Phi for All

The "animals" are making the private prison industry in the US a TON of money: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/who-has-most-to-gain-from-trumps-immigration-policies-private-prisons/2018/06/29/4ae9c6a8-7a4d-11e8-aeee-4d04c8ac6158_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.6c2b3eda9693

No, this is a misuse of the term "logic". Blame Star Trek writers for that one, but the correct term is rational, or reasoned, or critically thought out. Pop-sci "logic" has sloppily and subjectively come to mean "Oh, that makes sense to me!", which is just about the opposite of mathematical or philosophical logic.

This is part of an extremist capitalist tactic I've been noticing for some time now. Ignore things until they get really bad, then supply the overpriced experts to overcharge to fix it in a way that means when the job is done, it will be time to do it over again.

Discussion should still be explored. Please start your topics in the most appropriate places, and as StringJunky says, we may later decide to group those discussions more specifically along the lines you suggest.

Koti explains it better than I did: Unobservability can take a few forms. Hiding in places mortals can't go is the same as invisibility. Ditto waiting until a prophesied time to reappear. It just struck me, can a god be omnipotent if it can't show itself to its followers without destroying the basis of their faith?

! Moderator Note Moved from Modern and Theoretical Physics (which are completely absent) to Speculations. You need to support your concepts with evidence. And please use paragraphs in the future.

! 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.

If they're as smart as I think they are, they'll realize they can make even more money if more people are capable of buying what they sell. If they fight too hard, the blowback could be much worse for them. I'm guessing the extremist money/power addicts are always going to scream about any tax or regulation, but if the People wake up angry, the addicts could be looking at Eisenhower-era graduated taxes instead of a modern compromise. We just have to make it more costly for them to stay with the present economic environment. IOW, if they want to fight the People, bring it on. We don't need violence to maintain our anger over the lack of representative leadership.

Swamp coolers are more about moving air than about temperature. Heating and air conditioning are all about affecting BTUs, but swamp coolers are all about air movement and units of cubic feet per minute. Without a proper blower, you're just adding humidity. And as I mentioned, many places with a swamp cooler make the mistake of closing the windows. Edit to add: A high volume fan would be a bad thing for a snooker hall. Not everyone appreciates a cool breeze on their balls.

Evaporative coolers aren't as efficient when the humidity gets past 50%. Remember, the air cools as the water in it evaporates, so in high humidity there's more water and less evaporation going on. The air coming out of the unit would be the same temperature as the air coming in without evaporation.

The key to a swamp cooler is to keep the windows open so you get constant moving air, pretty much the opposite of what you do with regular AC. And if you couldn't feel the cooler air movement in your snooker hall, their fan wasn't big enough. You're right about the overall humidity, but the breeze should feel even cooler against your skin. I grew up with a swamp cooler that would practically knock you down if you stood in the upstairs hall where the fan came in.

But you were talking about how there are folks who don't need it. How big a group is the folks who don't need it who also don't pay taxes? For me at least, the ultimate goals in a program like this are to raise everybody up a bit economically, like the rising tide analogy, and also to make sure more people have a fair chance at overcoming the circumstances of their birth and arm them with as much skill and information as their potential allows. There will be those who don't spend this income well. There will be those who will thrive solely because it was made available. More freedom would be made available. It's up to us to get the tax rates to be as effective as any social program we experiment with. Folks need to get a bit more fired up than they have been about this. If the people remembered they're The People, that small group of individuals would feel the pressure.

Mars has lots of possibilities as a colony planet. I though you were talking about the chances of the specific group you referred to in the OP. I don't think they're going to make it.

The concept of an unobservable creator is unfalsifiable, therefore it can't be proven or disproven (which disqualifies it from scientific methodology). What koti was showing is that his yeti who may show up tomorrow (same thing as being invisible) is equally unfalsifiable, and therefore no different from a creator who also can't be observed. The analogy is sound.

There are many private groups gearing up for colonization. Personally, I don't want any private group off-planet that doesn't represent Earth as a whole. I think we need to be very thoughtful about who we allow access to system resources. What makes this group special? Their $6B budget isn't very inspiring, and I assume it means they've removed much of the redundant system architecture that gave NASA so much flexibility when things inevitably went wrong. Also, they've claimed they'll be using SpaceX to send certain equipment, but they don't show up on SpaceX's launch schedule, and as far as I know, they have no contracts with them. These kinds of things are planned so many years in advance, I don't see how Mars One can be taken seriously. I would not invest.

