It also has an different label, "emergent behavior". "Social contract" has a special connotation, namely that it is a mutual agreement between society and the people who make up that society.
Profit is a strong indication that you are generating more value than you cost. If you aren't generating a profit, there should be a good reason why. You don't provide such a reason. Let's look in more detail.
The government should be an alternative to markets, provide a safe haven for those who want to do things because they're interested in advancing knowledge, not selling something.
First of all, no. There's no "should" here. Second, who gets this safe haven and who doesn't? We can't have everyone sucking up money just because they're more interested in advancing knowledge than in the alternatives. Someone has to generate that tax revenue in order for the scheme to work.
Then there's the matter of unintended consequences. If you put up this scheme, then someone will game it for profit. In practice, there's no real yardstick for what "advancing knowledge" means, so it's been long exploited by universities and businesses.
Space exploration is in the General Welfare, not only for the 1%.
One near universal problem that NASA has long contended with is that space exploration is just not that valuable to the US public. I don't mean just perceived to be not that valuable - public perception has always been lukewarm towards space activities. But truly not that valuable. It doesn't materially change the human condition to know a little more about our universe. And the vague intangibles which NASA supposedly brings, like inspiration to go into the STEM fields, could be achieved for a fraction of the cost by Earth-bound activities.
Finally, NASA is just terrible at its assigned role. It might not need to be profitable, but it certainly needs to be getting an order of magnitude more activity and exploration out of the money it currently spends.
There may be no current commercial need for the SLS, but you can bet that it will appear once the system launches successfully a few times.
Even if that were really true (it weren't for the Space Shuttle, which got payloads by forcing everyone to launch on the Space Shuttle through to 1985 or so), you still have the problem that a few successful launches puts you somewhere past 2030. That's at least 15 years of fucking around.
Also, I'm sure the US military and NASA will be excited to be able to launch heavier and heaver things into space and stop being reliant on Russian launch technology, especially with the Russians dusting off their 1950's era bombers to test NATO defenses.
The SLS has to successful fly first. NASA's last success construction of a launch vehicle was the Space Shuttle Endeavor which was delivered to NASA on 1991 and first launched a year later. Since the Space Shuttle has been under development, there has been a long string of failed launch vehicles: DC-X, X-33, X-37, and Ares I.
There's a history of failure here. When you also consider that SpaceX is likely to fly its Falcon Heavy in the next year, which can put 50 metric tons into orbit, and probably could develop a straight up SLS competitor for two years of the spending that NASA has chucked so far at SLS (and a timeline of say, five years), I think the SLS will be obsolete before it ever launches, assuming it ever does.
He's talking about a single person, Putin not the whole nest of thieves. That's 10% of Russia's annual GDP. The equivalent in the US would be Obama making off with $1.6 trillion in assets just by himself.
we get to launch rockets without having to have a profit requirement for it!
You say that as if it were an advantage. Interesting.
That's why the US gets to launch big expensive, and awesome science projects like Hubble, Cassini, Voyager, Apollo, etc.., while Russia is stuck with shitty Space-X sized rockets that only has commercial appeal.
NASA doesn't currently have a way, aside from the commercial launchers, to launch those various probes you mentioned. NASA doesn't even have the capability to launch crew to the International Space Station.
If you have no model, then collect data in enough detail to come up with one.
Which data? Again, this is a use for hypothesis testing in that it helps you find out what data you should be collecting and what phenomena needs modeling.
You always have something to model. If you don't, your study was dead on arrival.
And the obvious rebuttal is that you can have something to study without a model. A study alleged to be "dead on arrival" can be far better than no study, if it is done well.
Nobody deserves unnecessary suffering. People who recognize their mistakes will feel punished for that, and people who don't will feel vindicated.
America wants to execute peopleâ"more specifically, America wants to punish peopleâ"but few of us have the ability to distance ourselves from the process that you apparently do. America does not want to be present and aware of its brutality, it wants to be able to say justice is a balancing of scales and then to wash its hands of the whole affair. And nobody really believes you can balance the scales. Executing a monster doesn't undo their monstrous past.
Punishment and vengeance is part of justice. From the pragmatic point of view, if your system of justice doesn't punish someone for a heinous crime, then the public will. You don't want a devolution of justice into escalating feuding and vendettas.
By leaving him in prison, we avoid creating provocation that might induce the impulsive with legitimate grievances to kill Hitler. I'd hate for a sixteen year old whose grandmother died in the camps to spend some time in jail for shooting Hitler or worse. And given that there's no compelling reason of justice to cut short Hitler's sentence, I think this concern reasonable.
