lemur

Personally, it offends me that the world is economically segregated. If people want to develop, why shouldn't they gain access to the knowledge and resources to do so? If the developed economies had better political relations with less developed economies, there would be more freedom for people to move around and choose various lifestyles. Personally, I don't like having to pay high prices to support an economy of excess, so it would be nice if there was sufficient security and democracy in poorer regions to facilitate living well without the material excesses. Someday, consumerism might calm down but for now it seems like recession after recession does nothing to deter people from wanting to live a high-consumption lifestyle. I think economic prosperity should not require high employment. At this point in modernity, I think economic production should be consolidated down to a few necessary labor activities that are shared among large numbers of people by taking turns. Obviously ethnicity/nationalism has a lot to do with it or else the various developed economy regional governments would allow freedom of movement and people would migrate wherever they wanted within the developed/civilized world. As it is, however, part of each national ideology is that its people and institutions are more civilized than all the rest and therefore it is necessary to keep 'barbarians' out. And if it was a single region, they would just be running back and forth without crossing a border. Whenever I watch documentaries about "poor Mexicans," the people are usually living more or less independently with their own livestock and homestead-farming. I think people migrate to the cities (either in Mexico or the US or elsewhere) because they want some excitement away from rural mundanity. Rural-urban migration is the main type of migration throughout history and today as well, I think. People may say that they're doing it because they need the money for themselves or for their families, but I think the pull of high exchange rates and adventure is a big part of the attraction. If NAFTA was better integrated, I think the adventurousness of migrating to the US would lose allure. Similarly, I don't see why more US-Mexico migration shouldn't be taking place, although I think English speakers should learn Spanish, at least to the extent that they expect Spanish speakers to learn English. Still, my main point is that people view it as natural to separate the world into national regions instead of viewing it as an intervention in global free trade, which it always has been. Colonialism took place before the rise of nationalism and although nationalism has had some positive effects, I think the negative effects have outweighed those. Look at WWII and EU national-supremacy today, as well as the bickering that goes on between people with Canadian and US citizenship, nevermind the disdain of Anglo North Americans toward Spanish speaking North, Central, and South Americans. Nationalism has mostly stoked lots of ethnicism and superiorism. I think people need to get over their ethnic egos and start living as the global citizens they ultimately are.

The irony when people say things like this "love it or leave it" ideology is that they are the ones making it unpleasant to be free and democratic, because they basically forego respect of freedom in favor of insisting on authoritarian devotion to the institutions. The institutions are there to support freedom and democracy, not to promote their own worship. Use it or lose it, if you truly believe in it, that is. Also, you have absolutely no right to tell non-citizens to "shut up." There are laws protecting people against discrimination on the basis of national identity. There are two approaches to terrorism: 1) you treat it as an internal problem in a global democratic republic and basically police the world against it. 2) you divide the world up into bounded regions and utilize terrorism as a means of intimidating people into internal solidarity within the region that "protects" them. It's like the old mafia trick of getting people to "pay for protection," when the point is actually extortion of support regardless of consent. Ok, bye. Good luck warding off your fear of the Taliban by rallying for international apartheid. Do realize, however, that anti-migration nationalism did play a role in the conditions that led to the war on terror in the first place. I actually agree with you more than you realize, but I question whether there's not a less ethnicist way of policing the threats that national borders are supposed to keep out. The question is whether the goal is to control global threats or to segregate people into separate regions according to national identity.

I wish I had the quantitative skills to compare the rate of heat transfer from an object at 36C to three different heat sinks: 1) +2C air at 90% relative humidity 2) - 2C air at 90% relative humidity and 3) -2C air at 10% relative humidity. I don't even know what unit the results would come out as, joules/second?

No, but why isn't this used as a reason to subdivide existing regional territories then? Also, why do political allies such as NATO members need migratory restrictions among them? Utopias and dystopias are types of societies. They are types of ideologies/visions for the future. You mentioned "idyllic utopias," which means an optimistic vision for future life. Since you said you didn't like "idyllic utopias," I asked if you preferred "oppressive dystopias," i.e. visions of a future in which oppression increases and intensifies. It is simply social realism to many people that nations and borders exist and that it's natural for people to live within the national borders of their citizenship. Personally, this seems inconsistent with US ideologies of freedom, which should naturally refer to global freedom, imo, but many people do exactly the opposite and assume that US ideologies of freedom only refer to citizens and to the bounded regionalities of the 50 domestic states. Look, there's no reason to debate the realism of nationalism. For people who take it for granted, it is unthinkable to question it. It just so happens that I have an anthropological perspective that views nationalism and national institutions the same way I would view any tribal ideology practiced throughout history. It's as hard to get national-naturalists to view nationhood as merely an institution as it would be to get cavemen to recognize that their cave paintings of hunting game are just a ritual to validate their hunting and not the supernatural reason that the gods send animals to them in the first place.

