lemur

And what was the problem with 4-wheeled motorcycles that was worth outlawing? Has anyone attempted to appeal the law in court?

Emitting less CO2 costs less, not more.

Did the Nazi freedom include the freedom to dissent and question nazi views regarding freedom?

1) 'society' doesn't have to take responsibility for taking care of all sickness by paying for it all. Governments could also simply make rules that mandate doctors take care of all sickness within a given "jurisdiction" and if they didn't, they'd lose their license. 2) The issue of preventable illness isn't about whether most sickness is preventable or not. It's simply that there are an enormous number of potentially healthy people who live unhealthy lifestyles. There's no reason why people who do make the effort to live healthy should be responsible for people who don't bother. If an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, why should people who prevent have to work more to pay for doctors to crank out cure by the pound?

Can we substitute "global republic of Earth" or "Gaia" or does it have to be a national-identity? Also, have you ever noticed how pride interferes with people's ability to rationally contemplate things like the meaning and value of democracy and freedom? Sure, they love it but because they love the idea of it being "their country," they would sooner live in denial before ever considering the possibility of their country betraying its own ideals. why must people live in the clutches of submission to pride and shame? why can't they embrace the true freedom of intellectual independence and reason instead?

I consider this a very relevant response to the OP. I often wonder why no one builds large, three-wheeled motorcycles like the ones used to haul passengers and cargo in Asia for use in the US and Europe. It seems to be a status-issue hindering adoption, but it's hard to believe that there are so few people willing to deal with sneering laughter from automotive snobs. As far as I know, these vehicles get excellent gas-mileage, can carry as much or more than a compact car, and can be partially or fully enclosed. I just don't know how much speed/acceleration/range they have - and as Inigo mentions they lack the accessories, including status.

Global warming seems to have failed to galvanize much cultural change as far as reducing energy-consumption goes. Yes, there have been some flashy high-profile projects designed to reduce carbon footprinting. However, radical cultural changes that would drastically improve conservation have continued to be treated as too painful to rush into. Hitting the snooze button just one more time seems to be more appealing. So if the prospect of global warming wasn't enough to motivate change, the question becomes how active people are willing to get to fight the prospect of indoor warming? Are they willing to build more power plants, increase fossil-fuel production, and nuclear as well as renewables? Are they willing to support global military and economic projects to secure long-term energy security that can provide at least another few generations of high-energy comfort living for at least a portion of the global population?

There was a BBC article a few years ago about how the Cuban health care system is so effective while costing so little. The answer basically came down to mandatory exercise and surprise checkups. As long as people have the freedom and means to destroy their own health with poor diets, exercise, private automotive transit, etc. you can't promise to pay their medical bills. If the US government would follow suit with the EU and raise auto safety standards and driver's license requirements to levels that would restrict driving to a wealth elite who actually have something to lose (financially) in car accidents, I would be more supportive of better universal coverage. As much as I hate the current system of providing services and then billing people into bankruptcy, it does provide a certain incentive to take special care in dangerous activities like driving and work.

The problem that no one seems to want to face is that it's not just about population growth. It's about current elite standards of living that set the bar high for expectations about the level everyone globally wants to raise their standards of living to. Currently there are mad levels of political resistance in the developed economies to migration from economically poorer regions. But what is it in 'the west' (or the north, east, or south, depending on where you are and where you want to go) that appeals to poorer people globally? Having a car and the freedom (fuel) to drive it around a lot and go practically anywhere you want? Having a well-built insulated house with year-round climate control? Access to fashionable clothes and venues to display them (and yourself) in fresh exciting ways on a regular basis? Shopping? As a friend of mine who like to rap told me, it's about "the cars, the clothes, the money, and the hoes." This lifestyle is energy intensive, so how can any source create enough energy to make it possible for everyone globally to live this way? If not, doesn't it become a question of how to start making low-energy living more comfortable in order to deconstruct energy-intense western culture?

Yes, that's what school is good for, imo: trapping people in a situation where they HAVE to learn because they wouldn't want to otherwise. Also the use of reward-systems, grades, competitions, etc. The problem with it is Marx's classical criticism of industrial capitalism alienating workers from their labor. I.e. instead of being interested in learning for its own sake, people come to see it as a (boring) means to an end. It takes the joy out of life (until the bell rings or it's vacation time of course).