That's a very enlightening description and it covers the obvious point of calling this thing a "social contract" rather than say a "social mandate" or a "social duty". But what I think is particular interesting about the grandparent post is the perversion of "agreement" to mean merely being born or not trying hard enough to escape execution. At that point, every evil no matter how vile is condoned as long as it has the fig leaf of law allowing it.
The correct response to a disagreement with societies rules is to (A) Get them changed, or (B) emigrate elsewhere.
There are many other solutions such as progressively destroying one or more of the parties to the disagreement until the conflict goes away. And given the relativistic amorality of the social contract in the first place, this means this third solution is just as correct as the two responses you mention.
The funny thing is that stuff like the constitutions of democracies are the closest real thing to actual social contracts. But the people who speak of social contracts tend to ignore that stuff.
China only wanted to punish Vietnam's invasion of Cambodia, and that was already achieved. So the Chinese just shrugged and went home.
Given that Vietnam continued to occupy Cambodia through to 1989, a full ten years after the invasion, I think victory is an appropriate term. I think it was a combination of various factors, such as USSR logistics support, including satellite intel (which enabled Vietnam to avoid following China's intended strategy), considerable guerilla warfare, the revelations about the atrocities coming out of Cambodia, and simply not being prepared for a long fight that caused China to retreat from Vietnam.
You have an odd definition og "got into". In WWI, the deciding factor was Germany started using unrestricted submarine warfare on American ships. It was either fight back or keep losing sailors. In WWII, the Empire of Japan bombed the crap out of a US naval base.
And what is that odd definition? The US could have halted trade with England and France. In the second case, the US had been building up military power and obstructing both Japan and Germany before that point.
but in both cases there was not a whole lot of choice remaining.
Which is a common MO of US presidents - dither the US's way into a war.
Have to agree. Where's TV going to be in a couple of decades? I think it'll have the status of FM/satellite radio at that point, except you risk getting a ticket, if a cop catches you watching TV while you drive.
Math is based on a subset of logical rules that are described in general philosophy and then applied on numbers.
And patterns. The application of math is very general.
In philosophy however the meaning and validity of those rules are discussed and questioned.
Without consequence. If something could be proven rather than merely discussed and questioned, then it would be math not philosophy.
To prove the validity of the mathematical axioms you have to go to philosophy where the meaning of equality and conclusion is less axiomatic.
And far, far less relevant. The point of axioms is that these are at best, initial conditions. To use your implied example, there are a variety of philosophical schools on identity and change with respect to time. Math simply encoded those ideas into a variety of relationships and moved on. For example, endurantism is the idea that a thing is present at every moment of its existence. That is encoded into the constant function. Doesn't sound impressive, right? Well, a rival philosophical idea is perdurantism which claims that a thing can change over time, but in a way that you can trace its evolution (such as a car where every part including the entire body has been replaced). That's encoded mathematically as homotopy equivalence. Namely, there's a parameter (such as time) which when varied can transform one structure into a second structure smoothly.
The kicker is that one can classify all such structures by what they are homotopy equivalent to. Then one has a map from the structures to these equivalence classes. which is independent of any homotopy choice. Hence, we have a constant map which describes all the structures which are homotopy equivalent, independent of the parameter of the homotopy.
This means, among other things, that perdurantism is a special case of endurantism, but not one recognized by a number of current philosophers.
Mathematics is an exploration of structures which are not completely understood.
Mathematics is an exploration of created structures. I don't see the empiricism here. There is actual empirical math where someone takes a simulation of a dynamic model and looks for interesting behavior.
"Try to stay away" is not the same thing as success. Note that Obama is following the same dysfunctional playbook in Iraq as the Vietnam War with inadequate, incremental escalation of a US military presence.
In this case the job is collecting data and coming up with a model, or at least the outlines of a model, a posteriori (ie exploratory analysis). There is no need to test any hypothesis.
You still have to explain why we keep some models around and discard other models. That's where hypothesis testing comes in. Also, suppose you don't have enough to go on in making a model of the phenomena? You can still say that something is going on, even if you don't have a clue how to model it.
Even if the "chance" null hypothesis is ruled out (100% for sure, God said so) there are still going to be infinity minus one other explanations.
Because you discarded the most important important rival hypothesis, namely, that you don't actually have something to model.
It's worth noting that carbon dioxide forcing is more like 1.5-2 C increase in long term temperature per doubling. There is no evidence to support the higher numbers for doubling.
Slashdot Mirror
It also has an different label, "emergent behavior". "Social contract" has a special connotation, namely that it is a mutual agreement between society and the people who make up that society.
The government should not be run for profit.
