Past a certain point, super-high resolution could get quite interesting: once your "pixel" structures get smaller than visible light wavelengths, you can use them to form interference patterns to not only control the brightness, but also the wavefront shape of transmitted light --- A.K.A. holograms. Then you get a "true" 3D display, which recreates the proper relation between binocular depth perception and how far out each eye is focused.
Yes, I'm stuck selling my skills at "market value" --- that doesn't mean I have to accept that markets are an ethical system for treating humans. In the ethics I ascribe to, humans should be treated as humans --- not commodities, who are told to FOAD if their market value falls below the "price of production" so they become "surplus capacity" to be "creatively destroyed" by market forces.
By which standard mathematics manifestly is not science. While there is no "one true formulation" of what the "scientific method" exactly is, pretty much every formulation roughly follows the schema described here on Wikipedia, including the critical element of:
Testing: This is an investigation of whether the real world behaves as predicted by the hypothesis.
A mathematician --- let's consider a game theorist for example --- will set up a problem ("given this rigorously-defined hypothetical scenario, what strategy would result in maximization of mathematical object 'X'?"), and apply mathematical logic to produce a provably correct answer to the hypothetical question. Whether this scenario *actually exists* anywhere in reality, and whether participants *actually act* according to optimal strategies to maximize 'X', is wholly irrelevant to whether the mathematician's theory is "correct". A scientist using game theory would ask such questions (and perform real-world tests to conclude the answers) --- and might even conclude that the theory (applied to a real-world context) is scientifically false (fails to model the real world), even though the mathematical theory is provably true.
... not that I don't think masturbation (and math, possibly at the same time) is nifty. Science is distinguished from mathematics in that it not only considers mathematical models, but compares (and judges) said models by correspondence to "real world" observations. Game theory, while "physically motivated," is mathematics. Game theory can be applied by scientists to explain real-world measurements, but on its own is not science.
If you like get-rich-quick schemes that involve robbing utilities in bad neighborhoods, you could also consider calling in fake water leaks and downed power lines, then carjacking the utility repair crews at gunpoint when they show up. On the other hand, you could consider not trying to get rich quick off of antisocial douchebaggery.
How is this any different from how *the entirety of physics terminology* is generated? "This is a handy way to talk about the mathematical systems that match our observations" is basically where every physics term comes from. There isn't some "more real" definition for the terms *we made up* to describe the universe than what stuck after some physicist decided to use it.
If I said you were arguing along those lines somewhere, let me know:). I was just pointing out (relevantly to a thread about Bitcoin) that Voltaire's quote applies just as well to magic-bits money as magic-printed-notes money (with the exception that magic bits are even less useful for lighting a fire or wiping one's bum).
OK, then consider the minimum supersymmetric extension of the spherical cow model, in which all spherical cows have supersymmetric 'scow' partners. In practice, this should allow to work out similar results to the unpaired spherical cow model in the low energy cow scattering regime, while preserving the cow-pairing symmetry that you prefer.
FTFY, recycling my own reductio ad absurdum from another reponse:
It is impossible for you to give a mugger your wallet in return for your life (an ethical thing for you to do) without someone else mugging you for money, therefore to be mugged for money is to cause another to mug you for money. Since causing another to do something unethical is unethical, it must also be unethical to be mugged for money.
Just because it's ethical to work for money (because, e.g., you need to feed yourself / your family), it's not necessarily ethical to be the hirer (without many more stipulations that keep "hiring" from coming close to "mugging").
Exactly how you re-use the telescope indeed "depends." However, given the original poster's assumptions --- that you could extract the 3.5m primary mirror to use to heat up space rocks --- there's pretty much no conceivable situation where you couldn't use the gigantic top-quality space mirror for something way more interesting than a solar concentrator, even if that required putting a whole new detector package at the focus. At the same time, you could produce a bigger/better solar concentrator (with cheap and light reflecting foils) with less resources than needed to capture/extract/re-purpose a telescope primary.
I'm being pedantic because being precise and pedantic is a way to reach logically correct conclusions. Your statement:
If it is ethical to work for others, it is ethical to employ others.
is simply false. An ethical system might choose to adopt both assumptions (or reach them both from other assumptions), but the latter does not follow from the former. Especially when "employ" is shorthand notation for the precise case you were originally supporting:
2. Put others to work earning you money for a profitable wage using other peoples special skills or qualifications.
in many ethical systems this might not be ethical at all --- specifically, the "earning you money" part, in systems which assume the laborer should be earning themselves the fruit of labor, with the possibility of equal exchange (useful and beneficial but not profitable to both sides) with other parties.
