@rbar I didn't call you a socialist, I don't know you that well! It was about your portrayal of capitalism. Also, I apologize for referring to free market capitalism, subject of this topic, as just "capitalism", that caused understandable confusion. I completely agree with you that some of those "isms" fall under a broader definition of capitalism, as they're social orders dependent on private property rights. Those who advocate free markets like me, however, really tend to consider free market capitalism as the only real one, while variations are just "less capitalistic" or not capitalism at all.

Any economic system is as cooperative as the next? Hmm... I don't know, rbar. Would you say there's as much cooperation inside North Korea as there is in South Korea? The old East and West Germanies? Surely any country with a lesser economy enjoys much less cooperation of their citizens among themselves (or with other countries) than a country where policy favors economic growth, no? Very common in North Korea, the "do what I tell or you'll starve in a concentration camp" approach, just isn't my favorite definition of cooperation. Coincidence or not, their economy is shit.

You raise a very important issue of limited resources, that wikipedia article on Capitalism explains better than I ever could, that counter-arguments to "those criticisms of the depletion of finite natural resources consists of the economic Law of Diminishing Returns, opportunity cost, and scarcity in economics". Interesting stuff.

My issue is with you portrayal of capitalism as ever-increasing competitiveness, because it's kind of biased and overlooks the abundance of cooperation. Imagine looking at a crowded night club and describing it simplistically as "a bunch of people struggling for the attention of the opposite sex". Seems pretty accurate if one hates night clubs. There is competition going on, specially for the most popular people, but what about all the other people enjoying each other's company over drinks, talking, flirting, and laughing, couples making out and enjoying the music on the dance floor? Who would describe those activities as purely competitive?

There is a lot of supply and demand in a capitalistic economy, not trying to sound like an economist, but competition is proportional to the difference between supply and demand. So what about where supply is meeting demand, should we just overlook the huge amount of cooperation happening there?

I find it amusing that you ask "What? What policy?", then, at the end of the same paragraph, write "The way the bailout happened is ... utter crap, but that is a different story all together." No, it's not a different story, the bailouts are government/central bank policy, partly the answer to your important question. Stepping in and handing out money to bankers who should have been punished by their excessive risk-taking with bankruptcy, is the exact opposite of letting free markets work.

To try to answer your persistent request for examples of free markets, if you didn't realize it yet, free markets are not very compatible with central banks, institutions that have a legal monopoly over what happens to half of a country's economy (usually half of all economic transactions involve money). Now, do you know how many countries have central banks today? Except for Monaco and Andorra, all of them.

Centuries ago, there wasn't a single country in the world where people enjoyed freedom of expression. That fact could be considered an obstacle to its adoption, but never a testament to its impracticality.

yes, join the movement against stupidity.

a major obstacle in the US against the use of rationality is the dominance of the corporatocracy and the illusion of a democracy. Because of the legalized graft and the depth of political deception, change here will be slower. but it will come. the slowness to change, especially in the spectrum of climatology and planet change, may soon make the US a worldwide villain.

The principal goal of the US, as an empire, is to maintain that empire.
as a pretext, the drug war has always been a method of maintaining that empire.

corruption, climate/planet change and resource depletion will dictate the eventual collapse of that empire, along with it's stupidity.
or so the magic eight ball says

>> ^PHJF:

Lunar!?!?
Who the shit gives a shit about the moon anymore (unless it's Phobos)?!?! What is this, 1960?


If you want to go to mars, having a base on the moon is a good first step. And while a direct trip to the mars is still physically a possibility, a useful staging ground could be the moon. Water is heavy, and the discovery of polar water on the moon means you could drastically reduce takeoff weight by supplying water from the moon. Also, this is a very advanced rocket that could see use elsewhere. Most rockets don't burn in a controllable way; once you start them, they go until they run out of fuel. More over, most don't allow for thrust throttling, wide open throttle until the fuel depletes. And on top of all that, it is able to vector its thrust that is being dynamically altered to keep a relatively clean trajectory.

Another way to look at it is the moon is a good place to practice ferrying people. Might as well use your own back yard (the moon: 384,400 km away) than a distance planet (Mars: 56 million km away at the closet point) for a technology test bed.

I would argue that China's "one child" policy might have something to do with the negative effects of overpopulation, but that's a different conversation.

I really am curious as to the answer to the question: What use could we possibly have for filling the earth to carrying capacity? Not to mention the effects that reaching human capacity might have on... all the other life on earth.

It wouldn't actually take that much to accomplish something. Free access to birth control for everyone and a little bit of education could go a really long way. Even if only one in a thousand people listened or used contraception because of it, population rates would decrease dramatically.

