lemur

how is space a quantity or how does it become a quantity? What do you mean by light being force? Do you mean it consists of electric and magnetic fields, which are force? Do you realize these fields also move and transmit energy? Do you see any difference between force and energy? And what do you mean by "Numbers (mass)?" Are you writing these things as physics or metaphysics?

You referred to "occupying space" as a fundamental aspect of matter. That's why I brought up the issue of black holes, not because I wanted to discuss them specifically. Personally, I don't think space is something that exists prior to its being "occupied" by anything else. I think it is constituted from the relations of gravity and other forces, which is why I responded to that part of your post. It sounds like, however, that you just want to assert your ideas as "True Principles" and skirt any questions that bring up issues not convenient to supporting your ideas.

I don't understand what this analogy specifically addresses? Sacrifices may be voluntary or coerced. When they're coerced, it is likely to be unfair to the person being coerced if the person/market doing the coercing isn't taking their best interest into account. You can't assess what kinds of exploitation and/or coercion are going on based on the price of a commodity. The money-exchange results in a set of material relations that may or may not be exploitative/coercive. By buying the chocolate, you might be assisting the managers to coerce the workers in some way. If you are a chocolate addict, the workers are exploiting your addiction to pay their wages and may be exploiting the managers to provide certain levels of job security. Exploitation and coercion can go in any direction, and even multiple directions simultaneously, like any other form of social power. When a person is economically independent and they decide to sell their labor in exchange for wages, that is un-coerced trade. The question is at what point people have little if any choice EXCEPT to sell their labor. Obviously, at the point someone gives you the choice of selling your labor or losing your life, that is coercive, but what about the broad spectrum in between? I'll agree that people can abuse the will to legitimacy/fairness to achieve unfair ends, but if you would completely reject the very possibility of fairness, why would you criticize people abusing it arbitrarily as a means to dominate and exploit others? You're implying that there is merit in the things you say and that merit should matter. Why should it? It is "fair" to allocate resources on the basis of some person/people's notion of what constitutes "merit" and what doesn't? You can say, "that's life," but does that erase the fact of unfairness? You have yet to explicitly state whether you believe the concept of fairness totally bankrupt/fictional or whether you consider it a valid concept on some level. They don't, but they need food and shelter and certain other things to maintain their health. All I'm saying is that cell phones and everything else is built by humans and/or human technologies. So, theoretically, it is possible for everyone to participate in the process of making things according to their level of interest in the product. I.e. as free as people are to contribute their money to the processes they want in the form of stock investments, why shouldn't people be just as free to contribute their labor, buying and selling as much or as little as they want at will? Not give you someTHING, but to prevent unnecessary levels of structural constraints from emerging to limit your otherwise greater freedom to make economic choices. Some levels of freedom are unacceptable because they require constraining the freedom of others. However, when freedom is being constrained in favor of others, isn't it reasonable to expect these to be replaced with something that allows the maximum amount of freedom for the maximum number of people? What would you build in your garage and how much could you sell it for? Enough to pay taxes and insurance and bills? And even if that was an option, why would that legitimate employers exploiting their position of relative economic power to sollicit excessive levels of submission from employees? I agree that there is too little critique of the "employ-me" right to a job attitude. Employees should be and view themselves as co-investors in the businesses they work at, since that's what they are. Actually, I think the opposite is the case. Current prices are set at levels that create excessive amounts of profit and middle/upper class income. Some people think the way to achieve greater fairness is by raising prices and paying higher wages from the bottom up, but I think this would just result in more economic exploitation. I think it would be far better to lower prices by cutting expenditures from the top-down, since that would reduce consumer-dependence on income and require middle/upper class people to do more with less money, which would mean doing more things for themselves. Then, if the economy would reach a point where people were free of economic coercion, they could voluntarily cooperate to produce whatever they wanted and it would be fair because it wouldn't constrain anyone else's freedom to choose their own path.

