lemur

I don't know that it does. I'm just citing the political discourse that is currently construing budget-cuts against planned parenthood as abortion-related. There's also some governor, I heard, that is trying to make a political statement out of cutting funding for abortion. I wouldn't presume to be able to dissect the realities going on behind the public discourse, so I just think about the issues raises and try to come up with creative thoughts to move the discussion along. Thus, if many people don't want to contribute to abortion-funding in any way, the logical next step would be to ask how it would work for abortion-supporters to fund their own sub-culture in the form of private insurance and how it would work if they did.

Men always say this until it is their wife/gf, mother, or sister. This points out a deeper gender inequality regarding sexuality, though, which is the fact that men continue to be seen and used for sexual leadership and/or initiative. Imo, it works like this: women exercise social control against each other for sexual desire and promiscuity in various ways. They are the keepers of relationship responsibility in terms of recognizing and patrolling the emotional, physical, and relationship consequences of sex. However, although they seem to be more aware of sexual consequences, they often have repressed libidos as a result and thus they may have a covert admiration for masculine care-free sexuality. They may fantasize about throwing caution to the wind but never do it because the consequences are more imminent in their minds. But then many/some will find pleasure in gossiping about promiscuity or other bad sexual choices because in a twisted way they "get off" on both the fact that it's not them that got into trouble and at the same time they may find the intrigue of the affair exciting. Anyway, I know this is a very stereotyping analysis and it probably has many exceptions, but it's a pattern I think that I've noticed. One side effect, though, is that women tend to see men as sexually naive dogs who only go around drooling after a treat without having self-control, dignity, etc. for the most part. So when women want to lower their guard and participate in sexual activities, they like to do so by allowing men to take initiative and ultimately only "give in," so they can blame it on bad judgment if they end up regretting later. This is terribly stereotypical, but I think that many women really are still more concerned with their sexual reputation and image as a defender instead of pursuer than they are about equality in desire and initiation of sexual interactions. Men, on the other hand, should be stronger and resist more to allow women some leeway in pursuing without always immediately getting whatever they want when/if they want it, imo.

I've heard people say that they don't have free-will like humans, but I don't see how they couldn't if Lucifer was able to make the choice to oppose God. I think angels, saints, and prophets are similar except that angels don't have to deal with material struggles without bodies (good point). I think angels and demons mainly help to facilitate the imagery of multiple agency for the forces of good and evil. The mythology wouldn't work as well if God and Satan were trying to run around doing everything themselves where influencing humans was concerned. I think it's also nice to think that when saints and prophets die, they become angels so they can continue their work without a material body.

That's why I brought up the idea of premium-increases with greater use, i.e. like when you get tickets and have accidents your car insurance premiums go up. This would reward people for using alternative forms of birth control. This might be an example of the free market doing a better job of governing abortion than government can by promoting better self-governance. What would REALLY work is if men would be able to register their genetic fingerprints and allow them to be compared with aborted fetuses to credit them with "good driving records." This would give men an incentive to prevent unwanted pregnancy since their premiums would go up with each fetus aborted with their genes.

Actually, the food and drink example is good. You would not want to deny yourself adequate water for hydration, but drinking only water most of the time enhances the pleasure of drinking flavored beverages. Compare you enjoyment of any treat you enjoy on an occasional basis with one you consume daily and I think you will find that the occasional treat is more pleasurable. If you compared this with sexuality, you could have a regular diet of affectionate interaction with potential partners on a regular basis and some non-intercourse physical affection slightly less often and reserve sexual intercourse for special situations. This all assumes, of course, that poly-amory doesn't have detrimental effects - which I think it must, although at the level of non-intercourse physical affection and definitely non-physical interaction, it is the norm rather than the exception. How many people avoid all social exchange with people they are attracted to besides their partner? I would be interested to see empirical data that shows that people could maintain such high levels of intercourse on a regular basis. I think sex would become more of a chore than a release. related issue: what would happen if the taboo on discussing sexual relationships openly (kissing and telling) was completely ignored and everyone knew how much sex everyone was having and with whom? Would that lessen the titillating effects of (imperative) privacy as a form of sexual repression?