Profit is a strong indication that you are generating more value than you cost. If you aren't generating a profit, there should be a good reason why. You don't provide such a reason. Let's look in more detail.
The government should be an alternative to markets, provide a safe haven for those who want to do things because they're interested in advancing knowledge, not selling something.
First of all, no. There's no "should" here. Second, who gets this safe haven and who doesn't? We can't have everyone sucking up money just because they're more interested in advancing knowledge than in the alternatives. Someone has to generate that tax revenue in order for the scheme to work.
Then there's the matter of unintended consequences. If you put up this scheme, then someone will game it for profit. In practice, there's no real yardstick for what "advancing knowledge" means, so it's been long exploited by universities and businesses.
Space exploration is in the General Welfare, not only for the 1%.
One near universal problem that NASA has long contended with is that space exploration is just not that valuable to the US public. I don't mean just perceived to be not that valuable - public perception has always been lukewarm towards space activities. But truly not that valuable. It doesn't materially change the human condition to know a little more about our universe. And the vague intangibles which NASA supposedly brings, like inspiration to go into the STEM fields, could be achieved for a fraction of the cost by Earth-bound activities.
Finally, NASA is just terrible at its assigned role. It might not need to be profitable, but it certainly needs to be getting an order of magnitude more activity and exploration out of the money it currently spends.
There may be no current commercial need for the SLS, but you can bet that it will appear once the system launches successfully a few times.
Even if that were really true (it weren't for the Space Shuttle, which got payloads by forcing everyone to launch on the Space Shuttle through to 1985 or so), you still have the problem that a few successful launches puts you somewhere past 2030. That's at least 15 years of fucking around.
Also, I'm sure the US military and NASA will be excited to be able to launch heavier and heaver things into space and stop being reliant on Russian launch technology, especially with the Russians dusting off their 1950's era bombers to test NATO defenses.
The SLS has to successful fly first. NASA's last success construction of a launch vehicle was the Space Shuttle Endeavor which was delivered to NASA on 1991 and first launched a year later. Since the Space Shuttle has been under development, there has been a long string of failed launch vehicles: DC-X, X-33, X-37, and Ares I.
There's a history of failure here. When you also consider that SpaceX is likely to fly its Falcon Heavy in the next year, which can put 50 metric tons into orbit, and probably could develop a straight up SLS competitor for two years of the spending that NASA has chucked so far at SLS (and a timeline of say, five years), I think the SLS will be obsolete before it ever launches, assuming it ever does.
He's talking about a single person, Putin not the whole nest of thieves. That's 10% of Russia's annual GDP. The equivalent in the US would be Obama making off with $1.6 trillion in assets just by himself.
we get to launch rockets without having to have a profit requirement for it!
You say that as if it were an advantage. Interesting.
That's why the US gets to launch big expensive, and awesome science projects like Hubble, Cassini, Voyager, Apollo, etc.., while Russia is stuck with shitty Space-X sized rockets that only has commercial appeal.
NASA doesn't currently have a way, aside from the commercial launchers, to launch those various probes you mentioned. NASA doesn't even have the capability to launch crew to the International Space Station.
How can you have cavemen in space without the BFR?
If you have no model, then collect data in enough detail to come up with one.
Which data? Again, this is a use for hypothesis testing in that it helps you find out what data you should be collecting and what phenomena needs modeling.
You always have something to model. If you don't, your study was dead on arrival.
And the obvious rebuttal is that you can have something to study without a model. A study alleged to be "dead on arrival" can be far better than no study, if it is done well.
Nobody deserves unnecessary suffering. People who recognize their mistakes will feel punished for that, and people who don't will feel vindicated.
America wants to execute peopleâ"more specifically, America wants to punish peopleâ"but few of us have the ability to distance ourselves from the process that you apparently do. America does not want to be present and aware of its brutality, it wants to be able to say justice is a balancing of scales and then to wash its hands of the whole affair. And nobody really believes you can balance the scales. Executing a monster doesn't undo their monstrous past.
Punishment and vengeance is part of justice. From the pragmatic point of view, if your system of justice doesn't punish someone for a heinous crime, then the public will. You don't want a devolution of justice into escalating feuding and vendettas.
By leaving him in prison, we avoid creating provocation that might induce the impulsive with legitimate grievances to kill Hitler. I'd hate for a sixteen year old whose grandmother died in the camps to spend some time in jail for shooting Hitler or worse. And given that there's no compelling reason of justice to cut short Hitler's sentence, I think this concern reasonable.