Suppose that during Hurricane Katrina, the US had prevented any interstate migration and prevented anyone outside Louisiana from intervening to mitigate the disaster. If some other state government or private individuals had acted to intervene according to their own "law" and "moral right," what basis would there be for claiming that US federal law was morally right and theirs morally wrong and illegal? In the same light, what basis is there for legitimating UN conventions of non-interference except majoritarianism among an elite club of sovereign governments? Since that club is made up of people with an interest in territorial autonomy within their designated regions, doesn't it seem a little biased that they support an organization that makes it illegal and immoral for them to intervene "in each other's affairs?" After all, as "sovereigns" aren't they intervening in the affairs of governed individuals by definition? What are you saying here, that it's legitimate to attack random individuals if you're not targeting them on the basis of ethnic identity? "Majority rule" is only a valid principle of democracy when combined with other checks and balances. Unilateral majoritarianism is not democratic. However, it's also not democratic to prevent people from expressing themselves and representing their interests, so that is what is going on by force now. The question is whether the rebels are going too far by wanting to achieve some form of total domination over state power. Once they shift to being the repressors of the previous ruling class, what does their responsibility become for respecting their rights as a minority? Can a previously oppressed class claim retaliatory rights toward the previous ruling class? Isn't that what happened in the case of the Rwanda genocide?

If collective bargaining is actually undermined, what would the effects be for social-economics generally and the "middle class" lifestyle specifically? Would the same number of people find ways to individually gain access to the same standards of living? Or would some people negotiate highly favorable contracts, wages, and benefits while others lost out in theirs? Or would management simply drive down as many people's wages and benefits as possible and grow the gap between rich and poor to its maximum? If the middle class would be impoverished in this way, how would the standard of living for the rich change? Would more people become rich? What would really change if unions ceased to exist?

Unfairness begins at the moment people begin building networks of exclusive supply-chains and coercing people into doing relatively undesirable labor or exploiting them through manipulative trading. Most people I talk with about economic unfairness usually end up saying something like, "well life's just not fair and you have to learn to deal with it," at some point in the discussion. That shows that 1) they admit unfairness is present and 2) they're willing to accept it if/when it benefits them. Why do people need to get rich? Why can't they just sustain themselves with their own labor and help others do the same by sharing advice? Have you seriously thought about hunting and gathering? Even if you owned property without debt, how would you pay taxes? Health care? goods you can't make yourself? The problem with the economy is that in order to get access to relatively basic necessities, people are expected to totally submit to the terms of employers. Where's the freedom (free trade of labor) in that? It goes beyond making other people happy in limited ways. Control capitalism is rooted in the belief that people can only be happy if everything about their lives is totally under control and they are directly responsible for very little of their own welfare. Money doesn't do work, people do. If people who do things with money tried doing them with their own labor, how far would they get? Granted, I'm not propagating the Marxist belief that labor is everything and management is nothing, but I do think there is a tendency to look at economics as money doing something in itself outside of the labor and other resources that go into production and distribution.

Theoretically, energy conservation could reach a level where only renewable sources would be needed. The irony of this would be that if such high levels of conservation could be achieved, non-renewable sources would become much less scarce relative to consumption. What do you think will progress further faster, renewable supply or conservation of demand?

Who said anything about "forced reforms" through "unwarranted regulations?" I think people would reform themselves if it weren't for elaborate cultural assumptions that deter people from rational choices. Face it, most people's consumption choices are predicated on impression management and maintaining social popularity, not reforming their lifestyle to the most economically rational possible. True, one-stop shopping is more efficient. However, as I said there is a strong middle-class resistance against rationalization and economic efficiency in favor of fragmenting consumption into numerous high-profit niches. One-stop shopping isn't glamorous enough for them and they're willing to waste resources to get glamour, even if it promotes social-economic structuring that promotes having an underclass. I hope such rights are extendable. Optimistically, I would like to see the global economy rally and reach a level of conservation that quickly ensures fossil fuels get locked in the ground permanently in case some distant future need would arise. I would settle for a slow tapering of demand, since that would be better than barreling full steam into abrupt scarcity. Ok, I can see you don't like vehicle-sharing, but why do you think it would cause more accidents?

