Have you checked the kind of salaries and sign on bonuses hospitals in the U.S. are offering to RNs lately? There's such a nursing shortage in the U.S. healthcare industry that you can essentially dictate your own terms.
That being said many of I have not been in the area for a while, but there used to be mad hordes of naked Hippies that congregated there for a monthly drum circle on the night of the full moon.
I hear nerve gas is good for infestations like that.
There's nothing right now that looks as promising as the great booms of the past - railroads, automobiles, electricity, radio, aviation, plastics, computing, the Internet.
All those innovations were dependent upon the availability of cheap, plentiful energy resources. As we move into the era of expensive, scarce energy resources there will be less and less economic viability for technologies that consume enormous amounts of them.
Industrialized civilization is currently on its way out. If you're looking to cash in during whatever time remains one is probably best off getting into "green" energy industries as nations frantically try to find replacements for fossil fuels. I believe that the endeavor will ultimately fail, but it certainly holds more short term promise for revolution than any huge advances in various "futuristic" pipe-dream fields such as robotics, AI, space travel, or biotechnology.
In the novel Manifold, Time it's discovered that Venus once supported life, but the planet was encircled in superconducting electromagnets and its molten core "spun down", causing the loss of its magnetic field and hence its oxygen atmosphere.
Not really a device, but the photino birds weren't very good for the universe either.
Essentially none. The consumers who overpaid certainly won't any kind of credit from the government, that's for sure. And real price competition among corporations has long become passe - you won't see any drop in TV prices anytime soon. This is just an example where the parties involved got caught; free markets really suck for big corporations, particularly during an economic downturn. It's much easier to consolidate and collude and keep prices high to extract as much money as possible from the people who can still afford to pay than accept the huge uncertainty of lowering them and ending up in a price war.
Another thing that got glossed over in the TNG films is just how long it supposedly took to construct a Galaxy-class starship. A long time ago I owned a copy of the Star Trek Technical Manual, and it had a timeline of the construction process for the Enterprise D. If I'm remembering correctly it took the better part of 40 years to complete a Galaxy class ship. Building a single one would be a huge multi-generational task, which is why it's understandable the Federation Council would have been pretty pissed at Kirk after Star Trek 3. In the TNG movies it seems like they blow one up every installment.
Whenever old material has been revived lately, "a new outlook" seems to have always translated to "An edgier, darker _____" which means "Make the cast younger, and ramp up the sexy and the violence."
Major retail stores generally aren't laid out inefficiently, at least from the perspective of attempting to subtly manipulate consumers. For example, you almost never find "things that go with other things" located in the same geographic area: DVDs and DVD players aren't going to be right next to each other, and you usually won't find the TVs right next to the interconnect cables. Supermarkets do the same thing - vegetables at the front, meat at the back, dairy at the side ends. Essentially it's to prevent people from engaging in "surgical strike" shopping, and make sure that every opportunity for impulse buying is made available. This is why I find IKEA intolerable; they've taken this idea to its logical conclusion and made it difficult to just "run in" for a single item without navigating through the entire store.
A book on retail interior design makes a fascinating read; it gives you insight into the psychology of shopping and the way (successful) retailers try to manage it. Even the manipulation of empty space is important - for example there are certain areas in stores where it has been shown that people are much less sensitive to their surroundings, such as the first ten feet inside the store entrance. It's pointless to put advertising or products in these "dead zones" as people generally won't notice. Large retail stores are probably the most complex visual environment that a modern human deals with on a regular basis; they're probably the most complex visual environment that people have dealt with in all of human history. A lot of high tech research goes into modeling how best to set them up for the desired results.
Personally I can't say I miss some of the NES RPGs. A few years back I dusted off my NES console from a closet and fired up Dragon Warrior. Somehow my saved games were still intact from 1989, but first I started a new quest. After 20 minutes I was pretty well bored. These games were the ultimate grindfests; killing slime after slime to get enough gold to upgrade my bamboo stick to a sharpened bamboo stick or whatever comes next without even the social interaction or plot that makes WoW or modern RPGs interesting respectively. Sometimes nostalgia is well placed, in this case old is definitely not better.
I remember that some of the later titles in the Dragon Warrior series were more interesting. I did get a kick out of loading up one of my nearly 2 decade old games, saved right near the end, and killing the Dragonlord once more for good measure.