That's a very enlightening description and it covers the obvious point of calling this thing a "social contract" rather than say a "social mandate" or a "social duty". But what I think is particular interesting about the grandparent post is the perversion of "agreement" to mean merely being born or not trying hard enough to escape execution. At that point, every evil no matter how vile is condoned as long as it has the fig leaf of law allowing it.
The correct response to a disagreement with societies rules is to (A) Get them changed, or (B) emigrate elsewhere.
There are many other solutions such as progressively destroying one or more of the parties to the disagreement until the conflict goes away. And given the relativistic amorality of the social contract in the first place, this means this third solution is just as correct as the two responses you mention.
The funny thing is that stuff like the constitutions of democracies are the closest real thing to actual social contracts. But the people who speak of social contracts tend to ignore that stuff.
In other words, we haven't introduced enough data to infer anything significant.
China only wanted to punish Vietnam's invasion of Cambodia, and that was already achieved. So the Chinese just shrugged and went home.
Given that Vietnam continued to occupy Cambodia through to 1989, a full ten years after the invasion, I think victory is an appropriate term. I think it was a combination of various factors, such as USSR logistics support, including satellite intel (which enabled Vietnam to avoid following China's intended strategy), considerable guerilla warfare, the revelations about the atrocities coming out of Cambodia, and simply not being prepared for a long fight that caused China to retreat from Vietnam.
You have an odd definition og "got into". In WWI, the deciding factor was Germany started using unrestricted submarine warfare on American ships. It was either fight back or keep losing sailors. In WWII, the Empire of Japan bombed the crap out of a US naval base.
And what is that odd definition? The US could have halted trade with England and France. In the second case, the US had been building up military power and obstructing both Japan and Germany before that point.
but in both cases there was not a whole lot of choice remaining.
Which is a common MO of US presidents - dither the US's way into a war.
Have to agree. Where's TV going to be in a couple of decades? I think it'll have the status of FM/satellite radio at that point, except you risk getting a ticket, if a cop catches you watching TV while you drive.
You have a reason for your opinion, or is it a hope that this time, the federal government won't abuse the power it's given and which it didn't need?
has grown by more than 20%
Starting at 70%, yow!
Math is based on a subset of logical rules that are described in general philosophy and then applied on numbers.
And patterns. The application of math is very general.
In philosophy however the meaning and validity of those rules are discussed and questioned.
Without consequence. If something could be proven rather than merely discussed and questioned, then it would be math not philosophy.
To prove the validity of the mathematical axioms you have to go to philosophy where the meaning of equality and conclusion is less axiomatic.
And far, far less relevant. The point of axioms is that these are at best, initial conditions. To use your implied example, there are a variety of philosophical schools on identity and change with respect to time. Math simply encoded those ideas into a variety of relationships and moved on. For example, endurantism is the idea that a thing is present at every moment of its existence. That is encoded into the constant function. Doesn't sound impressive, right? Well, a rival philosophical idea is perdurantism which claims that a thing can change over time, but in a way that you can trace its evolution (such as a car where every part including the entire body has been replaced). That's encoded mathematically as homotopy equivalence. Namely, there's a parameter (such as time) which when varied can transform one structure into a second structure smoothly.
The kicker is that one can classify all such structures by what they are homotopy equivalent to. Then one has a map from the structures to these equivalence classes. which is independent of any homotopy choice. Hence, we have a constant map which describes all the structures which are homotopy equivalent, independent of the parameter of the homotopy.
This means, among other things, that perdurantism is a special case of endurantism, but not one recognized by a number of current philosophers.
Mathematics is an exploration of structures which are not completely understood.
Mathematics is an exploration of created structures. I don't see the empiricism here. There is actual empirical math where someone takes a simulation of a dynamic model and looks for interesting behavior.
Such as three times as many Nobel prizes per capita?
"Try to stay away" is not the same thing as success. Note that Obama is following the same dysfunctional playbook in Iraq as the Vietnam War with inadequate, incremental escalation of a US military presence.
I guess they'll just have to nakedly pursue their self-interests like everyone else then.
In this case the job is collecting data and coming up with a model, or at least the outlines of a model, a posteriori (ie exploratory analysis). There is no need to test any hypothesis.
You still have to explain why we keep some models around and discard other models. That's where hypothesis testing comes in. Also, suppose you don't have enough to go on in making a model of the phenomena? You can still say that something is going on, even if you don't have a clue how to model it.
Even if the "chance" null hypothesis is ruled out (100% for sure, God said so) there are still going to be infinity minus one other explanations.
Because you discarded the most important important rival hypothesis, namely, that you don't actually have something to model.
It's worth noting that carbon dioxide forcing is more like 1.5-2 C increase in long term temperature per doubling. There is no evidence to support the higher numbers for doubling.