lemur

Great, now I have to pay to change my license tag AGAIN! Well, at least I know why I've been losing the lottery now.

It would reduce the pleasure of status-superiority and deprive people of the sense of satisfaction they get from knowing that other people have it worse; not to mention the fact that they wouldn't be able to use the fact that other people have it worse to silence people who complain about problems in their own lives.

You have all the right data here but your conclusions are one short, imo. You say yourself that government stimulus to the poor and middle-class produces economic boom. Now, how do you think the prosperity of that boom gets distributed? Do you think the boom decreases or increases the gap between rich and poor? Imo, the gap ends up increasing due to economic boom/growth and, as a result, social-economic culture leaves more people behind as many compete to keep up with the expanding costs of achieving/maintaining middle-class status. Now, if you look at the net effect of tax cuts, as you note about the Bush 'recession,' they tend to slow down growth and cause people to conserve/budget their spending. This, in turn, stimulates people to make due with less consumption and prosperity which effectively reduces the gap between rich, middle-class, and poor. This is, imo, the only way to reduce this gap because growth always leads to increasing stratification. If you really wanted to eliminate stratification, you would strive to get back to the pre-Keynesian social-economic model where it was the job of the rich and middle-class to save their wealth and live meagerly to show that they did not take it for granted. This resulted in a very meager economy and cautious consumption, which meant that the rich, middle-class, and poor were all suffering to make due with as little as they could. I think that's the closest you can ever get to social-economic equality - but maybe someone else has another vision where everyone can live it up and achieve middle-class status. I don't think it's possible for various reasons, but I'd be interested to debate it.

Interesting and very pertinent example. It makes me wonder why Goldwater's politics seemed like such a radical challenge to the status quo at the time but during the Obama campaign (and even during the Kerry campaign after GWBush1, the democrat approach was to vote out the status quo. I may be biased for various reasons, but at some point I came the realization that the big-government vs. small-government opposition basically comes down to support for institutionalized authority vs. deconstruction of it. Somehow, however, support for institutionalized authority has become associated with progress in democrat ideology (as has conservatism become associated with republicanism, which has basically always emerged as a departure from central government and authority - first as the US independence from royal colonialism and later as anti-federalism prior to it becoming anti state-sovereignty with the civil war). It's not that I'm trying to promote a political agenda, I just try to make sense of the constellation of ideological topics and how they're brought together in party ideologies. Liberalism, for example, which is traditionally derived from the idea of free market economics has become associated with liberal spending or liberal social behavior. Progress was once used to refer to industrial progress and is now used more to refer to social progress, which now seems to be associated with more regulation while social exploitation, discrimination, etc. are associated with "laissez faire" social-economic culture. The thing that interests me currently is that the "going green" movement really started taking off while GWBush was still in office, and really long before that (recycling got popular in the 1990s for example). Yet once it became dominant popular culture to "go green," that facilitated the possibility of a popular backlash as people grew annoyed by having to go out of their way to "save trees, wildlife, etc," which they don't ultimately like as much as, say, their cars. So the question is whether the status quo that they are fighting to protect and rekindle isn't really the product of the popularization of the green movement in the first place. It's almost like reverse psychology using popular culture.

I don't know that grants/subsidies/support are ultimately conducive to development of innovations when they are met with resistance on the basis of beliefs about economic structure and order. As you mention, division of economic labor/function causes people to view it as natural for one industry/company to specialize and deviation from the specialty/concentration is seen as a liability. In businesses where this is the case, the only viable solution would seem to be to promote (price) competition among competitors (by anti-trust if necessary) to shrink profit-margins to a level where companies see the value in increasing efficiency even where it is a challenge and/or a pain. Ultimately necessity is the mother of invention, so if you want invention/innovation it would probably help to breed some necessity.