If we've drifted off into the territory of anti-social annoyances:
Remember that parking directly in front of the entrance to a gas station convenience store in what is normally a fire lane is OK so long as you're driving an Escalade, just running in real quick, too drunk to find a proper parking spot, or need to get scratch tickets. Also, if you buy scratch tickets make certain you scratch all 20 of them right at the counter like your own private casino, regardless of how many customers may be waiting behind you.
Poor people are poor because they're stupid with their money.
Or because they were born into the wrong environment. Because they had no access to education. Because they have chronic illnesses, or have to support family members who do. Because they were unlucky. Because their jobs were shipped overseas. Because it's a priori impossible for _everyone_ on a 6 billion person planet to be wealthy. Because the deck is constantly stacked against them in an economic system that always privatizes the profits and socializes the costs. Because the ideal of the "American Dream" has been consistently proved incorrect by study after study: the majority of people in the US will live and die within the socioeconomic bracket that they were born in no matter what they do.
By the way, most middle and upper class folks need to develop some fiscal responsibility themselves.
Aha! So when the poors are in financial trouble, it's called being stupid, and they stay poor. Capitalism is working just fine at that level. When the wealthy do it, it's called being "fiscally irresponsible" and it's of course not any flaw of character, but the fault of any number of externalities. Where's FedGov with the bailout?
One would think that the chance that the younger generations will have indefinitely longer lifespans would encourage more people to think of long-term consequences.
Life extension technology will arrive just in time for me to live indefinitely in the body of an octogenarian. I can't wait! (seriously!)
What I wish to say is that if the definition one has of eliminating poverty is the "American Dream" of everyone owning an 11,000 square foot home, 2 luxury cars in the driveway, and 2.5 kids going to the best universities, forget it. It can't be done! Attempting to bring the whole planet up to what is considered an American middle class standard of living will burn through what resources remain on this planet like flash paper.
I feel the reason "poverty" exists as it is defined in the United States is finally because the resources that do exist are ultimately advertised, marketed, and distributed to the "poor" in a way that leaves them physically, emotionally, and spiritually unsatisfied - to keep people always grasping for more - and this is done intentionally by the industries involved to make sure wealth continues to always flow upward. If you can trick people into believing that just that little extra effort, that next little purchase will somehow lead to true satisfaction, you can always make them believe that it's just around the corner. It's just a con-game to make what resources are left bubble to the top.
Finally it all comes down to breeding rights and reproduction. That's what life is here for, it's what the specialized organ at the center of our bodies is there for. Perhaps the final reason for the existence of every concept of wealth, prosperity, and economic success is that it's the current measure by which one's fitness for breeding is judged. And if the current gold standard of breeding fitness is the American way of life - then by God those who have it are going to use every trick in the book to squeeze those who don't by the balls to give them the illusion of getting there when they're really not. The worst thing that could ever happen for their breeding prospects is for the masses to wake up and realize it's all a fucking lie - the closest the U.S. ever came to that stage was the late 1960s - and such deviance was eventually sublimated by consumer culture into the packaged deviance of basically body piercing and ass tattoos.
If all that's not worth a -1 Offtopic I don't know what is.
I know that if I were watching my family starve to death while others lived profligate lives wasting food and resources the way the average American family does, my moral inclination toward righteousness would be challenged by my love for my family and desire to care for them, to the point where forcibly redistributing wealth from said fatsos to my family would seem less and less reprehensible as time went by.
Nobody starves to death in the United States - poverty in the United States is positively associated with obesity and the numerous so-called "diseases of affluence" such as type 2 diabetes that accompany it, not the symptomology of malnutrition. It is extremely ironic that one must pay a premium for so called "healthy" food, which in essence just consists of fancy packaging and fewer calories per unit volume.
I would REALLY love to see what study you found that supports that claim.............
I've been looking for years to find one, still haven't;)
Before you jump to prove me wrong, only peer-reviewed papers count, I hold everything to the same rigor that I hold science.
The studies that I have found, however, and the numbers at that show no problems with gun ownership.
I would REALLY love to see what study you found that supports that claim.............
I've been looking for years to find one, still haven't;)
Before you jump to prove me wrong, only peer-reviewed papers count, I hold everything to the same rigor that I hold science.
The studies that I have found, however, and the numbers at that show no problems with gun ownership.
Here's a study based on CDC statistics that essentially confirms what everyone should know intuitively - states with more gun owners have more gun related deaths.
Now you want money. In California, New York, Hawaii, Illinois, D.C., or Michigan, you're in heaven.
