lemur

Ok, now I see your point. I agree to an extent, but part of my point was that even these kinds of discount retailers still have to pay salaries and costs that cater to middle- and upper middle class lifestyles. For example, when Walmart builds a new store, they still have to buy land, hire contractors, construction workers, buy building materials, etc. Although they may be able to find suppliers with a philosophy similar to theirs, they may not be able to for everything. Likewise, taxation and government expenditures tend to pay middle-class and upper-middle class wages, which creates a class of consumers that "subsidize" retailers at price-classes above that of Walmart and other discounters.

One word posts. . . what's your point about Walmart? Yes, it is a price leader that provides one-stop shopping which lowers costs and benefits the poor and working class. There is much criticism of Walmart, but I think much of it is from the perspective of a disgruntled middle-class that wants/expects a certain lifestyle and conditions of employment. Personally, I don't see what would be wrong with Walmart setting standards of employment for the entire workforce. People complain that they hire people part time so they can deny them benefits, but what would happen if everyone in an economy worked part time without benefits? Wouldn't health-care just have to adjust to what working people could afford, for example?

If you call that clarifying, I'm glad you didn't attempt any obfuscation:)

The OP of this thread sounds like a practical expression of the logic, "if you want to freely talk about something, go somewhere that you're not censored." If this kind of logic starts permeating discourse, public communication is going to become somewhat nightmarish, imo.

If you wanted to inquire into possible relationships between gravitation and electromagnetism, I would do so by starting with what you know/accept about both forces and looking for potential linkages. I'm sure many people would call this crackpottery, but as long as you are willing to accept when you are chasing a wild goose to the point of insisting that there must be some relevance to some slant-rhyme between unrelated aspects of the two forces, you should be able to postulate, deduce, and reason to your heart's satisfaction. Personally, my hunch is that gravitation is a necessary condition for EM wave propagation but what basis do I have to substantiate that besides speculation? On the other hand, what basis is there to think that EM force can exist in the absence of gravitation? Therefore, who can say that they're not related in some way?

Thank you for saying this. Math is simply a language that quantifies and processes data by representing it quantitatively. People should read too much into the fundamental order of the things being quantified and processed.

If you're lucky, it wastes time pleasantly. If not, it can be burdensome and tedious. It can fulfill the emotional need for social interaction in a way that saves you from having to listen to breathing and other audio-nuances of phone conversation. I think it can also allow people to liberate their typing from writer's block that can come with holding yourself to higher expectations when writing than when talking.

It depends on the relationship between various prices. Let's say you trade in farmland and housing at a rate of 10k/acre and you pay your farm workers $5/day. Now your workers are making $100/month working 5-day work weeks. Now let's say you charge them rates for housing and food so that their $100/month is just enough, but they can't save money to buy their own land. Wouldn't they be stuck working for you? Now, if you charge the same price for beans to your land-owning neighbor, they are paying you out of income they are making by renting housing and selling beans at the same prices you are; which means they also are preventing the workers from saving up enough money to buy their own farm land. So, in essence, you and your rich neighbor would be colluding to keep the workers from saving money and starting their own farms, simply by charging the same "fair" price for beans, land, rent, and other commodities. In other words, it ultimately comes down to relative prices and the ability to CHOOSE whether to save or not to save. If workers fail to save because they choose to just work and pay their rent, that would be one thing. If that's what they choose because they don't have any other option, that's something else isn't it? It has to do with the role taxation and spending have in maintaining certain economic possibilities. If, for example, independent farmers and business people are incapable of competing with large-scale inter-regional industries, the interstate highway system would be privileging mass-production over local independent economic activities. Look at how the advent of railroads and steam-shipping, for example, made it possible to harness a great deal more land for cultivating raw materials for the global colonial economy. You can argue that this economy ultimately helped everyone it influenced more than it harmed them, but I'm not sure everyone would agree with you. The practical issue would be to ask what it would take to foster maximum economic-cultural independence/diversity for people to be able to choose their own approach to economic sustainability. Can some people have an economy that requires massive infrastructure, industry, etc. without economically driving others to have to participate in that economy just to pay their bills and taxes? What is currently happening is that the government is maintaining an infrastructure that supports a corporate economy that is not very flexible in terms of employee-choice. Basically people have the option of conforming to corporate expectations or being relegated to menial low-wage position, if that. If they choose to be self-employed, they have to compete with corporate enterprises and generate enough revenue to compete with consumers making corporate wages. Some people manage it, but I don't think it's an option for everyone yet. My point, though, was that I don't think the economy that is supported by the current tax/government system is universally more beneficial than one that would, say, re-invest less through tax/spend. Of course, I can't say this definitively, but I think it's worth more detailed analysis. I don't think you should just automatically assume that the interstate highway system is a major benefit to all classes, although it may be. Generally, however, I think the current relationship between progressive taxation, government spending, and corporate/private economics is more favorable to the middle-class than to working and/or poor people. I think the closer middle-class incomes get to lower-class incomes, the less incentive their is to sell premium products at higher prices and thus raise the bar for profit for businesses that cater to the poor. So, for example, low-price supermarkets and other retailers have to keep prices higher to appease their investors and employees because those people expect to have income on par with higher-priced businesses. In this sense, the working and poor classes have to struggle to keep up with middle-class, in the current economy promoted by progressive-tax government. Do you have data/reasoning that contradicts this?