Imo, social economic analysts don't do enough to distinguish between free market capitalism and control capitalism, which tends to emerge within and despite free markets and their ideology. So marketing, for example, and its corresponding response in consumer psychology/behavior is really an attempt to exercise market control despite and by means of consumer freedom of choice. It's like suppliers decide that if they can't control their market niches by formal regulatory institutions, they will attempt to create the same niches by convincing consumers to make choices on non-rational bases. The effect is the same as governmental market control, only it's achieved through manipulation of consumer freedom. Imo, a pro free-market government would focus on deconstructing marketing psychology and promoting rational consumption as well as productivity. It's not enough to leave people unregulated in their choices of how to work and shop because they will use their freedom to network and manipulate relative positions of monopoly/oligopoly instead of exercising faith that atomic rationality will lead to the optimization of economic good, which is the premise of free market theory. But what happens when government subsidies are injected into a market like solar panels. You have to realize that the investors and workers engaged in producing the solar panels are living with means of production/consumption that are organized to produce profits and wages for workers who are buying fossil fuels and nuclear power. So when government puts money into alternatives like solar panels, that money ends up funding existing industries and making them more competitive against the solar panels and other alternatives. Then, once the subsidies are reduces or eliminated, the produces and consumers of the alternatives (solar panels, etc.) go back to investing, working, and consuming the old technologies/fuels, which have maintained a strong market position due to the fiscal stimulus of the economy generally by subsidizing alternative ventures. A true free market would allow the economy to recede, which puts pressure on existing industries to cut their budgets. Then, as wages and profits are decreasing, this stimulates investment, labor, and consumption to seek alternatives because the old methods are failing. E.g. as electricity and fuel costs rise and wages/profits drop, people gain more free time to invest/work on developing solar systems and enhancing their conservation to levels that are sufficient to power with solar and other renewable energy sources. This comes down to engineers and investors shutting off their air-conditioning systems and cutting their driving, etc. Given subsidies, they will simply maintain their current lifestyles and convince themselves that one day they'll be able to use 1000kwh/month and drive as much as they feel like by using renewable energy sources, which is naive imo. This is a deviation from the thread topic, though, actually. The point was really whether anyone who didn't want to work or invest in existing institutions and enterprises could pull out their inputs (strike) without others engaging in coercive stimulus activities that push them to continue supporting and re-invigorating failing enterprises and governmental institutions. Theoretically, in a free market of ideas like that of the internet, proposals would come forward that people would voluntarily support and desire to work toward. The problem is that instead of this happening, there's a lot of manipulative discourse designed to convince people to accept and support existing regulatory institutions that effectively prevent change from occurring. People succumb to this, I think, because there are numerous creature comforts and other economic institutions that give them stability that they might not have in a radically evolving economic situation. So, for example, people and organizations keep borrowing money and spending it on everyday consumption, which funds the status quo of existing consumption-driven industries in their old work habits. They even think that their financial success as a result of stimulus through government-spending and private-lending/financing is proof that their old systems are the best way to do things.

I think what the OP is describing is propagation, not cloning, though what would the difference be with cloning since cloning also relies on the propagation of existing DNA, right?

I wonder if this culture of questioning US birth certificates could go so far that it would begin to affect other people with US birth certificates as well? If so, will they get into alternative methods of establishing citizenship legitimation, such as lie-detector tests and bio-scanning? It could turn into Gattica with national identity instead of genetic identity.

I think military strategists aren't stupid. They know what a war of attrition is and how to win one or lose one. There's an MIT news article on fuel/energy concerns and developments in military applications. Here, I went ahead and googled it: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/energy-conference-0322.html

Designers of educational methods should come up with ways to empower people who have been excluded from academic science due to budgeting restrictions to contribute to R&D. Many paying jobs require very little mental effort, leaving the mind free for other activities - why not harness creativity wasted in workplaces for science and engineering if the workers have the interest and ability?

There were multiple questions with divergent discussion issues in your quote.

I think of angels as mythological messengers or agents. You can look at them as archetypal personalities as well, which raise your consciousness to certain ideas or virtues when you study them and meditate on the knowledge. I've heard of people attributing experiences to them as well - like for example if something good happens to them, they interpret it as being a gift from a certain angel whose personality they associate with the good thing that happened. I don't think the bible or other mythology about angels is supposed to explain their origins and DNA, etc. They are symbolic concepts of personified intermediation of good and evil in people's living experiences.

But Marat, sexual restriction intensifies sexual desire and pleasure. This was Foucault's "repressive hypothesis" and according to him the whole point of Victorian sexual repression.

