lemur

When the government organizes spending and taxation to promote job-creation in all sectors through trickle-down from military, social redistribution payments, government contracts, or whatever; whose income ISN'T the result of government spending? The problem isn't whether the government generates spending or private business. The problem is that people spend too much money and that sets high expectations for how much money people think they need. What many people in developed economies consider intolerable poverty would be sufficient means to live well in developing economies.

How will they know it wasn't caused by genetically modified foods, BSE, acid rain, the hole in the ozone layer, or global climate change? BTW, "radiation" doesn't stay around for a long time, radioactivity does. I'm not sure it stays concentrated enough to remain dangerous though. There was another thread where this issue was addressed thoroughly, though. edit: sorry for being cynical. What exactly do you think should be done about the problem?

Interesting thought experiment. It's a good one for generally shifting people's perspectives from the money-finance part of economics to everything else that goes on between transactions. Still, what would people do when they started realizing they could make purchases without their bank balances decreasing? Well, it WOULD be slavery if people weren't getting paid for going to work. Slavery doesn't require racial distinctions or whips and chains or having farmer's markets with humans on an auction block. It just requires people working for others without compensation. I suppose though if everyone was free to compensate themselves by taking whatever they wanted, there would be compensation. That would actually be what Marx meant with communism, i.e. "producing all you can and taking only what you need." Of course I know that. But I was referring to big projects that require a lot of people working to produce something complex. Yes, but in more stable economies people tend to refuse to contribute labor and resources without guaranteed compensation. If you pay attention to the news, you can identify all sorts of instances where it is assumed that as funding is cut, the services will be lost. In fact, they were just planning to shut down the US federal government instead of working without pay. Whereas FDR's new deal democrats put people to work as volunteers, the present day party prefers strikes and government shut-downs until the desired debt-spending cycle is established. It's not about how much people spend. If your funding gets cut completely, you don't have ANY money to spend. The question is whether the economy can reach equilibrium by people cutting their budgets to a level that doesn't require government subsidization. I.e. if they tighten their belts enough, will the private economy provide them with sufficient funding to stay out of debt? Maybe, but it could all be in the same money-supply chain. E.g. I get 1million from the government and spend it to build a road. Then the road builders get it and spend it on sandwiches. Then the sandwich makers spend it on housing. Then the landlords spend it on building maintenance. Each time that million dollars changes hands, it adds to GDP right? But if building maintenance is waiting on money from the landlords, housing deteriorates, etc. But the question is whether those people could organize their own economy without government spending to initiate the cash-flows and help people cover their bills/debts?

I find the hardest thing for people to do when discussing economics is to get down to the fundamental level of what is going on at the level of labor, production, distribution, etc. In other words, the economy consists of numerous exchange relationships where people perform some labor or sell some non-labor resource in exchange for money, which they then spend or pay to government for taxes, etc. The networks of exchanges that emerge and the patterns of production and distribution are what we're concerned with regulating using either government, corporate management, small-business, household-level management of consumption choices, etc. So all the politics of taxing, spending, and regulation of labor, business, and trade all dance around the general issue of how to live, what to do with your labor and property, and how to influence other people to do something with theirs in other people's interest (whether you name those other people specifically or just call it "the nation" or "GDP" or "the economy" or however you view what goes on beyond individual households. So what would happen if the government completely stopped spending money? Wouldn't we have to re-legalize slavery so that people could perform collaborative labor without pay? Is there any other way for people to legally work for each other without having money to pay each other? If people who do have money pay it only to certain other people, and those people in turn pay it back to the people who paid them, forming essentially a closed spending-circuit; should those that are excluded coin their own money or find some other way to barter and exchange goods and services? Do people just need to reduce their own spending to avoid relying on credit and government funding? If they do that, what level of economic activity would be reached as stable equilibrium?

Are there any absolute limits where certain forms of matter with mass could never be converted to energy under any physical conditions? And why is there as of yet practically no natural mechanisms theorized for the conversion from energy into matter (that I know of anyway)? Is it assumed that energy originates as matter w/ mass and may degenerate into energy under certain conditions but that the process is basically 1-way entropy?