Thanks for posting these links. With the method that measures the difference in orbital periods of the moons, I wonder how they established a complete revolution if the orientation of the Earth from Jupiter was changing due to their respective orbital movements. I still don't understand exactly the method that looks at how the stars move relative to the Earth's position but I did notice that the number of minutes for light to cross the full diameter of Earth's orbit was 22 minutes, which is more than 2X the 8 minutes it supposedly takes for light to arrive from the sun; but is the additional time due to the diameter of the sun itself maybe? Also, although I can see how these discrepancies are measured in terms of minutes measured on Earth, I'm not sure what the basis is for measuring the distances in question. Is it just Newton's inverse square formula and assumptions about the relative masses of the bodies based on estimates?

I don't think it's accurate to say that democracy can be ultimately protected or destroyed in any context, classroom or otherwise, in the sense that democracy is foremost a recognition of the multilateral fact of power and resistance in its various manifestations. So when authoritarian rule is exercised in, e.g. a classroom, there are other contexts in which authoritarian expressions are challenged, e.g. the student's mind if nothing else. Yes, students often get to the point of choosing to accept authoritarian decrees of the teachers or administrators to avoid the costs of confrontation/conflict/dissent, but how long can they do so before they discover reality itself to conflict with authority? The blatant example that comes to mind is when the US congress supposedly decreed pi to be rounded to 3.2 for all contracts. Obviously land measurements that used 3.2 would ultimately cause problems that would prove congress wrong. Generally, democratic conflicts are supposed to prevent such unreasonable decrees from persisting by allowing conflicting views to argue their cases on the basis of reason with the assumption (perhaps too optimistic in many cases) that reason will prevail over arbitrary interests/bias. What happens a lot in democratic discourse, however, is that people abuse their freedom to procure ideologies without adequately subjecting those to critical reason/scrutiny. Either that or someone abuses the idea of reasonability to push a certain interest as an objective/neutral or otherwise correct point of view. I suppose it helps when people recognize that democracy is a culture of critical civil discourse between conflicting interests on the basis of open critical reason, but I don't think that this is a necessary condition. There are plenty of examples where authoritarian power ends up generating sufficient resistance to itself that conflict erupts organically. Granted, this can result in overthrows of one authoritarian hierarchy for another, but ultimately it sets a precedent that arbitrary power/authority isn't sustainable. The only kind of authority that is ultimately sustainable, as far as I know, would be one that is subject to reasonable consent of the governed. A simple example would be when a boss tells an employee to perform a task, that employee will only truly respect the order if they fully agree with it as a reasonable order. If they think the order is unreasonable, they may comply out of fear for the consequences of disobedience, but they are not supporting their boss out of legitimate agreement, which renders the boss's "authority" coercive and prone to rebellion. People have been saying in this thread that "shared" culture is a basis for democracy, but it's really not. In fact, the very idea that culture is paradigmatic/axiomatic is contrary to the idea of reason as a basis for democratic legitimacy. Democracy can be host to cultural differences and conflicts, but there has to be some appeal to reason in any cultural claims to legitimacy. E.g. religious customs can be protected as freedom but they can't be expected to be immunized from reasonable critique. Likewise, secularism or statism can critique religions or other cultural prerogatives, but they cannot expect to have their authority validated without reasonable consent of those they are attempting to govern. The major problem with cultural conflicts in multicultural democracy, imo, is that some cultural assumptions get institutionalized as being politically neutral because they are dominant traditions while others get treated as problematic simply because they are identified as different relative to dominant culture. This can best be mitigated, imo, by rendering dominant cultures as just one culture among others and requiring them to pursue the same avenues of critique and defense as any other culture. This is not cultural relativism, because it is not claiming that people can't value some cultures over others. It's just saying that when cultures conflict, they should conflict with each other in a reasonable and preferably non-violent way.