This is really interesting considering how much energy traditional grow lamps demand. It's too bad they didn't publish the LED wattage used and crop yield in mass/weight of edible produce. edit: I don't get the point of adding green LED except to make the plants appear green while they're growing. If they reflect it, then they're not absorbing it, right? edit2: I also wonder if plants don't get any benefit from infrared and/or UV in addition to visible colors.

I once toured a 19th century foundry. It described how many people were required to go around the surrounding forests with horse and cart cutting wood to power the foundry. I imagine that the heavy work of cutting and hauling the wood warmed up the workers, and they probably didn't mind arriving at the foundry while it was in operation. I believe it was Poor Richard's Almanac where Ben Franklin wrote that it is possible to stay warm all day with one log of wood: 1) carry the wood upstairs 2)throw it out the window 3)go back downstairs 4)goto step #1 (or something to this effect). I guess this is a diversion from the OP's idea but no matter how many ideas I try to think up for consolidating energy utilization, I can never get over the underutilization of bio-energy in the form of individual metabolism. You could, however, build a sauna-annex onto steam-plants to give people a break from the cold. What would be the harm in that?

I think I'd have to be a god to decode this level of formalism into language I could comprehend and process.

The culture of defending a "status quo" is fairly well-known and also may be called "reactionism," "realism," and/or, "conservatism" depending on the context in which these terms are used. What has occurred to me that I find interesting is that such a culture of "status quo" may actually emerge subsequently to a culture of change rather than preceding it, as might be logically expected. After all, new technologies, lifestyles, and everyday social-economic practices evolve independently, without necessarily getting incorporated into an overall worldview. However, once evolving forms become spotlighted as "change," it becomes possible to react against or control such "change" in favor of something else. Since anything that is not spotlighted as "change" would necessarily get defined as "the status quo," this culture seems to promote certain developments just by generating the notion that "elements of change" are in conflict with the "status quo" that they emerged from.

Sometimes I think the reason it doesn't work to get a job for a while is that you're applying to the best you can find out of pragmatism but somewhere you know there's a more perfect job for you possible and this comes through in your application. At some point a job that's perfect for you will seem to just find you more than you found it. You may have sent an email half-heartedly as yet another fleeting attempt and you even thought that job was long gone to another applicant and yet, voila', you get an email or a call. In the meantime, you have the opportunity to reflect on your field and labor economics generally. You can reflect on the ultimate social-economic philosophical question: i.e. "what is the point of human labor-capacity?"

Yes, thanks. I've already switched to microwaving ceramic or glass bowls instead of the plastic ones because of this thread.

Yes, I think you could actually rate various instances on a continuum of energy-preservation. Cutting the top off a can, poking holes in the bottom, and using it to pot a plant, for example, uses less energy than recycling it by sending it off to a plant to be crushed, melted, and re-formed. Plus you can do that with it anyway after using it as a planter. So, basically, you can take any piece of "trash" and maximize its supply-chain of uses following the moment of retail purchase. Consumerism has somehow created a culture where people think of buying something, using it once, and tossing it - but this is really about the least economically effective/efficient way of utilizing resources. Yes, it promotes revenues and job-creation but the question is whether making more money flow this way does anything except self-perpetuate the culture of waste.

The only problem with this, imo, is that people can get the wrong idea that since trash isn't piling up in a landfill and energy is being generated that it suddenly becomes a good idea to throw away as much as you want. You can't generate as much energy by burning trash as it takes to make new stuff to replace the trash, so conserving and recycling with the slowest rate of degradation is more energy effective/efficient in the long-run.

If new energy was continuously being created, where would that be taking place do you think?

How does a distribution of wealth lead to starvation? You are basically implying that it's natural for people with wealth to use it to prevent people without it from getting (to) food. What if it was not capitalism but borders and migration-control that was responsible for both control over the global free market (capitalism) AND hunger and other forms of relative resource deprivation and concentration elsewhere? Would you then favor liberalizing global capitalism so everyone could gain access to the global food economy, or would you continue to support migration control to protect citizens/economies of wealthy regions over poorer ones? I'm not sure what you're saying here. Your language is a bit cryptic.

