Delta1212

A 10 question multiple choice test might just be gradable in 10 seconds. Anything longer or more complicated is going to take considerably longer. Also, 30 children in the entire school? In the entire grade? In a class?

Huh, today I learned that if you deal out an entire deck in one go, cutting the cards has absolutely no effect on what hands that deck will deal out, only on who gets which hand.

Yes, but the size that determines whether or not it can pass through things is... wavelength.

That is a common misconception. It is not. Also, attempting to define the smallest possible measurable distance/volume is literally the definition of trying to quantize space.

The 2D surface of the balloon isn't expanding into anything. It is just getting larger. Same goes for 3D expansion.

Yes, given the conversation so far, I guess that would be important to specify.

If space is infinite, it has always been infinite. That infinite space just used to be more dense than it is now.

Light travels at c in a vacuum. Through a medium, the propagation speed slows down.

If you're descended from your grandparents, why do you have cousins?

Two things: North Korea's ballistic missile program is not new information. They've been working on it for years. Their recent test has gone about as well as all previous tests. Second, their long range missile technology is not the concern. North Korea shares a border with South Korea. South Korea's capital is only 35 miles from the DMZ. That puts it just about in range of conventional artillery and at serious risk from a military incursion, which would certainly be an issue because North Korea has one of the largest militaries in the world in terms of raw numbers, behind only China, India and the United States. They are also all present on the Korean Peninsula rather than spread across the globe. It's exceptionally unlikely that North Korea could actually win a regional war if it came down to it, but it would hurt, and hurt badly. Their entire culture is built around a siege mentality preparing for invasion by a hostle world. This is not a group you are going to be able to just roll over if it comes to blows.

If your logica chain of reasoning is contradicted by experimental evidence then your axioms are wrong.

And yet it contracts.

Who said space has solidity? Why does space need to be solid for distances to change?

If Alan measures the distance before he leaves while at rest with respect to points A and B, and then measures the distance between A and B again while in transit, he will discover that his second measurement, taken while moving with respect to the two points, will be shorter than the first measurement that he took.

What evidence is there for such a static background?

Because it's a science forum and your way isn't science?

Yes, the long and short of it is that observers in different frames will agree on neither the total elapsed time nor the distance travelled during that time. It winds up balancing out to give the same speed for light no matter what frame you are observing it from.

Time is generally considered to be a dimension. Spacetime consists of three spatial dimensions and one temporal dimension. So that's not a case of our idea of dimensions being wrong. That is, in fact, our idea of how dimensions work in the context of spacetime. That's why it's called spacetime.

There are two things at play. One is the debt, which is how much overall the government has spent beyond its revenue in total. The other is the deficit, which is how much we add to the debt each year. Generally, what you want to do when the economy is strong is decrease spending and raise taxes in order to pay down the debt, giving you the flexibility to then lower taxes and increase spending when the economy is flagging or crashing in order to spur growth. This helps to even out the boom-bust cycle and spur consistent growth. What has happened over the last twenty years instead, is as follows: Under the Clinton years, the economy was fairly strong and in some years ran a surplus, which is what you want to be doing. When Bush II took over, he reasoned that running a surplus meant that we were taking money we didn't need from our citizens and proposed a series of tax cuts. At the same time, he opened up two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq without arranging any way to pay for them. In essence, he charged them to the national credit card pretty much in full. Those two things took that surplus and turned it into a very large debt. Then the end of Bush's term rolled around and the economy crashed. This left Obama in the position of needing to drastically increase spending in order to prop up the economy and keep it from failing all together. Unfortunatelt, part of that process is that we should have been building that cushion in the preceding years when the economy was doing well, but we hadn't been. Just chugging along at normal, we were already running a pretty sizable deficit. Adding in the cost of the spending required to deal with the crisis ballooned the deficit to record levels. However, in the time since that initial spike, pretty much year over year, spending has come down as the economy has recovered and the deficit has been pretty consistently shrinking. Keep in mind that this is still a deficit, so we're still adding to the debt, but we've been adding less and less each year. Now, once again, the economy is in pretty good shape. The unemployment rate is way down. A lot of people are still feeling the after effects of the Recession, but moving forward we're looking to be in a pretty strong position overall. This is the time we should be thinking about how to build up that cushion for the next time the economy trips. Instead, Trump is talking about, like Bush II, cutting taxes, a move that will almost certainly push the deficit back up again, and he isn't even starting from a balanced budget this time the way W was. The rhetoric surrounding this is that it doesn't matter because the tax cuts will spur economic growth which will increase GDP and therefore raise revenue in the long term. This is predicated on something called the Laffer Curve. It is the idea that, tax rates above a certain threshold cut into income enough that putting in additional effort to increase one's income is no longer worth, so people make less money and revenue actually falls with increasing taxes. You can see the logic of you imagine a tax rate of 100%. Who is going to bother working at all if they don't actually get paid anything because the whole check goes to the government. The problem lies in where on the curve revenue actually starts to fall. The empirical evidence, such as it is, seems to point to this number being pretty high, as historically tax cuts even at the highest rates we've seen have not ultimately led to a corresponding increase in government revenue. Right now, tax rates are actually at recent historical lows. Given past performance, it is exceptionally unlikely that any tax cuts will spur economic growth to a level that will increase revenue beyond what was lost in the cut. Cutting taxes without a corresponding cut to costs will increase the deficit. Anyone who tries to tell you that a series of tax cuts will pay for themselves is selling you a bill of goods. Tax cuts are popular. Cutting government programs is not. Deficit spending is not. Telling people that you can cut taxes without cutting any programs or increasing the debt is therefore popular. It is also a lie.