Right, which is why "buying labor" is not automatically an ethical extension of "selling labor," since it may be a form of stealing (though more "dilute" than jumping someone with a gun) without a large number of additional stipulations that are frequently absent from existing labor markets. Specifically, in the formulation that started the thread: "Put others to work earning you money for a profitable wage" is unethical in many ethical systems, since you shouldn't be "earning money" by putting others to work, rather "getting an equal trade for things produced by your own labor" (only the contribution of your own labor should "earn" you something, not arranging to reap the profits of others' work).
I can't prove that this actually is unethical (since I can't prove which ethical system is "right"); but I'm pointing out that it's not a "logical" consequence of accepting that selling your own labor is ethical, but rather an assumption adopted within particular ethical systems (e.g. Capitalism).
"I'll trade you some of these pretty rocks I effortlessly found in a stream for that saber-tooth tiger skin."
"Screw that. I'll just go down to the stream myself."
... a few hours later...
"Screw that; looks like you found all the obvious sparklies. See this big spiky club I just whacked a saber-tooth tiger with? How about you give me your sparkly rocks in trade for keeping your skull in one piece?"
Alternate reductio ad absurdum argument that I hope will make you see the problem with your logic:
If it is ethical for you to sell it, it must be ethical for someone else to buy it.
Suppose you're strolling along when a mugger leaps out with a gun to your head, and says "your money, or your life!". I'd say it's ethical for you to give him your wallet and run. By your logic, does this make the mugger's actions ethical, too? After all, he's only enabling the other side of the transaction to your perfectly ethical decision to hand over your wallet.
Exactly, "employing others for money" is not necessarily ethical by extension of the ethicality of "working for money," without adding a lot of other stipulations (such as wages representing the full value of labor, not some lesser amount negotiated from a position of wealth and power).
If you are selling your labor, someone has to buy it. If it is ethical for you to sell it, it must be ethical for someone else to buy it.
Not without "added stipulations" about fairness of the work. For example, I might consider it ethical for a child laborer to sell their own body to feed themselves in a cruel and exploitative world, but not for their scumbag industrialist overlord to exploit this condition --- the "selling" side of the transaction is ethical, the "buying" side is not (without the addition of a lot more stipulations, involving the industrialist overlord turning over a much larger share of the profits to the employee, and paying himself far less for his easy desk job).
You seem to think that you're personal worth is priceless
Where did you get this idea from? My idea of fairness is that an hour of my labor is worth (roughly) an hour of someone else' (with some room for modifications based on the unpleasantness of work; but not the massive differentials typically represented in Capitalist society, where the least pleasant tasks often pay the least).
It is when one begins to value money over all other things that one begins to fall.
So, as long as money isn't your absolute #1 priority, you're fine: "It's OK; I love the finer things in life more --- like having peons cower in my presence, collecting fine art, and snorting drugs off of gold-plated hookers." In the ethical system from which the "love of money" quip comes, "loving money" isn't bad just when it reaches Spot #1; and the typical advice for folks who had lots of money was "sell everything you have and give it to the poor." The rationalization that it was hunky-dory to amass giant heaping loads of money (so long as you had a couple "worthy cause" excuses for why it's so much better in your hands) came later, when folks with giant heaping loads of money got in charge and wanted things to stay that way.
If it is ethical to work for others, it is ethical to employ others.
No, one does not follow from the other. Both assumptions are often held, but not on account of irrefutable logic or some god-given law of ethics.
Suppose I need work done, within your skill set. I can pay you to do the work, yes?
What you "can" do has nothing to do with what is ethical. Under some systems, if you want the results of my skills, you owe me the full value of those skills, not "as little as you can get away with at labor market prices because you are rich and I am desperate".
I can pay an agent to find me a skilled worker, yes?
Again, what you "can" do under current systems does not prove anything is "universally" ethical. If you need labor and the skill of locating labor, then perhaps you should pay the full value of both (instead of paying a labor-finder to exploit a laborer). Keeping slaves "in line" is a skill, but that doesn't make it ethical to benefit from slave labor by paying a slave-driver as your agent.