By this logic, you could lock your 17-year old daughter in a dungeon while she is still in your custody. Then, when she turns 18 and gains the right to choose to go free, you are not obligated to unlock the door and let her out? Ironically, this situation could prevent someone from raping her.

Good question. The only way I have to answer this without propagating wild conspiracy theories is to just say that it is possible for people to arrive at the conclusion that economic malaise necessarily/naturally leads to violence. This is a political assumption that can be found in all sorts of ideologies, from the view that crime and/or civil strife is likely to increase in hard economic times to the (Mertonian) view that difficulty (strain) in finding institutional employment leads to "innovation" in the form of criminal pursuits of income/wealth. Essentially, it comes down to a deterministic view of violence where individuals are seen as having no choice but to victimize others when they're suffering economic deprivation. Such determinism ignores the examples of individuals who do not resort to violence under similar circumstances. It also contains the view that economic wellbeing basically is something that is distributed by central authority instead of something that is created through decentralized processes. This also reflects, imo, an underlying political debate between whether to accept central authority as a reality and therefore accept the impossibility of (social economic) life without submission to such authority; or whether to view economy as decentralized fields of production and distribution that can, will, and do function without central command-control. By establishing one ideology or the other as popular belief, certain approaches to government/governance come to seem more natural/preferable/logical than others.

Does this mean that the weak force is only present in elements heavier than iron and only the strong force is present in iron and lighter?

Thank you for revising the first bolded statement with the second. For a long time I scrutinized memorials, commemoration, and historiography generally trying to figure out what the social effects of these rituals is. My opinion is that while for some, it may be a moment of peace or thankfulness that a terrible moment in history is past/passed, for many it is nothing more than a moment of fear for the possibility of such a thing repeating itself. For this reason, I have thought that WWII war remembrances are used as political-economic propaganda for promoting post-WWII Keynesianism. It is kind of shameless to promote spending and economic growth this way, because it basically amounts to a threat, "fix the economy or we'll have more holocaust and war." The essential part of such threatening propaganda is that the social consequences of economic recession are naturalized as if it is not ultimately a choice to resort to violence in response to economic malaise. This is not to say that individuals can't become vicious when tortured by material deprivation - only that there are always other solutions possible than violence, despite the fact that constructive reason may be shirked in favor of taking advantage of people in their desperation. The most striking pattern in EU political-opinions in recent times, imo, is the correlation between economic recession and anti-migration/xenophobia, and this pattern seems to occur in US politics as well. It's as if the moment the economy gets tight, people know to show their nazi teeth because they know that WWII was followed with a strong pro-labor welfare-state social-democracy. This is a big problem, imo, because democracy should be able to achieve economic prosperity without resorting to war and intimidation by reference to historical atrocities. Such atrocities should not be denied out of respect for people who suffered and died, but they certainly shouldn't be used as implicit threats for what is to come if certain kinds of political-economic policies aren't enacted, imo.

That makes sense. Do you know if there are any theoretical models attempting to explain why and how specific materials/molecules/atoms absorb specific frequencies and not others?

Thanks. That is a very good explanation (clear as a bell). Now, what allows one to know which materials/molecules are sympathetic to a particular frequency in a given state?