Well, so far he has struggled to make much progress with really any of his legislative agenda, which significantly restricts the number of actions that can be tied directly to him. Additionally, some of what he has done is still too young to do more than speculate on the consequences. For example, his appointment of Neil Gorsuch is pretty weighty, but until he starts ruling on things, we won't know what the real consequences that can be attributed to Trump's decision there are. That leaves us with just executive actions and things done by the members of his Cabinet to look at. One of the first things he did in office was kill the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which is a definite mixed bag of an action. In general, free trade has been a net gain for the US economy, but by sector there have certainly been winners and losers over it. There are definite costs too it, and there is a debate to be had over whether those costs are worth the gains that I think is entirely valid. In terms of diplomacy, though, TPP was a master stroke and killing it was a major fuck-up for us. China has been getting increasingly expansionist and domineering over time, and a major goal of TPP was to give the countries of the region a significant economic outlet other than China in order to allieviate the degree of pressure that China could bring to bear on its smaller neighbors if their economies relied on Chinese as the largest regional economic player. It would have brought most of East Asia into or further into the US sphere of influence, helping us cement political ties and economically boxing in China, allowing the US to essential dictate the rules that everyone in the region needs to play by in order to participate in not only the global economy but their own regional economy as well. By dropping that deal, especially at the stage it was at, we left a lot of countries swinging in the wind. That both paints us as unreliable for those looking to the US for cover from the Chinese and gives China an opening to move forward with its own plans that exclude the US instead of the other way around. They've already got their own proposal fashioned and reached out to various players from the deal in the wake of our withdrawal, including the likes of Australia and even across the Pacific to Latin American countries. We also have a number of allied countries whose leadership expended significant political capital in order to get TPP accepted in their own countries only to see it fail in the US. See, for example, Shinzo Abe of Japan. From a geo-political perspective, this is at the very least a missed opportunity to expand US influence in the region, and it could wind up being significantly worse depending on how events play out in the area over the next few years and what moves China winds up making. The handling of North Korea of late complicates that situation further. It seems like China may be growing weary of Kim Jong Un's increasing belligerence and escalating rhetoric, and Trump's actions fanning those flames may wind up putting pressure on them to finally make a decision about whether the current regime in the DPRK is worth propping up and how much action they might be willing to allow against them. That said, that's a very fine needle that must be threaded with little margin for error as North Korea is entirely capable of turning Seoul into a lake of fire even without a functional nuclear missile. Unfortunately, our handling of the situation with the aircraft carrier was major screw-up from top to bottom, and we've been roundly mocked over it by much of the region as a result, including in allied countries like South Korea and Japan. And although the screw up was of a somewhat different nature, the end result is that we're seen as bluff and bluster which is not going to help with our ability to negotiate from a position of strength when it comes to dealing with North Korea, or the Chinese themselves for that matter.

There is a difference between negativity and bias. If something is a problem, calling it a problem is not an example of bias. That said, I don't personally think that lists of general assertions are especially helpful for making a case about quality, so that's not how I would go about addressing such issues myself. I'd rather stick to addressing specific positions and issues. Considering the political environment we're in right now, having something concrete to discuss is, I think, necessary for grounding any conversation unless you want it to slip quickly into a ping pong of 'nuh-uh's.

I'd rather see this thread that the "annoying Trump" thread, frankly. I think the subject matter of that one is fairly petty. In any case, the caveat that needs to be included for anything for or against Trump posted in this thread is the typical "Trump did X, then Y happened" is a correlation not necessarily a causation, and I think some effort should be put in to draw a line linking the X to the Y more directly if we're going to discuss it. There is always a tendency to blame Presidents for things they had no control over and Trump has always been adept at taking credit for things that he didn't really have any direct impact on, so some added rigor to go over various claims is probably a good idea.

I really think the ant on the balloon is a good analogy. The balloon is expanding under its feet, and if there is another ant along the balloon, the distance the ants have to walk to get to each other along the surface increases, but they are not "pegged" to their position on the balloon. They can move around freely as the balloon continues to expand under their feet. That is essentially what happens with us and space. So it's 2, but it doesn't require anything being permanently fixed to its location.

How does she know what green and yellow are supposed to look like in order to know that she is switching them? Wouldn't she just think green was called yellow and yellow was called green?

If you are on the moon, it is not 1G. It is still 1/6G. It is only 1G when taking into account relativistic mass as observed from Earth. I know you said earlier to forget the different observers and relative velocities but you literally cannot do that.