Depends upon where you are where you are. Trying to lump "California" or "New York" into one unit regarding crime statistics is disingenuous. Hawaii has a lower per-capita violent crime rate than even Massachusetts, People's Republic Of.
Places like Dallas, or Pensacola, Denver, Missoula, Kansas City, or even Miami are quite a bit different. In states and cities that support CCW (Concealed Carry Weapon) permits, now the criminal has some math to do.
The major cities you listed have violent crime rates per capita significantly higher than the national average. Dallas and Miami are your examples of cities that prove the crime-reduction ability of concealed carry laws? Good grief.
To quote a wiser man than me: "An armed society is a polite one."
An armed society is a polite society during the periods that nobody is shooting. One can easily think of any number of societies on the globe that are well-armed that are by no means "polite."
As a gun proponent, I rebuff, I say show me the numbers. Put up or shut up. Prove with credible stats and studies (I.E. anything that can actually stand up to peer review, Daily Kos, bloggers, and the stupid shit you read on the lib pamphlets don't count), and I'll cede the point.
The easiest statistical correlations to draw
regarding violent crime is that it moves in lockstep with both poverty levels and the number of Hispanic and African-American residents in a certain area. With regard to current ideals in social discourse it is of course racist to say this, though the FBI statistics show exactly that - but it's in the form of graphs and charts and nobody actually comes out and says it in a straightforward manner.
"Open design hardware" sounds pretty much right. Is it possible to get the Verilog code that describes the operation of say the FTDI USB/Serial chip? Nope. Will a semiconductor manufacturer tell you what really goes on inside the STA013 Mp3 decoder chip that a lot of "open source" Mp3 player projects use? No way! But so long as you're OK with looking at many integrated circuits as abstract building blocks, then essentially any product you can find schematics for or take the time to trace out a circuit of is open source. I still think projects like the ones mentioned are fantastic though, as component selection and construction are well thought out with the hobbyist in mind, and like the x0xb0x fill a niche market (a re-engineering of a defunct product) or the WaveBubble (which no consumer electronics company would touch).
Which are about as "capitalist' as the post office. Government-created monstrosities exempt from the law, which were leaned on by Barney Frank (see also, Barney's Rubble) and Chris Dodd to lend to poor people with bad credit.
I have to ask the question - if the Libertarian ideal of laissez-faire capitalism is so obviously the "correct" way for the fundamental economic idea of maximization of utility to manifest itself, why are there such problems creating a pure free market system in the U.S. instead of the quasi-socialist current system? I find it very difficult to believe that, given the power of American corporations, that somehow the Democrats could enforce such a system without their consent. The only conclusion I can draw is that the current economic system must exist because it creates a symbiotic net benefit for both government and corporations that's better (at least for those parties involved) than pure LFC. That or the economic theories that pure LFC are based upon are incorrect.
Capital wouldn't be finite. Productivity drives growth and growth drives investment which in turn drives productivity.
That's the fundamental flaw in all economic theories, that capital is the driving force behind economies. Economies exist in the service of entropy - they serve as a vehicle for the conversion of low entropy resources into high entropy products and waste. "Productivity" doesn't really drive growth, it's our term for the process of adjusting an energy balance through economic activity.
Capital, whether specie or fiat, has no value to an economy unto itself - they're finally just ways of representing one's access to energy. If all economic systems must exist in a closed system consisting of the Earth and Sun (which they must), which consists of finite energy sources and sinks, then capital is always finite. How exactly economies are expected to grow multiple percentage points each year relative to their current size (dx/dt = kx) apparently indefinitely in a fundamentally closed system is left as an exercise.
(IANAPP, there may be experiments that distinguish between exactly zero and not quite zero that don't put an error bar around the measurement of mass. If that's the case, then either hypothesis is falsifiable.)
If the neutrino does undergo "flavor oscillations", then it can't have exactly zero rest mass; roughly speaking for an elementary particle to change it has to "experience time" which massless particles traveling at exactly c do not.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you checked the kind of salaries and sign on bonuses hospitals in the U.S. are offering to RNs lately? There's such a nursing shortage in the U.S. healthcare industry that you can essentially dictate your own terms.
That being said many of I have not been in the area for a while, but there used to be mad hordes of naked Hippies that congregated there for a monthly drum circle on the night of the full moon.
I hear nerve gas is good for infestations like that.