The difference in "practicality" is all the government regulation and lack-of-anonymity in stock shorting transactions. All the "benefits" of bitcoin make it a really dumb idea to say "hey, I'll send $10000 to pseudonymous internet guy #9cdn89274nkdw0, for a promise to sell me back bitcoins later." If you expect to buy "promises" from people, you need a lot of complex safeguards to make sure they don't just vanish away as soon as they have the money --- the opposite of what the Bitcoin system is set up to achieve.
And why does #2 follow from #1? This might be Capitalist dogma, but it's not a universal moral law. Many people do distinguish the category of "enjoy the fruits of your own labor" from "interpose yourself between someone else' willingness and ability to labor (by, e.g., owning the tools and resources), and collect a big cut of the fruits of their labor just because you are already rich (and they are poor, since they can only keep a tiny fraction of their labor's value for themselves)."
Not compared to heat pump systems, that can often provide a lot more warming per watt than dumb direct heat generation methods. From Wikipedia on heat pumps:
When used for heating a building on a mild day, for example 10 C, a typical air-source heat pump (ASHP) has a COP of 3 to 4, whereas an electrical resistance heater has a COP of 1.0. That is, one joule of electrical energy will cause a resistance heater to produce only one joule of useful heat, while under ideal conditions, one joule of electrical energy can cause a heat pump to move much more than one joule of heat from a cooler place to a warmer place.
On the other hand, ground-source heat pumps (GSHP) benefit from the moderated temperature underground, as the ground acts naturally as a store of thermal energy.[4] Their year-round COP is therefore normally in the range of 2.5 to 5.0.
Burning energy for 1:1 return on heat (+bitcoins) is still a terribly inefficient use of energy.
And remember another old adage: "There's a sucker born every minute." Want to get some ROI? Don't mine bitcoin, sell bitcoin mining rigs. Like selling shovels and booze to miners in a gold rush, it's a great way to make sure you get the cash now, and leave someone else scrabbling in the dirt with all the risk that tomorrow's newer custom FPGA rigs and market prices will make today's mega mining cluster not worth the electricity to switch on.
Car analogy: "My friend said I could have his Aston Martin DB5 --- mint condition, except the gas tank is empty. Think about how many doorstops and bookends we can make when we chop this baby up into little pieces of scrap!"
A solar concentrator is just about the dumbest way to waste a precision space telescope mirror (I suppose you could de-orbit it and grind it up for concrete filler rubble if you wanted to be stupider). For the weight and complexity of devices required to capture and manipulate a used spacecraft, you could send up a far bigger array of brand-new aluminized mylar solar concentrators, that would get you way more raw thermal power for your space-smelter. If you want a non-fucking-stupid idea for how to re-use a space telescope, how about sending up a helium refill (and perhaps an instruments package upgrade)?
Here we can formulate a basis for morality within the framework of The Theory of Evolution.
That's right, you can make up all sorts of goofy philosophical rubbish --- but it's not part of the Theory of Evolution, and not something that you must believe if you consider Evolution to be an accurate explanation for the order and diversity of lifeforms (with no reference to "good"/"bad" whatsoever).
Glad I could shine a little light into your world!
What you're spewing is usually called "sewage," not "light" --- you seem to be having trouble distinguishing the two.
You have to consider the sort of message that would send. It would look like an implicit acceptance of contraception and of sex between unmarried Christians.
It would look like care and compassion for the lives of non-Catholics, showing "even if you make the wrong decisions, we still don't want you to also get STDs." The alternative message that you're sending is "God won't punish those infidels nearly enough in hell, so we've got to make 'em suffer more on earth." The Jesus of the Gospels had some extremely harsh words for those Pharisees who made a big show of enforcing "moral" laws while ignoring the actual suffering of their fellow people. "I don't see any way how you could still state the church's point of view credibly" when choosing empty Pharisaical moralizing over love. I trust people to be able to understand the distinction between "this is the best and right thing to do," and "this is an unfortunate necessity to ease suffering in a sin-scarred world."
