YaDinghus

If this goes where I think this is going - without watching the video - there should be the factor (x-x) in there, which makes the answer quite trivial...

I love dark turns ;-) "Arbeitsbeschaffungsmaßnahme" is a real thing in Germany. People create a problem for someone to solve just to make them do something. It's like an empty reference joke: the reference itself is the joke and doesn't depend on the content.

It doesn't help that "Utopia" and "Eutopia" are ponounced exactly the same in English

I do assume I would keep working for money even if I could live on BUI, if I got at least 20% more than BUI for a regular job. I would certainly not be as stressed out at my job because I wouldn't have to fear losing it. Maybe I would just become an artisanal blacksmith and sell cutlery (always wanted to do that) or armor for LARPers. That I would even do just to cover the cost of the materials and a marginal profit. Right now I am stuck earning money doing something utterly useless. And there are plenty of jobs that are just "Arbeitsbeschaffungsmaßnahmen" (A job for the sake of having a job with no productive or service value, just to not be unemployed in the statistics)

F*** commas. Periods are the real deal now

No matter how you word it, there will always be someone who will take advantage of the incentives. This only becomes impossible if EVERYONE GETS THE SAME PERIOD. And even more strictly so of nobody gets anything because then there are no secondary effects like increased inflation

I'm not sure if your agreeing or disagreeing with me

I wouldn't get hung up on the fact that it's 10^-49 seconds that defy our current understanding of physics. Also, Big Bang is an historic misnomer From Wikipedia - Fred Hoyle. But this term has lead many people to imagine the beginnig of the universe as an explosion from a single point. But now just imagine that you could appoint an infinitely large amount of numbers to every real number. Every real number here is a single point, on a scale consisting of an infinite amount of points. Our observable universe might have sprung from a single point, but it needn't have been the only point that was there at the "beginning", so even though this point would be special to our observeable universe, it would be utterly insignificant among a lot of insignificant points, and the cosmological principle would continue to hold

I think what you are asking is implicitly at the core of this thread. Utopia is a model of a better world, like a platonian idea of what we imagine to be the perfect world to live in. So it's not entirely useless to imagine how we would design such a Utopia. You name some important branches of science to look into for knowing what Utopia might look like. I've often torn down economics for not being a real science, mostly because economy students are stereotypically interested in making money, and not for scientific ambition. Economics also get a bad wrap among intellectuals because it is (or more aptly: the people in this branch of science are) predominantly concerned with justifying and refining a system that enriches the few at the expense of the many. But really economics are concerned with resource rationality, and determining how an individual or a small collective can get the most out of a pool of a scarce resource, or a set of scarce resource pools, while contending with a large amount of competitors. Economics also describes how the conditions need to be in order to be favourable to all individuals when they act altruistically. It is not a stabile configuration, which doesn't mean it doesn't work, but that upholding these conditions requires a constant input of work, and that purely and unfettered market forces will tear such a system apart faster than an angry grizzly your neck. What I just wrote suggests that a Utopia would have to make Altruism so favourable that it is equal to Egotism. I don't believe this is the case. I do believe that Utopia shouldn't be neoliberal dog-eat-dog cut-throat capitalism, but a society where neither (financial) Altruism nor Egotism are punished. If you love money, then you shall have it, if you don't care about it, you should still be able to live a decent life doing exactly what you think is important. If scarcity is removed, I believe this can be achieved. I wouldn't go so far as to guarantee it, however...

The observations that lead us to the assumption that Dark Matter is needed to explain the movement of stellar bodies in the galaxies is already seen with purely newtonian gravity. GR has givren us the (or a) tool to confirm this assumption with the effect of gravitational lensing. GR is (part of) the solution here, not the problem

I hereby posit the "lazy god theorem". So God really is just a slob like all of us ;-)

Different name, same charge from THE SPANISH INQUISITION (nobody ever expects them)

Oh I know. I just wanted to start the shattered mirror support group and add the curious information of the subsequent color change. Seems to be more widespread than I had assumed at first Witch!!! Shoulda known this would happen when I signed a contract with that devilishly handsome and persuasive [insert preferred gender denominator here] with my blood

I really tried escaping the World Cup this tine around. It is virtually impossible

Tried that. First it shattered spontaneously, then the shards turned black...