I don't think this is as far-fetched as people are making it seem in this thread. I find it fascinating that elements heavier than iron decay spontaneously into lighter elements and that there is a pattern of half-life shortening as elements get heavier. This pattern leads me to wonder what external factors are involved with weak nuclear stability. In other words, I wonder if there are are conditions under which heavier elements become more stable or lighter elements spontaneously fragment into even lighter ones. The latter would consume energy, but I think our physical assumptions may be skewed due to the fact that our point of view is oriented toward a certain consistency of matter-energy instead of, say, inside a star where energy is extremely abundant and matter is in constant flux as a result.

I think this is a little like in the war on terror where we got lots of levels of security threat to ponder. At first it caused a lot of tension and unrest whenever the level went from green to yellow, but slowly people's reaction to the fear dissipated and now few people are "in the grips of terror." I think maybe something similar happened during the cold-war period where people were gradually desensitized to the nuclear threat.

I see a similarity here with blood pressure. I can personally mind my stress level and intentionally relax in many cases. It requires taking deep breaths and allowing myself to calm down, but I can usually do it. On the other hand, I know people who react to everything with stress. They basically have a single sub-conscious strategy for dealing with anything that comes to their attention, which is to stress about it until the problem gets solved or goes away (i.e. "fight or flight" response). Such people's blood pressure goes up when they are confronted with observing their own blood pressure. I think the same would occur if they were observing scans of their brain activity. You would tell them to just relax and not think about calming their minds and their response would be to think more about how to do that. Ideally, people would be able to replace automatic reflective reaction with consciously chosen "proaction," but I don't know if displaying brain-scans of their thought-activity would be sufficient. I think people need to have a whole philosophy and discipline of mind complete with reasons and strategies. They don't just naturally see why they should control certain reactions and know how. They think they are reacting to problems in order to solve them.

It is easy to think of photons as being independent particles for two reasons, imo: 1) they are fundamental packets/quanta of energy 2) their sources and destinations can be measured as very distant. But does it really make sense to say that photons exist independently of their sources and destinations? I.e. when a photon leaves one electron en route for another, does it really have a life/existence except as a conduit of energy-transfer between its source and destination? Could photons be just as well described as moments of connection between seemingly distant electrons? Would this idea fit with the idea of quantum tunneling and unlimited possibility for electron-emergence within a probability distribution? In other words, could photons simply be electromagnetic force that tunnels infinite distance through conduits of gravitational geodesic paths? When I think of a particle with mass, I think of it being able to break away from other particles in a configuration and behave as a free particle before re-configuring into another situation. Photons, on the other hand, seem to just propagate themselves from their own force like a chain-reaction of shadows, if such a thing was possible. In other words, they don't seem to have an existence independent of the propagation of force to transmit energy between particles with mass. I don't know if this could also be said about, say, an electron when it breaks away in an ionization process. Does it then just behave as a linear propagation of negative charge until it reaches a positive charge? Or can an electron have a life of its own, bouncing around among particles until it gets integrated into a new atom/molecule?

I re-read it and it seems you're right. He was saying that he wants to stop deceiving students that rest-mass increases with speed. So what does/would he want to do with Einstein's claim that mass and energy are "essentially alike . . . only different expressions of the same thing?"

I vaguely remember this but I don't think it mentioned in what sense exactly it isn't uniform. Was it due to density/consistency or different plate-thickness. If the core/mantle is molten and therefore fluid, I don't see why it wouldn't form a sphere and exert uniform gravity to the crust. Or is gravity more complex in that it compounds through the whole diameter so that, e.g. the himalayas' mass causes higher gravity on the side of the Earth opposite the Himalayas (or something like that)?

Idk, I think he mentioned the idea that it would be fruitful to teach students both approaches separately instead of focussing on a single best approach that combines energy and matter as mass. Just because science is objective doesn't mean it's impossible to have different epistemological approaches existing side-by-side. Generally I don't like pluralism and relativism but the alternative, i.e. attacking any approach just because it is not the one you support, also has drawbacks. I think the best critical discourse comes from having open criticism among conflicting approaches, but to do that you have to have some conflict. Organizing it into epistemological pluralism may prevent conflict/intercourse by promoting the idea that each approach is valid in itself as its own paradigm and that plural paradigms can't or shouldn't be used as sources for critique in each other's discourses. I guess what your point is and what the author's point was, is that it's different to say that the momentum of an object with rest mass has increased mass due to its momentum than it is to say that an object with rest mass has energy that is causing it to have rest mass in the first place? I know that electrons, protons, and neutrons are ascribed mass. Are their sub-constituent particles, e.g. quarks etc.? Could there be some level of matter where the constituents are all point-particle-fields devoid of rest mass? If so, mass would be an emergent phenomenon, right? And if it was an emergent phenomenon, you would understand the relationship between the factors that constitute it and its relative stability, so you could explain why mass emerges at the atomic level but doesn't increase in subsequent levels of energetic systems, for example. Could it also be that the mass of a moving object doesn't increase due to its momentum, but the mass of the system it is a part of does? I.e. could mass be an emergent effect of force-exerting particles moving in relation to each other, like the way magnetism is emergent from the movement of electric charges (vis-a-vis what exactly?)?

