lemur

I have to google it but 1 Corinthians 7:9 seems to be the one about better to marry than to burn. Homosexuality seems to be named along with adultery and drunkenness and other sins in I Corinthians 6:9-11. Masturbation seems to be less directly mentioned and maybe the victorian term, "Onanism," was based on a faulty interpretation. Maybe I should have been more explicit but it is my general impression that the reason Jesus supposedly prescribed celibacy except for those who couldn't resist and then marriage is that Christians are supposed to devote all their energy to "joining with the body of Christ." In fact, it's explicitly in the rest of 1 Corinthians 7. So generally it seems that sexuality is viewed as a carnal diversion from higher spirituality. Thus, I think any sin that diverts people from spirituality is regarded as bad because of the diversion, but it's not the same kind of sin as killing or stealing, because you're not really harming anyone besides yourself. I mention this because I think people waive around the label "sin" to make things sound grave. In reality, I don't think the term, "sin" was intended to be used for shame-induction as it has been appropriated. I think it was just intended to describe activities that diverge from God's will, however interpreted, and people were just supposed to recognize the harm caused by sin and avoid it. Christianity seems to have been innovative by promoting forgiveness as an investment in redemption. This seems to me to be a giant innovation in behavioral control since it eliminates the whole conundrum of how to reach people that say, "well, I guess I'm already a sinner and doomed to hell so I might as well sin as much as I want now."

Sorry I can't remember the specifics about the units canceling, but you might try to look up old threads about converting mass to energy (I may be thinking of another forum, though). I don't see why so many people get hung up on the idea that time and space have to be things independent from duration and volume measurements. It is a philosophical issue to ask why durations and volumes display regularities across divergent phenomena. Clocks don't have to measure something outside themselves because they can function just fine by running according to their own mechanics. Likewise, the physical force-fields that make up matter don't need collusion from some abstract container called "space" to assert volume, do they? Either way, these are philosophical issues that always seem to cause problems so I don't know how much value there is in pursuing them here. I'll be happy to PM on the subject with you, though, if you like.

Supposedly the bubble burst, but I think you could say that people stopped buying but that price-equilibrium has yet to be established. Currently, I think there are attempts at marketing certain properties as retaining or gaining value regardless of market-swings. This, of course, assumes that a certain level of economic liquidity can be sustained for elites despite whatever may happen to "the bottom of the iceberg," so to speak. Bailouts and stimulus have been intended, I think, to prevent large-scale devaluation by artificially maintaining revenue-levels and jobs, but it is entirely possible that the economy will be slowly allowed to deflate and that real-estate values will stabilize and begin trading again at levels dramatically below (some people's) expectations. The big question is whether the long-term economic recovery will be a revival of the post WWII style gradual-inflation-driven-growth or whether it will be some form of economy where property doesn't appreciate but still gets traded as people continue to seek (unprofitable) means to satisfy economic needs and wants.

Time and distance can be used as dimensional variables regardless of the ontological status of "time" and "space" as transcendent phenomena, can't they? So what you're saying is that since work is force across a distance, energy should be able to be limited to force and distance without time? But force itself is described in terms of acceleration, which involves time in terms of distance-change (speed) as well as in terms of speed-change (acceleration). Regarding E=MC^2, I have read many people say that it is simply a consolidated formula derived from other equations and that the units cancel out when using it to calculate the amount of energy contained in a given amount of mass. I'd jumble the math or I'd provide an example.

I think everyone should marry with a prenuptial agreement that prevents any possible benefit coming from divorce (besides legal separation, of course). It is cynical to say so, but I think it is possible for people to attempt to drive their partners to divorce them or commit infidelity or some other action that legitimates them seeking divorce. The key to having a successful marriage is for the benefits of staying married to outweigh the benefits of getting divorced as much as possible. The only problem with this is that many people probably wouldn't want to marry someone if there was no compensation in the case of divorce.

