lemur

I see what you're saying now. I think you should address the relationship between quantum 'weirdness' and the kinds of spacetime-rules you describe. For example, I think that there is a reason that quantum mechanics emerge into classical mechanics at super-atomic levels. Since I assume that all the energy of the universe was present in the form of force-potential prior to the big bang, I would be interested to know how quantum mechanics would operate within a total concentration of force to the point that no classical motion would be occurring.

Which "rules of time" are you referring to exactly? How is your conclusion related to the if-statement it follows?

That comment confused me. Are you saying that both classes would be equally affected by losing collective bargaining? The point of the OP was whether middle-class standards of living would disappear without unions as capitalism would reduce them all to sweat-shop quasi-slaves. . . or, put less pessimistically, could cultural evolution in the direction of more sustainable, less materialistic standards of living be achieved more smoothly without collective bargaining fighting to keep wages and benefits as high as possible for as many people as possible?

The problem with these crowded urban and suburban areas is that the crowding drives property prices higher, which makes them more popular and lucrative areas to live in where people can mostly afford rising food costs. But there's a catch, which is that property appreciation and the economic boom that goes with it tends to expand until the point of meltdown, at which point everyone is left scrambling to afford anything let alone everything. This is why it makes more sense to figure out what is sustainable and adapt to it BEFORE the point of meltdown, because as long as the bubble is growing it makes it seem like there's no end to prosperity in sight. This is because the larger economy continues to serve those with money until they've lost it. I would even say that capitalist economics pro-actively builds up dependencies among relatively prosperous people, which makes them that much more vulnerable to loss when it happens. Predicting subsequent fuel sources just drives investment, which sustains the bubble/meltdown economy. Yes, of course it is a good idea to seek new sources of energy but in the meantime, it is also sensible to reduce energy-dependency generally to the lowest level possible. That way, whether new abundant energy sources are found or not, more people are in a better position of living sustainably without them.

I think post-industrialization will gradually simplify things by combining more traditional ways of living with hyper-modern technologies like AI, IT, etc. I think the main factor that causes the perception that life is getting worse is the fact that modernization generated such high levels of materialism in the 20th century. Now, because materialism/consumerism has become unsustainable, it's easy to mistake the end of a culture for the end of life itself. It's just like when you are used to driving all the time and you decide to limit your driving to absolute necessities, it seems at first like you are stranded until you begin to develop patterns of walking/biking that open up local amenities to you in a new way. It's not that you're actually stranded without modern culture, it's that you're programmed to view every possible alternative as inherently meager.

I don't understand how an Earthquake could change the tilt of the Earth's axis.

I think that malthusianism or other population/future pessimism has a very specific cultural function. It generally tends to emerge strong in times of economic recession, imo, because it evokes the ideology of, "hey, we're going extinct as a species so it's ok to kill, destroy, live-it-up, and otherwise live as if there's no tomorrow. Then, the more resources are wasted and people killed, the more "breathing room" there is for the survivors to procrastinate the difficult cultural adaptations that will lead to real sustainability. In other words, pessimism promotes cultural conservatism by basically accepting that the status-quo is only way to live even when it's leading to self-destruction. BTW, I liked the way the OP casually associated elimination of disease as a cause of unsustainability. This is basically like saying, "if people don't die naturally, they'll kill each other artificially because they'll never change their ways so that they can all survive."

