lemur

Probably you shouldn't drink any more than you need to prevent you from using more damaging substances. I interpret the "water to wine" myth as referring to getting intoxicated on sobriety and spiritual clarity.

You must be kidding. Stimulus spending caters to the general mentality that in order to help the poor, you have to fund the profit margins of existing corporations and their payrolls. If Obama and the left wanted to pay reparations for historical inequalities, they would have to replace the existing industrial world with one run by and for historically oppressed people. That would require either disenfranchizing everyone who benefits from historical privilege or dividing the nation into separate territories with the best natural resources owned and managed by historically disenfranchized people. Obviously the intent isn't to do that but to re-invigorate the infrastructure and economic privileges that have been created by historical inequalities. Obama said himself in speeches that capitalism is an economic system that has created unprecedented wealth. Then the party focussed on getting the auto industry and infrastructure strong again. Sure, they claim to be for change and solar power because it sounds good but if you look at what the unions want in terms of jobs and lifestyle for the workers, it is automotive-intensive consumerism. That's the only "change they can believe in," i.e. more of the same for more people.

You can no more dismiss or purge your body and its desires and effects on your spirit as you can purge your ego. You just have to deal with these facts of life and recognize them as being potentially negative influence despite their being natural facets of you as an individual. People who hate ego and try to eliminate it usually end up replacing it with some collective identity that they project their shame and pride onto because they won't allow themselves to express pride or shame in themselves individually. Buddhist detachment is a more promising path insofar as it allows you to observe the presence of the attachment without stimulating it by interacting with it in an aggressively positive or negative way. The ego and the body are inevitable but they don't have to dominate consciousness or will - imo.

But what if women don't really want to objectify themselves in all the ways you mention? What if they only do it because they are afraid that if they don't, the men they want will ignore them? What if a man wanted to have an attractive gf/wife but he didn't want to climb a corporate ladder or wear nice clothes, etc.? Once he realized he would be banished from dating until he did, might he not take up these habits that he would technically rather avoid? In that case, he might even come to see his choices as voluntary instead of being coerced by female preferences, but in reality he was only conforming to a culture out of fear of not being able to get girls, right?

True, but that would cause dissidents to think that their preferred economic choices/culture would thrive if allowed by government, which would be avoided by simply allowing people to pursue their economic goals and realize for themselves that they don't work. In a mixed system, which is typical in social-democracies, subsidies for alternative cultures end up supporting the status quo as well so you end up with both cultures. That's fine when it's about something relatively immaterial like which art to display, but when it's something like energy-usage, allowing people to spend money made building subsidized solar-panels on fossil-fuel electricity promotes a culture that isn't ultimately sustainable by means of solar energy. In a free market, a growing poor class would not be able to afford power-dense consumption activities, so they would have to conserve and then solar panels could emerge as an affordable way to get some electricity. Why would anyone disagreeing with a majority want to be coerced to go along with it? If majoritarian socialism flourished at this moment in consumerism, people would insist on oil being pumped until gas was $1/gallon and they would create loads of jobs in retail sectors that pay people wages high enough to buy and throw away all they want. They would also coerce loads of people into doing the cleanup and other auxiliary services. People who are legitimately green and conservative spenders/consumers as a result would be driven to work to sustain high-waste consumerism for the majority. Supporters would claim it was socialist because the poor were getting stimulated to middle-class levels of consumption, but in reality it would be majoritarian cultural tyrrany. The issue of the thread isn't when people regard themselves as being reasonably or unreasonably coerced. It is about the possibility of economics without any coercion, whether it is possible and if not, why not? Why can't people act voluntarily on the basis of independent reason and have this result in an effectively productive economy?

8 50ft high malls stacked on top of each other?

I know what you mean. It is a tactic of political realism, like when people accuse a political candidate of wanting to make education worse by cutting its funding and that propagates the assumption that the only way to make education better is by putting more money into it. I'm not trying to do that with this thread. All I was doing is proposing the idea of direct insurance for abortion. The only problem with it, I think, is that it could be stigmatizing if abortion wasn't just part of a larger bundle of services, sort of like the way prostitution is stigmatizing when it's not done as part of an larger relationship that includes non-sexual activities as well. Still, as easily as we could discuss legalizing prostitution and creating insurance for that (e.g. like unemployment insurance for relationship-breakups, divorce, etc.), we can also discuss abortion insurance, whether men would buy into it and why, whether premiums would be lower for people who utilized the insurance less, and whether the poor would get discounted rates, whether charitable people would donate money for poor people to get abortions and what their interests might be in doing so, etc.

The reason your comparisons is like apples to oranges, imo, is that it's counterintuitive to think in terms of gravitational attraction between objects at our scale because we simply don't experience gravity at that level. The gravity we experience is at the level of objects' weight at sea level (unless you've been to the moon and experienced that gravity). So if you want to construct an experience-based intuitive comparison between gravitational and electrostatic force, it makes more sense to compare it to the amount of force holding some object to the ground. E.g. you could say that the charge holding molecules of salt together is analogical to the amount of gravity holding a bus to the ground, or a mall, mountain, etc. Or you could give it in numbers of such objects, e.g. 100 Mt. Everests stacked on top of each other. I think a better analogy would be to compare it to the strength of a small ferromagnet and then say how big a cube made out of such magnets would be if it had the same amount of total bonding force as a grain of salt. A mall was just the biggest visualizable thing I could think of. Aircraft carrier might work too, or cruise ship, but I don't get to stand next to one of those as often as a mall, so it's harder to visualize the volume and how much salt would fit in one.