There's nothing right now that looks as promising as the great booms of the past - railroads, automobiles, electricity, radio, aviation, plastics, computing, the Internet.
All those innovations were dependent upon the availability of cheap, plentiful energy resources. As we move into the era of expensive, scarce energy resources there will be less and less economic viability for technologies that consume enormous amounts of them.
Industrialized civilization is currently on its way out. If you're looking to cash in during whatever time remains one is probably best off getting into "green" energy industries as nations frantically try to find replacements for fossil fuels. I believe that the endeavor will ultimately fail, but it certainly holds more short term promise for revolution than any huge advances in various "futuristic" pipe-dream fields such as robotics, AI, space travel, or biotechnology.
Ooooh yeah. It's been several years since I read the two. I skipped Manifold, Origin as the reviews on it seemed to be pretty uniformly bad.
In the novel Manifold, Time it's discovered that Venus once supported life, but the planet was encircled in superconducting electromagnets and its molten core "spun down", causing the loss of its magnetic field and hence its oxygen atmosphere.
Not really a device, but the photino birds weren't very good for the universe either.
Uno. Uno. Dos. Uno. Quatro. Cinco. Cinco. Nueve. Cinco. Siete. Cero. Nueve. Cinco. FINAL. FINAL. FINAL.
It's even more fun when you can hear crosstalk originating at the transmitter from Radio Habana Cuba. ESTE ES....RRRRADIO HABANA CUUUUBA!
Essentially none. The consumers who overpaid certainly won't any kind of credit from the government, that's for sure. And real price competition among corporations has long become passe - you won't see any drop in TV prices anytime soon. This is just an example where the parties involved got caught; free markets really suck for big corporations, particularly during an economic downturn. It's much easier to consolidate and collude and keep prices high to extract as much money as possible from the people who can still afford to pay than accept the huge uncertainty of lowering them and ending up in a price war.
Another thing that got glossed over in the TNG films is just how long it supposedly took to construct a Galaxy-class starship. A long time ago I owned a copy of the Star Trek Technical Manual, and it had a timeline of the construction process for the Enterprise D. If I'm remembering correctly it took the better part of 40 years to complete a Galaxy class ship. Building a single one would be a huge multi-generational task, which is why it's understandable the Federation Council would have been pretty pissed at Kirk after Star Trek 3. In the TNG movies it seems like they blow one up every installment.
Whenever old material has been revived lately, "a new outlook" seems to have always translated to "An edgier, darker _____" which means "Make the cast younger, and ramp up the sexy and the violence."
Have you tried making cuprous acetylide instead?
Major retail stores generally aren't laid out inefficiently, at least from the perspective of attempting to subtly manipulate consumers. For example, you almost never find "things that go with other things" located in the same geographic area: DVDs and DVD players aren't going to be right next to each other, and you usually won't find the TVs right next to the interconnect cables. Supermarkets do the same thing - vegetables at the front, meat at the back, dairy at the side ends. Essentially it's to prevent people from engaging in "surgical strike" shopping, and make sure that every opportunity for impulse buying is made available. This is why I find IKEA intolerable; they've taken this idea to its logical conclusion and made it difficult to just "run in" for a single item without navigating through the entire store.
A book on retail interior design makes a fascinating read; it gives you insight into the psychology of shopping and the way (successful) retailers try to manage it. Even the manipulation of empty space is important - for example there are certain areas in stores where it has been shown that people are much less sensitive to their surroundings, such as the first ten feet inside the store entrance. It's pointless to put advertising or products in these "dead zones" as people generally won't notice. Large retail stores are probably the most complex visual environment that a modern human deals with on a regular basis; they're probably the most complex visual environment that people have dealt with in all of human history. A lot of high tech research goes into modeling how best to set them up for the desired results.
How many 555 timers could dance on the head of a pin using a 45nm process?
Yeah okay. Good plot for a Sci-Fi Channel Made-for-TV movie, or maybe a Direct-to-DVD production.
Or a Greg Bear novel. I can't wait for my kids to smell more than kids already do!
Personally I can't say I miss some of the NES RPGs. A few years back I dusted off my NES console from a closet and fired up Dragon Warrior. Somehow my saved games were still intact from 1989, but first I started a new quest. After 20 minutes I was pretty well bored. These games were the ultimate grindfests; killing slime after slime to get enough gold to upgrade my bamboo stick to a sharpened bamboo stick or whatever comes next without even the social interaction or plot that makes WoW or modern RPGs interesting respectively. Sometimes nostalgia is well placed, in this case old is definitely not better.