You keep saying we're well within capacity, but problems like overfishing, the depleting oil/energy supply, the food supply, the need for arable land... these problems actually exist right now. Even with advancements, capacity is a problem right now. All the energy that we put into trying to implement the solutions to these problems could already be getting applied to making them better. Instead of trying to fix problems as they arise, we could avoid them completely and spend our time on other things.

Maybe you're right, maybe it is just hype, but I just can't help but think that the energy spent on reducing the world's population would solve many more problems, way more efficiently than just eliminating Hummers, golf courses and fast food, and then waiting three-hundred years to see if the numbers drop.

That's very true. The simple fact that because the pressure of the tire off the rim is going to be normalized with the atmospheric pressure, even if you seated the tire back on manually, you'd have a zero pressure delta between outside the tire and inside. For a tire to run properly, usually you have to have a difference of approximately 30 psi. So yea, case closed. THANKS!>> ^messenger:

That might work better, but to pressurize a tire, you need significantly more gas than just the little bit that comes out of the spray can, and it must be at ambient temperature too to count. Clearly, the only reason this inflates the tire at all is the heat. Here's a thought experiment that disproves the "stays inflated" myth:
Consider that you need to have much more gas inside the tire than outside for it to stay inflated at ambient temperature. Before lighting the gas, there's the same pressure inside and outside the tire because the two areas are contiguous. When she lights the fire, the gas inside expands rapidly, and lots of it escapes, so now, while there's a greater volume of gas inside the tire than before, this is due to a greatly reduced density, so there's actually less gas inside than before, which is why there was a vacuum. Using heat, there will always be less gas inside than before. It's not even worth experimenting. The only way something like this could work is with compressed gas, which you certainly wouldn't want to do because that would blow the tire up if it were lit on fire.
I think there are self-inflating tires already on the market that have compressed gas cartridges built in, triggered by a sensor that fixes flats by spraying a sealant inside, then lots of pressurized gas, probably CO2. They don't use fire.>> ^rottenseed:
So the limiting reactant would be the starter fluid and the air in the tire. Oxygen to be more exact. Because you want enough forces to seat the tire, but not so much it removes all of the gases from the tire, maybe they should have tried less starter fluid. If that's depleted in the reaction quickly leaving enough energy to seat the tire, but also enough oxygen left over from the reaction, you might end up with a working tire.
Somebody please double check my thought process, but I think it's definitely worth more experimentation.

That might work better, but to pressurize a tire, you need significantly more gas than just the little bit that comes out of the spray can, and it must be at ambient temperature too to count. Clearly, the only reason this inflates the tire at all is the heat. Here's a thought experiment that disproves the "stays inflated" myth:

Consider that you need to have much more gas inside the tire than outside for it to stay inflated at ambient temperature. Before lighting the gas, there's the same pressure inside and outside the tire because the two areas are contiguous. When she lights the fire, the gas inside expands rapidly, and lots of it escapes, so now, while there's a greater volume of gas inside the tire than before, this is due to a greatly reduced density, so there's actually less gas inside than before, which is why there was a vacuum. Using heat, there will always be less gas inside than before. It's not even worth experimenting. The only way something like this could work is with compressed gas, which you certainly wouldn't want to do because that would blow the tire up if it were lit on fire.

I think there are self-inflating tires already on the market that have compressed gas cartridges built in, triggered by a sensor that fixes flats by spraying a sealant inside, then lots of pressurized gas, probably CO2. They don't use fire.>> ^rottenseed:

So the limiting reactant would be the starter fluid and the air in the tire. Oxygen to be more exact. Because you want enough forces to seat the tire, but not so much it removes all of the gases from the tire, maybe they should have tried less starter fluid. If that's depleted in the reaction quickly leaving enough energy to seat the tire, but also enough oxygen left over from the reaction, you might end up with a working tire.
Somebody please double check my thought process, but I think it's definitely worth more experimentation.

>> ^rottenseed:

So the limiting reactant would be the starter fluid and the air in the tire. Oxygen to be more exact. Because you want enough forces to seat the tire, but not so much it removes all of the gases from the tire, maybe they should have tried less starter fluid. If that's depleted in the reaction quickly leaving enough energy to seat the tire, but also enough oxygen left over from the reaction, you might end up with a working tire.
Somebody please double check my thought process, but I think it's definitely worth more experimentation.

Would be one to test, but I think you'd end up with the same problem. End of the day to jump the tyre back on the rim you are going to be filling quite a lot of the inside of that tyre with the hot gases from the combustion. You might get less deflation with less accelarant, but I'd think you'd start with a lower pressure within the tyre even before the gases cool, so you wouldn't gain much. Thats my guess anyway.


