lemur

It doesn't really matter. The question is whether someone whose (official) income is below the poverty line can afford such things with their budget. There are a lot of other factors. For one, some people are granted public housing and some have to pay exorbitant rent (more than 1/3 their monthly income). Second, poor people have differing access to social capital. Social capital means people's ability to secure resources through social networks without paying money. "Couch homelessness," for example, is a materially richer form of homelessness, as is living in a tent or a makeshift shelter instead of completely uncovered. The issue really isn't averages. It comes down to the situation of a given individual and the specific barriers that individual faces to achieving improvements that s/he seeks.

I don't think that either a magnetic field or electric fields require a medium, so if you accept that light is composed of these two types of fields propagating at the speed of light, you should be able to accept that light can travel through a vacuum as only the propagation of force-fields. Is your question whether there is direct evidence of the electric and magnetic fields in a light wave?

I can't figure out whether you're talking at the atomic level or the astronomical level. Are you saying that EM force counteracts the compression of gravitational attraction?

Good post. I like it when people can explore theological thoughts in depth regardless of their level of religiosity (not that I know yours but it doesn't sound like total dogma-spewing so that can be a breath of fresh-air in theological discussions). What you're saying about the devil hurting God by hurting "His children" is logical. In fact, I think the logic of satan/evil/sin is that they are opposed to the creation and the goodness of it. So they would logically want to destroy humans as part of the creation. I've also been thinking about the story of Job lately for some reason. I have this fantasy about what it would be like for Job to meet with both of them together after he dies. It's like God and Satan are friends speculating about how Job as a lab rat is going to respond to their experimentation and Job finally gets to meet them both together, his torturer and the gracious father who allowed him to lose everything but then also allowed him to prosper after having suffered through it all. That would be an interesting meeting to watch. Well, the idea that human souls have power relates to the idea that humans are created in God's image. Also, in the story of Adam and Eve, they utilize their free will to choose for sin, which banishes them from Eden and curses them to an eternity of temptation, sin, and sacrifice to redeem themselves. So most of the other stories that follow that seem to be about humans having the power to choose between good and evil. Eve was blamed for becoming Satan's instrument after he tricked her into believing that God lied to her about the forbidden fruit being deadly. Thus we have the idea that Satan can seduce people into his service. But presumably for Eve to convince Adam to take the fruit, she had to have some soul-power; otherwise Adam might not have even paid attention to her, right? But can he use them to seduce others? This is why I am so fascinated with theology. I never understood it for a long time and once I understood the logic, I find it fascinating. It's like a mythological form of social science mixed with philosophy that has coherent logic.

Psychiatry is terribly bound up with cultural normativism, imo. The problem is that it is in fact true that cultural conflicts can result in stress, alienation, conflicts, and other factors that can eventually affect one's mental health. The problem with psychiatry is that it ignores it's own cultural biases and often ends up attempting to address 'deviance' instead of mental health itself. Ironically, it does neither too badly - it works pretty well to stimulate/induce cultural conformity AND it makes people feel better in doing so. Still, it would be better if it would attempt to overcome cultural bias and treat these two functions separately. If you WANT to learn to conform culturally better, you should be able to use psychiatry for that. But if you want more cultural independence/freedom but you still want to feel mentally healthy, it should work for that too, imo.

The last interesting thing I heard about neural function involved the development of shielding that allows the nerve-signals to get transmitted faster and more isolated from each other as the body ages (forgive me if I am butchering this, it is second-hand knowledge that is pretty vague). It made me wonder, though, whether there are basic electronic-transmission issues that effect neural function. Is this not the case?

I agree. I get tired of the same old tired oppositions between stances. I even get into these discussions to put forth ideas that cut through that standard fare of polarization and I get tired of hearing myself repeating ideas to the point of dogmatism. Why don't you actually start a thread on transhumanism and/or whatever else you mentioned to have a discussion about it instead of talking about talking about it? You don't need to make anything more rigid since each thread can be as rigid as the OP suggests. My only request would be that you explain what transhumanism means and make the question/issue accessible to non-experts. Teach us a little and we'll process and give you back a lot.

Progressive taxation is based on the idea that it is good for the economy to maximize productivity relative to the maximum level consumption possible. In this sense, you have to view all the money taxed and spent as essentially extra spending of those that are taxed, which then is used to benefit (supposedly at least) everyone equally. The pre-Keynesian social-economic "agreement" between the classes, at least as Keynes himself wrote, was that the wealthy would conserve their wealth by consuming very little and the poor accepted this as legitimation of class-differences, because the wealthy were assumed to be saving for the public good (i.e. they would never spend it on indulging themselves). To have this kind of economy, a flat tax would work because the government would be limited to what everyone could afford together equally. I would be like having a party with rich and poor people and since the only thing everyone could afford together by equal contributions would be, say, potato salad, everyone would contribute to the potato salad and eat it - only the rich would save a lot more money by doing so. I could accept a flat tax because I like the idea of wealthy and middle class people adopting more meager spending habits and lifestyles. However, since this is unlikely to occur with the modern triumph of consumerist lust, the best tax-scheme would be a progressive sales tax. That way, those who chose to live meager lifestyles and save money could do so whereas those who chose to live extravagantly would pay for the reverberations of their choices. You could see it as consumption impact fees.