Isn't energy a time-based attribute? Isn't it something like power over time? Sorry for being vague; I just wanted to move this thread along some.

But when people invest in companies, those companies past their costs along to the consumer. So what's the difference between the price going up a few percentage points due to tax or due to business costs, such as investor dividends, personnel costs, etc.? "Physical" and "actual" economic growth are not the same, and they're often in conflict with growth of GDP/revenue. For example, the economy grew physically/actually with the building of many new houses and other structures during the early 2000s. This actual/physical growth resulted in abundance-driven supply-side competition that lowered real-estate prices, thus lowering revenues/GDP growth. So in a way it is good for people to invest directly in physical/actual growth of businesses, but the problem it creates is that once rising productivity-levels result in abundance, the resultant GDP losses are disproportionately shifted to a certain number of people who lose their jobs/income/etc. while the rest of the people try to maintain their income levels despite overall losses. Thus, the irony is that productivity-driven abundance has the potential to provide enough for everyone, but because of the way markets value commodities and distribute revenues, people end up fighting harder over money as a result, with more people getting disenfranchized by the resulting recession. I don't understand why people always say that they "have" to pay taxes. How is anyone being forced to make an amount of money that results in taxable income? Why can't you just reduce your income to tax-free levels and live off of that? Why not leave the taxes to people who refuse to curtail their spending and income needs to tax-free levels? Theoretically you could shop around for a higher interest rate. Just be careful that the bank you choose doesn't disappear from the internet tomorrow leaving no trace of your accounts. You're right, though, about banks reducing costs and narrowing the gap between lending and savings interest rates. A bank with no overhead could theoretically pay the same interest rates on savings that it offers on loans. In fact, you could lend money out directly this way and not have to pay anyone else to do anything for you. The problem you would run into would be how to enforce repayment in the event of default, which requires court-costs, etc.

How would you prefer to see people save their money then? Non-profit status doesn't necessarily mean that an organization is operating at maximum efficiency or minimizing costs, but you're right and I believe there are non-profit banks that exist. It sounds like what you want is just to streamline the banking industry. You could layoff employees, but you'd end up having to find income for them through some other economic channel. You could also cut their wages without laying anyone off, which would also reduce banking costs. What exactly is your end-goal with reducing costs? I ask this because as long as the ultimate goal is to keep humans alive and reproducing, you have to have SOME means of distributing labor and the means to consume at least basic necessities.

Someone seems to have redeveloped an older concept and won an award for it:http://www.greenoptimistic.com/2011/02/09/dickson-ekranoyacht/ The fact that this vehicle's efficiency is being attributed to its use of hydrogen as fuel leads me to question its validity, since hydrogen is not a fuel but a storage medium. Still, I'm wondering about the claims that such a low-flying boat/plane could actually be more efficient than a non-flying boat. Surely it is much less efficient than a passenger Jet flying at very high-altitude, but how much less?

Yes, I know. I should have specified that people would only have the option of saving money in higher-risk investments if savings bonds would no longer be available. I don't think many people who dislike government debt would prefer to force all money to be either invested in risky ventures or hidden under mattresses.