While there may currently be examples of long-distance shipping that are more fuel-efficient than local production, I think it is in the interest of creating long-term eco-friendly economics to work on building up efficient local farms and other enterprises. The reason I say this has to do with long-term cultural patterns. If/when people get in the habit of thinking that it's more efficient to produce vegetables 1000s of miles from where they are consumed, it promotes cultures of large-scale distribution. As fuel becomes increasingly scarce and thus expensive, those large-scale distribution assumptions are going to lead to the belief that local agriculture and industry are impossible, let alone sustainable. In reality, it should ultimately be possible for people to live close enough to farms and factories to walk, if necessary, to work and get food at the farms. This way, they can be totally fuel-independent as needed. I think the major hurdle to achieving more fuel-independent economic productivity is that people are accustomed to certain lifestyles where they simply take for granted that food will be processed and brought to supermarkets, restaurants, and other distribution venues and that they are doing their part by working their office job to make the money to fund those means of food-distribution. In reality, it would use a lot less fuel if people would directly pick up their food from farms, and actually they should even live near and work on those farms as well to prevent the need for migrant agricultural labor and commuting. This is practically unimaginable for most people securely situated in elaborate modern divisions of labor, but it may be the only means possible as fuel grows increasingly scarce/expensive. The exception, as far as food goes, imo are things like grains that are grown and harvested on a massive scale very efficiently. It doesn't really make sense, I think, to grow wheat, oats, corn etc. locally when these crops can be more efficiently dealt with by large machinery and can be shipped as dry-weight and relatively compact. Compare shipping a truck loaded with bags of dry flour compared with one loaded with bags of potato chips. The number of calories per unit-fuel would be many times higher for the flour. Now think of what it takes to ship refrigerated containers of wet, fresh, frozen, and/or prepared food around. And yet locally grown fresh vegetables are more expensive! Why? Because the people who grow them have to charge rates that generate the same levels of revenue/income as everyone else gets for doing eco-unfriendly stuff. Why? Because they have to pay the same price for property, taxes, and whatever else they consume.

Job-creation politics are one of the worst side-effects of industrial modernization, imo. If you install a dishwasher to do dishes for you, you are happy to replace the job of dishwashing with a machine so you are free to do other things. Yet when a wage-labor job as dishwasher is replaced with a machine (or any other job), people complain about taking jobs away from humans. If all people basically lived from their own homesteads, they would welcome labor-saving technologies because they would have control over the productivity those technologies enable. However, because industrialism produced a class of workers whose only means of sustaining themselves economically involves trading their labor for money, a culture of job-seeking has evolved into a politics of job-creation. It is putting the cart before the horse, but how do you return people to the point where they can become self-determined economic agents instead of passive recipients/dependents of social-economic structuring?

Imo, the whole idea of organizing and ranking people within a group according to seniority, ability level, or other forms of "merit" is an abstraction from the actuality of labor as directly productive in situations. What I mean by this is that if you were trying to get something done, e.g. put up a ceiling, I would attempt to get whoever was available at the moment to help and, if they weren't able, I would seek the next available person. Theoretically, if all economic activities were done this directly, individuals would just work on self-sustaining projects and would seek to enlist other available individuals when they need some kind of assistance. Factories could run the same way if people wouldn't attempt to lie about being able to do a job they couldn't do to get the money. I think the various systems and methods for exercising economic control have evolved beyond being just support for individuals trying to accomplish things to being a system designed to provide everything for everyone without them having to do anything really, other than fulfill whatever immediate abstract bureaucratic requirements are put to them. Then, when systems are failing, the bureaucratic requirements are designed to provide unchallengeable means of severing labor relations. Social structuring/control has become primary and labor productivity secondary and that destroys direct economic consciousness. It all sounds like symptoms of the same problem: abstraction of economic processes and negotiating them on the abstract level to the detriment of being able to work more directly.

I don't know if this directly addresses what the OP is wondering about, but I do tend to think that the motion of rotation is paid too little mind with regard to why things fall and "hold" to the ground. After all, in a perfectly non-viscuous ball of matter nothing could ever come to rest when falling, because it would simply continue to fall through anything it ran into, right? So it seems to me that there is something about viscosity of planetary matter that is responsible for the falling and holding effects of gravity. Without it, I would think gravity would seem like a more dynamic/kinetic than passive/potential force. Technically, gravity is both but I think it is typically viewed as force-potential that sometimes causes things to move instead as dynamic motion that gets resisted by viscosity causing matter to pile up in a "traffic jam." I hope this is relevant, because it is a very interesting topic to me.

Compare two green peppers. One is farmed far away by people who don't drive cars or have air-conditioning. The other is farmed locally, and thus requires virtually no transportation costs/resources, but build into the price is the cost of local land, labor, taxes, etc.; all money that is likely to be spent driving around, running climate control, and funding elaborate consumerism. So, either price may stimulate more, less, or the same amount of fuel consumed and eco-unfriendliness, but they might just do it in different ways. I think it is all too common to make the mistake of only comparing the most superficial ecological aspect of a good instead of looking at the whole network of economic activity that goes into producing its various inputs, including the human-capital (nothing against humans - just pointing out that many humans can be pretty eco-unfriendly in their lives outside of producing eco-friendly products).