The general structuralist assumption is that the economic structure that promotes prosperity for a large number of people also makes the poor better off than they would be if large scale trade, interstate/global commerce, etc. were significantly less. There is another point of view, however, that believes that the poor and disenfranchized are actually worse off because of the success of "the mainstream economy." The easiest example I can think of goes back to the disenfranchisement of Native Americans in the 19th century due to the expansion of cotton and other cash-crop farming that promoted removal of those whose use of the land didn't generate as much profit. Still, who is to say that these people are better off for having been moved to reservations instead of being allowed to freely use the land, albeit without contributing to GDP? Likewise, who is to say that those who did and continue to profit from the large-scale capitalist approach to resource-management are ultimately better off than they would be if they used resources more conservatively and lived more frugally, generally? It seems like the stronger the economy gets, the more wasteful economic practices emerge and this eclipses the gains in efficiency that were achieved through economies of scale and technological innovations. And, imo, it seems like progressive taxation allows the wealthy to procure this system of economics just because it benefits them the most; and they just justify their profiteering by claiming that the middle and lower classes are better off as a result of their economic structuring.

I've googled it and I've only read about laboratory measurements that have been conducted on Earth. I've heard that time dilation is accurately compensated for by GPS. What I haven't ever heard of is a way of measuring the speed of light over long distances. I have read that long ago measurements were made astronomically but I don't understand the methodology, which is why I raised the question in this thread, since I would assume that once one understands the methodologies of measuring the speed of light, one would also understand why the experimental/observation parameters work and thus more accurately consider the question of why those parameters are related in the way they are.

You were basing fundamental philosophical meanings of number-relations on rounded versions of the numbers? That's cheating. 0 + 0 + 0 . . . ad infinitum = 0. One can't be divided by zero because an infinite number of zeros will never add up to one. 0/0 would be senseless because any number of zeros would sum to zero. Regardless of how many or few zeros you chose to answer the question, you'd be right, yet you'd still be wrong insofar as there was another answer that could sum up to zero as well. Creation is an epistemological concept related to the dichotomies new/existing and active/passive. New things that are actively made are referred to as "creation." New things that are passively found are referred to as "discoveries." Existing things that are actively made into something new are called "innovations" "transformations," "reforms," etc. while existing things that are viewed to passively transform of their own internal processes are called "evolving." I think this pretty much sums up the logic of creation vs. similar concepts but I might have left out something(s).