If you read the Christian gospels regarding sexuality, pretty much everything is a forgivable sin. Jesus even recommends total celibacy as the ultimate ideal, but he says that since most people can't achieve this "it is better to marry than to burn." So presumably monogamous marriage is a strategy for channeling inevitable sexual desire in a way that minimizes the temptation to expand one's sexual horizons. I don't see why this logic wouldn't apply to homosexual as well as heterosexual unions, though. The modern logic that heterosexual marriage is more natural than homosexuality seems more resonant with the Roman culture, as is most modern secularism, imo. People are too quick to assume that Christianity is the dominant ideological force behind all modern governance, when in fact I think the old Roman culture(s) were re-produced with Christianity as the flag. But that's diverging to another topic . . . This is a great point, but the thing they argue about are the legal/economic privileges afforded between spouses. Theoretically, there's no reason you shouldn't be able to "marry" your business partner if they're the same sex as you if it would help your business, but heterosexuals are claiming that allowing this would undermine their special privileges as childbearing couples. Then there is the argument that same-sex couples can also have/raise children so maybe there should be a general form of partnership called a childbearing-partnership with the same legal rights/privileges as marriage but which isn't dependent on the gender of the parents. Of course, then the question would become if marriage is just an institutionalization of love between two people, why shouldn't same sex lovers be allowed to institutionalize their relationship as a marriage? What I have found interesting in studying the bible is that while homosexuality is basically treated as a sin of gratuitous sexuality, so is fornication and masturbation. Yet how many homophobes regard masturbation and heterosexual fornication as equally repulsive or sinful as homosexuality? Few, so this shows that popular aversion to homosexuality is not rooted in religious theology but rather uses theology as a vehicle for expressing something cultural that doesn't ultimately come from theology. In other words, homophobia is appropriating Christianity/religion for legitimation, not the other way around. In fact, I don't think Jesus would have feared or been disgusted by any form of sexuality. I think he would have just counseled people to refocus their energies on spirituality as much as possible, because he preached detachment from "the flesh" similar to buddhism and other religions/philosophies.

I don't understand when people think it's a good idea to pay off government debt? If people sold all their treasury bonds back to the treasury, how would they save their money if no new treasury bonds were being sold? When an economy is overheated, it has a tendency to culminate in meltdowns. For a government to invest in deflationary measures, it has to transfer money to agents that will freeze the money. Freezing money is very difficult because lots of people want it and are willing to offer practically anything (and sometimes everything) to get it. Banks are the institutions with the greatest interest in withholding lending during deflation because they cannot sell collateral for the full price of recovering the loan value. Thus if you want to expedite the deflationary trend to get the economy growing again, the best thing to do is give all the money to the banks and tell them to hold it until prices bottom-out. This can take a long time, though, when government fiscal policy becomes oriented toward preventing the deflation in the first place. This would allow the popular will to excessive cheap money to determine bank policies. This would be like having a school where the kids get to vote on how many A's to give out. Dutch politics tends to have a fixation with statistically-determined assumptions about resource-distribution with the presumption that everyone should get an equal share of whatever is available. As I understand it, the low population growth of the Netherlands has to do with increasing childlessness and emigration. This means that people are having kids with the expectation that housing will become available by others vacating it. This is disturbing when so much of the Dutch news seems to be about anti-immigration politics. I think the Netherlands needs to expand its territory somehow, though I think this will have to happen globally since there are probably Belgian and German interests against giving up land to Dutch governance. Back to the OP: if people are devoting income to paying off debt and interest, doesn't that prevent that income from being spent/invested in growing the economy? Couldn't you even say that the best way to slow/stop a growth economy would be to slowly replace its cash flows with flows of deficit-spending, since that would give the creditors a means to reign in the economy?

This post, like the one about psychology and sociology prescribing different "best" ages for marriage confuses social science with the opinions and social mechanics it studies. Social science can no more prescribe the best age to marry than physics can prescribe the best momentum for two objects to collide. It can explain and predict a lot about the collision but the independent variable are, well, independent and variable. I think you can generally say that it is unethical to enter into a marriage or other social interaction with the knowledge/intent that it is going to have deleterious consequences for the person(s) involved. But how can you expect someone to go into a marriage with knowledge that they don't have. If you're completely in love with a person you can't stand to lose, and your parent(s) tell you that you're too young to get married, who says that you should listen to them instead of your heart. After all, if the law says you're old enough to make your own adult decisions, why should you defer to your parents? Of course, the ideal (non-dysfunctional) situation would be where the relationship between the parents and adult child is mature enough that the adult child can accept advice from the parents and seriously take that information into consideration without it either determining their decision or them totally rebelling against it. Usually it seems like people are either doing the opposite of what their parents say because it's their parents, or they do whatever their parents say because it's their parents. Why are so few people capable of doing what they reason is best after seriously taking other people's advice into consideration? What is really unethical is to willfully enter into a marriage with conscious intent to hurt the other person. Good faith marriages are never unethical, even when naiveté or love-blindness ensures there will be unplanned factors that end up affecting the relationship.

