exchemist

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OK let's see if someone else bites. (Hope not just Mordred, as he tends put up walls of Greek at the drop of a hat.😄)

I'm not great on the physics of this but my likely imperfect understanding is there is a change in phase velocity, when the frequency of the light is close to an absorption band of the medium. This arises due to an increasing degree of coupling of the atoms of the medium with the EM field, as the frequency approaches the absorption frequency more closely. The resulting phase velocity can be either <c or >c depending which side of the absorption frequency you are. But this seems to be talking about the group velocity, not the phase velocity. I hadn't realised this too could be slowed down by passage through the medium. Is that what they mean or am I misinterpreting it? It crossed my mind that this "-ve time" thing could perhaps be associated with reconciling a phase velocity >c with the fact that no actual information is transmitted >c. Can anyone shed light (haha) on this for me?

Surely the problem is you can't get close to the speed of light without incurring a close to infinite energy cost?

This has to be the hockey stick to end all hockey sticks! How in hell can anybody have confidence in this vast, apparently exponential, extrapolation from such a noisy data set?

le-Is-what-he-calls-nothing-really-such-What-is-wrong-with-defining-nothing-as-synonymous-with-nonexistence-to-ask-Why-is-there-existence-itself Well not really. Nothing does not mean chaos. Chaos means utter disorder, surely? That seems to imply there must something to be disordered, or ordered, in the first place.

That's interesting. Where does Krauss claim the universe originated from chaos?

By "people" I presume you mean creationists, right? Because that is not how the origin of the universe is thought of in science.

Oh sure the upstream margins on equity crude can be huge when the crude price is high. But this for decades now has been driven by OPEC, i.e. cartels of national producers, not by oil companies. The amount of equity crude owned by oil companies, as opposed to national organisations nowadays is pretty small, less than 10% if I remember correctly. I'm not sure how one would create a supply constriction in the US, though. There are so many supply sources, both domestic and international. How would that be engineered?

Hear hear. It’s absurd. It’s global supply and demand. The US President has bugger all influence on it, except as an indirect consequence of geopolitical decisions. But we’re not really off-topic, because the whole issue of “price-gouging” is highly political, suiting politicians to talk up when they want to curry favour cheaply or find an easy scapegoat. There are some blatant examples of course - the Shkreli affair springs to mind - but it’s a minefield of bullshit (to mix metaphors). For instance I was depressed to read Harris has been trying to play the price-gouging card, inviting a certain amount of ridicule from economists, apparently.

That sounds correct, yes. Using an inflation-adjusted figure could well lead to a crude price above $100/bbl but then, as you say, one obviously needs to compare that with a fuel price that is also inflation-adjusted. I do get a bit fed up with this constant belief in price-gouging by fuel retailers, actually. Unit margins for fuel products in the oil industry are always fairly tight, due to the fact the products are commodities that are widely traded internationally by numerous parties. It is pretty hard for manufacturers to manipulate the prices of such commodities, because there are so many sources of supply. The low unit margins are why the supermarkets are taking over fuel retailing. By combining it with grocery sales they can make money in the shop to supplement the tiny margin, or even sometimes loss, they make at the pump. The fuel operation serves mainly to draw the customers in, when they need to fill up. The supermarkets themselves buy the fuel by shopping around among the traders on the commodities market for oil products. You are misinformed. See @swansont ‘s comment re possible confusion between actual and inflation-adjusted prices. See also my further comments above on retail fuel margins.

When, in the 1970s, was crude $100/bbl, and what is the source of your information? I don’t believe it ever got anywhere close to that, or not for long enough to affect the cost of petroleum products. As I recall it was in the 30s most of the time. That was itself a shock compared to the prices in the 1960s, which were in single digits, but $100/bbl sounds fanciful to me. But if you have a solid source for it I’ll happily concede my memory is at fault.

Ah, Godwin's Law again. Are you really suggesting Hitler was a typical atheist? And where did Hitler express any of these views you ascribe to atheists in your opening post?

Are you sure about that? I don’t recall it ever exceeding about $40/bbl in the 1970s.

OK that makes sense.

That's interesting. So there is actually a legal constraint on the rate at which prices can be increased. But I suspect the "rise in costs" bit is fairly hard to establish unambiguously. Attributing costs to individual products is notoriously difficult and arbitrary. Sounds to me like a licence for rival groups of snarling American lawyers to earn huge fees 😄.