Now maybe if you did this, and at the same time dropped just the right amount of dry ice in with it you could get the tyre back on the rim AND get it pressurised without the need for some sort of pump. Ofc, dry ice is not exactly something you tend to have stored in the glove compartment...

So the limiting reactant would be the starter fluid and the air in the tire. Oxygen to be more exact. Because you want enough forces to seat the tire, but not so much it removes all of the gases from the tire, maybe they should have tried less starter fluid. If that's depleted in the reaction quickly leaving enough energy to seat the tire, but also enough oxygen left over from the reaction, you might end up with a working tire.

Somebody please double check my thought process, but I think it's definitely worth more experimentation.

@renatojj

Your claim is that economic anarchy is more efficient than any system of rational control, and I say this must be false.

It's naive to presume that mutually beneficial agreements between individuals necessarily prove beneficial on a wider social scale; many economic transactions will benefit all directly involved parties while catastrophically harming others.

Ethically, it is appropriate to intervene in these transactions between free individuals where harm will come to a third party, especially where that third party is your whole society. Social harm is caused by production of frivolous luxuries like sports cars, both in terms of squandered labour that could have been used to enrich mankind and depletion of finite resources that belong to everybody. Everything from oil to aluminium is communal property; we all have equal claim to what's in our earth.

Even assuming their ability to do so, it ought to be obvious that wherever each individual has to make their own social benefit analysis of a transaction instead of referring to an authority; that is an immense, inefficient, duplication of effort. In such cases, the cost of servicing ones responsibilities may outweigh the gain in freedoms.

Freedom to hurt others is not a desirable condition. There is a school of thought that suggests preventing a murder is a violation of the rights of the murderer; I would hope you don't subscribe to that view.

Regarding ideological freedom, from which freedom of expression is quite distinct and unequivocally desirable - Yes, I oppose it for the same reasons.

evolution favors intelligent life.
his kind is already facing extinction and will eventually disappear.

This is strongly suggested by the shrinking demographics of organized religion. We are getting more rational as a species. The addition of the internet hastens the process as, in overall effect, it facilitates the sharing of ideas. On top of that, a strong additional catalyst for change is the emergence of global warming and the depletion of resources, which will force the species to wise the fuck up.

I agree in theory, but in practice I'm not so sure whether the speculators are doing this for rational free market reasons, or if they're specifically trying to drive up gas prices in the hopes of unseating Obama.

I realize I need to put on my tinfoil hat for that theory, but I'm not entirely convinced the supposed galtian supergeniuses running the investment banks are actually fundamentally different from your average teabagger in terms of their motivations and grasp on reality.

>> ^jwray:

All oil speculation is a perfectly legit market reaction to anticipation of future oil shortages. These stockpiles of oil created by speculators will help consumers at some future date when the stockpiles are sold. Prohibiting oil speculation globally is not feasable, and even if it were, it would only delay and amplify the inevitable rise in oil prices as global oil reserves are depleted. Free market speculation that raises the price of oil early will increase the incentive to develop alternatives to finite fossil fuel reserves.

All oil speculation is a perfectly legit market reaction to anticipation of future oil shortages. These stockpiles of oil created by speculators will help consumers at some future date when the stockpiles are sold. Prohibiting oil speculation globally is not feasable, and even if it were, it would only delay and amplify the inevitable rise in oil prices as global oil reserves are depleted. Free market speculation that raises the price of oil early will increase the incentive to develop alternatives to finite fossil fuel reserves.

>> ^RFlagg:

Would you even need pumps or motors in this case? We don't see any of them operate long enough to prove they can overcome friction and other forces to keep in motion as we only see them for a very short time.
The train one stuck me as odd, even on first viewing, as it seemed the green line was made to make you think that was the level line, but it seemed to me to be slanted down some, using the grain and a slightly tilted camera to make it look like it was going uphill...
>> ^Mammaltron:
You can't win, you can't break even and you can't quit the game.
You can however troll a whole lot of people with some strategically-placed motors and pumps.



In the "Uphill Train" example you're missing the fact that there are two ramps at play, one steep and one shallow. The shallow ramp is the wooden ramp with the green lines which does indeed run uphill, but the "downhill" ramp is the double-cone "train" itself. Once it reaches the bottom of the hill (the outside tips of the cones) that's the end of the ramp, and the energy is depleted. The mass is not in fact running uphill at all, the net movement is still downhill. Follow?

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@joedirt

It seems like he lost consciousness from oxygen depletion. He kept asking them to breath for him, but they maybe didn't do it early enough or strong and fast enough.