But how does the probability-area maintain momentum vis-a-vis other particles? E.g. does it continue to be affected by the protons when it "blinks?" This is nonsensical discussion, I think because for an electron or multiple electrons to blink for 100 years, that would imply that macro-motion of super-atomic objects could have a shorter duration than electron motion, which seems physically impossible just because the one is emergent from the other, no?

True. That works pretty well but it's still not quite as inviting as stepping into an enclosed vehicle. It would be a lot easier to encourage people to bike for local commutes if there was a simple but highly effective canopy that would make cycling in the rain almost as dry as driving.

Me saying what "I think" it was shifts the issue away from why would anyone assume that something has to be preceded by its absence? Further, if it was anything prior to its beginning, the transformation could be described in terms of temporal progress. So if you take the logic of the big bang seriously, that spacetime actually began with the big-bang's initiation of its expansion, then anything that occurred prior to anything else still occurred as part of the expansion of spacetime. To answer your question, though, I personally think that force preceded energy but I don't think we're supposed to discuss our personal opinions. I could give you my reasons for thinking this though, but maybe someone else will say that someone more credible has better reasons for saying it started as a big (or small) ball (or point) of energy. Maybe someone else will say that it started as something else completely and transformed into energy or some other presently recognizable form (as alpha2cen suggested).

Ok, that makes more sense. Thanks for explaining it that way. Here's the thing about our conflicting ideas, though: if electrons could totally disappear and re-appear after 100 years time, what would cause them to remain in a certain position in a gravity field or even retain inertia? Would the electrons be absent yet somehow continue to respond to gravitational force? Would their place in spacetime continue according to its inertia without them actually being present as matter?

I think most political discourse has become devoted to propagating assumptions and normalizing/naturalizing policies and positions more so than having actual open critical discussion. People are more interested in protecting and/or pursuing their interests by whatever means, rather than achieving more reasonable forms of governance and society. Even the idea of "reasonability" has become co-opted to support certain political agendas or be against others. People struggle for legitimate authority as a means to dictate culture. Any attempts to legitimate radical cultural freedom and truly independent individual self-determination are met with insistence about what is "realistic." There is not much will to foster real freedom from institutions because those institutions have become too central a part of too many people's lives and livelihoods. In fact, I still can't understand why so many people voted for Obama on a platform of "change," when it is so clear that the main purpose of changing the government was to re-invigorate an economy where the majority has the financial means to resist any "change" they don't want to embrace, even if that means being dependent on oil and economic exploitation (which the left is supposed to be against).

Very long words or unfamiliar leitaliecxis would be ierabldeinhpce I think.

It's tempting to attack you in an insulting way for saying something so unconstructive in a thread as this, but it's against forum rules. I just don't understand why you wouldn't just PM me if you didn't understand my post. Otherwise you're not really responding to anything because you didn't get anything from reading it in the first place. Ok, I get it now. You think I am talking about something different than the post I quoted. To explicitly respond to the quote: you said, "they wanted a government that responded to the wishes and needs of the people." But the goal was economic independence, not a government that would ensure people's economic interdependence and a prosperous system of business and trade. The pilgrims, for example, sought land to independently farm. This was possible because the land available was fertile. The question is whether these mid-East rebellions are geared toward independent cultivation of the land or government control/stimulus of business and trade in a way that benefits them more financially (i.e. raises their monetary income). I don't want to re-type my whole post now. I was trying to point out that it twists things a little to say that the US revolution was geared toward financial prosperity. I think it was more about economic independence from colonial rule.

It would be equivalent to sending information toward past information. Does information have its own present or does it always refer to some other moment in time that it re-presents?

It is assumed that absorption of a photon adds energy to the electron cloud, causing it to increase in levels. The level then drops when a photon is emitted. Could the shifting position of the electron be caused by relaxation of the electrostatic force binding the electron to the protons? In that case, would a photon actually be a packet of anti-charge? I know that photons are known to be composed of electric and magnetic fields, so no need to bombard me with the true science that contradicts my speculation. The reason I post this idea is to explore what observable consequences of modeling photon as "anti-charge" would be. I suppose it would mean that static electricity would be neutralized by light, for example. Did I just falsify my own speculation? A perhaps more valid question would be how the absorbed energy of the photon is expressed by the electrons. Do they increase in speed or does it simply take more energy to orbit at a higher level? Does the intermittency of electron "sightings" change at different levels? Or is that even an observable question, since I assume that empirical studies of electron clouds are done by creating composite pictures from numerous measurements taken at different times. I.e. it's not possible to take real-time continuous measurements of electron clouds is it? This must get into Heisenberg uncertainty.

