Phi for All

A "ripoff" is a cheat, a scam. California, Ripoffornia. I'm guessing somebody had to pay for an autograph.

I thought it was a big mistake letting the utilities fall under private management. Our Public Service of Colorado grew just fine, matching the population and providing electricity and natural gas at affordable, not-for-profit rates to heat and light the homes of our citizens. Prices went up 40% in the first two years after privatization, and increase as often as they can talk CPUC into it. They've never matched the quality of service for the price that our publicly owned utilities had. A good example where using public funds benefits everyone, rather than the already wealthy. Another Reagan legacy, creating mentally ill homeless people. This sort of mismanagement causes untold costs down the line, which I'm sure exceeds the cost of caring for them. More weirdness from the right, let's stop paying to take care of the crazies (ironic, no?), and instead we'll pay for emergency room visits, police intervention, crime, costs to the legal system, etc. If you have a candidate who's racist, it's doubtful they're going to think much differently about the mentally ill. These are the people we can't get to STOP using the word "retard" to dismiss them. These folks tend to assume somebody in charge is just going to sweep that problem under a rug so they don't have to spend much time being guilty about it. As far as bureaucratic efficiency goes, for me it boils down very simply. If you're Medicare, you get to focus on paying claims and keeping people healthy. If you're United Healthcare, you have to focus on the extra 20% or so you have to charge as profit for your company, so your stockholders and C-suite executives are happy, and only then can you really think about the people you're being paid to keep healthy. When our social programs are funded well, and oversight is by people invested ideologically in those programs, they can be enormously efficient.

For me, capitalism/business is about profit. If I want a venture to grow, I apply a business model. It works very well. But there are some things that people need when they increase population density, like police and fire protection, hospitals because we're more susceptible in greater numbers to disease, roads to get us where we need to be. In these cases, I think it's smarter to use public funds where profit shouldn't be the goal. The goal is having smart, healthy citizens who add to the society in every way. I think it's inhuman to keep people ignorant, poor, and unproductive, and then hate them for it. Not when we can afford to educate everyone as much as we possibly can, so the whole society benefits from a lack of ignorance. I try to keep an eye out for mistakes in business. How smart is it to use business models with our prison system, when we'd rather have fewer criminals? This is the kind of socialism I embrace. Where the People have basic advantages for being productive citizens, and there's no foot on their neck because they were born into below average circumstances.

My goal with this discussion is to dispel the misunderstandings so many conservatives in the US have about any kind of socialism, if they'll bother to read. Rush Limbaugh has them equating it with communism, no matter what form it takes. So how would you express the US social democracy in a less lousy form? One suggestion I liked from another thread is to stop running appropriations for our social programs through the Dept of Defense. That sounds reasonable, not having all those defense contractors swaying votes on what happens to a widowed mother of three.

It had to take a LOT of spin to convince conservatives that a company's profits were more important than making safe products. You'd think that consumer goods NOT hurting people would be in that emotional, fear-wracked wheelhouse they're so proud of. More Republican insanity. It's OK to make children sick as long as the profit is good.

But I gave some parameters, and I did ask for your subjective take on it. I thought it was clear I didn't want to talk in broad terms. Maybe I should change the title? This is why I wanted a discussion. My version of socialism seems to be right in line with a majority of the population, but like you, many seem to be convinced it could never work. I was hoping you could at least tell me why you think it can't work in the US. What makes the socialism in your head unworkable? What could be changed about socialism to make it work in the US? Why do you think the level of socialism we already have is all we can handle?

I started a thread on Socialism here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism What does Socialism mean to you? What are it's strengths and weaknesses? In the US, we're being exposed to the Sanders campaign as a liberal socialist candidate, yet elsewhere he's barely on the left side of the scale. Is Sander's brand of socialism a good step in the right direction, or does he go too far for the US, or not far enough for everyone else?

This probably scales with how much of an impulsive, ignorant loudmouth you are. If you're above 80% on the obnoxious scale (and I'm not saying you are), I think sitting quietly would allow for a pretty deep personality transformation. As long as you remembered how grateful everyone was when you were quiet, it could be long term. If you don't have an obnoxious personality, "deep personality transformation" is a bit vague. What is it you're doing/not doing now that makes you want to meditate, and what exactly do you want to transform into? Are you talking about something like being very nervous around more than one person, and meditation might help you relax in situations with lots of people around? Or are we talking about something else, where you go from being a wallflower to the life of the party? Librarian to stand-up comic, like that? I don't see the harm in meditating to relax, clear your mind, and slow life down for a bit. I don't think it will "transform" you by itself. Maybe as part of a process?

Guess what? You get to hide too, since Nixon took all the bad things associated with the Dems back then, and made them all Republican. It's your history now, and you've done a great job in beefing up all the bad. Such a nice sound byte you've found to dismiss a whole movement. It encapsulates all the ignorance and lack of critical thinking I've come to associate with emotionally-driven pseudo-sociopaths who don't think humans deserve more than just the right to work when they choose to live in such close quarters. You obviously like our socialist/serfdom police and fire departments, probably use the healthcare we've got (since you get disease when you put so many people together in societal environments). You drive the serfdom/socialist roads, use goods that come in via serfdom/socialist ports, and enjoy government incentives to grow your economic base, all in exchange for taxes that you think are unfair because they sometimes help people who aren't like you. I think Trump represents you pretty well.