Slashdot Mirror
Past a certain point, super-high resolution could get quite interesting: once your "pixel" structures get smaller than visible light wavelengths, you can use them to form interference patterns to not only control the brightness, but also the wavefront shape of transmitted light --- A.K.A. holograms. Then you get a "true" 3D display, which recreates the proper relation between binocular depth perception and how far out each eye is focused.
Yes, I'm stuck selling my skills at "market value" --- that doesn't mean I have to accept that markets are an ethical system for treating humans. In the ethics I ascribe to, humans should be treated as humans --- not commodities, who are told to FOAD if their market value falls below the "price of production" so they become "surplus capacity" to be "creatively destroyed" by market forces.
By which standard mathematics manifestly is not science. While there is no "one true formulation" of what the "scientific method" exactly is, pretty much every formulation roughly follows the schema described here on Wikipedia, including the critical element of:
Testing: This is an investigation of whether the real world behaves as predicted by the hypothesis.
A mathematician --- let's consider a game theorist for example --- will set up a problem ("given this rigorously-defined hypothetical scenario, what strategy would result in maximization of mathematical object 'X'?"), and apply mathematical logic to produce a provably correct answer to the hypothetical question. Whether this scenario *actually exists* anywhere in reality, and whether participants *actually act* according to optimal strategies to maximize 'X', is wholly irrelevant to whether the mathematician's theory is "correct". A scientist using game theory would ask such questions (and perform real-world tests to conclude the answers) --- and might even conclude that the theory (applied to a real-world context) is scientifically false (fails to model the real world), even though the mathematical theory is provably true.
“Physics is to math what sex is to masturbation.”
-- Richard Feynman
... not that I don't think masturbation (and math, possibly at the same time) is nifty. Science is distinguished from mathematics in that it not only considers mathematical models, but compares (and judges) said models by correspondence to "real world" observations. Game theory, while "physically motivated," is mathematics. Game theory can be applied by scientists to explain real-world measurements, but on its own is not science.
If you like get-rich-quick schemes that involve robbing utilities in bad neighborhoods, you could also consider calling in fake water leaks and downed power lines, then carjacking the utility repair crews at gunpoint when they show up. On the other hand, you could consider not trying to get rich quick off of antisocial douchebaggery.
How is this any different from how *the entirety of physics terminology* is generated? "This is a handy way to talk about the mathematical systems that match our observations" is basically where every physics term comes from. There isn't some "more real" definition for the terms *we made up* to describe the universe than what stuck after some physicist decided to use it.
If I said you were arguing along those lines somewhere, let me know :). I was just pointing out (relevantly to a thread about Bitcoin) that Voltaire's quote applies just as well to magic-bits money as magic-printed-notes money (with the exception that magic bits are even less useful for lighting a fire or wiping one's bum).
OK, then consider the minimum supersymmetric extension of the spherical cow model, in which all spherical cows have supersymmetric 'scow' partners. In practice, this should allow to work out similar results to the unpaired spherical cow model in the low energy cow scattering regime, while preserving the cow-pairing symmetry that you prefer.
Which is why magic random bit sequences, with their loads of intrinsic value, are so much better!
FTFY, recycling my own reductio ad absurdum from another reponse:
It is impossible for you to give a mugger your wallet in return for your life (an ethical thing for you to do) without someone else mugging you for money, therefore to be mugged for money is to cause another to mug you for money. Since causing another to do something unethical is unethical, it must also be unethical to be mugged for money.
Just because it's ethical to work for money (because, e.g., you need to feed yourself / your family), it's not necessarily ethical to be the hirer (without many more stipulations that keep "hiring" from coming close to "mugging").
Exactly how you re-use the telescope indeed "depends." However, given the original poster's assumptions --- that you could extract the 3.5m primary mirror to use to heat up space rocks --- there's pretty much no conceivable situation where you couldn't use the gigantic top-quality space mirror for something way more interesting than a solar concentrator, even if that required putting a whole new detector package at the focus. At the same time, you could produce a bigger/better solar concentrator (with cheap and light reflecting foils) with less resources than needed to capture/extract/re-purpose a telescope primary.
I'm being pedantic because being precise and pedantic is a way to reach logically correct conclusions. Your statement:
If it is ethical to work for others, it is ethical to employ others.
is simply false. An ethical system might choose to adopt both assumptions (or reach them both from other assumptions), but the latter does not follow from the former. Especially when "employ" is shorthand notation for the precise case you were originally supporting:
2. Put others to work earning you money for a profitable wage using other peoples special skills or qualifications.
in many ethical systems this might not be ethical at all --- specifically, the "earning you money" part, in systems which assume the laborer should be earning themselves the fruit of labor, with the possibility of equal exchange (useful and beneficial but not profitable to both sides) with other parties.