I remember that some of the later titles in the Dragon Warrior series were more interesting. I did get a kick out of loading up one of my nearly 2 decade old games, saved right near the end, and killing the Dragonlord once more for good measure.
If we've drifted off into the territory of anti-social annoyances:
Remember that parking directly in front of the entrance to a gas station convenience store in what is normally a fire lane is OK so long as you're driving an Escalade, just running in real quick, too drunk to find a proper parking spot, or need to get scratch tickets. Also, if you buy scratch tickets make certain you scratch all 20 of them right at the counter like your own private casino, regardless of how many customers may be waiting behind you.
Poor people are poor because they're stupid with their money.
Or because they were born into the wrong environment. Because they had no access to education. Because they have chronic illnesses, or have to support family members who do. Because they were unlucky. Because their jobs were shipped overseas. Because it's a priori impossible for _everyone_ on a 6 billion person planet to be wealthy. Because the deck is constantly stacked against them in an economic system that always privatizes the profits and socializes the costs. Because the ideal of the "American Dream" has been consistently proved incorrect by study after study: the majority of people in the US will live and die within the socioeconomic bracket that they were born in no matter what they do.
By the way, most middle and upper class folks need to develop some fiscal responsibility themselves.
Aha! So when the poors are in financial trouble, it's called being stupid, and they stay poor. Capitalism is working just fine at that level. When the wealthy do it, it's called being "fiscally irresponsible" and it's of course not any flaw of character, but the fault of any number of externalities. Where's FedGov with the bailout?
One would think that the chance that the younger generations will have indefinitely longer lifespans would encourage more people to think of long-term consequences.
Life extension technology will arrive just in time for me to live indefinitely in the body of an octogenarian. I can't wait! (seriously!)
What I wish to say is that if the definition one has of eliminating poverty is the "American Dream" of everyone owning an 11,000 square foot home, 2 luxury cars in the driveway, and 2.5 kids going to the best universities, forget it. It can't be done! Attempting to bring the whole planet up to what is considered an American middle class standard of living will burn through what resources remain on this planet like flash paper.
I feel the reason "poverty" exists as it is defined in the United States is finally because the resources that do exist are ultimately advertised, marketed, and distributed to the "poor" in a way that leaves them physically, emotionally, and spiritually unsatisfied - to keep people always grasping for more - and this is done intentionally by the industries involved to make sure wealth continues to always flow upward. If you can trick people into believing that just that little extra effort, that next little purchase will somehow lead to true satisfaction, you can always make them believe that it's just around the corner. It's just a con-game to make what resources are left bubble to the top.
Finally it all comes down to breeding rights and reproduction. That's what life is here for, it's what the specialized organ at the center of our bodies is there for. Perhaps the final reason for the existence of every concept of wealth, prosperity, and economic success is that it's the current measure by which one's fitness for breeding is judged. And if the current gold standard of breeding fitness is the American way of life - then by God those who have it are going to use every trick in the book to squeeze those who don't by the balls to give them the illusion of getting there when they're really not. The worst thing that could ever happen for their breeding prospects is for the masses to wake up and realize it's all a fucking lie - the closest the U.S. ever came to that stage was the late 1960s - and such deviance was eventually sublimated by consumer culture into the packaged deviance of basically body piercing and ass tattoos.
If all that's not worth a -1 Offtopic I don't know what is.
I know that if I were watching my family starve to death while others lived profligate lives wasting food and resources the way the average American family does, my moral inclination toward righteousness would be challenged by my love for my family and desire to care for them, to the point where forcibly redistributing wealth from said fatsos to my family would seem less and less reprehensible as time went by.
Nobody starves to death in the United States - poverty in the United States is positively associated with obesity and the numerous so-called "diseases of affluence" such as type 2 diabetes that accompany it, not the symptomology of malnutrition. It is extremely ironic that one must pay a premium for so called "healthy" food, which in essence just consists of fancy packaging and fewer calories per unit volume.
I would REALLY love to see what study you found that supports that claim.............
I've been looking for years to find one, still haven't ;)
Before you jump to prove me wrong, only peer-reviewed papers count, I hold everything to the same rigor that I hold science.
The studies that I have found, however, and the numbers at that show no problems with gun ownership.
I would REALLY love to see what study you found that supports that claim.............