Why couldn't you look at it as a republic of relatively independent worker-owners where there just happens to be a large number of people trying to control other people's labor and other resources to create their own aristocratic society/ies? I would say US laws generally are more favorable to people doing their own labor and trading in relatively affordable properties compared to, say, Europe where it seems like no one's allowed to do anything for themselves without government and/or union permission. Granted corporations attempt to exploit these self-employed people as much as possible in the financial benefit of managers, shareholders, and employee wages/benefits/etc. but you could view the whole project of true republicanism to consolidate these corporate organizations to the minimum possible in order to maximize the number of self-employed people who have to do their own labor to get by. Yes there is an enormous will to corporate dependency and division of labor, but there's just as strong a will to relatively independent self-employment - it's just that the media tends to ignore this class of people in favor of corporate middle class culture.

Good point, but upon rereading I think we diverted from Steevey's issue about where the energy goes between absorption and re-emission. Actually, your post would answer that though by reference to the electrons emitted, which I'm guessing occurs because the energy level jump in the absorbing electron would bump high level electrons in the same atom or others out as free electrons as the atoms themselves become positively ionized (maybe?)

You don't think corporate support was behind the recent fiscal stimulus project? How did Obama and other democrats get elected? Who was benefited by the bailouts and the notion that corporations are "too big to fail?" Redistribution has been going on sense the new deal in the form of military and other government spending that creates jobs, project budgets, long term low-interest loans, and other means to artificially boost spending and GDP. These all promote corporate business growth. How much do you think corporate people would like to be disbanded and relegated to free trade with other unemployed poor people?

I agree, it's a balancing act between maintaining demand inelasticity and conserving reserves. Theoretically, though, if people could organize a local economy that practically eliminates all dependency on fossil fuel, those people could invest in buying and holding oil drilling rights for as long as they wanted. They would not need to sell their oil to pay for oil, in other words. To me the dilemma is that existing infrastructure wouldn't have to be altered much to replace automotive traffic with pedestrian traffic. People and businesses would just need to move around some so that they'd be within walking distance. The reason I don't think markets work this out painlessly is that businesses and employees factor fuel costs into their wage rates, which means giving raises to some employees and laying off others when budgets are stretched thin by personnel and costs. It would be surprising to see existing businesses re-organize geographically, re-invest portions of their personnel costs in corporate vehicles and then limit use of these to special needs and vacation/weekend use; i.e. create mandatory vehicle-sharing.

Capitalist rationality is prone to driving up fossil fuel prices as high as possible simply because they are a non-renewable resource. As global sources get tapped, those that remain become more scarce and thus increase in value. For this reason, anyone who owns fuel sources should want to save them for the future, when they'll be worth more. I think the ideal situation for fuel dealers would be to drive prices up until only a very privileged elite could afford them and then milk their supplies for as long as possible at maximum rates. The trouble for them is assessing how high a price markets will sustain without collapsing. This is where conservation and economic/technological reform factor in. You're basically taking the opposite approach that I intended with the thread, which I intentionally tried to avoid because it is so many people's knee-jerk reflex to give reasons why reforms are impossible. The point of the thread is to consider what reforms have or will make it possible for economies to sustain higher fuel prices without suffering too much deprivation. Why, because they can't afford gas? Then the question would be if their limited mobility is resulting in them developing coping strategies that accomplish more with less fuel-expenditure and, if so, what might those be?

