Sisyphus

Surely you don't doubt the very possibility of pandemic? Because I know some plague-infected rats who beg to differ. Perhaps bird flu, SARS, etc. had negligible effect because they were taken so seriously, cases were isolated, and appropriate restrictions were put in place. Maybe if, say, HIV had been taken as seriously when it first emerged, it could have been erradicated relatively easily.

Alright, I'll play devil's advocate a little longer. I doubt faster. Modern high speed trains approach 300mph at peak speeds. So even accounting for waiting for connections (which would almost never be long, if everybody is taking trains - the subway I take to work comes to my stop every three minutes), it would still be much faster than any car (even an automated one) except for very short trips. But if we're talking about replacing the interstate system (and we are, one way or the other), we're not talking about short trips, anyway. I'll grant more personal freedom, if by that you just mean you leave on your own schedule and get taken directly to your destination. But you'd still be forcing people to use this system, and they'd still have to relinquish personal control. I have to take exception to this. The average train can transport one ton of cargo/passengers 436 miles on one gallon of fuel. That's a few orders of magnitude more efficient than any car. And what train isn't going to be heavily utilized, if they're carrying the bulk of the load currently carried by interstates? High-speed trains aren't enclosed. True, but as I said above, the more people that take the train, the less the wait. The subways in New York (which is what most people use for travel beyond walking distance) leave every 3 minutes during peak times, and even in the middle of the night come every 10-20 minutes, depending on the line. Which actually brings up another point. Mass transit has a much higher capacity ceiling than cars ever could. In New York the streets and expressways are oversaturated to a degree country folk can't understand without experiencing it, but they're still carrying just a small percentage of total traffic. We're both just speculating without enough information, but I don't see how enclosing every interstate could be cheaper than laying track. I don't know what it would require - that's the point. There are no functioning examples, and those would have to be developed and perfected. In fact, there doesn't yet exist even a single self-driving car with adequate capabilities, and it's not for lack of trying. And that's not even counting new types of infrastructure and unforseen problems.

That's an interesting point, and I guess you're right that they might not get cheaper (though I still think they almost certainly will). But what you're paying for is different, and that matters, too. If prices are high because of potential liability, then you're essentially paying for a safety guarantee (or at least a guarantee that it really is what the seller says it is). That has real value. So even if it costs the same, you're getting more for your money: a known, guaranteed product vs. a mystery product with an unaccountable producer.

I guess that all depends on how he actually propels himself. Staying in place while throwing mass away from you is equivalent to moving yourself forward without throwing mass backward (which I'm assuming is the case - he doesn't seem to have any exhaust when he's flying around in space and whatnot). So he would just violate Newton's laws the same way he does whenever he flies.

Yes, various speculations about very different forms of life are the basis for a huge amount of science fiction (that is, real science fiction, not allegorical/fantastical stuff like star trek, where it's all about the different forehead wrinkles), and something which is very interesting to me, as well. And you're right: broader definition of "life" is usually needed. I generally think along the lines of, "a self-replicating pattern of localized negative entropy" or something like that. It's vague, but it has to be. Even here on Earth life isn't especially well-defined. The line we draw between the living and the nonliving is blurry and arbitrary. We are definitely alive and a rock is definitely not, but there's a whole lot in between, and not really an obvious place to draw that line. The convention is somewhere between viruses and bacteria, but it doesn't have to be. In addition to discussing hypothetical extraterrestrial life, it often comes up when talking about abiogenesis on our own planet. i.e., the first "life" necessarily arose from "nonlife," but that nonlife would have to have many characteristics of life and be capable of becoming life, so isn't it essentially living as well? And so on.

I think if you kill for political reasons but not in the employ of the government, you're technically a terrorist. If it is in the employ of the government, then you're a soldier (generic sense, not limited to enlisted army or whatever). If your victims' treason is just a coincidence, then you're a serial killer.

The hypocrisy depends on believing that both wars are similarly worthwhile ends and both wars are similarly illegal, and opposing one primarily because it's illegal while supporting the other primarily because of its ends. But I'm sure you'll agree that there's quite a bit more to it than that. For one thing, I don't find them similarly illegal (and I don't buy the automatic legitimacy of the CSA), and I don't find the ends even remotely equivalent. But even then, neither situation is black and white, and I don't pretend they are.

Maybe it's derogatory towards chimps.

What is everybody going to do with the extra time? Me, I'm going to catch up on my exercise.

That's not true. There's always violence.

Why would it leave its electrons behind? What do you mean by "electrons (energy)?" In any case, one limit to acceleration of something like a rocket ship would be the its tensile and compressive strength, since a rocket engine wouldn't directly and equally push on every part of the ship. A big enough force would just rip the "pushed against" parts away from the rest. That's the kind of thing we (or at least I) are getting at when we ask how the force is applied. Gravity, for example, applies force uniformly to all parts, and so acceleration due to gravity puts no strain on you at all (assuming the field is nearly the same from one end of you to the other). That's why freefall is like being "weightless." Force applied by pushing on something is different, since you're only pushing on the surface atoms (which are accelerated by electron repulsion from the pushing object), which then push and pull on surrounding atoms, compressing and/or elongating the surrounding parts of the object. That's the kind of acceleration you feel.

Why would I want an automated, enclosed interstate system like that instead of a mass transit system upgraded to current state of the art and expanded to coverage comparable to the interstate system? That would be enormously expensive, but still, it seems to me, quite a bit less expensive than this proposal. Plus, it wouldn't even require any technology that doesn't exist today, wouldn't provoke public mistrust, would almost certainly be safer, would probably be faster, and would be far more efficient. Am I wrong?