Instead of trying to reply to each post specifically, please allow me to bargain with them as a single collective:) My issue with unions is the very idea of collectivism in collective bargaining and the fact that individual workers are told that they are powerless against management except by bonding together with other workers. Then, what bothers me more is that if an individual has an idea or a grievance or whatever, the union adds an additional layer of mediation to the individual expressing themselves to someone in a position to (help) change it. In other words, as an individualist, I look at all human communication as occurring through networks of individual-individual interactions. So when an individual approaches another and is told that they should go talk to their union rep, and then the union rep says that they'll bring it up at a meeting to see if they can get sufficient votes to put it on a ballot, etc. it boils down to essentially a method of structuralized suppression. Another thing about collective bargaining is the fact that it can be used to push for something by force when the thing being pushed for may or may not be reasonable. This would, of course, not happen if union reps wouldn't become convinced that management is nothing but greedy liars saying whatever they have to to maximize profit and power. But because they often view things this way, they feel justified in pushing as hard as they can to get maximum benefit for the workers. That could theoretically be a logical method of determining the fairest deal in that whatever they can get management to ultimately accept must not be too badly out of their interest, but I can't understand it when the company is not allowed to fold because the worker/union demands are more than it wants to deal with. At some level, people have the right to withhold their capital the same as workers have the right to withhold their labor, right? Finally, in practice I think the unions and the shareholders/managers actually work together to squeeze the maximum amount of money out of consumers/clients in order to make everyone as much money as possible. Both have an interest in preventing competition or other economic aspects that could benefit consumers at the expense of revenues, wages, dividends, etc. Theoretically this could be resolved by having consumer unions as well as government checking and balancing the powers of the corporations and unions, but what happens to individualism through all these acts of collective representation? Does everyone have to defer to a "larger" representative power in order to voice an opinion? Do individuals have to submit to the conditions given to them by these institutionalized powers? If so, why shouldn't individualists like me do everything we can to withdraw support from not only collective unionism, but also collective corporatism and any other form of collectivism that attempts to reduce individuality to a constituent element of "larger bodies?" Can you think of any other avenue individualism can take? Would you suggest we unionize in order to speak with a "louder collective voice?"

I agree with SMF that it depends on the specifics of each product and how you trace its supply-chain genealogies of cause and effect. However, it's a big question in my mind why something that requires less fuel and/or steps to produce should cost more than something that requires more. Obviously, the reason could be that it takes more human labor per unit production, but then the question is what the human laborers are buying with the money. Generally, I think a tighter economy has to be more eco-friendly because people and businesses simply can't afford as much fuel and elaborate business structuring. They have to keep things as simple as possible and consolidate everything they can to cut costs. I've been told that this isn't the case anymore, but I always imagined that cheap goods produced in Asia were so cheap because the workers biked for transportation, ate simple meals using local ingredients, weren't obsessed with expensive clothing and other status-boosting materialism, lived in smaller and more energy-efficient dwellings with less climate control, etc. Simple living is eco-friendly AND cheapens labor, so why should eco-friendly cost more instead of less? (except that its scarcity may drive up the cost where demand is high - but why should demand be high if consumers are being eco-friendly and re-using and conserving their stuff?)

I think this line of thought contains ideas that could be philosophically interesting at a metaphysical level. But since you're posting in a science forum, I would recommend posting such thoughts with a title other than "the universe and the true principles of nature," which sounds like physics. You should make a post in religion or philosophy titled something like, "philosophical significance and meaning of light and other physical entities in metaphysical terms." I can certainly see how the association of light with God and creation could relate to the physics line of research that finds light to have energy, momentum, force and other action-producing qualities, including perhaps being a basis for matter itself. But if you want to discuss the philosophical significance of that, you should be up front about it when starting a thread.

This sounds like a good idea to me, but who would dare to express any kind of political ideas that would be identified with those of the previous regime in any way? I think it may be a long time before supporters of the previous regime will dare to fully participate in the emergent democracy. Theoretically, they should not fear subjugation to the spirit of the rebellion but doesn't this always happen when a rebellion topples a demonized regime? I think you could call this authoritarianism of opposition since basically any political idea that doesn't oppose the former regime is suppressed out of fear of demonization. Democratically, you would expect it to simply be put on the table and discussed reasonably but people are usually too emotionally charged to be disciplined.