If such governments would continue to re-distribute wealth and income, they would appear to maintain more equal resource-distribution, but pre-tax revenues and incomes would be artificially high due to subsidized spending. You may say that this wouldn't matter if these revenues and incomes would continue to be taxed and redistributed but it would virtually eliminate the ability of people to forge their own economic paths and privilege those who conform to corporate structuring. So while social-economic differences might not show up in terms of comparing incomes and net-worth as much, they would occur in terms of various forms of structural inclusion and exclusion. What's more, corporate revenues and taxes would grow in a way that allowed business and government to buy up increasing amounts of private property and control its uses and prices. For example, if government had more money to spend on public housing, public housing corporations would buy or lease properties and control access to who could live where and who could maintain, renovate, and build. Private individuals would have difficulty acquiring property at the high prices created by subsidies and would thus have to take on more wage labor to pay for property. So while there would be more jobs, there would also be less opportunities to buy a low-priced property and fix it up to live in by using your own labor. You can tell people that they should be happy to have a job but what if they prefer to put more of their labor into their own property? With a system of low-redistribution, the wealth gap may grow to high levels but at least it levels off as money gets concentrated in certain accounts. This creates fiscal discipline that puts pressure on businesses to either cater to current spending levels or give up and sell their equipment to people who are willing to work for what people can afford to pay. That way, poor people don't have to rely on money re-distributed by a government that has the power to stop or curtail their subsidies. Instead, they gain relative economic independence to produce for themselves according to what resources become available to them through consolidation sales of businesses that are folding. So, which would you say gives more power to the poor? 1) redistributing money in a way that maintains class-hierarchies and makes them dependent on government or 2) allowing fiscal discipline in consumer spending to push businesses to consolidate and turn over resources to them so that they can control them for themselves? Corporations are basically means of controlling supply-chains to the maximum degree possible. This way, prices can be relatively fixed along with wages, contracts, etc. Corporations do formally what many people would do informally if there were no corporations. E.g. people would build up informal networks of trade-favoritism and supply their favored clients with the best merchandise at friend-prices. Others would get excluded and relegated to less favorable form of labor serving the people with the power to control the more desirable forms of labor. The exception would be if people would treat each other fairly and each take their share of undesirable labor instead of (ab)using their economic power to leverage other people to do it for them. It is conceivable that individuals could voluntarily float between different forms of labor with the intent of producing sufficient basic necessities and infrastructure so that everyone would have a basis from which to pursue their own economic activities. This sounds a bit communist but it would not have to involve abolishing private property rights. It really just comes down to an ethic of approaching economics constructively instead of exploitatively.

Is it accurate to say that a black hole "occupies space?" Isn't a BH more like a rate of spacetime curvature into an undefined gravity well? Since it absorbs any and all energy, it doesn't really have inertia - or maybe you could say it has infinite inertia. I suppose it could have inertia in the sense that it can be pulled by gravity external to itself. Still, how can you say it "occupies space" if its gravitation exceeds the ability of its "contents" to achieve distance from each other via momentum? I would think that protons and electrons would collapse into neutrons and that neutrons don't have any ability to maintain volume under their own >C gravitation. But then maybe their are anti-collapse forces among their constituents (quarks?) that exceed the ability of BH gravity to compress them. Is there even sufficient knowledge to predict this?

I wonder if this has to do with why some frequencies of light bounce off (reflect) certain electrons instead of getting absorbed.

And yet the taxes would increase to such high proportions that we would have already had to find fuel-free alternatives for all our basic needs by the time it runs out.

What? That it was unfairly distributed in the first place? No kidding, that's the reason for seeking economic justice. The problem is that people abuse the concept of inequality to promote redistribution, which results in greater inequality. The question is how to intercept historical unfairness in a way that REDUCES unfairness instead of reproducing and augmenting it, which is what re-distribution does. Do you not see how this game works?

Those refer to the cause of research, not the effects. why? It would be if you wanted to create a very small black hole by means of organizing sub-atomic particles.

Agreed, but that doesn't mean that fundamental understanding can't result in practical applications. Distinction doesn't necessitate absolute separation. Who's to say that humans won't be generating artificial black holes at some point for the sake of accelerating matter into them? Controlling black hole formation, growth, and gravitation may all be technological applications of quantum gravity, no?

How dare you, then, force your ethical relativism on others? (sorry, I can't resist putting responses in the form of direct application sometimes). Maybe I should instead say, "How can you claim that forcing ethical boundaries on others is an ethical breach and yet force your ethics on others by saying so?"

Probably it will shed light on the fundamental relationship between gravity and electromagnetic force, which could revolutionize practically everything we understand about the relationship between matter and energy, no? A less fundamental example might be better because its practical consequences could be circumscribed better.

Wouldn't it be better if your grandchildren would marry each other so their kids would be more like you? Maybe I'm just being narcissistic though.

Nothing definable can be infinite in a representational sense. However, considering that nothing can exceed the speed of light, perhaps the region of the universe defined by the reach of light is in a sense infinite in that anything, including light, can travel infinitely and never reach beyond it. If there is something beyond infinite spacetime, does that make infinite spacetime finite?

Marat, why don't you ever acknowledge what happens to the wealth/money after it's redistributed?