I've been looking for years to find one, still haven't ;)
Before you jump to prove me wrong, only peer-reviewed papers count, I hold everything to the same rigor that I hold science.
The studies that I have found, however, and the numbers at that show no problems with gun ownership.
Here's a study based on CDC statistics that essentially confirms what everyone should know intuitively - states with more gun owners have more gun related deaths.
Now you want money. In California, New York, Hawaii, Illinois, D.C., or Michigan, you're in heaven.
Depends upon where you are where you are. Trying to lump "California" or "New York" into one unit regarding crime statistics is disingenuous. Hawaii has a lower per-capita violent crime rate than even Massachusetts, People's Republic Of.
Places like Dallas, or Pensacola, Denver, Missoula, Kansas City, or even Miami are quite a bit different. In states and cities that support CCW (Concealed Carry Weapon) permits, now the criminal has some math to do.
The major cities you listed have violent crime rates per capita significantly higher than the national average. Dallas and Miami are your examples of cities that prove the crime-reduction ability of concealed carry laws? Good grief.
To quote a wiser man than me: "An armed society is a polite one."
An armed society is a polite society during the periods that nobody is shooting. One can easily think of any number of societies on the globe that are well-armed that are by no means "polite."
As a gun proponent, I rebuff, I say show me the numbers. Put up or shut up. Prove with credible stats and studies (I.E. anything that can actually stand up to peer review, Daily Kos, bloggers, and the stupid shit you read on the lib pamphlets don't count), and I'll cede the point.
The easiest statistical correlations to draw regarding violent crime is that it moves in lockstep with both poverty levels and the number of Hispanic and African-American residents in a certain area. With regard to current ideals in social discourse it is of course racist to say this, though the FBI statistics show exactly that - but it's in the form of graphs and charts and nobody actually comes out and says it in a straightforward manner.
"Open design hardware" sounds pretty much right. Is it possible to get the Verilog code that describes the operation of say the FTDI USB/Serial chip? Nope. Will a semiconductor manufacturer tell you what really goes on inside the STA013 Mp3 decoder chip that a lot of "open source" Mp3 player projects use? No way! But so long as you're OK with looking at many integrated circuits as abstract building blocks, then essentially any product you can find schematics for or take the time to trace out a circuit of is open source. I still think projects like the ones mentioned are fantastic though, as component selection and construction are well thought out with the hobbyist in mind, and like the x0xb0x fill a niche market (a re-engineering of a defunct product) or the WaveBubble (which no consumer electronics company would touch).
Which are about as "capitalist' as the post office. Government-created monstrosities exempt from the law, which were leaned on by Barney Frank (see also, Barney's Rubble) and Chris Dodd to lend to poor people with bad credit.
I have to ask the question - if the Libertarian ideal of laissez-faire capitalism is so obviously the "correct" way for the fundamental economic idea of maximization of utility to manifest itself, why are there such problems creating a pure free market system in the U.S. instead of the quasi-socialist current system? I find it very difficult to believe that, given the power of American corporations, that somehow the Democrats could enforce such a system without their consent. The only conclusion I can draw is that the current economic system must exist because it creates a symbiotic net benefit for both government and corporations that's better (at least for those parties involved) than pure LFC. That or the economic theories that pure LFC are based upon are incorrect.
Capital wouldn't be finite. Productivity drives growth and growth drives investment which in turn drives productivity.
That's the fundamental flaw in all economic theories, that capital is the driving force behind economies. Economies exist in the service of entropy - they serve as a vehicle for the conversion of low entropy resources into high entropy products and waste. "Productivity" doesn't really drive growth, it's our term for the process of adjusting an energy balance through economic activity.
Capital, whether specie or fiat, has no value to an economy unto itself - they're finally just ways of representing one's access to energy. If all economic systems must exist in a closed system consisting of the Earth and Sun (which they must), which consists of finite energy sources and sinks, then capital is always finite. How exactly economies are expected to grow multiple percentage points each year relative to their current size (dx/dt = kx) apparently indefinitely in a fundamentally closed system is left as an exercise.
Neo-Nazi or Elder Geek? These are tough choices you offer.
(IANAPP, there may be experiments that distinguish between exactly zero and not quite zero that don't put an error bar around the measurement of mass. If that's the case, then either hypothesis is falsifiable.)
If the neutrino does undergo "flavor oscillations", then it can't have exactly zero rest mass; roughly speaking for an elementary particle to change it has to "experience time" which massless particles traveling at exactly c do not.