hurt the bottom line.

6 hours ago, Sensei said:

But that way you won't have the smell of freshly cut grass, which is nice..

I have a brilliant idea - rotating laser and mirrors on the edges of the field..

Actually, this would also work well on a regular farm if you need to quickly cut an entire flat field..

Advantages 1) quick 2) noiseless 3) jobless lawn mowers..

Disadvantage 1; seems to me a laser would cauterize the grass as it cuts so no fresh mowed grass smell. 

                        2; could be a fire hazard.

                        3; few fields are flat enough.

21 minutes ago, Genady said:

it depends how the 'hardness of work' is measured.

One way would be to measure participation in a given activity but it seems any method will be imprecise because you are trying to quantify a subjective human judgment.

On 5/5/2023 at 7:15 AM, dimreepr said:

system that doesn't allow money to earn more than hard work? 

I'm sure it is possible but so long as the system is based on money rather than tangible things, those with the money are unlikely to ever allow it to happen.

On 5/5/2023 at 7:42 AM, Genady said:

Work doesn't have to be hard.

Some work has to be hard, there aren't enough machines in the world with the skill sets to do all of it.

On 5/3/2023 at 8:54 AM, dimreepr said:

Don't fall into the trap of imagining our current model is in any way free, besides it's already regulated by some sort of moral code, just not a fair one.

I don't recall ever claiming the market to be "free". AFAIK such a thing has never existed but fact of the matter is the market is less free in no small part because of abuses of that freedom.

On 4/28/2023 at 5:13 PM, Genady said:

This is a short-term future, isn't it?

Depends on what is meant by "short term". To drosophila a human lifetime is an extremely long time. To the universe, all of human existence is very short period.

On 5/1/2023 at 7:27 AM, dimreepr said:

I'm more of an optimist, most people I meet are quite nice; I just hope "cometh the hour cometh the man" has some validity, it's worked in the past. 🤞 

Most people are nice but the "market" seems to reward those who are least moral the most. Besides, once you introduce anything like "ethics" or "morals" into the market, it is no longer "free". It is regulated by those morals and ethics.

If humans universally had the same morals a free market with morals would be a given. However, not everyone agrees on what is "moral" (indeed, some seem to see nothing as moral) which will certainly IMO lead to a market free from morals and full of abuses of all kinds.

On 4/26/2023 at 8:22 AM, swansont said:

The negatively charged particles aren’t atoms, they are electrons. The fission fragments are the positively charged atoms.

Sure. Perhaps I am mistaken, but I had always thought the difference in fragments was in size of mass not charge and that in fission it was mass lost not charge. That is why you don't get a useful electric current directly from fission. I could see a magnetic field, atomic filter or some similar scheme possibly causing an electric current to be produced, as the OP seems be asking, but the catch (as usual) will be in getting more energy out than you put into the process.

38 minutes ago, zapatos said:

In theory or in practice? If in practice, what do you propose for a breakthrough given that no nuclear power (AFAIK) seems willing to give up their nuclear weapons? Or even willing to talk about giving up their nuclear weapons.

Well, in a world where "might makes right" and there always seems to be a military ready to invade a neighbor or even some country far away it seems unlikely in practice before humans become extinct. It seems to me it would require adopting a universal set of rules for all nations and all peoples, something I don't see the ruling class in most places ever allowing to happen.