The problem is you can't control how people spend money once you reward them with it. So how can you reward people for installing solar panels with money and then discourage them from spending that money on buying more gasoline, running the a/c cooler, etc.? Free markets are actually supposed to do what you say by lowering the price of more efficient products and raising prices for less efficient ones. The problem is that capitalism has evolved social-control mechanisms like corporations and redistributive government that provides people with such bountiful budgets that they can afford to splurge on things they like and drive up the prices of such things to levels that stimulate greater production of them. In a truly free market, aristocracy would evaporate as a result of price-competition driving down revenues and eventually most people would be either poor or very thrifty (think of Dickens' the Christmas Carol). In capitalism, no one can "demand ever increasing profits." If they could, the market wouldn't be free. They make ever-increasing profits because people aren't content to spend their leisure time engaged in non-consumptive activities. This means that leisure generates revenue/profit and stimulates more job creation, which eliminates the possibility of free time. If people wouldn't eat out during their free time, there wouldn't be so many restaurant jobs to fill, and if the people who weren't working in restaurants would take on some of the hours of the people not eating in restaurants, everyone would have more leisure time. It's just that people can't comprehend leisure-time without consumerism. If they could, capitalism would work fine as a means of maximizing efficiency of labor and therefore leisure time.

Inequality research/politics typically assume a meritocratic model where status and resources/privileges are allocated on the basis of status. In this context, it is logical that there should be no wage gap between men and women unless you for some reason validate the traditional logic that men need to earn more to support a family while women's income is merely supplemental to their families. While this traditional logic is sexist, it persists imo, even for contemporary women who earn income equivalent to males with the same occupational status. The way it persists, imo, has to do with a cultural preference women have for men who have equal or higher status to themselves. I.e. whereas men used to accept the duty/burden of funding a housewife and children, many women would prefer to hire child care workers/services or perform their own housework instead of having a low-income husband to support. I guess a simpler way of saying this is that as homemakers, women are still preferred over men, to the extent that such work is desired, which it often isn't. Granted, I have read of women who happily support their husbands taking care of the home and children, but those are usually exceptional stories and more typically I hear women express a desire for a man to out-earn them, either so that they can take time to raise children or so that their combined household income is significantly higher than it would be if they were the primary earner. To be completely crass, I would say that men have been socialized into a culture of prostitution where they are willing to spend money on women, even just by paying for dates and gifts, whereas women have also been socialized to see good men as those who are generous. In terms of who gives and who receives, it seems to me that women are actually on the profiting end of the material-exchange dimension of relationships; though they are disrespected and talked down to on many other levels with the prejudice that they are simply not capable of the same level of work, thought, responsibility, rationality, morality/ethics, etc. as men and that is not fair.

But that "other question" doesn't matter b/c it's not the one you want to deal with, right? And yet you criticize me for not accepting your answer as the pertinent one? But you're necessarily uncertain of what they're doing, aren't you? Isn't that why you plot probability curves and wave functions for them? When a free electron moves from A to B, it doesn't travel in a straight line? When it is affected by a positive electrostatic field, its path doesn't curve into the field? Don't mistake that for rejection, though. I was and am interested in what you experts have to say about it, and I am certainly not dismissing anything you say. All I am voicing is my reasoning for why it makes more sense for particles to move freely relative to each other if there isn't some fixing mechanism that causes them to attach at specific points. Mississippichem's explanation that it has to do with the geometry of the charges made the most sense because it implied, as I understood it, that without limiting geometry, these particles would move geodesically. Yes, I understand electrons do weird things like tunnel and entangle, etc. but at some level atoms have to start following geodesic paths, so I was trying to figure out why they would or wouldn't do that at the intramolecular level and learn what experts know in the process. That's a given, but maybe I should say so more explicitly instead of just expressing my response, which should show when I'm not getting something because it wasn't clear enough to me. If I was doing that, I'd do it in speculations. All I was doing in this thread is expressing what is logical according to spatial reasoning. Yes, I know you are going to say that's classical mechanics and thus inapplicable but, as I said, I'm trying to figure out at what level classical mechanics applies. Since molecules are described as having "shapes," it seems reasonable to apply spatial reasoning to how those shapes are constituted and maintained, no? I actually immediately accepted Mississippichem's explanation of the bonds being like connective springs that oscillate and have angles, etc. as being legitimate. The reason I brought up my intuitive logic that it could happen another way is that I thought he or someone else might be able to give me an example of why it can't work that other way. That way I can exclude what I think not just on the basis that it's not standard knowledge but also because it has been thought of and falsified OR that it can be clearly falsified on the basis of known information. That is just clarification of why a theory works one way and not another - it's not speculating about new theories (yet), though I suppose it could evolve into that - but then I would repost it in speculations.

Not complain but question your explanation. If electrons are particles moving along geodesic paths, the energy wouldn't go into moving them but rather changing their relations relative to each other and the other particles they interact with, right? It wasn't. I was just giving that as an easily recognizable examples of how electrons could become more fluid as energy increased. You make it very difficult to compare and contrast related phenomena when you problematize every comparison as being a separate topic.