What about the effect of water vapor freezing below 0C? I would think that as water vapor freezes, it collects into crystals, thus decreasing the total number of water particles and their ability to spread out when they come in contact with skin and clothing. I realize that surface tension in liquid water would also have the effect of reducing the number of particles, but I don't think that surface tension is a factor in vaporized water. Is crystallization a factor when the water freezes? Also, does dry frozen water have the same ability to absorb heat as dampness in/on air, clothes, and/or skin?

Obscenities have the effect of lowering one's spirits for some people. They may consider the aesthetic or philosophical richness of the text a vehicle for lowering their spirits with the use of obscenities or other disheartening content.

Who's saying anyone HAS to do anything? My point is that if I was working as a janitor for a company making $5/hour and the company laid me off and contracted (out-sourced) janitorial services to an external company that paid its janitors $2, wouldn't I rather avoid taking the exclusion and pay-cut and do some other work for a company that wouldn't exclude me, even if I was getting the same $2/hour? In other words, the issue wouldn't be losing the $3/hour as much as it would be seeing that money go to the people whose wages went up because they cut mine. Take another example: what if after cutting my wages to $2 and raising their own, those people offered me overtime work cleaning their houses during the day before cleaning their offices at night? Should I really be grateful for the opportunity to make more money by serving them more at a lower wage? Is this the typical nation=house metaphor? I disagree with this analogy because there is a fundamental difference between public and private property, imo. It's not a question of whether any government "should allow" migration but whether governments should protect the rights and culture of certain people more than others. Yes, people deserve to have public space where they are free from discrimination and where they can speak their language(s), but why would providing this require excluding others unless they were abusing their freedom and harassing others or something like that? You don't think people who are poor and discriminated against care about it? I suppose it depends on the extent they are conscious of it and to what extent they legitimate it. Probably there are nationalist migrants who accept anti-migration and they are just doing what they can to build up wealth so they can exclude people from their region and exploit people in "foreign economies." Different individuals have individual motives, interests, and perspectives. Beyond being rude, it's just naive to think that if more people moved to the US than current food- or other industries can sustain, that resources couldn't be increased. For example, if everyone in Canada or Mexico wanted to be US American (or vice versa), the national regions could simply be merged. Of course, national identity and other political reasons cause people to resist merging governments and regional territories, but this is mostly status-quoism, the same as people resist dividing regions into multiple smaller regions. I don't know what this means. I really meant that I think dividing the world into national regions and relegating and separating people according to national identity is just as artificial as any other human cultural institution. It's no more natural for the world to be nationalized as it is for men to wear their hair short while women wear it long. It's just a cultural habit that many people have grown accustomed to and accept. Restricting migration is like restricting men for wearing their hair long or women from cutting it short. Some people find the idea of ethnic-segregated restrooms offensive, but they find it just as offensive to de-segregate restrooms and allow both sexes to use either restroom. In other words, traditions have emotional inertia beyond the rationality that people attribute to them. Why is there a need for national defense but not for state-militias or racial policing and governing? I'm not saying that there is or isn't; just pointing out that the national level is just one level of political territorialization among many so why is it elevated above others in importance? When you say you're not interested in a discussion of "idyllic utopias," does that mean you would prefer to discuss oppressive dystopia? Politics is always a discussion of directions for the future, or at least it should be. Yes, but what gives people the right to institutionalize collectivism and control of a "collective fate?" What given any two people the right to determine the fate, religion, culture, etc. of a third person? Isn't that bullying and disrespect of individual freedom?

That sounds pretty mature that he gave the writer three chances to clean up their language before giving up on the book. Also, compared to some people who would burn the book or threaten the life of the writer, this guy sounds relatively peaceful. Why is it immature to stop reading something that offends you?

how do you prevent it from bouncing and flipping some more after landing? Do you catch it at a specific height? How do you insure the exact position at which it is caught?

I always thought that same-charge repulsion should be expressed in some way in the modeling of electrons around the nucleus, but I haven't seen that yet in QP, though my knowledge is admittedly superficial. Same-charge repulsion seems to be responsible for the volume of atoms insofar as the electron clouds resist interpenetration. Electrostatic attraction between the electrons and the protons of the nucleus also seem to be responsible for the localization of electrons within the volume of the atom. If electrostatic force was less, for example, I would expect atoms to be much larger or not occur at all. Non-magnetic matter seems to be the result of unharmonized charge within a material (but this may just be my opinion). Magnetism seems to be the result of harmonizing negative charge away from positive charge in numerous atoms simultaneously. My sense, though it may be incorrect, is that non-magnetic materials are neutralized by dispersing their electrostatic charge equally in all directions (if someone has a reason this is incorrect, please explain).

