Science Student

I must have misunderstood the point of your post. Is it world trade that you are saying will change?

Yes, that is my point.

If every country cut 10%, then the U.S. military could still have the same degree of power over each nation individually as it does today. Globally, the U.S. military would actually gain power.

I think that you took my post to mean the exact opposite of what I intended it to mean. My post was not about anyone necessarily doing anything for anyone outside of an individual and the interests of the individual's family. To reiterate in an example, imagine a selfish psychopath who we will name John. John may be very powerful, but one thing for sure is that he only cares about himself. He reads my idea on this thread. He may realize that the more he promotes and helps advance this idea the better off he will be individually, while doing "good" and helping others incidentally. He may also realize that not even money is more valuable than his life and health since he needs to be alive and healthy in order to enjoy his money. My point is that nobody can do this alone, so even the selfish who like the objective may be willing to be help this cause. Because the nature of this objective is so ambitious, it will require as many people in as many different countries to promote, support and even help advance effective medical research. I am a huge advocate for the win-win philosophy. Selflessness is good for societies but may not be good for the individual, lose-win. Selfishness may be good for the individual but bad for a society - win-lose, which we know sometimes comes back to the individual in a negative feedback loop. But a complete win-win for all individuals should simply be good for a society and the individual.

It must come down to what each person wants individually. If this idea can gain popularity, then the heads of military contractors and congress may be influenced by societal pressure and voters respectively. Or, these individuals that can make significant changes may notice that they and their families could be better off with longer and healthier lives rather than wealthy lives that don't necessarily make them happier. So it might actually make sense for them to support and even assist medical research.

I sincerely appreciate your constructive criticism. This idea relies on faith that individually we will choose the more logical priority. Energies and interests will unfortunately have to shift from other priorities. For example, even a kid reading this that agrees with me and decides to study harder, may stop paying a monthly online gaming charge. There will have to be changes. As for the quote, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions", it seems as though "good" intentions is the best thing that one can start with. If you accept that, then it's whether or not you stay true to the "good" intentions as the philosophy materializes. Moreover, we have become jaded from all of the times we were fooled by the ones who used such expressions but certainly had ulterior motives. This dilutes our trust but should not dilute intensions that really are "good".

That is why I put "in wars".

My point was that the bigger the armies the more people that have to die in wars and the more money wasted, on both sides. So if every country had a smaller army, then there would seem to be less devastation in a war. And the 10% cuts wouldn't necessarily have to be on humanitarian efforts.

Militaries kill, and medicine saves. I can't think of one other thing that is further from advancing health care than diminishing war efforts. I also can't think of anything that I would like to see less of than militaries, but only on an even keel as I still try to be a realist as much as possible.

Okay, I partly agree with you. So maybe we could index the percentage to the GDP per capita of a country using a certain formula that is fair enough for countries to agree on.

I don't necessarily agree. How do you know that a decrease in total spending is not roughly proportional to the overall "strength" of a military? I would even argue that money spent on a military does not always equate to military ability as past wars have shown.

But if they allocated the same percentage to medical research, then no country is necessarily any better or worse off militarily.

Thank-you everyone for the good feedback. Now I wonder how to get this ball rolling. It seems possible because it's not just the health and lives of us that depend on it but also the health and lives of the people and the loved ones of the people in the positions to make this change.

The Ted talk explains that the very poor and unhealthy nations are the ones with the highest birthrates. There might be a negative feedback loop to decrease the world population by advancing medical technologies and providing them to the poorest nations. In other words, the more we advance medical technologies the less people that will be born to shift the focus off of medical advances. There is more than enough food to feed the world many times over. For whatever reason, we all want new cars with the unnecessary options instead of saving lives. I like to think that we choose these luxuries because we think that life is short, and we might as well be as happy as we can be during our short lives. But what if we don't have to see an end to our lives? Could this possibly change our greedy nature - just a little?