Nothing is free but the question is what extra waste is being created. After all, the people running the ships would be eating the same food whether running a sailing ship, cargo ship, or on land. You're right about the materials and energy to put them together, but then the question becomes whether the shipping is worth the investment. If some other method of powering ships besides fossil fuel is found, it may be more efficient to use that than sails. It's just that fossil fuel has been around, what, about 200 years now and it's going to probably run out in the next couple centuries as well. Wind will long outlive fossil fuel, at least for those humans who survive the end of fossil fuel, provided it happens abruptly instead of in a series of pro-active adjustments designed to avoid haphazard transition. "Society" has no needs. It is an abstract concept used to differentiate between self-interest and interest in helping others. You would be more correct to say that people are more often motivated by immediate needs then long-term planning. It's called short-sightedness. What is "societal" about that short-sightedness is that because the economy entails exchange and structured exploitation of labor and resources, many people can bet on being a part of a privileged elite who gets the luxury of wasting scarce resources even as others suffer from their depletion. So it's actually "society" that causes people to be short-sighted. If they had to grow their own food for the winter, for example, they would plan ahead so as not to starve. Because of society, people can wait until they get hungry and then go to the supermarket or get prepared food. You never travel? You enjoy spending all your time at home? You would rather work out of your house than commute to a workplace? If so, I think you're an exception. Most people like to be mobile, I think. It could be, but the nomadism (migrant work) that I'm familiar with is stigmatized in terms of race and class status (i.e. poor Mexicans) so many people would eschew the very idea of such a lifestyle because they associate it with people they don't want to associate with. Sounds fun, but my idea is a response to energy limitations so I see a culture of nomadic walking/bicycling emerging due to the energy it would save. Again, this sounds fun. I don't see how it would be sufficient to pay for the costs of a vehicle and driving, though, if you did it that way. Also, if you're looking for better pay and benefits, etc. agricultural labor rarely provides that, from what I have heard. Exactly, telecommuting. But I can also see IT allowing traditionally fixed-location jobs to be organized in a way that trained people can combine travel and work. For example, if you were trained to work at Walmart, you could work at one store for a few days or a week and then spend some of your days off walking/biking to another store some distance further down the road. Working low-paying jobs in this way would probably require low-cost camping facilities or hostels where people would basically take care of all their own amenities and work for the hostels/campgrounds as they travel. The details could take shape in many different ways, but I don't see any reason why nomadic work-scheduling couldn't be done by floating managers with the aid of telecommuting IT systems.

Yeah, the smooth skin thing is a great example of a product claim that doesn't rely on scientifiç language at all. Pseudoscience would be saying something like, "X results in smoother skin because of its unique combination of vitamins, nutrients, and enzymes," without actually doing any research into what vitamins, nutrients, and enzymes it actually contains or how those would affect the skin. I am a little stricter than most, though, in that I don't view statistical correlations without causal explanations as sufficiently scientific. In other words, I don't really care that someone finds a correlation between drinking dehydrated grass juice and having smoother skin. I want to know how it would have that effect and how they know.

I believe the ultimate goal of representative government is to turn voters into independent thinkers. The idea is that whomever you elect will get criticized to the point where you will identify flaws in the ideas you based your vote on, which will cause you to develop your ability to think independently of party dogmas. Of course, some people will spend their entire lives clinging to dogma and refusing to question their assumptions. Part of this dogma/assumptions is that elected leaders are actual leaders when they're really just representatives. People are free to lead themselves so representation is just a means for them to see how ideas they identify with get handled in public venues. Even the laws created are ultimately nothing more than institutionalized expressions of everyday interests and morality. Yes, people who resist compliance with the law get dragged through the formalities of court-proceedings, etc. but most people's experience of legal constraints occurs through "governmentality," i.e. they internalize the logic of the laws and policies and implement them for themselves in their everyday lives. This is how most people self-govern without having to undergo direct interventions. This is not my idea - it comes from M Foucault (Discipline and Punish is the book, I think).

Why? Interesting. Did they explain how they got the jobs? I have the impression that most people who need low-paying jobs are afraid to lose them out of fear that they might not be able to get a new one right away or that they would lose the longevity benefits they've built up by sticking with the same employer/manager for a while. A while ago I had heard that Walmart allowed people to park their RVs for free in the parking lot, which would facilitate nomadism at a substantially lower cost of living. It would be quite interesting if people could actually sustainable plan and execute their lives in this way without undergoing excessive stress with all the uncertainties and obstacles they would encounter due to present institutional constraints.