Delta1212

Now I'm wondering which countries those would actually be.

The average American pays 22.5%~ in taxes if you include state and local taxes which this flat tax does not. Those add up to between 9% and 10% on average. So you need to take that 20.5% flat tax rate and add 9% to it. Bringing the total up from 22%-23% for the average American to nearly 30%. That is not a tax break for anyone and would be a disproportionately large increase on the bottom tax brackets.

The most important thing is always how willing a person is to learn, not how much they have already learned.

It could not. A black hole must be a black hole in all frames. If it isn't a black hole at rest, it cannot be a black hole in a frame moving very quickly with respect to it.

I assumed Mordred was talking about relativistic mass, which is not the same thing as rest mass in terms of how it interacts with gravity.

Noting also that which object is moving will depend on which frame you are in. If you are sitting on one of the objects traveling with it, you always calculate as if it is at rest.

Yeah, I was hoping merely asking the question would help.

In Case 2, the planetoid isn't moving at 0.5c then. The Earth is.

Is the planetoid traveling at 0.5c or is the Earth?

Is the planetoid traveling at 0.5c or is it at rest, and it is the Earth that is traveling at 0.5c?

Yeah, it seems like it would be more likely that hormonal changes in the womb could lead to both an increase in the likelihood of being gay and also an increased chance of premature a birth.

Why is this gut sense different from the lottery one?

What about all the whites that populate non-white land as is the case with most of North America?

There are a few issues with a flat tax like this, but let's tackle the big one first: A minimum wage job worked 40 hours per week every week gives you a total annual income of $15,080. The federal poverty level is $12,060 a year. If you tax $15,080 at 20.5%, your net income falls to $11,988.60. Taxing someone on minimum wage at that rate puts them under the federal poverty line even if they work full time. Also, people's money generally gets spent in order of certain priorities. There are always people who are dumb with their money, but we're going to look at how this affects even people who are responsible. People generally tackle very basic needs like food and shelter first. Then then you get into things like transportation costs for work, and basic necessities for hygiene and clothing. Once all of the basic needs are met, then you can start saving for things, and putting some money towards basic entertainment. Even if it's just an Internet connection, which may also be considered a semi-necessity in the modern age. Then once that is covered and people are able to save they can start thinking about vacations, luxuries and investments. Those groupings divide people into tiers based on how far along that chain of priorities their income stretches. Different people can stretch the same amount of money to different levels, but there are limits for even the most frugal. Money taken from the top tier might decrease their vacation budget. Money from the tier below that may mean post-poning their retirement. Money from the tier below that may mean they have to walk to work or can't get their at all, and money from the bottom tier may mean they don't eat or lose their home. What the same chunk of income represents to each group is very different. You don't want to tax the food out of anyone's mouth. Ideally, the best bucket of anyone's income to take money from is the luxury bucket. If you tax everyone at the exact same rate, you are failing to take into account the fact that one person may be capable of putting 50% of their income into the luxury bucket, while another person may have no money at all for the luxury bucket. For the first person, losing 20% of their income is barely felt. For the latter person, 20% of their income being taken away may very well be crippling on a day to day basis. A progressive tax rate allows for taxes to be taken from each bracket based on how much of a groups income likely falls in that disposable bucket. A flat tax shifts the burden so that the tax rate creates greater hardship at the bottom in order to lower the amount that the top bracket has to pay out of their vacation fund in order to achieve a balanced budget.

Theories are almost all mathematical models of some sort. In science "just a theory" does not make sense. Theories are the best, most finely detailed explanations of how things work. They are not guesses or conjectures or ideas that someone had. The correct language to express a theory in is math. If you do not wish to express it in mathematical terms, then it is not really a theory. It is an idea that you have. That is something else entirely.

Sure. Kinetic energy from footfalls, heat energy from friction.

I'd say Cyanobacteria did more to fundamentally change the world than humans have so far.

Fun fact: The universe seems like its billions of years old, but it was just created to look that way. In reality, it's entire lifespan from start to finish will only be 30 seconds in duration. Time's almost up.

Because I don't believe in "It's too obvious for a citation" here is a citation: http://www.people-press.org/2016/09/13/2-party-affiliation-among-voters-1992-2016/ Republicans win whites overall and white men by a lot. They also win white evangelical Protestants, white mainline Protestants, Mormons and white Catholics. They also win whites over 35. They are approximately tied (within a point or two) with Democrats for white women, Catholics, and white Millenials. Democrats win with women overall, blacks, black Protestants, Hispanics, Hispanic Catholics, non-whites over every age cohort, Jewish voters and the religiously unaffiliated.

I'm still not entirely clear on what you think sticking a mirror in the experiment actually does that's different from how it typically works.

Anything that oxidizes, really. You're replacing the heat source for ignition with psychically slamming the atoms together, essentially.

Nothing is "intended" for anything.

Because the escalator example was used to illustrate the principle of local speed limits vs separation rate. It's not a good analogy for every aspect of expansion. In this case, the critical point is that space is expanding per unit of distance. So, to put it in manageable terms: After X amount of time, every mile gains an inch. Someone who is one mile away will then recede at a rate of 1 inch per X. Someone two miles away at 2 inches per X. Three miles at 3 inches per X. And so on. The farther away you get from something, the faster you will move away from it. There is more space between you to expand, and so you get a larger amount of distance between you being added due to expansion in the same amount of time. Eventually you get so far away that, as explained above, the distance is increasing faster than the light is traversing that distance. Like a train with track being laid in front of it faster than the train is moving, it will never be able to reach the end of the line.

Have you ever been on one of those moving walkways that are basically like flat escalators that they have in some places, especially airports? So let's imagine a top running speed of 30 mph. Absolutely no one can get any faster than that no matter how hard they try to run. Now let's imagine you try sprinting down one of those moving walkways. You still can't run any faster, but as the walkway carries you along with it, you could certainly recede from someone standing at one end of the walkway faster than your top running speed wild take you. The speed at which you can run around on that walkway still has the same limit it always has had. You may now move away from someone at one end of the walkway at 45 mph, but you still can't run at 45 mph. You're still capped at your normal sprinting rate compared to someone riding along next to you. Similarly, the speed at which anything can move through local space is still capped at c. However, the region of Spaxe you are moving through is growing more distance from the region of space on the opposite end of the universe because of the metric expansion of space. As they become more distance, the space may "carry you along" so that you recede from the other end of the universe faster than the speed of light. You still can't move any faster than normal through space, but the space you are moving through is not restricted to the same speed limit, so to speak.

Why be so opaque and not just call it rock oil?