This would be nice, but it won't happen until we can show them something worth turning down money, power, fame, etc. Their own control over their own mortality should logically be more important to them. Convincing them that their own existences are in their own control if they can just change the priorities of their pharmaceutical companies, countries' powers, personal interests, etc. It would even be in the interests of the most powerful people. We all have two things in common: the will to live and to be healthy while alive (except for some bizarre cases). If you really want to understand why this isn't a problem, then watch http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/01-demographic-challenges-21st-century-video . But if you don't have time to watch the lecture and can trust me, here are the points of the lecture that I think will at least partly address your issues. World populations are starting to decelerate and are expected to start to decline by 2100. Africa is the only reason why the world population isn't expected to decline much sooner. - It is not our responsibility to save them if places like Uganda continue to average 6 births per female. They are making this decision. Regarding clean water, I do not have an answer for you because I am not really even sure why we can't just purify our own water. I mean, technology on the ISS can actually purify urine that the astronauts can re-drink. Regarding pollution, if we don't tackle the pollution problem better than we are, what's the difference if we save the world another 20 years of deteriorating environmental conditions with an impending end to the world. Either way we have no choice if we want to help humanity's chances for survival.

They would be self-supporting and would provide more knowledge and experience for societies. Here's an example; what if Steve Jobs, Einstein, Feynman, Cantor, etc. (if you can agree that they helped society) were all still alive and mentally healthy? My father is a typical baby-boomer. His engineering firm offers him wages 3 to 5 times higher than people with less experience. I am that his profit-driven employer must have good reasons why. Also, better medicine might be cheaper than what the health services will have to do to keep unhealthy people alive. One more point, I don't want us to just die off for the coming generations. That does not make sense to me since they are not alive yet. We could promote longevity with a counter balance of promoting the minimization of population growth.

Imagine that we could feel good into the 100's or possibly longer. Imagine how good this would be for society if the elders felt good enough to work using the knowledge and experience that they have. And if all nations agree, then no nation will become relatively weaker. Please criticize constructively.

Thankfully, our professor made us do this in the beginning of the year so that we don't have to do it anymore. a < b, a + a < b + a, a + b < b + b, therefore a + a < b + b etc. I think that I know what you mean now. Never mind what I put above. Oh, I see. My professor seems to give us answers mine, but he explains it in further detail in words after, which is what I didn't do. Thanks again.

Ohhhh, so I did step 3 backwards? Don't worry about responding if the answer is yes. And - thank-you - in advance.

Here's my attempt at the answer to the following question: Question: Use induction to prove that 3^n > n x 2^n for every natural number n ≥ 3 Answer: Step 1: 3^3 > 3 x 2^3 ⇒ 27 > 24 Step 2: Assume 3^k > k x 2^k Step 3: 3^(k+1) > (k+1) x 2^(k+1) ⇒ 3 x 3^k > k x 2^(k+1) + 2^(k+1) ⇒ 3^k + 3^k + 3^k > k x 2^k + k x 2^k + 2^k + 2^k. So am I allowed to use the assumption as a given to make the green and red parts of the inequality true? And am allowed to just plug in the base k value that would show the black parts of the inequality to be true? Another thing that I don't understand about induction is why we have to assume that the inequality in the question is true for k. If k can only be the base case in the beginning, then why do we have to assume that it works for some k when we just showed that it works when k is the base case?

I have no problem knowing how to find the right sig-digs when just doing one of: adding, subtracting, multiplying or dividing. But, I know doing them all at once in more complicated equations gets trickier. For example, something like 110.0 + (500434.0 - 34.0)/0.37 This is my thought process for finding sig-digs when addition/subtraction is combined with multiplication/division. The answer may be correct by luck, but I know that this is not the right way to come up with the correct number of sig-digs. 110.0 + (500434.0 - 34.0)/0.37 = 110.0 + 500434.0/0.37 = 110.0 + 1.4*10^6 (I make 500434/0.37 equal 2 sig digs because the denominator only has 2 sig-digs.) = 1.4001100*10^6 (Then I increase the sig-digs by 5 because I am adding 110.0.) I know this process is wrong because my professor tried to explain to me that there is an intermediate step that I am missing. I can't grasp what it is though.