I would guess that this is roughly equivalent to the volume of a mall. So if you filled a mall with salt and pictured the mall as a grain of sand with you the size of a microbe standing next to it, an actual grain of salt would be analogous to an atom relative to the mall as a figurative grain of salt? The amazing thing, imo, is the idea that all those grains of salt could spontaneously lock together to form a boulder the size of a mall and that such a boulder wouldn't crack when dropped on a pile of similar boulders. I guess at that scale, gravity exerts force at a magnitude similar to the moon or some other low-gravity situation. Now that this salt-grain vs. mall analogy has been established, maybe it would be interesting to make an analogy between Earth-gravity at the scale of a grain of salt and the effect of gravity on a boulder the size of a mall. edit: just for fun I looked up the volume of Earth to compare with the size of a human. Wiki gives it as 1.08321×1012 km3. So if you add 9 to the superscript 12 to get the number of cubic meters, it would be 1.08x10^21, which would be about 600,000 times less than avogadro's number, right? So if atoms were cubic meters, a mole of them would fill up 600,000 Earths? What is 600,000 times bigger than the Earth, then? The sun?

I get criticized for derailing threads when I address the premise, or at least I have. btw, the thing you fail to address is why you attack the very possibility of discussing abortion funding separate from other forms of medical insurance. Something must bother you about the idea so much that you keep attacking the premise.

If you were given the task of designing the simplest vehicle possible, what would the components be? Assume at least one or two passengers and possibly some cargo. Also assume you would want it to be able to cruise for extended periods at highway or slightly under highway speeds. By simplicity, I am mainly referring to the number of parts and their complexity. Air-cooled engines seem simpler to me than their water-cooled counterparts, for example. I don't know much about electric motors or other types of combustion engines, e.g. rotary engines. A related issue is how much fuel efficiency advances can be achieved alongside simplification of systems. The air-cooled engines of the VW beetle era were reasonably fuel-efficient for their time, I believe, but I wonder if there is some reason they wouldn't evolve well into the 30+ mpg many cars of today are able to achieve with heavier weight.

I know. That was the amount of atoms in a grain of salt. I was trying to make an analogy to consider how many atoms were in a grain of salt by thinking about how big a pile of salt would be with as many grains as there are atoms in a single grain.

I suppose you're right about this too, but it is probably just included with any number of other services and treatments. I'm really focussed on abortion-funding purely for abortion, based on the popular assumption in politics that people want to fund abortions for others based on whether they are morally opposed to or supportive of its use as a last resort for unwanted pregnancy. I don't think this popular assumption is necessarily true for everyone, btw. There may be many people who don't want to take an absolute stance against abortion but they also don't want to rule it out for themselves or others as an option. They may have reasons like overpopulation, poverty, and unfit-parenting (and possibly eugenics) to support broad public access to abortion; yet they may not like to think of themselves as promoting it by making it available. Either way, my point was to take the popular framework that people do or don't want to socially fund abortion based on their morality and politics and translate that into the idea of having insurance devoted entirely to funding and regulating the cost of abortion. I've posted various possibilities for specific discussion issues several time, but you keep attacking the whole basis for the premise. If I would do that on a thread, I would get criticized and warned by administrators.

what does this mean?

I'm glad you pointed this out. How is it that we learn to use hurtful language without actually meaning it? The hard thing is it is nearly impossible not to do this, imo, because if you've been avoiding using a particular slur, it gains that much more 'potential energy' so to speak.

Sorry to hear about the cancer. I've never had sex that much but I always just assumed that when you do it enough, it loses allure.

How effective is social control by means of gossip and reactions to the knowledge gained through gossip? Are people subconsciously prone to behaving in ways that maintain a good reputation or is there a great deal of freedom to behave as you please and enjoy a happy social life regardless of what others say about you to each other?

That's a smaller volume than I would expect for so many salt grains. So then if there are 10^18 salt molecules in a grain, that compares to how large a volume of salt grains? 97 micrograms x 10^18 = 97 X 10^15 grams? Or 97 X 10^12 kilograms? Or 97 X 10^9 metric tons? It sounds like there's a mountain of salt-grains worth of atoms in just one grain of salt. I wonder what the smallest grain of salt possible is, a single molecule?

Are you saying 100,000 grains of salt can fit into 2cm^2?

If I would question the premise of a thread like this, I would be getting harassed about it by administrators. I didn't start this thread to make any claims about whether or how public funding is going to abortion or not. All I was trying to discuss was whether private funding of abortion was a good idea and, if so, how it would work. I'd like to stick to questions such as how poor people would gain equal access to abortion and whether greater usage could/should be cause for raising premiums and that kind of issues. In fact, even if no public funding IS going to support abortion, what would be wrong with discussing the use of (private) insurance to fund it? edit: oh, I forgot to reiterate the issue of male contributions to funding if privatized. E.g. allowing genetic testing of fetal-material to offer lower premiums to men who contribute to less abortions.

Just think how much he's going to be able to sell his birth certificate for now!

I'm not good with dividing exponents. Do you subtract them to get the quotient? E.g. 10^23/10^18 = 100,000? If so, what would the volume and/or weight of 100,000 grains of salt be, approximately?

What would you do about any public concern that public funding is being indirectly used to fund abortions then? What you seem to basically be saying is that if something's illegal and people say they aren't doing it then they're not. But can you honestly say you're not taking that position because you are in favor of shielding abortion from budget-cuts? I don't particularly care either way, which is why I'm just saying that if the public is so concerned with preventing public money from funding abortion in any way, isn't there just a way to ensure its funding occurs 100% privately and be done with the discussion?

If chickens don't have arms and hands, then where do chicken fingers come from?

You can't give up your ego any more than God can purge evil and banish Satan from the creation. "Armageddon," the eternal struggle taking place between good and evil could be as easily interpolated as a struggle between God and Satan as between consciousness and ego - my opinion, but a logical one I would argue.