Could a vacuous sphere "bounce and roll" into the atmosphere without burning up? Isn't the velocity needed dependent on gravity, which is dependent on altitude? Also, what about air pressure/density? Doesn't that make a different in drag?

That's a good idea to start from space and work down instead of working from sea-level up. Maybe such vehicles could be used to lower payloads slowly into the atmosphere to avoid re-entry friction and then carry some air up on their way back to space.

But that only describes the fixity between different molecules, not that between the atoms in each molecule. You make it sound like it is automatically the case that if bonds are strong enough to prevent detachment, they must also fix the positions of the atoms relative to each other. It's like a hammer thrower who doesn't let go - the chain need not be rigid for the relative configuration of hammer and thrower to remain basically fixed and move together as a moving system. Why couldn't electron bonds allow more intramolecular motion at one energy level and less at another? Metals get progressively softer as energy/temperature increases, and they're electron-rich.

Maybe they could have a version of Toss It that only lets you crumple a page and throw it after you've read it. It would be like reading a paper book and tearing out pages one by one to use for wastebasket-ball. That way you'd have to read really carefully before playing the game. Maybe you could even get the page back if you made the shot as a further incentive.

Since the political campaign to stop public funding for abortion is strengthening, I wonder if private initiatives will emerge to allow people to insure themselves against unwanted pregnancy. If such abortion-insurance would emerge, how would you expect it to be funded and regulated? E.g. do you think that anyone who wanted to could sign up for unlimited abortions for a fixed fee or would it be like auto insurance where your premiums increase due to accidents and tickets? Also, would you expect men to contribute to such insurance, for example, and if so what would their incentive be? Would women restrict themselves to have sex with men whose abortion-insurance payments were up-to-date? Sorry if I have somehow presented this topic in an offensive way. I'm just trying to raise discussion about whether voluntary semi-public funding of abortion is possible and, if so, how would it work?

But how would you know whether the nominal fixity was due to interaction among the molecules of the solid or their internal configuration independent of how they are arranged vis-a-vis other molecules? I understand the ripping apart within a solid, because there are other molecules fixed in position to create friction for the moving molecule, just like pulling a plastic sack full of billiard balls out from the middle of a pile of such sacks would tear the sack. But if molecules in a liquid can "roll around" past each other, why couldn't their atomic-parts also be "rolling around" and shape-changing according to the flexibility of the bonding energy that holds the nuclei together? I realize that this is hypothetical in light of mississippichem's claims about 2D spectroscopy photography/video, but it still seems plausible to me that if molecular bonding occurs through the sharing of electrons that generally circulate around their nuclei, that the bonds themselves and the bonded nuclei could be in relative dynamic motion until fixed by external constraints.

Meaning you can make photos and/or videos of individual molecules? Down to what scale? Why does it matter if an electron pair tunnels through the nucleus? Does that change the shape/orientation of the molecule?

I think Marx would view unions and social-economic governments as corporations that usurp ownership of labor from the individual laborers in order to control (collective) labor as a means of production. As I recall, Marx strongly criticized state-socialism as an obstacle to the realization of true communism. Idk if I'm for "true communism" but I do see a major difference between a system of organized re-distribution of money within a capitalist economy and communism in which the commitment of all to the greater good would make money meaningless, as everyone would simply voluntarily contribute their labor and resource-conservation to the goal of maximizing economic access to the greatest number of people. But the question is whether Michael Eisner would take his share of coal-mining shifts, and whether the coal-miners would minimize their coal-usage voluntarily to conserve the resource and minimize the need for coal-mining labor. The problem in capitalism is that people like to work hard to have more - and they expect others to do the same regardless of how ecologically or socially detrimental the consequences. Nevertheless, capitalism is the only system, as far as I know, that rewards individuals for conservation by allowing them to save more money while those who spend more lose it. I think capitalism tends to evolve in the direction of greater efficiency, which leads to increasing unemployment, which would lead to increasing free time to choose what activities to pursue with one's time. The obstacle to this is that corporate resistance to price-competition allows certain wages and profit-margins to be maintained, which prevents deflation and further layoffs. I think that in a truly free market, prices and wages would continue to drop until the point where free people would have access to the means of production to produce for themselves. This doesn't occur because of class-formation where certain people control the means of production in a way that maintains a relative monopoly/oligopoly and thus prevents total free-market competition. It's ironic that Marx's criticism of capitalism actually strawmanned it by treating its socialized version as the natural result of its ideals, which I don't think is the case.