Right, which is why "buying labor" is not automatically an ethical extension of "selling labor," since it may be a form of stealing (though more "dilute" than jumping someone with a gun) without a large number of additional stipulations that are frequently absent from existing labor markets. Specifically, in the formulation that started the thread: "Put others to work earning you money for a profitable wage" is unethical in many ethical systems, since you shouldn't be "earning money" by putting others to work, rather "getting an equal trade for things produced by your own labor" (only the contribution of your own labor should "earn" you something, not arranging to reap the profits of others' work).
I can't prove that this actually is unethical (since I can't prove which ethical system is "right"); but I'm pointing out that it's not a "logical" consequence of accepting that selling your own labor is ethical, but rather an assumption adopted within particular ethical systems (e.g. Capitalism).
"I'll trade you some of these pretty rocks I effortlessly found in a stream for that saber-tooth tiger skin."
"Screw that. I'll just go down to the stream myself."
... a few hours later ...
"Screw that; looks like you found all the obvious sparklies. See this big spiky club I just whacked a saber-tooth tiger with? How about you give me your sparkly rocks in trade for keeping your skull in one piece?"
Alternate reductio ad absurdum argument that I hope will make you see the problem with your logic:
If it is ethical for you to sell it, it must be ethical for someone else to buy it.
Suppose you're strolling along when a mugger leaps out with a gun to your head, and says "your money, or your life!". I'd say it's ethical for you to give him your wallet and run. By your logic, does this make the mugger's actions ethical, too? After all, he's only enabling the other side of the transaction to your perfectly ethical decision to hand over your wallet.
It only is after you add existing stupilations.
Exactly, "employing others for money" is not necessarily ethical by extension of the ethicality of "working for money," without adding a lot of other stipulations (such as wages representing the full value of labor, not some lesser amount negotiated from a position of wealth and power).
If you are selling your labor, someone has to buy it. If it is ethical for you to sell it, it must be ethical for someone else to buy it.
Not without "added stipulations" about fairness of the work. For example, I might consider it ethical for a child laborer to sell their own body to feed themselves in a cruel and exploitative world, but not for their scumbag industrialist overlord to exploit this condition --- the "selling" side of the transaction is ethical, the "buying" side is not (without the addition of a lot more stipulations, involving the industrialist overlord turning over a much larger share of the profits to the employee, and paying himself far less for his easy desk job).
You seem to think that you're personal worth is priceless
Where did you get this idea from? My idea of fairness is that an hour of my labor is worth (roughly) an hour of someone else' (with some room for modifications based on the unpleasantness of work; but not the massive differentials typically represented in Capitalist society, where the least pleasant tasks often pay the least).
It is when one begins to value money over all other things that one begins to fall.
So, as long as money isn't your absolute #1 priority, you're fine: "It's OK; I love the finer things in life more --- like having peons cower in my presence, collecting fine art, and snorting drugs off of gold-plated hookers." In the ethical system from which the "love of money" quip comes, "loving money" isn't bad just when it reaches Spot #1; and the typical advice for folks who had lots of money was "sell everything you have and give it to the poor." The rationalization that it was hunky-dory to amass giant heaping loads of money (so long as you had a couple "worthy cause" excuses for why it's so much better in your hands) came later, when folks with giant heaping loads of money got in charge and wanted things to stay that way.
If it is ethical to work for others, it is ethical to employ others.
No, one does not follow from the other. Both assumptions are often held, but not on account of irrefutable logic or some god-given law of ethics.
Suppose I need work done, within your skill set. I can pay you to do the work, yes?
What you "can" do has nothing to do with what is ethical. Under some systems, if you want the results of my skills, you owe me the full value of those skills, not "as little as you can get away with at labor market prices because you are rich and I am desperate".
I can pay an agent to find me a skilled worker, yes?
Again, what you "can" do under current systems does not prove anything is "universally" ethical. If you need labor and the skill of locating labor, then perhaps you should pay the full value of both (instead of paying a labor-finder to exploit a laborer). Keeping slaves "in line" is a skill, but that doesn't make it ethical to benefit from slave labor by paying a slave-driver as your agent.