But going to the moon was a frontier. Abundant nuclear energy is about turning the thermostat down. That's not quite as inspirational, imo.

What does that demonstrate? What alternative scenario are you comparing it to? A situation where nothing moves? If you assume that time is something separate from 3D space, then it's possible to imagine space without time. But why wouldn't this just be an artifact of the ability to imagine "a single moment frozen in time?" Why are we even capable of imagining such a thing, considering that it never happens in reality? If you find fish frozen in ice, is that the same thing as being frozen in time? If not, why would the mind analogize something real to something impossible? Because water normally moves and when it stops, it seems like an interruption of movement as its natural state? Why isn't it just as natural to see objects in motion as a continuous dynamism? Time could be just the abstract logic of sequentializing events/moments to make sense of motion. Really I don't like these discussions because I just get trolled in when people do things like insist that time is real. Of course SOMETHING is real or there would be no perception of time. The question is what is physical and empirically observable and how and what is subjective and how to distinguish between subjectivity and objectivity.

Why do you completely undermine the premise of this thread to make yet another pitch for redistribution. The point of the thread is if redistribution continues to get blocked and GDP growth doesn't increase, etc. what can people do to improve quality of life. If you want to discuss studies about how quality of life goes up by redistributing money, why don't you post a thread about that? Obviously people have been dreaming about redistributing wealth in the US for decades but it simply doesn't gain popularity - so the question is whether there are any other ways to improve quality of life or do we just have to accept poverty as inevitable suffering until we annihilate all opposition to redistribution?

Idk. I think people's, even children's, conceptions about the nature of time and space largely emerge from popular mythologies and metaphors used in stories and everyday talk. So when people hear time described as a river or an invisible fabric that ties everything together, etc., they don't want to let go of those any more than they want to let go of Santa Claus as a metaphor for Christmas giving or God as a metaphor for creative power in a general sense. I think there's a reason why Einstein had to state something as simple as the fact that two clocks can be viewed simultaneously before explaining the relativity of time. I.e that was the only empirical basis he had for describing "time." He couldn't say, "time is a river that flows at different speeds under different conditions," because then he would have to account for the "river," the cause of its flow, etc.

If you look at US culture since colonialism, you could say there are competing views about whether "the American dream" is the dream of the pilgrims who sailed on the Mayflower to set up their own grass-roots economy independent of others or whether it is the dream of exploiting the land and labor to produce loads of goods to sell globally and make loads of money. Obviously the media tells us that the American dream is to make lots of money and be rich, because that is what drives global capitalism. However, the republican party began as a "back to basics" party that wanted to redistribute land so that people could go back to yeoman farming instead of relying on slave-cultivated cash-crops like cotton. To me it seems logical that Danes or anyone else whose economy has stabilized as a permanent beneficiary of global capitalism would create social welfare benefits to share the profits of capitalism relatively equally. After all, what benefit would Danes see in dismantling social welfare and having capitalism reduce people to mere survivalists? Yet that's exactly what the pilgrims did after living and working in Leiden subsisting in the trickle-down economy of the continental bourgeoisie. So it may well be that global capitalism creates such vast levels of wealth that a large number of people can enjoy more freedom than they could if they were independent farmers, but I also don't think that global capitalism will produce these levels of social welfare benefits for everyone. So the question is whether you want to be part of a prosperous elite who has the privilege of being "free from worry" with regards to how to pay for extravagant levels of care and other other social benefits; or whether you want the people who serve your needs to be free. Think about it. If everyone is entitled to health care, then doesn't that mean that a sufficient number of health care providers MUST work in health care? Likewise, if everyone is entitled to housing in good working condition, doesn't that mean that construction and maintenance workers MUST keep sufficient dwellings in good condition? It is easy to say that the wealthy will always have more money to extract as taxes to pay everyone for their labor, but what happens when the wealth run out of money to tax? Eventually, it's just going to be a government-induced set of cash-flows that require people to take care of each other in whatever way the government decides to mandate. What's more, people are going to resist the pressure the government puts on them to go to school and work in high-demand professions like healthcare, etc. when every desirable job comes with guaranteed health care, housing, etc. Believe me, I would love it if people were responsible enough to consume frugally and contribute their labor to making sure that there are abundant goods and service for everyone but what I see is that everyone wants to be a high-paid manager and not a low-paid worker and that everyone has their sights set on a level of consumption that is above what would be sustainable if everyone was equal. So that means that there will have to be some mechanism that limits access to the middle-class, so why shouldn't that mechanism be the free market? What's more, if the free market makes the rich richer at the expense of the middle class, at least that puts more middle class people in the position that they put the poor in by raising living standards to levels that make poor people look idiotic. Poverty is only pathetic in a status-consumed bourgeoisie. In reality, poverty is just a dignified way to live and work for everything you have without having to lord over others to get it.