But if it was possible to exceed the speed of light in this way, wouldn't you have to stop relative to the source to even see it again? E.g. as you accelerate toward C, time on Earth would appear to be slowing down and the image would become faded and redshifted. Once you reached C, time would appear stopped on Earth if you could see it, but you couldn't see it because the energy of the light relative to you as an observer would be zero. Then, as you sped past light in front of you, you could possibly see Earth's past moving backward in front of your vehicle instead of behind it. If you would make it to Cx2, the light of the past would be moving toward you at C and so you would then see an image of the Earth's past going backward in front of your vehicle at a natural rate of time, brightness, and hue (i.e. no redshift). Does this make sense?

Wouldn't your number change if you used other units, like km and hour or mile and day?

The whole point of fiction is that it's fiction. You're trying to unify all sci-fi fiction to follow the same fictional rules? Why would you do that? You're entitled to your opinion that you dislike my idea but why would you attempt to criticize it on the basis of majority opinion? It's like saying that I'm wrong if I color a unicorn red because most people color them white or purple, so that makes more sense as a unicorn color. Unicorns are fictional! They don't have a natural color. I can't imagine how harsh you'd be on a preschooler for coloring a zebra with green and orange stripes.

I doubt your numbers are correct, but I can't do the math either so I'll just go by the numbers you gave anyway. The interesting part of your story, imo, is that the 100 light years are experienced as taking only 50 years to the traveller. So if the 100 light years for Earth's perspective is a true distance, then how could it only take 50 years for the traveller if nothing can exceed the speed of light? Also, it's a good point about assuming that Earth is not already traveling close to the speed of light relative to some slower moving entity. There may be some distant planet where a month on Earth takes a year. Humans living their could live out their lives from childhood to old age in 6 Earth years! Just think that intellectuals just a few decades ago would have to have discussions like this via post where each letter could take days or weeks to arrive and the response just as long. Compared to them, we have years worth of discussions every week.

Let me get this straight - you are insisting that one approach to fiction is more reasonable than another on the basis of citing "contemporary sci-fi travel?" That is like saying that it's foolish to imagine teleporting could occur without a brightly colored aura and electronic sound-effects because that's what happens when you beam up on Star Trek.

It is interesting to experiment with consciousness-shifting and, with caution, you can develop the ability to draw on various forms/modes of consciousness for insight without latching onto one or the other as the ultimate replacement for materialist reality. Obviously if you actively dismiss materialist consciousness you will encounter numerous protests from other material entities, both living and non-living. This is also an interesting idea - one that can help with experiencing certain religious beliefs. Be careful, though, because it can also lead to notions of ESP and people otherwise being able to connect with each other sub-consciously, hear each others thoughts, etc. You don't want to start obsessing about the possibility that people are listening to your thoughts because such thoughts can provoke as strong a reaction as the patriot act did by legalizing wire-tapping. I think Plato's cave is an early rendering of this idea. I don't think it's that difficult of a concept to deal with. It's like knowing that your sensory perceptions are like the view-finder of a video camera where you cannot see the world beyond the camera except through the camera. So you can use your sensory data to interpolate what might be outside the camera causing the images to appear as they do, but you just have no way of somehow circumventing the camera. You can use the camera to look through microscopes, telescopes, magnifying glasses, infrared lenses, etc. but you're always stuck with the camera itself. It's a frustrating concept, admittedly, but it doesn't prevent you from making claims about what could be going on outside the camera. And yet it remains possible to consider the existence of physical stimuli beyond "the typical way our perceptions influence the stimuli that act on them." I think this is a common misuse of the concept of "subjective." I.e. many people assume that subjectivity is necessarily individually unique and that harmonization among different individuals' subjectivity can't and doesn't occur. Therefore, they assume, anything that people widely commonly agree on must transcend subjectivity. In fact, all those social interaction forms you mentioned are often used to (re)produce and enforce institutional consistencies among individuals' subjectivity. It's like with time: it upsets people tremendously if everyone sets their clocks to their own arbitrary time setting, so people set their clocks to prevent punitive effects of not doing so, such as missing trains, showing up late for meetings, etc. Fashion is a better example because it is such an obviously arbitrary/subjective aesthetic. People could choose to dress in any way possible, but they often choose to base their choices on tastes derived from familiarity with "fashion-trends." But even if everyone thinks basic black is always in fashion, it's still not more than subjective.

But if you could somehow just get all your particles to "blink" for 100 years, during which time they would cease to have momentum or be pulled or pushed by any force, where would you be when you re-appeared? Think of the galaxy as a vehicle and your "blink" was relative to some medium that the galaxy was traveling through. You might re-appear very far from Earth.

I agree that absence is only possible conceptually in that it requires a concept of what is not present. Empirically/physically, what is present is present and that's it. However, in the case of big bang theory, there is a pretty strong basis for assuming that there was a physical state of the universe in which spacetime dimensionality was not yet applicable to the existence of force and energy, right? Or was dimensionality always present, even within the most condensed primordial material?