Maybe aliens understand the language of marketing because that's the dominant form of media communication and junk mail is filled with alien attempts to communicate with us by luring us into consumer exchanges.

If it is a vacuum, where does a given particle end and 'the vacuum' begin? When it is said that the majority of an atom is empty space, what does that mean, that the 3D volume staked out by the various particles is greater than the sum of its 0D (point) parts? How is it sensible to claim a 3D volume is mostly empty space because it is a constellation of 0D points? If space is an entity that curves separately from the gravity that is attributed causation for the curving, why is gravitation separate from the space it curves? What is matter and what are its boundaries? That question is the underlying one that reveals the ontology of space, imo, that is to say if there is such an ontology that is not just an extension of the epistemology of boundary-attribution and separation of distinct entity-ness thereby.

I'm afraid my answer to this is based in religious philosophy more than physics. I would say that because God is part of every human's subjectivity (soul if you want to call it that), God sees everything that humans do through their eyes AND God is the ultimate wisdom, experience, and consciousness that knows all there is to know about everything because of its nature. God would also know every possible interpretation and implication of every possible outcome of all imaginable variables. I.e. God is the ideal of omnipotence, so all forms of power you can imagine are attributed to the idea of God. So if you can fathom the possibility of seeing everything, God can do it. God doesn't have to obey the limits of nature, only because humans can imagine the power to limitless overcome such limits. You see how it works? God is imagined as an ideal so anything you can possibly imagine is what God is and can do.

I think it is logical that when you give someone something, they become part of your community and would have the ability to use the thing you gave to them as well. That's why I don't like giving, because I know it brings some level of social bond with it where I will be obligated to do something for that person at some point, most likely when I find what they're doing least valid. I think the answer to this lies in the perfect symmetries/balances of nature. If God had created life without death or goodness without the possibility of evil, it would have created imbalance and violated conservation laws, which seem to be universally pertinent. Karma doesn't result in punishment in the sense of a concerted response to an abstract judgement. Karma just means, imo, that actions people commit are also actions that they will be on the receiving end of. E.g. when you're a kid you behave badly toward your parents and when you're a parent, your kids behave badly toward you. Parenthood isn't God willfully punishing you for being an obnoxious kid. It just so happens that the cyclical patterns of behavioral-learning put you in the position of experiencing something quite similar to what your parents did when they were in your situation. For people who never have kids, I'm sure there are psychological mechanisms that cause them to experience things that reveal to them what it was like to be on the receiving end of their past actions. I think this is just an artifact of consciousness, no? I don't think there are such technicalities in sin/karma as there can be in legal code and practice. I think stealing refers to an inherent sense of ownership people have regarding things that can be taken from them. I use karma to answer complex questions like these without having to analyze too much just by putting the shoe on the other foot, so to speak. I.e. you would later go to your cabin and find that someone had broken in and you would find a note explaining that the person was dying of exposure and they were sorry for using your firewood, etc. If you didn't leave a note, you wouldn't find a note. I.e. whatever you choose to do to someone else, that exact thing will happen to you and you will experience the exact effects of your actions for better and/or worse. If God went by secular or religious judgments, Jesus would be in hell for blasphemy. Personally I think it's misleading to think of hell as a place you get sent or not with generalized punishment for all sins (fire). I think the karmic model works better, OR you can just look at hell as the suffering that follows from sin generally. Such as when Moses killed the Egyptian in the book of Exodus, it caused him some social conflict and defamation (which is why I think he arrived at the revelation to have a commandment not to kill).