The difference in "practicality" is all the government regulation and lack-of-anonymity in stock shorting transactions. All the "benefits" of bitcoin make it a really dumb idea to say "hey, I'll send $10000 to pseudonymous internet guy #9cdn89274nkdw0, for a promise to sell me back bitcoins later." If you expect to buy "promises" from people, you need a lot of complex safeguards to make sure they don't just vanish away as soon as they have the money --- the opposite of what the Bitcoin system is set up to achieve.
And why does #2 follow from #1? This might be Capitalist dogma, but it's not a universal moral law. Many people do distinguish the category of "enjoy the fruits of your own labor" from "interpose yourself between someone else' willingness and ability to labor (by, e.g., owning the tools and resources), and collect a big cut of the fruits of their labor just because you are already rich (and they are poor, since they can only keep a tiny fraction of their labor's value for themselves)."
Not compared to heat pump systems, that can often provide a lot more warming per watt than dumb direct heat generation methods. From Wikipedia on heat pumps:
When used for heating a building on a mild day, for example 10 C, a typical air-source heat pump (ASHP) has a COP of 3 to 4, whereas an electrical resistance heater has a COP of 1.0. That is, one joule of electrical energy will cause a resistance heater to produce only one joule of useful heat, while under ideal conditions, one joule of electrical energy can cause a heat pump to move much more than one joule of heat from a cooler place to a warmer place.
On the other hand, ground-source heat pumps (GSHP) benefit from the moderated temperature underground, as the ground acts naturally as a store of thermal energy.[4] Their year-round COP is therefore normally in the range of 2.5 to 5.0.
Burning energy for 1:1 return on heat (+bitcoins) is still a terribly inefficient use of energy.
And remember another old adage: "There's a sucker born every minute." Want to get some ROI? Don't mine bitcoin, sell bitcoin mining rigs. Like selling shovels and booze to miners in a gold rush, it's a great way to make sure you get the cash now, and leave someone else scrabbling in the dirt with all the risk that tomorrow's newer custom FPGA rigs and market prices will make today's mega mining cluster not worth the electricity to switch on.
Car analogy: "My friend said I could have his Aston Martin DB5 --- mint condition, except the gas tank is empty. Think about how many doorstops and bookends we can make when we chop this baby up into little pieces of scrap!"
A solar concentrator is just about the dumbest way to waste a precision space telescope mirror (I suppose you could de-orbit it and grind it up for concrete filler rubble if you wanted to be stupider). For the weight and complexity of devices required to capture and manipulate a used spacecraft, you could send up a far bigger array of brand-new aluminized mylar solar concentrators, that would get you way more raw thermal power for your space-smelter. If you want a non-fucking-stupid idea for how to re-use a space telescope, how about sending up a helium refill (and perhaps an instruments package upgrade)?
From YOUR God, The Wikipedia:
Actually, I'm Christian. Wikipedia is not my god (at least according to Wikipedia).
Here we can formulate a basis for morality within the framework of The Theory of Evolution.
That's right, you can make up all sorts of goofy philosophical rubbish --- but it's not part of the Theory of Evolution, and not something that you must believe if you consider Evolution to be an accurate explanation for the order and diversity of lifeforms (with no reference to "good"/"bad" whatsoever).
Glad I could shine a little light into your world!
What you're spewing is usually called "sewage," not "light" --- you seem to be having trouble distinguishing the two.
You have to consider the sort of message that would send. It would look like an implicit acceptance of contraception and of sex between unmarried Christians.
It would look like care and compassion for the lives of non-Catholics, showing "even if you make the wrong decisions, we still don't want you to also get STDs." The alternative message that you're sending is "God won't punish those infidels nearly enough in hell, so we've got to make 'em suffer more on earth." The Jesus of the Gospels had some extremely harsh words for those Pharisees who made a big show of enforcing "moral" laws while ignoring the actual suffering of their fellow people. "I don't see any way how you could still state the church's point of view credibly" when choosing empty Pharisaical moralizing over love. I trust people to be able to understand the distinction between "this is the best and right thing to do," and "this is an unfortunate necessity to ease suffering in a sin-scarred world."