Always amazing how you think the Dems haven't changed since the Civil War, like the name is the important thing, that once named a Democrat you're a part of everything the party has ever done. You crack me up. Equally amazing is how far off the mark you always are when it comes to your interpretations of what others say. You misrepresent anyone who isn't like you, and force them into the nice box you made for them LOOOOOONG ago. You are a really good representation of what liberals think is wrong with your party. You're going to be voting for Trump, despite the fact that we can tell he makes your skin crawl. I think that says it all.

! Moderator Note This link takes us to this discussion. Please fix it.

I always thought it was a much stronger argument to base your morals on what is right, rather than how badly you'll be punished if you do wrong. I asked a religious friend once if his god didn't exist, would he feel free to do bad things, and he said of course not, in the end it's about doing the right thing because it's the right thing. I told him that's exactly the way I felt, I just didn't need to remove god from the equation. He wasn't there to begin with.

In the US, testimony you give to the police can NEVER help you. It can only be used AGAINST you. If your lawyer tried to put the police on the stand at your trial, to corroborate something you told them, the prosecutor can have it thrown out as hearsay. If they need to use it against you, however, your testimony to the police is ironclad. People who exercise their right to silence, and get a lawyer to speak for them, are usually the ones who's cases are dropped, or who win their cases. People who tell all because they have nothing to hide often go to jail because they're the only ones who talked.

Enough so that they don't listen when anyone points out that Trump's "tax plan" deficit spends three times what W deficit spent. Even though balancing the budget has been an ultra conservative talking point for years, they don't propose to do it in a responsible way. Let's keep all the stuff that makes rich folks richer, and just cut the social stuff the rich never get involved with. I wonder if they've thought about how much more money Drumpf will want when he finds out Mexico doesn't have to pay for his wall?

They're the car-racing, beach-bunnying, tax-dodging, gambling branch of the Vatican.

! Moderator Note Ta-da! And we're done here. No more threads like this, PLEASE. This was 5 pages of people telling you what you finally posted here.

Pick a small country, and there should be fewer religious people. Vatican City is the smallest country... OK, how about Monaco? I doubt the millionaires who make up the country's population allow much door-to-door Bible-thumping.

! Moderator Note Please save this type of speculations for the appropriate section. There is a difference between "This is my assessment, am I right?" and "Do they lose mass at an equal rate?" The leap at conclusions/assessments is NOT rigorous enough for Relativity. Please stop forcing speculation into this discussion. A little bit more effort is all it takes to change your "assessments" into legitimate inquiry. Please take this on board. And resist the urge to respond off-topic to this modnote.

We have a Speculations section. You aren't the only person reading this thread, and many of those are students looking for the best, mainstream answers so they can pass school. They aren't looking for guesses, so we keep mainstream mainstream. Now you don't fail, hopefully, and neither do the students.

! Moderator Note Not our job. We're a science discussion forum, not an advertising platform. The rules you agreed to spell that out pretty nicely.

! Moderator Note STOP interjecting your own made up ideas into mainstream threads. When someone is trying to determine our best current explanation, we don't need unsupported guesses, we need evidence and science. You've been told this many times before, so have a warning point too. Do NOT respond to this action in thread. Report it if you object. That's what someone else did to your post.

The hypercube doesn't have to be moving. It's not related to time until you assign that coordinate (a place on a map only needs 3 dimensions to tell you where; time will tell you when something happens at that place). And you don't really "place" something into any dimension. Dimensions aren't places, they're part of the information you need in order to know where and when anything is. Weird, I know. Here's something to think about. Living in 3 dimensions (even though we only see in 2D), we're able to look at a 2D object and see anything inside it (imagine a square, with 3 circles inside it). So technically, if someone could see in 4D, they could look at us 3Ders and see our insides!

! Moderator Note Four more pages on this topic, and all agree that analogies have limited but definable use in science. Beyond that, we risk stretching the point into unrecognizableness. Arguing further about this doesn't seem productive. Beyond the above, subjectivity increases and spoils any efficacy you might realize. Please don't bring this up again, MSC, it's not a discussion we need so many pages about.

It's a coordinate system for determining any spot, both physically and temporally (x, y, & z coordinates to pinpoint the spot in space, and t to let you know when to be there). I had it explained this way. 1D is a line, and if you take every point on that line and move 90 degrees, you have 2D, length and width, in this case in a flat square. Now take every point on that square and move 90 degrees from that, and you'll have a 3D cube. NOW, take every point on that cube and move 90 degrees, and you'll have a 4D hypercube. That's the one that's difficult to grasp. How do you move 90 degrees from every side of a cube?! The rest (including the 4th spatial dimension) are part of different theories, which is the way all science works. When you say something is theoretical rather than fact, you're misusing the term "theory". Theory is the best you can get in science. Theoretical doesn't mean "unsupported guess". Science doesn't try to "prove facts". It's all about the evidence that supports a concept, and a theory is a model of how we're explaining reality.