You seem to be mixing problems here, imo. Critique of authority is essential to the functioning of democracy in any ethnocultural context, but when culture-critique is pursued as a means of demonizing and/or subjugating some ethnic identity/ies, it becomes an authoritarian tactic. Anyway who does online discussion knows that ad hominem attacks ruin discussions, and that is what happens when democratic discourse regarding culture degenerates into attributing various aspects of culture to ethnic identities. But the other side of that is what to do when different people hold different cultural values and regard others with different values as wrong, which of course they are according to the ethnocentrism of the other. The question is when a certain cultural practice deserves protection, subsidization, etc. Did the automakers, for example, deserve government protection and subsidy to prevent their financial collapse as a particular culture or should the free market have had to adjust to the market failure by adopting more sustainable forms of transportation? The big issue in cultural-communitarianism, imo, is language territory. As the EU continues to maintain open-border policies that could theoretically facilitate widespread regional integration, can and will language-propinquity be able to be maintained or will global languages become stratified into regionally dominant languages and others that get relegated to private usage among speakers who are broadly dispersed throughout dominant-language regions? Theoretically, it is not that difficult to imagine global cities evolving to host numerous language communities without privileging some over others, BUT this would be difficult considering the amount of national resistance there would be coming from nearby regions that identify more with a national identity than with regional multiculturalism. Considering that it seems like currently there are critiques of multiculturalism that are only negative reactions to the idea that certain languages and cultures "simply don't belong" in certain national regions; the issue becomes whether such national-supremacism won't evoke the kind of separatist-pluralist multiculturalism that was criticized in the 1990s for treating ethnic minority cultures as absolute sovereign territories with the right to total political protection and economic support from the dominant cultures/ethnicities that threaten them. Ideally there needs to be a shift from a discourse of total separatism to one in which various forms of freedom for individuals to congregate for social-cultural purposes AS WELL AS for integration among ethno-cultural identities to take place at various levels, from region, to neighborhood, to families and individuals. No one enjoys when cultural differences get elevated to the point of hostilities and shows of feathers designed to intimidate people into "sticking to their own." Of course, the problem is that not everyone is making such "shows of feathers" out of hate, but rather many are doing it out of fear that incorporation/integration within a dominant ethnic-community will result in cultural/identity losses among subsequent generations. So, in the US for example, without some serious support for ethno-cultural diversity (not meaning government spending, btw) there is a good chance that language death will continue to occur among subsequent generations of anglo-conformist migrants. Then, when people around the world see this cultural-economic pattern occurring in the US, why wouldn't they continue to resist global migration and free-market reforms? Indeed, nazism did view subordination of the individual to the community as a high virtue and, correspondingly, viewed individualism purely as selfishness/egoism with no purpose other than to deplete community strength in favor of individual profit. There was no conception, as far as I know, that strong individuals could provide for themselves and make their methods available to other individuals to be able to replicate their strength/success. Likewise, there was no acceptance for individuals who didn't submit to membership in one national identity against others. I believe this was one of the main issues found against Jews, because Jews were seen as insufficiently loyal to any nation and hence they were believed to always be exploiting the nations in favor of their own transnational communities. These are some of the reasons that national socialism became taboo, but these logic still make sense for many people who have no real experience with multicultural families, transnationalism, etc. Even many Americans (N America and S America) don't remember far enough back in history to identify themselves as part of global colonialist migrations. A couple of generations pass and people think they are loyal and rightful citizens of a nation-state and anyone who isn't is a threat to them. In reality, the world consists entirely of individuals doing the best they can in the situations they have available to them. Only many of them think the only means available to them is to collectivize with others and assert group-solidarity for economic territory against others instead of reforming the global economy in a way that makes it possible for all individuals to prosper economically without exploitation. Shouldn't part of that involve identifying what exactly it is that communitarians seek from their communitarianism and come up with ways of achieving those without issues of inclusion/exclusion and intergroup exploitation?

What about the possibility that women who dress provocatively to get a response only want to get such a response from the men whose response they are interested in. They don't want losers drooling over them; just hot/rich/powerful men. Men are the same. They don't want every woman impressed by them to come flirt with them, but they eat it up when the cute/sexy/beautiful ones do.

I think it's misleading to suggest that $65 a year is a bargain for highways. I don't know what portion of the bill is paid by higher tax brackets, but how can you feel charitable by funding a highway system that promotes your income to a disproportionately greater degree that all those workers who are supposedly getting such a bargain because of your contribution? I think interstate highways are beneficial in many ways, but they also seem to promote a lot of superfluous travel and business that may fill the pockets of some, but when does anyone who is poor complain that these highways promote lifestyles that they will never gain access to? What's more, maybe many poor or economically-alternative people don't want the kind of economy facilitated by the highways and yet they are supposed to be grateful for it. I'm not actually that opposed to having these interstate highways and free interstate commerce, but I do think there's too much arrogance in the attitude of people who simply assume that such an economy is an imperative and anyone who would do things otherwise has to hold their own against "the mainstream" or sink and join it. There must be a way to allow infrastructural progress without the automotive hyper-commuting culture it seems to bring with it spiraling to excessive levels.