It's usually not a conscious-movement as much as realpolitik (if I'm using that word right). It's just a sub-conscious assumption people make about whether it is natural or repressive for the world to be separated and policed into national or other regions. Why should people be segregated according to political beliefs? The only reason I can think to actively promote propinquity is to create a concentration of a particular language so that speakers have ample opportunity to use the language. This doesn't mean that non-speakers or semi-proficient speakers should be excluded; just that speakers should be allowed/facilitated to live and interact. What other political reasons would their be for supporting propinquity? It depends on how you view the situation. I wouldn't be so vague as to believe that every purchase of a Chinese-manufactured good supports socialism or that every purchase of a US-produced good supports democracy. However, I understand people who don't eat meat because it supports animal slaughter. I could also see how people wouldn't want to buy goods produced in child-labor sweat-shops if they think children shouldn't be used for manual labor. If I was mistreated or fired from a company for reasons that I didn't consider just, I wouldn't want to contribute to that company's prosperity. If I was excluded from the US economy because people feel that preventing me from working raises their wages, I wouldn't want to move to a low-wage region and work to produce goods that benefit them by lowering their company's production costs. It's like if I pay you $5/hour and then fire you and deport you to a region with factories where I can pay you $2/hour, why would you gladly give up half your wages so I could make more money? Wouldn't you just say, "screw you, I'll work to support an economy that won't deport me?"

Dad, I need $20 for new shoes. What do you mean? I gave you $20 for shoes last week. Yeah, but I spent it all on lottery tickets.

Well, I don't think that I'm inventing a whole new conceptual language of physics when thinking and asking about interactions between force-fields. It's just an interest that occurred to me when I figured out that there doesn't have to be any distinction between a particle and its force-field (i.e. that the field can be self-constituting). This also got me wondering whether there could be force-field interactions between EM fields and gravitation that constitute EM waves. I don't know if these questions are conclusively answerable by current knowledge/theory, but I certainly think they are posable according to it, no? edit: btw, I realized that there's bound to be a lot of vagueness in defining relative difference between "languages." If you define two ways of talking about something as "different languages," it's easy to assume that communication between them is difficult. But in reality, language differences are often minor enough to easily overcome in conversation. Often people have different syntactical or expressive habits, use different words, etc. and they are able to understand each other. A lot has to do with how much exposure people get to interacting in culturally diverse situations.

Right, but they could choose to work in an industry that only benefits locals, or do work that benefits exporters to regions that are less restrictive/discriminatory toward them. E.g. If I was treated badly and/or fired at one company, I would probably rather work for its competitor than for another company in its supply chain, just because I would like to see the company where I was mistreated go out of business (this could either be out of spite or just because I wouldn't want other people to have to work for that company that mistreats them).

Why should your kids be allowed to gamble when you are still legally/financially responsible for them? If people should be allowed to gamble at all, shouldn't it be when they have surplus money to lose/waste? When their losses have the potential to affect people beyond themselves, why should they be allowed to risk those people's welfare? Why should parents, for example, be allowed to gamble unless all their kids expenses are covered first?

I think what you refer to as "religion" is actually better termed "dogmatic authoritarianism." There are non- or anti- dogmatic/authoritarian approaches to religion and as with other approaches to culture that resist dogmatism and authoritarianism, they tend to get marginalized and attacked by dogmatic authoritarians as being too "wishy-washy." Ironically, Christianity began as anti-dogmatic/authoritarian Judaism. There's nothing about any idea that PREVENTS it from being packaged and transmitted as dogma and used as authoritarian hegemony. In fact, the most successful authoritarians are those who know how to convert radicalism into dogma in order to seduce critical-thinkers into authoritarian social-relations. I think this may be why so much dogmatic authoritarianism is perpetuated using the ideologies of Christianity and democracy/freedom, i.e. because these ideologies promote resistance to authoritarianism in their content.

I've been reading about solar sailing projects and they seem to mostly focus on using solar panels to charge batteries that are used to run propellors. The problem is that the batteries are heavy and cumbersome. I am wondering why the batteries couldn't be replaced with some kind of sea-water hydrolysis system since, as I recall, salt water electrolyzes more easily into hydrogen and oxygen anyway. I also haven't seen any that combine wind (sails) with solar panels. Could solar panels be used to make hydrogen and the hydrogen used as fuel for propellors when their is no wind on a sailboat?

But, on the other hand, should expensive brand products be profiting from government subsidies? Maybe premium brand companies should provide a certain amount of product at the same cost as generic brands to be sold to customers with food stamps.

Personally, I agree that people should make good nutritional choices and economical choices by ignoring brand-status. The problem you get into by only controlling the choices of people using food stamps is that they get stigmatized and feel second-class because they are not allowed to consume products that seem to be higher quality, although they may not be. In other words, if I'm poor and I'm not allowed to buy the same brands and products that someone else is, I'm going to think that there's something better about those products. Imo, no one should buy brand name junk food but the fact that some people are allowed to buy food with private funds instead of using food stamps means I have no say in their prerogative to do so.

