Phi for All

! Moderator Note Links, pictures and videos in posts should be relevant to the discussion, and members should be able to participate in the discussion without clicking any links or watching any videos. Videos and pictures should be accompanied by enough text to set the tone for the discussion, and should not be posted alone. Please present your topic here, and give us enough of an opener to steer us in the direction you'd like the discussion to take.

I'm not sure why you're so embarrassed. When I google the subject, most of the links are written by AI, telling us that we can trust this information because the AI checked it all out. It's fallacious logic. I still haven't seen any claims about the subject itself because AI seems to be the most important aspect, and as swansont mentions, ChatGPT is a language program that will always give you an answer, right or wrong. I can appreciate starting off on the right foot, especially with us cliquish discussion junkies, but you're judging WAY harsher than we would. So what's more important, this new propulsion system concept, or the AI angle? I'd be very interested in knowing more about the propulsion system.

This is a spectacularly horrible way to start any conversation. You'll tell us something tomorrow you aren't sure of today?! This is a science discussion forum. If this is a commercial come-on, it's not wanted here.

Exactly, the engineers already know what the problems with roads are. It's the profit priority of private enterprise that spins these issues into more ignorance for the masses. Contractors spend money lobbying for contracts that make them more money at the expense of good roads. Not sure if it's this way elsewhere, but in Colorado right now, when they resurface a road, they just pave that road without smoothing intersections. People turning right from the new surface hit the edge of an old surfaces at the intersection, and before you know it, that corner has a big pothole right as you turn. Along comes a special crew to fix just that, at additional expense. This isn't engineering, it's pirateering, private interests taking advantage of social funding and screwing the People for more money.

Are you willing to wait a LOT longer for road repairs? Right now, privately contracted companies are laying down the asphalt and letting you drive on it within a day or two. This means less time waiting on road repair as a commuter, but it also means the roadbed has no time to cure. If the crews let the asphalt cure for 90 days, you wouldn't have potholes within a year or two. Asphalt wears like stone when it's allowed to cure, but then the commuters have to wait. Being patient is the reasonable, efficient, and sustainable approach. Insisting on quick repairs is the profitable, primitive, and embarrassing approach.

! Moderator Note I can ban you if you like, we don't delete accounts. Or you could make your arguments without linking to your old thread (which the staff gave far too much leeway to for a mainstream topic), shore up your sketchy science, and try to persuade the members about the validity of your ideas. Please stop throwing out anything and everything, hoping something will stick. Use the arguments from the other thread that were valid; many were shown to be false, so throw those away. Focus and present your arguments with rigor and reason. Or I can ban you if you like, we don't delete accounts.

! Moderator Note If there are references to earlier posts in the other thread, I'll close this one. There's NO SCIENCE there. We'll let Luc figure out which of his arguments will be persuasive here, and if they aren't, this won't go to 14 pages, promise.

! Moderator Note And this is why we ask for evidence in the mainstream sections. 14 pages of not doing science and you've failed to convince anybody that your concepts are valid. If you feel you could support a Speculation with your arguments, open a thread there. This one is closed.

I think this argument is jaded. It comes from a Republican perspective, where doctors lying to cover up the president's condition is typical. And the Republicans know only the Democrats care about ethics, since they've seriously gaslighted their own into believing they have the moral high ground. Most Democrats know one person doesn't run the whole country, and are willing to let Biden's accomplishments prove his fitness for office. Republicans are too far off into the weeds with populist worship to see that many of us want a representative of our hopes and dreams, not the villain of our worst nightmares.

Your view is hampered by your own acknowledged lack of knowledge. As an analogy, children are often perplexed at what the adults are doing, and offer their opinions the way you do, but it's mostly just guesswork without the requisite knowledge.

! Moderator Note Slurs against groups of people aren't allowed here. And as you can see, this commentary adds NOTHING to your argument, but plainly marks your prejudice. Do better please.

Telemedicine would give a more accurate diagnosis than this, since there would actually be some interaction with the patient.

Storms need energy to build. In this case, studying some science would help your brain... storm.

Is this macho loner stuff, or are you also talking about homesteading off-grid?

Ethanol has problems, mostly because it involves hideous amounts of synthetic fertilizers and herbicides. Also, any cornfields that aren't producing food to eat means there are people somewhere down the line who die from starvation. We've tracked this for years. Ethanol isn't magic.

! Moderator Note Thread closed.

It does none of these things. What it does is give you a way to claim you know more than people who've studied this their entire lives. It gives you the ability to sit on the fence about any bit of science you refuse to study rigorously. It gives you an excuse to claim the giants who went before you don't have broad enough shoulders to stand on. It gives you an unearned reason to question without understanding. You'll probably just keep throwing things at the wall, hoping something sticks, wasting the time you might have spent studying more than popular science on the internet. You have a good mind, you should at least try to formally study the knowledge humans have accumulated over centuries.

ImplicitDemands has been banned. We discuss science, and they need to seek answers elsewhere, for the sake of everybody's health.

Mass measures how much matter is in an object, while weight measures how gravity affects the mass. Gravity gives the same mass a different weight on planets with differing gravity.

My apologies, I thought others had persuaded you that your definitions were non-standard and ill-conceived.

That's when the sun burns up most of its hydrogen. Long before it does that, it will be so bright with energy that Earth will dry out. Earth and Mars might even survive as planets as the sun goes red giant, but they'll be dry rocks, and they won't be habitable.

But you said that intelligence might be the defining line between living and non-living. Then you double-down right afterwards: As others have said, if you're claiming that plants have intelligence, you've broadened the definition so far that it's now useless. No definition of life I've come across would exclude plants, and no definition of intelligence would include them. I have noted before that life is generally better at absorbing and dissipating energy from the sun than inorganic matter is. That's mostly due to movement, not whether they have a brain or mind.

You mad the claim that intelligence "may be the defining line between non-living and living". I took that to mean... well, what you wrote:

You have the kinds of fears that are helped by education. You don't have the kind of education to help you know what you don't know. Your gut tells you something is wrong, but it doesn't tell you that you're the problem, that it's wrong to make things up to fill the gaps in your knowledge. If you want to pursue your WAGs, there are plenty of discussion forums for you, but not here. The problem with them is that everyone is like you, convinced they've solved a problem science doesn't really have, so they tend not to really listen to other people's WAGs. If you want to pursue science, I suggest you take some science courses so the discussions here make more sense to you. You're not dumb, you can lean this stuff, but it's not always intuitive. You have to stick with it to see the predictive power of the methodology. You can't give up and start making up things that make more sense to you in your ignorance.

So sorry for all those unintelligent plants and organisms that just lost their "live" status. It breaks the heart!