Obviously many marriages end up failing, but I always wonder what it is about people and their relationships that make them impossible to sustain. How can some couples be compatible and others be fundamentally incompatible? One can also wonder if marriage-failure due to marrying at a young age would not occur if the same two people waited until they were older, and then the question would be why? I.e. what changed?

Isn't it just simply logical that the less mass a particle has, the less positionally stable it would be? After all, energy has to express itself via momentum in particles with mass and energy doesn't seem to be infinitely divisible into smaller amounts. If the only means you had to move a ping-pong ball around was to use a leaf-blower, would you be surprised if the ping-pong ball always seemed to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time? Sorry if this is a naive analogy.

Usually recession is discussed in terms of rates of GDP growth and unemployment. It is common to hear people blame "the recession" for their economic woes, but could this be redundant? Could it be that the economic woes themselves are the recession. Consider an example where GDP growth is very high but unemployment is still high. Wouldn't the high unemployment rate still signal "recession?" Then, if you analyzed what the cause of the high unemployment was, it would be due to economic dissatisfaction on the part of employers, correct? In other words, the assumption is that when employers are satisfied with the growth of their business, they must create more jobs. Then, the next assumption is that if there are sufficient jobs for unemployment to be low, job-seekers must be satisfied with their jobs. But if either employers or employees aren't satisfied with their economic circumstances, they seek more money causing the current economy to be insufficient in contrast, right? The reverse case would be one in which employers hired everyone possible regardless of revenue-growth, and as a result everyone had a job and both employers and employees were satisfied with the arrangement. Is such a situation ever possible or has modern economic growth evolved into a persistent state of dissatisfaction and desire for more money?

Even if an electron can exceed the speed of light, how could its interaction with other electrons ever exceed C when EM force is the medium for interaction between electrons?

Time is the tendency for distinct clocks to remain synchronous. Time dilation theory predicts the extent to which different clocks will deviate from each other despite good mechanical functioning in divergent physical situations, such as different gravitational situations and/or levels of speed. I believe this correctly addresses the ontology of time and time dilation.

The OP seems to be implying, for example, that marrying at a younger age is more likely to result in divorce. So if you consider it unethical to marry knowing that divorce is likely, then that would be how the OP is an ethics question/issue. Of course, I don't know if that was (part of) the OP's intent or not.

I couldn't think of an antonym for "stimulus," but could debt be the antithesis of fiscal stimulus in terms of encouraging spending? This thought occurred to me when reading recent political articles about republican criticisms of deficit-spending as hurting economic growth, preventing job-creation, etc. At first this just sounded like a reversal of the by now well-known liberal political logic that deficit spending encourages growth and job-creation. However, I have begun to wonder whether debt, both public and private, stimulate people to avoid spending because they're worried about the consequences of debt. Maybe if people were free of debt, they would also be free-er to consume and work based on the allocation of economic surpluses instead of doing so with the focus on repaying debt. Or would being out of debt just stimulate people/government to take more loans and spend the money to end up in the same indebted situation they were in before?

Good point. If you meet someone who you truly believe you can happily spend the rest of your life with faithfully, it would not be wise to pass up the chance to marry them at any age. If you just think of marriage as a temporary commitment that can be severed whenever conditions are no longer favorable to the relationship, then you're not really looking for a spouse, imo, but on the other hand if you regard marriage as casual monogamy "for the time being," than what reason would you have not to get married and then get divorced later when the marriage no longer suits you? Marriage has everything to do with ethics. You are establishing a committed, life-changing relationship that will have a major effect on your life course as well as that of your spouse. Certainly there are ethics involved with the intent and planning that you enter into a marriage with.

