mistermack

I wonder if our American friends would like to make full reparations to the Palestinian Arabs, who have had the very earth beneath their feet stolen, on the basis not just of skin colour and ethnicity, but of religion too. How much would it cost to put right that modern atrocity, which is still happening, and doesn't even have the dubious mitigation of "oh well, nobody knew better in those days".

Evidence? You have no more idea of how I feel, than you do about reparations. I don't feel bad, I feel slightly irritated to read it, because I like to stay within the bounds of reality, and fantasy just niggles me. There might be some tokenism, performed to attract votes from some quarters, but there won't be reparations on any real scale. It's just fantasy. And in any case, they are not always a good thing. The reparations imposed on Germany after WW1 directly created the atmosphere for WW2. That's widely accepted by historians as a fact. Just a small matter of about fifty million deaths, and enormous squandered resources, laid directly at the door of WW1 reparations.

I just saw a piece on the BBC news channel about a rather similar spraying exercise as an experiment on cooling at the Great Barrier Reef. They are hoping to create more cloud cover in the area, reflecting more sunlight, and cooling the reef. It's not the same purpose at all as what I suggested in the OP, but it's remarkably similar in what is proposed. I was proposing it as a way to get more rain falling over deserts like the Australian Outback, rather than cooling anything. But the spraying idea is much the same. I wouldn't want the salt water to completely evaporate, the way they are suggesting. Too much salt in the atmosphere, and no control over where it would fall. I would aim at a small proportion of the spray falling back into the water, taking all of the salt with it. But it's interesting to see that spraying on a huge scale has been costed, and is being tested. Maybe they read this thread and pinched the idea ! https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-06-28/tiny-cloud-brightening-particle-research-climate-change-icnaa/102524408

No, you were preaching down to me. Of course I negged it. Too long, too preachy and self rightous to get involved with, so I said it with a neg. AL point. And no Genady, not me.

Drug assisted.

I don't think so : It's changed. But that's fair enough. That's the point of discussing stuff.

Yes. The only point of difference is that free-falling is not acceleration. That's why you can't feel it. That's there at the start of special relativity. As soon as you start to free-fall, you stop feeling the effect of gravity as you like to put it. When you step off a cliff, you ARE accelerating, in the frame of reference in which the cliff is stationary. But your're not accelerating in your inertial reference frame. So you feel no force. No, that would be non-sense.

Yeh, but that's just mincing words. Of course not. That's the equivalence principle. But the same principle establishes that free-falling in a gravitational field is equivalent to zero acceleration in a zero gravitational field. Common sense.

I always double check it's the right train.

That's right. But in free fall, you will feel nothing. You can only feel the transition from not free-falling. We can feel gravity. Sat in a chair, you can feel the effect of gravity in every part of your body, although we're so used to it we hardly ever note it. But in free fall, you can't feel gravity at all. And as we're not used to that, it will feel strange. Of course, free falling in air, you will soon feel the air rushing past you.

No, it's actually more like acceleration suddenly stopping. When you stand on the edge of a cliff, you experience an upward force through your feet, that's transferred throughout your body. If you step off the cliff, that force is no longer there, so that's what you're feeling, the sudden absence of that upward force.

That's not acceleration you feel. It's the sudden change, from not free-falling to free-falling. You can't feel free falling. Nobody can.

How?

No we don't.

Same thing.

Quite right. Which just means more to go wrong. When you are hosting the malarial parasite, one minute you're freezing, the next you're overheating. When I stood next to the window in the Empire State building, I felt the world spinning. And I often feel I'm being hilariously witty. Senses can really let you down. And give you the wrong idea.

I once sensed an entire marching band, just around a blind corner in a country lane. When I walked around the corner, there was nothing there, just a large waterfall just yards from the road. It was an audio hallucination, but very real at the time. So one might not sense god, but other ones definitely can, and do so all the time. And they're probably round the bend, like I was.

So why don't you all clear off back where your ancestors came from, and give the continent back to it's rightful owners?

You're jumping around in your logic. I might be legally liable, but I'm not morally "to blame" in any way for the gas tanks. Just like the government is NOT legally liable for reparations, but you're trying to argue that they are "to blame". It's all very much special pleading. Your simple model was, "if we did something wrong, make it right". You're now a million miles from that.

No, the government are also dead and gone. And Ford is just a name, the organisation is in constant flux. If I buy Ford shares today, I'm not to blame for their previous gas tanks. Basically, your "simple" rule is anything but.

An eye for an eye? That's simple. Find the people who did something wrong, and I agree, force them to make it right. Good luck with that. They're dead and gone. My ancestors were probably enslaved by vikings. Not much chance of the Danes or Swedes chucking me a wad of money. I'd be embarrassed to ask for it, but not too proud to take it.

Or there could be no gravitons to carry it?

Do you have to run the calculation of what black people would now be earning, back in Africa, if their ancestors had never been enslaved in America? Because there was plenty of slaving going on in Africa before the American market opened up, so the chances are that their ancestors would have died as slaves in Africa, instead of slaves in the Americas. It's a complicated calculation. What do you include, what do you leave out, and who decides? To me it's a ludicrous concept. People have been oppressed and enslaved, black and white for thousands of years. Very few people weren't enslave or oppressed. Only the very rich. They might not have called it slavery, but it was, in all but name. Take 50% of the adult population, for example. Women. Slaves, property, sex-slaves, they were all of that, quite legally, right up the social ladder till relatively recently. Then children. Sent up chimneys, down mines, sold as apprentices, even kidnapped and made to work as pickpockets and burglars, according to one documentary I saw, about a kid called Oliver. The distinction between "free" people and slaves might be fairly marked now, but it was just a faint blurry smudge for most of history.

My own feelings about reparations are that cash to individuals should not happen, unless that individual was individually harmed. What I would approve of is reparations to a disadvantaged group, in the form of educational facilities, health facilities, sport facilities etc. To be honest, I think that should be happening anyway. I'm not a proponent of equality, but I would vote every time for equality of opportunity. That's not going to happen, but if there are to be any reparations, I think they should go in that direction.

The day that decided their fate really would have been the day that they decided on carbon fibre for the body of the sub. (probably). Certain decisions tie you in, once taken, and there is no going back. Carbon fibre has a sexy image with the public, being used in formual 1 cars, expensive golf clubs and racing yachts etc. I think that that sexy selling image would have appealed to the boss, bearing in mind the huge sums of money that he would be charging, for trips to the deep. It just sounds more hi-tec than steel, even stainless. So they pictured themselves selling dive seats, and went to carbon for marketing purposes, to impress the punters, as much as anything else. That's the feeling I get. Carbon fibre on the face of it seems an odd choice, and that's the only explanation I can conjure up. But once that decision is made, and commenced, there's no going back. That would have been ruinous. So even if you began to experience doubts, you're stuck with it. That's why no attention was paid to the various people who expressed concern. It was too late to change. So the choice was, keep on, or ruin.