Ok, you clearly don't see any benefit coming from unions. I hope some others respond that have a clear vision of what would happen to the middle class without collective bargaining, who think that there will be a difference. I am curious how bad supporters of collective bargaining think things could get in its absence. Basically, I'm curious what motivates them to struggle as hard as they do against losing the right to collective bargaining. Do they think management will mercilessly reduce them to slaves that are driven hard for a few years before death, like in 1930s work camps or some forms of colonial labor?

Sorry, but I guess I am getting really tired of hearing people act like anything between their current level of consumption and total deprivation is a disastrous "great depression." Globally, the resources are available to provide for everyone's basic necessities and the only real question is how to organize and distribute the labor in a way that's fair without abridging people's freedom, individuality, and private property rights. All fossil fuel is the product of solar-generated biomass accumulating over many years. That is why it is non-renewable. When it ends, the only energy that will be available will come from sunlight and what grows from it. There's no magic source of fuel that can justify continuing to consume as if there's no end in sight. That's why conservation is so important and the major obstacle is cultural norms that make it difficult for people to see that their regular everyday consumption is actually excessive and what they think of as practically abject poverty (walking around in old clothes or biking) is sustainable living. Middle-class culture is so dangerous, imo, because it causes people to measure wealth and poverty relative to themselves as "just normal." Middle-class culture is not "just normal" and should evolve into what would basically amount to working-poverty with responsible social behavior and better education (which the poor should also have access to, btw)

Thanks. I knew that black-body radiation means that things at the same temperature mostly emit the same level of radiation, but I didn't know the equation (and I'd probably mess up applying it). Now I'm wondering how it changes things to wrap the water bottle in a towel. Would that reduce the emissivity or would it be treated as itself an absorber and re-emitter with its own characteristics? The more I think about, the whole comparison falls apart when you start dealing with insulation. The heat lamp is designed to provide heat with little if any insulation while the water bottle works well by allowing it to slowly cool down in a well-insulated situation.

Surely they would be prepared for such a situation by having backup generators for the cooling pumps on site and ready, unless those were damaged too.

That's interesting but why isn't it just as simple as the fact that the reactor itself generates electricity so its own systems would run off that electricity? Why does a power plant need external power to run itself?

I'm trying to compare the heat output between a 250W lamp and a 1 liter hot water bottle filled with boiling water. I think this involves specific heat of water but I'm not sure how to set up the math. This is what I think so far: 4.187 kJ/kgK so does that mean 1kg of water produces @4200 joules per degree temperature change? Then I suppose I would have to know how fast the hot water bottle is cooling. Is there some short cut to compare the two without knowing the exact cooling rate of the water bottle? It doesn't have to be exact. I'm just trying to get a general idea of how they compare as heat sources.

If it's producing steam, why doesn't that generate the power to run the pumps? Were the generators damaged by the quake?

I don't understand your point. All I'm asking is whether organized labor (unionism) actually has marked effects on social-economics broadly. In other words, I think some people believe that without unions, wages would be driven down along with benefits and employees would be contractually abused. I'm not so sure if this is the case. Maybe nothing would change. Or maybe all that would change is that employees would negotiate their labor as individuals instead of having representatives to negotiate it for them and tell them that what they got was the best they could do for them. Your response seems to be providing some evidence but you're not really making any explicit argument to go along with it so it's hard to see what your point is. edit: consider the following scenario: you want to buy a car and you are told that there is a consumer union that negotiates car prices for buyers collectively. They tell you what car you have to buy and the price they negotiated for you. Do you take it and thank them for making your choice for you and getting the best deal, or do you wonder why you couldn't choose your own car and negotiate your own price?

Does German government put requirements on people for labor-force participation, etc. because the economy is seen as a public responsibility that people have in return for receiving welfare-state benefits? In one sense, this doesn't seem so bad to me. I mean, the benefits surely outweigh the cost/effort you put in. Still, at the level of individual freedom of choice, my question would be who gets to decide what economy I have to contribute to and what is good for me to have provided by my 'generous welfare overseers.' What if, for example, I am told I have to work in a restaurant because that is what brings tourist money in, which is needed to pay for the welfare state? But then I don't eat in restaurants and I don't value the idea of providing services to tourists because I am for having a different economy? Would I then be free to choose not to support the welfare state economy and pursue my own projects instead? My impression is that when government intervenes in economics, certain businesses get subsidized and people are driven to work for those businesses to pay the taxes to keep them running. So where does your freedom to vote with economic participation/choice go?