Maybe welders who don't go blind avoid that fate by some inherent bodily resistance to the intense light, which makes it more likely that they will attract a mate of "strong stock," whatever that may mean. Another way to put it would be to say that welders that do go blind would be more likely to attract "weaker stock" and their children would thus have less competitive advantage against future generations. As I understand it, Herbert Spencer was strongly opposed to any form of social intervention in poverty because he believed it was the kindest thing you could possibly do for the human population as a whole to allow poverty to do its work of eliminating the weak. Of course, I don't think he ever considered how wealth buffers "weak stock" from facing environmental hostilities. Personally, I think the whole idea of natural selection improving species doesn't make so much sense because it seems to me that the systematic elimination of individuals prior to breeding would gradually reduce genetic diversity, which would ultimately limit the possibilities for future adaptations.

If you're seeking purpose, you should ask yourself what the purpose of "purpose" is.

Another way to look at it is that a flat tax ensures that public spending always respects the level of the smallest contribution. Think of it like a party where everyone contributes to the food budget. If some people would contribute a lot and others very little or nothing, the party could still serve many expensive foods and loads of it. If, on the other hand, the lowest contribution was set as the maximum, only beans, rice, and tortillas might get served but at least everyone could feel proud of having contributed their fair share. It would maybe be annoying to the rich that they weren't allowed to flaunt their wealth by paying for an extravagant party (and thus making their servants work themselves to the bone to make it happen) but at least EVERYONE's contribution would be significant in that all contributions would be basically equal.

Well, I tend to agree but only because there has to be some way of dealing with people whose whole purpose of speech is to disrupt, obfuscate, and otherwise impede constructive democratic discourse. On the other hand, when someone is behaving this way because they feel that the discourse that's going on is creating cultural limitations of what is considered valid in the first place, it would be further autocracy to banish them for their point of view, no? I agree as long as it doesn't result in a culture of "supremacy of the civilized." People should not have to assent to the manners of others as long as they aren't being actively mean or rude for the sake of offending. There's a fine line between rejecting someone for actively insulting and rejecting them because they didn't use a tone that conforms to your standards of politeness. Fine, but you should at least give them the opportunity to express their opinion in a constructive way before banning them for trolling, imo. Here's the harder question: can we censor people who abuse authority to dismiss opposing voices by strawmanning them as disruption? If you pay close attention, you can find many examples in which someone in a position of authority avoids listening carefully to people who don't meet their normative expectations for reasonable speech. In that case, should that authority figure be banned or should others just check/balance their dismissal by listening to and interpreting the speaker whose speech was at first dismissed as being disruptive or incoherent? The point is why should one authority be sovereign over others? You and I may find it ridiculous, offensive, and unnecessary to cover a statue in cow dung but why should our opinion determine the right of someone else to do such a thing? This comes down to who has the right to regulate public expressions and activities and to what extent? And you should also take into consideration how a regime of manners can be just as authoritarian as a regime of laws. People can abuse such authority to the same extent and ends as they can abuse any other form of authority. Then the question becomes how far power is willing to go to dominate people who refuse to assent to their standards of manners and behavior. When is it legitimate to exercise absolute power/sovereignty over another person? Imo, the only time you can legitimately exercise forceful intervention over others is when they are a danger to themselves or others. Otherwise, you can intervene but the level of power used should not exceed the gravity of the reason for intervening. Someone who uses obscenities to insult someone else publicly, for example, may be extremely rude but it would not be legitimate to tackle that person or otherwise use excessive force unless they were asked to stop and refused. Sometimes, people are poised to use the maximum allowable force against others simply because they dislike their behavior and that is unacceptable, imo. People should be given the benefit of the doubt and their expressions should only be subject to appropriate levels of intervention based on actual occurrences and not on a general attitude of suspicion or annoyance toward them based on prior or peripheral expressions.