I'm no theologian, though I really like getting into arguments over this kind of topic (obviously). If an omnipotent being didn't make a better Universe than the one we live in, then either this omnipotent being isn't omnipotent (couldn't) or it isn't all-benevolent (wouldn't). Since omnipotence encounters the often-quoted paradox that @John Cuthber introduced above, and the only solution to this paradox seems so be that there is no omnipotent being, that only leaves all-benevolent, yet incompetent. Purely hypothetical, since this requires the a priori assumption that such a being exists, which we don't accept here

@Superboy wasn't particularly eloquent and precise when he posed his question to the community. I choose to look at it from an engineering point of view (which I did here ). As for philosophical points of view, I am quite partial to creative non-violent solutions. Agreeing to fight in a different location and just not showing up might seem cowardly, but as we've seen in Game of Thrones (Daenerys takes Casterly Rock without resistance, while the Lannister Army is free to pillage somewhere else), it is a prudent tactic

Omnipotence is in general a paradoxical attribute. It just makes no sense. Though it's more like a blind person telling another blind person to follow them. Neither of them actually have a concept of their own blindness, because nobody knows what seeing means in this context. So the leaders themselves are mislead by their own implicit perceptions of patterns that don't mean anything, unless they want them to. This should propably have gone into "What is Faith"

Reminds me a lot of a passage from Sun Tsu: If you are weak, make your enemy believe you are strong; If you are strong, make the enemy believe you are weak. Anyway we're steering off topic. Though I'd also posit that the topic is rather an engineering than a physics problem

Watching Rick and Morty and Bojack Horseman recently has opened me up to my inner honest person ;-)

As in a life I've tried to forget but the attempt of forgetting it has only bestowed upon me a phenomenal tolerance for alcohol and a sarcastic streak

You're asking for justification from an entity that is beyond reason. I did some bible studies in an earlier life. The whole foreplay of the deluge is that Humanity, which consisted largely of descendants of Cain, were ravaging the earth and it's natural resources. That wasn't the bad part, though. The people (except for the pure descendants of Seth) were defying god, claiming that they no longer needed him, and strived to become Gods themselves. Now God couldn't have that, but he was lazy and didn't want to start creation from scratch so he just told a pious dude (Noah) who was in the prime of his life (ca 400 Years then) to save all the animals on an arc. The plants had reproductive methods that would allow them to go on after the deluge, but the land animals not so much. Humans kept defying god, so later he sought more subtle measures to subdue them, like confusing their tongues so they couldn't organize against him anymore. Being God seems to have a learning curve...

If you want to make a shield to actively block physical impact, I can imagine a solution that works in an atmosphere. You could train a neural network to recognize attack patterns via cameras on critical points of the object or person you want to protect and shatter incoming threats with a concentrated sonic blast.

Ok so a lot of stuff has been said here. A few things I'd like to adress: all but very few white people can actually turn quite dark with ample UV exposure. So for the most part, that's not really a problem for white people migrating to more sunny climes. Also, people with a higher basic pigmentation can actually get plenty of Vitamin D in northern climes, and not just in the summer. Light skin is actually a rather recent adaptation to a lifestyle that involves the mass consumption of Vitamin D lacking cereals. Native Americans near the arctic circle are still quite dark skinned, because cereals never became part of their culture until really recently, same with the native Yakutsk tribes of northern siberia. Regarding the loss of knowledge, yes this would become a problem over just one human lifetime. But a few bastions of knowledge would remain like the monastic orders of Europe that conserved lots of the wisdom of the Roman Empire, which was rediscovered by in the Renaissance and made available to anyone who had the time and inclination to study them. I would hypothesize that this is where the word Renaissance Man comes from, someone who studied the ancient Roman sciences and made use of them. There are so many people and someone somewhere would still know how to fire up a PC and read their greatgrandparents digital copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica. I think someone wrote "played too much Fallout"? There certainly are some really weird folks and organizations portrayed in the series, but I don't think it's all too far fetched. An organization that used technology for their own goals and for whatever reason restricted the use of technology by other people after the Fall isn't too far fetched. It would basically give them a strong regional chokehold over whomever is in range of their fully operational rocket launcher base. If they wanted to expand their territory, they would have to install a sort of feudal hierarchy, so they would see societal structures akin to the middle ages. I wouldn't want civilization to fall. I am wholly dependent on it. Unless I ended up near a pharmaceutical laboratory, assuming I can defend myself from physical harm and not die of hunger, thirst or exposure, without medicine I'd be dead within months anyway

I don't have insight into any of their minds, or their recent transactions, but I find it hard to believe that either of those isn't funding fundamental physics research. Even if it's just a few million here or there