But what happens when you go from the round surface of the cylinder to one of the ends? Or maybe an even more blatant example would be sailing over the corner of a cube? I suppose a cube corner would stick out of the ocean like a mountain, though, so maybe it's a bad example. Actually, maybe any water on the end of the cylinder would cascade toward the center and try to form a sphere as close to the center of gravity as possible. But then what if you had a oddly-shaped hollow planet where the gravity was not due to the core but to very dense crust? I guess this is getting a little far-fetched, but I'm still confused about how different levels of gravity on Earth can deviate from relative altitudes. I always assumed elevation correlated 1-to-1 with gravitation, controlling for the centrifuge effect of rotation.

The author's concluding sentence states that he basically wants to stop teaching students that mass and energy are different forms of the same thing because he claims that pluralism is politically correct and fruitful. However, on page 11 he quotes Einstein as saying, This logic is well-known relating to the products of radioactive decay having less mass than the mother substance. But he doesn't specify that mass and energy are alike for radioactive materials. I have the impression that he believed that rest mass was a product of energy. Why would he say they are "essentially alike" if he actually believed that there were fundamental particles of mass that couldn't be reduced to energy?

How do you know Einstein wasn't trying to deconstruct the whole distinction between mass as passive energy and energy as active particles? That equation always seemed to me to say that mass is ultimately reducible to kinetic energy and I also assumed that some model of matter would be realized that attributes mass/inertia directly to some aspect of sub-atomic motion, the way gyroscopic resistance is due to course-change resistance in a moving object.

You have to put your hand on something when swearing and taking oaths and such, right?

Frictionless superfluid sounds like a perpetual motion machine to me. It's one thing for objects in motion to remain in motion under momentum of their own inertia. But for an object to interact with a fluid in a way that changes the trajectory(ies) of any number of particles with inertia, work has to be done. Work is/involves friction, no?

But isn't conceptualizing time as a dimension an optional approach to conceptualizing motion? I mean, before Einsteinian "spacetime" 4D-ism no one had any trouble conceptualizing 3D space as being a basis for motion. Maybe I'm misunderstanding your point, but it seems to confound epistemological with empirical-theoretical problems.

Overlooking the offensiveness of using the phrase "indian giving" to describe re-taking a given gift, I think the question is addressed by the fact that death as punishment for sin is simply the mechanical logic of nature, not some deus ex machina. E.g. when people commit the sin of killing, the consequence is logically death because death results from killing. Adultery is similar, except for what dies is a marriage/family instead of an individual. Stealing is another form of death, the thing stolen is like a part of you that gets killed by the thief. So when the "karma comes around" and the creation delivers its effects back to the agents of their causes, the first become last and the last first, etc. Another way to put it is that it's not God directly taking things away from sinners - it's them doing themselves in by failing to heed God's warning. E.g. in the garden of Eden, God warns them that if they eat the apple they'll surely die but they ignore the warning. How can you call that God taking away their lives? It would be like if you told someone that they can taste anything in your flavor-chemistry lab except the green stuff with the purple lumps in it because it's a poison with no antidote. Then if you found out they went ahead and drank it while you were in the bathroom, you would be angry at them and maybe banish them from your lab and tell them they are cursed to die - because you knew what would happen to them as a consequence of drinking the green and purple stuff and you even warned them about it to protect them.

Isn't this argument like saying that a photon can't travel linearly if space is 3D because a line is one-dimensional?

It may be that the problem with US free speech is that it used to allow the balancing of its abuse as provocation with various rights to achieving satisfaction by violence, such as dueling. In a sense, pacifism has promoted the use of free speech as provocation by repressing effective responses to such speech. I don't think speech should be met with physical violence/aggression, but I do think there should be a way for people to challenge others to debates or something similar where the provocateur would be required to show up by subpoena or something like that. In this way, people would have the right to speak and express themselves freely but not without the responsibility to defend their ideas against response. I doubt any law that censors speech to 'keep the peace' is effective since it would only serve to repress a conflict that would continue to simmer among those who self-censored to avoid punishment. The exception would be speech designed to rhetorically attack, provoke, and generally harass instead of constructively discuss. There would be no purpose of letting people subpoena someone to harass them publicly with rhetoric (unless they deserved it in which case it might be a reasonable form of retribution/punishment).