Are there ways of measuring the speed of light in radically different situations, such as between planets and/or stars as well as in laboratory settings on Earth?

Yes, that is basically the demand curve. Increasing prices diminish quantity consumed. True that profiteers will lower prices to the point of maximizing profit by balancing profit margins with sales volume. However, the general tendency for capitalism to increase the gap between rich and poor results in decreasing purchasing power for the growing lower classes, which can lower consumption and thus conserve more resources. The force that counteracts this is that the rich have an interest in bankrolling as many people as possible to keep them friendly, which results in a large semi-aristocratic middle-class who get basically spoiled by the rich/investors, which keeps them working and generating the profits that maintain the wealth and prosperity/income levels of the rich (and themselves - and the poor as well, actually). Still, however, I think the underlying logic of profiteering is to keep consumers as "hungry" as possible to stimulate consumption. This can have the effect of reducing consumption and resource-depletion to the extent that it doesn't drive consumers into a consumption frenzy, which it periodically seems to do. Economics is complex, though, so I don't think there are any perfectly simple relationships between resource-usage and economic activity that don't depend on the specific details of each economic activity in itself.

Sorry, it wasn't intended to be. I could have just said that I agreed with that portion of what you wrote. I find that the essential distinction between democracy and authoritarianism can be modeled at the level of individual interaction. Authoritarian interaction involves a hierarchization of the two parties where one leads and one follows. Democracy checks/balances the control-authority of the leader by allowing the follower to "check" the legitimacy of the leader by questioning, criticizing, requiring validation of authority through reason, etc. Authoritarianism = "shut up and do as I say" while democracy = "this is what I think should be done, what do you think?" Of course, these are the most obvious examples, but then you can get into all the nuanced subtleties like "here is what has to be done, if I ask you nicely could you please just do it without questioning why" (that's gentle-authoritarianism). In terms of exercising power outside of communication, however, democracy involves forcefully "discussing" or otherwise questioning or challenging authoritarian expressions of power. Authoritarianism acts unilaterally and democracy responds by acting back to demonstrate that unilateralism is not possible without resistance/response. In other words, the follower does not accept leadership without the possibility of critique. No taxation without representation, for example, and if there's no representation, the tea gets thrown overboard. The authoritarian response is of course to criticize the very act of resisting authority, calling assertions of freedom immature acts of rebellion, and otherwise attempting to solicit compliance with top-down command-control authority in whatever form. Authoritarianism also resists democratic leadership from below by rebelling against authority/power perceived to be weak. In this way, authoritarian subordinates use their power to demand a strong leader, i.e. one that will lead them according to their interests without requiring their input/discussion. This is anti-democracy. Recognizing the coercion of consent in authoritarian power is important because it reveals the seeds of resistance. If people have to be manipulated, seduced, or coerced into consent to be ruled by force, that means they cannot be directly forced to compliance. This in turn means that they are not incapable of exercising freedom; they are just afraid of the consequences they perceive will occur if they do so. Liberation from such fear is ultimately the goal of anti-terror activities, I believe. If I would change my approach because it is insulting to someone, that would be an emotional-submission basis for authority, which in itself would be authoritarian. I'm happy to discuss these things with anyone who has reasons to claim things are different than I do. But there's no reasonable discussion that can come from claiming "I know the reality of totalitarianism/authoritarianism because I've lived it" without putting concrete examples on the table and being open to reasoning about them. It would be authoritarian to insist that one has absolute authority to define something by experience. A democratic approach negotiates a reasonable theory through critical discussion. I find this logic very clear but, of course, I also need to be critically open to different points of view that may hold some insight that I'm not currently aware of.

Are you basically saying that the electrons repel each other due to same-charge, so as long as there is electrostatic force attracting them centripetally toward the nucleus as well as same-charge repulsion causing invigorating their orbital motion, they would maintain some level of energy? That is interesting because I have always read/heard that there is no physical reason to prevent the electrons from descending into the nucleus in any planetary/Bohr-type model, but it seems logical in this example that the centripetal attraction of the protons' positive charge would cause the electrons to draw increasingly nearer to each other is they occupy spherical planes of decreasing area. Since the electrons would repel each other more and more often within a smaller sphere-area, their speed would increase thus increasing their momentum in resistance to falling into the nucleus. It's as if the electrostatic same-charge repulsion of the electrons would translate the electrostatic attraction of the nucleus into the momentum that keeps the electrons "orbiting" at a certain radius from the nucleus. Or am I overextending the logic of what you said?