Just please try to remember that where there's anti-migration sentiment globally, everyone is a second-class citizen somewhere. If you're focussed on the US, you may not think about the fact that there are people with US citizenship living in places where other people consider them unwelcome guests. You can tell yourself that it is fair for the world to be divided into regions that rank people into first-class citizens and second-class non-citizens (or even into multiple tiers of citizens AND non-citizens), but the fact is that it is never fun to play second-class to someone else.

Them's fightin' words. edit: seriously though. None of what you wrote here is a constructive contribution to a real discussion. Can this post be deleted for doing nothing but propagating uncritical anti-migration assumptions? edit2: besides, this thread isn't about whether migration should be regulated or not and why. It was about whether people excluded from a regional economy because of their (lack of) citizenship should contribute to global trade that benefits the economy they're excluded from. You could look at this another way and ask whether a business that has been boycotted to bankruptcy in one regional economy because it is identified with the US should sell the same products to the same economy as an export for a lower price. If people boycotted your product when you were present, why should you help them profit by selling to them for less after they kick you out?

True, but I'm talking about boycotting jobs that add value to US consumer products and make money for US investors and workers. People are claiming that non-citizens take US jobs and drive down wages, so why would someone excluded from US jobs and wages want to work for less abroad and by doing so contribute to greater purchasing power for the people who wanted them to leave?

I used "escape energy" as an example of how to understand particles/objects on a continuum of mass with regard to the spacetime curvature of their geodesics. I'm trying to get at the possibility of looking at all trajectories as paths through specific topographies resulting from the specificities of force-interactions. This is not for instrumental purposes of measurement but for developing a unified view of materiality as force-governed energy-expressions/interactions. I think I see where we differ in opinion/approach. My general approach to technologies, including conceptual/interpretive/analytical tools, is to view them as having specific utility and functions. I don't automatically include or exclude them from relevance based on their status relative to each other. So, for example, I have a tea kettle and an electric water boiler, which are both technologies for boiling water. I generally don't use the kettle because the electric boiler is more convenient, but if I wanted to heat water over a fire or if my boiler broke, the kettle has its own function and parameters. I view conceptual tools the same way. E.g. People always criticize the Bohr model as being outdated and (fundamentally) flawed. I don't deny this assessment. I just take it for what it is and use it to gain insights to the degree that it offers insight. I don't feel the need to restrict my modeling of physical phenomena to certain models and not others. I see no reason to throw out the old in order to utilize the new. It's not like they interfere with each other if you know how to distinguish between them. I recommend practicing as many languages as possible. You may only be able to communicate with many people in English (or in this case standard physical concepts) but language diversity offers the possibility of developing different ideas in a different mode of thought. I have no idea why you would want to try to prevent people from thinking creatively, since this is the only way that new insight can be achieved.

I use the term, "anti-migration" to generally refer to people or ideologies who believe the world should be divided into relatively separated regions. Imo, mobile organisms are naturally free to migrate at will and I don't see why humans should be different. I know that "anti-migrationists" do not all "hate immigrants," as you say. They may just not think that non-citizens have as much right to be in certain places as citizens do. I, however, do. So my point is that regardless of whether US "anti-migration" citizens hate you or not, why would you want to contribute to their economic prosperity if they restrict your ability to migrate and work freely in "their regions?" To use a very different example for analogy, if you got laid off from a company, would you want to work in a restaurant serving your former colleagues who no longer value you as an equal? I understand what you're saying about workers in Mexican factories just doing it for the pay. My point, however, is that everyone works for others in some way and so there are politics to the relationship produced between oneself and the consumers of the fruits of one's labor. This relationship exists whether or not anyone chooses to pay attention to it. When you buy something at a store, some worker(s) somewhere made it for you and brought it to you. The issue is whether they would choose to do business with you if they had the choice, or whether they just serve you because the alternative is more than they can bear to take.

CRef basically explained it, but electricity is just a means of transmitting power from a generator to a resistor (could be a device or just resistance in the wire). Power has to be derived from a source, such as burning fossil fuel, or using radioactive reactions to produce steam and spin the magnets to make waves flow through the electrons in the wire. I believe that power lines have very high voltage to overcome the resistance of long lengths of power line wires. This voltage has to be "stepped down" by transformers before it can be used by humans. I'm not sure exactly how much power is lost in the process of transmitting it through the lines at high voltage, but I've heard it is a lot. edit (correction): I just googled "electric power transmission" on wikipedia and it says that power loss decrease proportionally with voltage of the transmission line. So the most power seems to be lost in lower voltage lines. It does say, however, that some current can be lost by various levels of short-circuiting between power lines, though it doesn't specify how much.