It's kind of (well, very) ridiculous that he would be appointed, but I think argument that the Senate can block the appointment is weak at best. The Constitutional language is, per usual, rather ambiguous (what does "the judge" mean?), and if the Senate succeeds in blocking an appointment that is technically perfectly legal, that sets what seems like a bad precedent. What's to stop the majority party from then simply "judging" opposition members "unqualified." Only public opinion. And if that were sufficient to control the government, we wouldn't need a Constitution at all, now would we? That said, there's still nothing stopping the Democratic Party from, say, threatening to "excommunicate" anyone who accepts an appointment from Blago, which could be very effective. Hooray for entrenched two party power structures?

Exactly. His race was an integral part of how he initially got national attention and had both positive and negative effects in the election, but if Rush really believes that's why people like him, it just shows how out of touch he's become with (dare I say it?) the "Real America." But I still think he's just trying to be literally outrageous, in that real or imagined liberal outrage is the main goal and source of humor, such as it is.

These elections are tearing this forum apart! Thus, I hereby assume the status of Generalissimo of the People's Liberation Army of SFN, declare martial law, and suspend all elections until further notice. (I was winning in a landslide anyway, if you count the non-public votes.)

You're almost certainly not going to get an answer you find satisfying, because it's just far too complicated to be intuitive. The best you can do is satisfy yourself that "you don't see how it could happen" is not an argument that it doesn't. The whole universe is made up of a handful of different fundamental particles and forces. You could understand what these are and how they interact on a basic level and still not be able to predict any of the macro-scale structures and behaviors we see every day. Basically, everything we experience is a complex emergent property. Life, and by extension consciousness, is just an extremely complex emergent property among other complex emergent properties. Of course you "don't see how it could happen." But we're working on it...

You could make some napalm. You know, for home defense.

Yes, it's quite dumb, almost unbelievably so. What were they trying to accomplish? As for the song itself, it's not overtly racist, as the intent is merely to mock white liberals for their "white guilt" votes, and to provoke them as well into accusations of racism. There's nothing blowhard conservative commentators love more than being unjustly accused of racism by PC fascists. Of course, implicit in the "white guilt" argument is an appeal to incredulity that anyone might possibly not care about race and, you know, actually vote for a black guy because he's the better candidate. So, despite itself, it is actually kind of racist, or at least deeply out of touch.

I can't remember exactly why I chose "Sisyphus," other than it was a whim, and he's kind of a great character in Greek mythology. He's kind of an anti-hero, unsurpassed in cunning, and punished for all eternity for defying the arbitrary wrath of uncaring gods, and ultimately (and briefly) transcending death itself. He's best known for his punishment: endlessly pushing a boulder up a mountain in Tartarus. The adjective "Sisyphean" refers to endless, thankless tasks, and the quasi-Existentialist philosopher Albert Camus adopted Sisyphus as his hero and symbol of triumphant human will. Oh, and it looks a little bit like "sissy puss," and if I can adopt a handle like that, it shows I'm not afraid of anything. I don't use it as a username anywhere else on the internet, so any other Sisyphus you encounter is not me.

Yeah, I realize that, and I realize it must seem like a double standard to demand liberalization from basically the most liberal nation in the region. I try not to do that. But still, it is still "the Jewish state," and its basic purpose hasn't really changed, no? They still offer special priveleges to foreign Jews, right? (Again, I realize they aren't unique in this. For example, I could get an Italian passport if I wanted, just because a quarter of my ancestors were Italian.) And all the pro-Israel (and anti-Israel, for that matter) lobbying in America seems to be mostly really about Zionism. Most people who support Israel don't support it for the reasons that I do (i.e., it's a liberal democracy and a loyal ally), but because it's a Jewish state. So the problem isn't really what Israel does, but what it is. If it had just been founded as an ordinary secular democracy that just happened to have a large Jewish population, do you really think there would be all these problems? I don't.

Because it's an empirically proven law that "YT2095" is the most common choice in all SFN polls in which it appears. Perhaps unfortunately for you, the duties of President have yet to be outlined.

So, to sum up: You thought you invented a perpetual motion machine, which you call a "theory of everything" (?) that will usher in a new "age of truth" that somehow, everyone else missed despite involving only a simple application of high-school level classical mechanics. However, it turns out you just left out a "1/2" coefficient in your equations. If this is for real (as opposed to you just trying to mess with people), then I think there are some badly needed lessons you could draw from this experience.

"With force alone" seems a little vague. "Acceleration force" isn't really a thing. Force (of which there are four fundamental types) causes acceleration. Introducing an electric field causes ionization, by applying opposite forces to nuclei and electrons. So I guess the answer is yes, but that's probably not what you had in mind, right?

A good comparison for Americans is noting that it is less populous and geographically smaller and than the state of New Jersey. As for this latest trouble, the most depressing aspect for me is that I can barely muster the interest to find out the basic facts, so utterly familiar is all of this. Per usual, Hamas is the primary instigator, and Israel responds in a technically justifiable but nevertheless unadmirable manner. Not that I'm claiming I would know what to do if I was in charge, of course. It just seems like everything they do just reinforces the status quo of low-grade, punctuated equilibrium of violence. And per usual, all I can really say is that this kind of thing seems unlikely to end until major cultural changes take place, which will probably require that a generation that doesn't give a **** about Zionism one way or the other grows up and takes over in Israel and its neighbors, the older generations die off, and Israel becomes just another secular state instead of a "Jewish state" and a "promised land." Good luck, right?

Look, we all know YT is going to win. This is almost as pointless as the coin-flipping experiment.