... but will appreciate how it offsets at least part of the extra taxes they'll pay. Don't focus only on one side of the equation. I think most reasonable folks agree that the uber wealthy need to pay more taxes than they currently do, and it needs to be structured to make investment more attractive than sitting on mounds of cash. I'm becoming convinced that much of the money we spend poorly on corrupted social and justice processes will be more effective in the hands of people with the power to affect their own economies.

And the fact that it doesn't let us go to voicemail shows that nothing is pre-recorded.

Sorry, but I've defended the reasons why beliefs are defined by the probability of them being correct, and why I feel definitions shouldn't be as loose and unmeaningful as you've claimed. You haven't supported your arguments. All you do is repeat that if you exercise your opinion, you're allowed to bypass rigor and precision, and redefine common concepts. That's not reasonable. Other than making your faith look better, why don't you think there should be a distinction between a belief in something tangible, predictable, and observable (trustworthy), and a belief in something like a god or an "afterlife" or ghosts or other unknowable things (faith)? Do you honestly think people believe in chemical reactions the same way they believe in Zeus? Don't you think we owe it to ourselves to use more precision in the distinction?

It seems what's really needed is an ethical stance that spells out plainly and simply why we need the wealthiest to help with the poorest, while we all try to raise the quality of the circumstances that might surround any human birth. Earlier, swansont quoted the West Wing episode that mentioned applying John Rawls' veil of ignorance when devising tax strategies. One of the best parts about the veil is that you're always better informed when you take it off, and hopefully your perspective is broadened as well. Bender mentioned an experiment with BUI in Namibia, and they experienced a 36.5% drop in crime. Saving a third of the costs for police, prosecution, courts, probation, and incarceration definitely helps pay for BUI. If we stop using business models to grow our prison system, more productive people could join the workforce, or even create their own jobs. Businesses will eventually require less to be spent on security as well, if crime drops as it did in other places.

Oh yes, you do. I have no idea what your last post was about. Was that preaching?

They have to keep a tight leash on immortal programmers.

I want you to know my opinion is based on the thousands of fake accounts created by the Russians claiming to be UK or US citizens, spreading fake stories that made hundreds of thousands of people feel like their fellow citizens were rallying behind a cause. It's one thing to spread rumors that Hillary eats babies spread on toast, or that the EU will be kicking back millions for healthcare, and quite another to pose as a fellow citizen with supposed first-hand stories of foreigner rapists and rabid packs of immigrants gypsying off with our children.

You're using one of the most profound upgrades to human intelligence, the computer, to access another of the most profound upgrades to information processing, the internet. You're SO much better informed than humans just half a century ago. It's weird all right. So weird it probably isn't true. You're making a sort of composition fallacy, in thinking that because we don't know everything about a subject we don't know anything about it. I look at the brain the same way I look at the observable universe. We know what we can observe, and that tells us there is an awful lot out there to know, so much so that it will almost always look like we've just scratched the surface. It's not really that weird, but it's clear you've stitched your science knowledge together from popular sources, rather than investing in a more mainstream course of study, and that means you're missing some basic science foundations. We aren't in the stone age about anything, and neither are we reaching into the future. Many advancements come along before their time, and need other technologies to become more sophisticated. We'd have long ago switched to solar if we had better battery tech, and even the first steam engine had nothing it could propel, so it just spun in place without doing any work, a novelty at best. I don't know what to say. You think it's all dumb, and human intelligence is limited. I think it's amazing, and humans are the only known species to figure out the power to leave their planet of origin. Life spreading life across the universe is hardly pointless, and would seem to be perfectly in line with evolutionary pressures. I guess I disagree with you and your philosophy completely.

On the other hand, if properly motivated, maybe PayPal can fix the "this breach not capable of remedy" part. "Dear Deceased PayPal Client, If we can bring you back to life, would you be willing to continue making your payments in a timely manner?"

I have to disagree here. I think Russian influence made the difference in both the Brexit vote and the US presidential election. Both were just that close, and whether or not the feelings were present is immaterial. Those feelings were exploited by Putin's troll farms and pro-authoritarian/anti-immigrant media campaigns with the intent to disrupt and skew. I don't think the UK would have voted to leave the EU, and the US wouldn't have elected Trump, without the Russian involvement. When a bad actor knows just the right buttons to push to goad someone into a fight, and they do it and a riot ensues, we hold them responsible for incitement, right?