As I said earlier, it's a perception by the customer, not an objectively quantifiable thing. You can charge what the market will bear in the short term, but if you value customer loyalty that has to be tempered by an awareness of what your customers are likely to think is a reasonable price. During my career in the downstream oil industry (lubricants), I used to distinguish between the mentality of traders and that of marketers. A trader behaves exactly as you describe. Each transaction is profit-earning in its own right and there is little or no loyalty expected or shown between a trader and his counterparty, save that of basic honesty - nobody wants to trade with a crook. (Traders used to be advised to be guided by the old adage "my word is my bond".) But in marketing you are trying to build a brand, to which your customers will feel some loyalty, returning time after time for repeat purchases. For that they must be happy with the product and any associated services, and part of that is the price, of course, as well as the performance of the product and the general market behaviour and reputation of the company. Brands take decades to build, but can be trashed overnight by clumsy behaviour or a product failure. So they have to be nurtured with extreme care. There are thus a lot more factors to consider in marketing than in trading, even in a theoretical unregulated, free market environment.

Which is why you have the FTC and we have the CMA. And we definitely need such bodies, since an unfettered free market tends eventually towards monopoly, or at least oligopoly.

True, but those same market forces mean that companies that are perceived by their customers as ripping them off risk losing market share over time, if they have any competition. So it's absolutely fair comment for customers to complain of price gouging if they feel they are being shafted. It's just one mechanism by which market forces operate!

Why does this not surprise me? I must say I have always found this exclusivist variety of Christianity thoroughly arrogant, smug and obnoxious. As @iNow remarks, it's a No True Scotsman. It's also distressingly petty: the reference to the Westboro Baptist church, whatever that may be, seems laughably parochial to bring to an international science forum. This is the funny thing about some of these extreme Protestant sects: because they are exclusivist they are forever falling out with one another and splintering, with each of them claiming theirs alone is the one true version of the faith. From the outside it looks thoroughly self-absorbed and ridiculous. If there is any truth in Christian belief, it seems far more probable that, as faulty human institutions, no one denomination or sect has a monopoly on either understanding or on salvation. Surely it makes a lot more sense, instead of castigating everyone but yourself as erring from the truth, you accept we are all sinners and build bridges with other groups, focusing on what you can agree upon.

Because, you dimwit, not everybody has a system with a control near the door. If you had read the posts you would have realised that. For instance my alarms have no control at all, as I explained.

Then I don't see your point. Both are cars, using IC engines, gearboxes, suspensions etc that are broadly the same. Unlike, say a bicycle. Calling both a Honda and a Ferrari cars is not an "arbitrary", in your words, classification. Nobody is asserting a gorilla is the same as a bonobo or a man is the same as a chimpanzee. But that does not make it "arbitrary" to classify all of them as apes.

Can you provide examples then?

You are dismissing the science, then. That's a stupid thing to do. The similarities between Man and the other apes are numerous and obvious, as is the evidence of linkage through the progression of fossils. Possibly the most conclusive of all is the DNA similarity. No other creatures on the planet have DNA so close to our own as the apes.

All this from a person who claims clades are arbitrary........ "Random chance", in my experience, is a phrase used by creationists attempting to ridicule the theory of evolution. I note also the conflation of abiogenesis with evolution, which is an error (or sometimes a deliberate rhetorical ploy) characteristic of creationists. Similarly, the notion of "aggressive competition" is one beloved of creationists, rather than people who understand the science. (The only "competition" in the theory is in the sense of relative reproductive success - there's nothing "aggressive" about it.) So we seem to have a string of Aunt Sallys here, being projected onto "atheists" but in fact based around what creationists wrongly claim the theory of evolution says. Last time I checked, most creationists are not atheists. And the projection continues. No one who understands the science thinks the universe arose from "chaos". Quite the opposite in fact, in terms of entropy at least. Chaos, again, is a term creationists like, as it fits the biblical account in Genesis. There seems to be also an attempt to elide acceptance of the theory of evolution with "atheism". This is something we often see from certain types of biblical literalist (i.e. stupid) Protestant, who are ignorant not only of science but of their own religion as well. In fact, the major western Christian denominations are perfectly happy to accept the science of evolution. And finally we have the ridiculous idea that "atheists" accept science merely out of loyalty to a preconceived worldview, rather than because they have been properly educated in science. Once again, most educated Christians also accept the science. Why would those Christians accept the science on its genuine merits, whereas "atheists" only do so out of some sort of tribal loyalty? But at last it seems you are running up the Jolly Roger. The agenda is finally revealed. In some ways it's a relief to see my suspicions confirmed.