Discussions about whether things are real or not are pointless. The problem is when people start reflecting on what time or space are in their essence. Then people do something similar to what you are doing, i.e. make reference to empirical realities, and then use that to "prove" metaphysical or epistemological claims. Plus there's a whole politics that goes along with the everyday views that time and space are real entities outside of their "contents." I would call it the politics of cultural imperativism, but that is really a tangential social issue.

It's really not such a bad thing considering that every little bit of hope for abundant future energy causes people to relentlessly waste present sources. Still, is there really any fundamental physical reason why hydrogen fusion cannot be accomplished in a reactor?

If you were really interested in the topic and you weren't confused by the webpage, I think online learning would be many many times more interesting than facebook.

But is there any point where you can define an object as having definitively escaped the gravity of another object? Given enough spacetime, any radius of closed-orbit is possible for an extremely slow-moving object, right? edit: as far as objects whose KE is greater than PE, these objects could gain distance from their gravity-well indefinitely but without ever being able to exceed the speed of light relative to their point of origin they wouldn't be able to escape the gravity either, right?

How large does the distance have to be between two massive bodies for an object traveling between them to escape one orbit completely before entering the other? Imo, it seems like the only way for any object to follow a path that's not some type of orbit around another object is for it to crossover to orbit a different object.

The blueness of the sky is all the sunlight getting scattered in your direction. The solar panel on your roof collects the blue-sky light as well as the direct sunlight, I believe.

What about hydrogen fusion? I know that still requires some radioactive material, but isn't the power-output significantly greater per unit power produced? Also, can't a fusion reactor sustain its reactions without adding radioactive fuel? I.e. can't the hydrogen keep the hydrogen fusing on its own? edit: But what would you do when all the water was gone after millions of years of fusing hydrogen into helium? Would Earth end up like Mars?

How much more energy do you think you can get from sunlight in space than on Earth? Is the energy gained per unit altitude worth the energy it takes to move the equipment to that altitude?

And yet no one ever lobbies those governments to allow labor migration from high unemployment economies. Nationalizing businesses is just a means of using governmental institutions to make capitalism more imperative. Instead of allowing people the choice to pay for health care or not, you make them. It is mandatory economic participation. I would like to see government create more freedom for people to live without choosing to support aspects of capitalism they don't want to. If people don't want to use banks, there should still be a way from them to get property to live in, no? If they don't want to pay for expensive health care, they should be able to access low cost medical information/advice for basic care. Anyway, this is getting into a competition of political assertions, but the issue is what effect cutting taxes will in fact have on everyday economics. What will people do and how will they get money and how much - and what will happen to various prices?

Math is a very powerful tool. The drawback of that can be that people may reify math-emergent concepts as actual physical entities. I think this is what has happened with the idea of space as a container and I also think that a belief in time as an entity extending through space is caused by the observation of multiple events as simultaneous as viewed from the same point of view. I tend to shy away from these discussions about the ontology of space and time because my position tends to win me enemies among scientists, for some reason. Still, I think the instrumental use of concepts for modeling and prediction is a separate affair from analyzing what the essential ontological nature of things is, and I think both can be scientific projects insofar as empiricism is maintained as a basis for reasoning.