Good point. I was being romantically idealistic about developing-economy poverty. Maybe what I should have said is simply that meager material consumption combined with no debt might entail a lower level of social-economic stress than more extensive material consumption combined with debt and the pressure to avoid things like foreclosure (mortgage and/or tax), repossession, social-economic stigma, drug and theft related crime, etc. Likewise, the misery of working a dead-end job in fast-food or other undesired service labor is probably worse than making due with less but being relatively economically self-sustaining. E.g. when you listen to middle-class people romanticize about their origins in poverty they always say things like, "when I was a kid we didn't have much but we made due with what we had and there was a lot of love and strong values," etc. So it seems like the key to escaping poverty is to forego most material consumption and develop as much self-sustainment skills as possible; but of course the consumption economy is doing everything possible to seduce people away from that into a life of maximum spending funded by minimum income.

You seem to be assuming that these are materialist accounts of observations of material events. Have you considered that what these writers were expressing was a hybrid narrative of material and spiritual experiences with the primary concern of conveying the spiritual significance to readers? I don't think their primary intent was to record as accurately as possible their empirical observations of events they witnessed first-hand. Of course not. The point was the spiritual message conveyed by the writing. Questioning of historical accuracy seems like something evoked more by ideologies perceived as dominant. Can you imagine someone devoting energy to undermining the historical accuracy of some fringe sub-cultural religion without much cultural influence? If that religion gained popularity, however, you would certainly expect critics to emerge with various approaches to undermining it, in terms of historical accuracy and otherwise. Whether the stories about Jesus are historically accurate or not, the miracle (for those that couldn't directly experience Jesus) lies in the symbolic meanings conveyed by the gospels and their further transmission and interpretation. The point is how far "the word" has been spread and how many good deeds and how much spiritual wonderment has been achieved. Yes, atrocities have also been committed in the name of Christianity, but hasn't every powerful ideology been (ab)used as grounds for atrocity in some way or other? I'm not saying this to promote or apologize for Christianity more than other religions. I just think you have to regard ideologies, religious and otherwise, as information that diffuses through space and time to get interpreted and acted upon in a wide variety of ways, many of which contradict each other in many ways. What would be far more interesting than corroborating the historical basis for the gospels, imo, would be to collect as wide as possible a variety of historical accounts of interpretations of "Christ's word" and actions that were undertaken with explicit citation of that "word." That would at least provide some historical data about how broadly ideologies can be interpreted and applied.

The OP was asking for speculations in the way of phrasing the question, imo. They basically expressed a vague sense of strong potential in the concept of "spin" and asked for validation. Such a question lends itself to musings about how significant "spin" could be or become. How can someone, purely on the basis of established facts, confirm or deny such a "feeling" about the (potential) significance of "spin?" If they didn't want speculation, they should have stated their "feeling" and then asked for delineation of the extent to which existing knowledge supports or contradicts such a feeling. Then someone with expertise could have said either, "no, current discourse does not hold any potential for further relevance for "spin," or "yes, there is a lot of discursive attention paid to 'spin' and its spectrum of potential implications." Beyond that, all people can do is speculate, based on their own knowledge and thinking, about the potential future applications of the concept of "spin," right?

Why can't Big Bang theory be generally defined as theories that attempt to describe possible origins of the universe, where the dimensions of space and time are given special attention as emergent rather than essential aspects of physical existence that transcend observable phenomena as they are known (or something similar)? Can't anything be relatively defined by generating a general description that is sufficiently vague to encompass common aspects of all competing expressions?

The OP's call for "eureka feelings" somewhat invites a broad spectrum of expressions. Perhaps it is the OP that belongs in speculations, along with any earnest responses that describe such "eureka feelings." If the OP wants non-speculative responses, I think they should ask more specific questions with more concrete parameters.