aleph_1

SK,
First off, thank you for kicking off an interesting discussion. It has been most enjoyable.
Now, I don't understand what you say on page 6 paragraph 3. In particular, you say
I do not know what "subly" is. Was this supposed to be "subtly"?
Let me subtly assume the existence of a concept that is tailor-made, etc. There is a concept in mathematics called a field. Examples of fields include the real numbers, complex numbers, finite fields and so on. Would it be fair to say that the concept "field" subsumes these subjects? Now, there is something called a complete field. Examples of complete fields include real numbers and complex numbers, etc. These subjects are subsumed by the concept "complete field". Finally, there is something called a complete ordered field. It seems to me that this is a concept. I have combined well-defined concepts to form a new concept. A priori, one does not know whether there exist any such subjects until once shows that the real numbers do in fact constitute a complete ordered field. Therefore we know that this is not an empty notion. Also, a priori one does not know how many such subjects exist. However, there is a proof that, up to isomorphism, there is only one such subject, the real numbers.
Was "complete ordered field" never a concept? If it was a concept until it was shown that there was only one, at what point did it cease to be a concept? Was it no longer a concept when someone first proved that there was only one such subject? What is a concept in your own mind until someone informed you of the proof that there was only one, making "authority" the determining factor concerning concepts. Or, was it once you read and understood the proof that it ceased to be a concept?
I believe that "complete ordered field" is a concept despite the fact that there is only one. Was this a cheap shot?

It is remarkable how little "common sense" resembles "sense". Opining from an ocean away before hardly evidence is in more resembles non-objective emotionalism.
Almost everything in the initial news reports was absolutely false. We were told that the boy was shot in the police car while resisting arrest. Then we were told that he was shot from behind while surrendering. We were told that he was gentle and would never harm anyone. Then we were shown a thug abusing a shop clerk while committing a robbery. Now we are told he was shot fron the front while rushing at the police officer. The young man was shot by a pistol and not
military weapons.

The case of Mr. Brown has little to do with police militarization. It seems that it has more to do with a thug culture that did not exist in the black community in the 1960's when racism was worse. The focus on police militarization is misdirection.

Ignorant ad hominem seems to rule the day. I take issue with your point 3. You say "Some of these effects can include benefits to white people today from injustices done to persons of color in the past."

So, am I to infer that all white people benefit from past racial discrimination? I call BS. In what way do I benefit from my ancestors deserting from the army of northern Virginia to join the Pennsylvanian army during the civil war and then losing all they had after the war because there was no going back to Virginia? How do I benefit from my ancestors' being discriminated against during WWI because they spoke German? I should count myself fortunate because all white people benefit today because some blacks suffered in the past. I grew up dirt poor and all I have I earned, but I should count myself fortunate because all white people benefit from past racial discrimination.

Pray tell, how precisely did I benefit because I'm having a hard time reconciling the penury of my past with your uniform assertion.

It is my observation that Catholic societies are more left-leaning while protestant societies are more right-leaning. I believe that this stems from the Spanish colonial centralized form of government and legal system in the former. The British common law legal system is predominant in the latter, except in India which became independent in the golden age of socialism.

This ruling is ill-begotten. How something is done is as important as what is done. In my view, marriage is an issue of contract and does not rise to a federal issue. This is not really about rights but about benefits. Again, benefits accruing from marriage should not be a federal issue. This should have been handled in the States through political processes. This ruling is sure to lead to a number of problems involving actual rights being infringed. What a mess of a decision.

Why is it so hard to talk to white people about racism? First, I object to the premise of the question. There is no such monolithic thing called "white people". Second, when discussing racism one encounters the shibboleth of white privilege. In this way one is side-tracked down a dead-end of nothingness and avoids issues of real substance. Third, those who object to the meaninglessness are ridiculed and side-lined. unreality prevails.

The problem, 2046, is not an unwillingness on the part of whites to accept responsibility for historical wrong. White guilt is too prominent. The problem is having racism literally spat in your face unjustly. I will have no more of this original sin. When I wiped that spit off of my face I was made clean and whole, baptized into blamelessness.

I don't know who invented the idea of renting but I'm pretty sure that a feudal serf couldn't rent anything. Well-established property rights are a prerequisite to rents. There may have been numerous inventions and re-inventions of rentals throughout history.
 
What I am familiar with is the feasibility of rents. At base, it is worth owning if the costs of ownership are less than the costs of renting. "Costs" should be interpreted to include financial and nonfinancial costs. If a rental makes you money but consumes your life then it may not be worth it. As an example, I bought a 6-plex in Sacramento, CA that was in reasonably good shape and fully rented. When I bought it the rents just covered the mortgage. As units became available, my wife and I would fix them up and turn them around at a higher rent. By the time we sold the 6-plex (one year), the rents had increased by 50% and we were making a tidy profit month-to-month. However, the property value had doubled so we sold (2001). In addition, we had some "problem tenants" that made my wife miserable.
 
On a 3-plex we owned, in the course of three years the rents tripled (after renovations) and so did the property value. We could have kept the 3-plex and received a few thousand dollars per month in rent or sell it and get several hundred thousand dollars cash in hand. At the time (2002) I reasoned that if someone bought the property from me and tried to do what I was doing (rent the units), and if the new owner put 20% down and had a large loan, then the new owners would lose money month-to-month. This indicated to me that property values had risen too much too fast and this it was a good time to sell.
 
What I didn't know is how irrationally markets can behave when goosed by the fed. The Greenspan bubble was burst by Bernanke in 2006. The housing market teetered over in 2007 and crashed in 2008. I was completely out of California real estate in 2005. It just didn't make sense to me. All of my US real estate is now in Texas.
 
Concerning peer-to-peer rentals, the same analysis applies. Ownership is preferable if the rents cover the financial and personal costs. Renting may be the way to go if the cost of renting is less than the cost of ownership. For example, in my experience boats and RV's are better rented than owned. The same is often true of vacation property.
 
The historical problem with renting many assets is the cost of advertising relative to the rents received. This is becoming mitigated by the internet. One must still consider the losses due to theft, damage, wear and tear, and the amount of one's life spent in the endeavor. Dealing with people can also be problematic. Going to court costs you more than small claims fees and payment to execute writs. It is also a lot of stress. I know. And you can't get blood from a turnip. Good luck!

In response to Harrison D's remarks about infinity being inferred from unboundedness, I would like to make a fine distinction. One might think of "unboundedness" as being the very definition of "infinity", but one must be careful then not to use "infinity" as a noun. One may also be careful not to collect things like natural numbers into a "set" in order to keep "infinity" from becomming a noun, or from possessing the properties of other sets that are closer to how perceivable concepts are organized. "Infinity" is not perceivable. In the extended real numbers infinity is added as a noun and certain arithmetic operations are defined for it. Perhaps this should be thought of as a convenient fiction that is not directly traceable to perception. People use "infinity" in very flexible ways that often have no particular meaning. Therefore, one must be careful about the use of this term.

My god! How easily we forget. There are easily obtainable images of Zykon-B on the web, as well as images of Nazi stockpiles of the poison. That the "final solution" was ordered by Hitler and carried out by the SS is an historical fact supported by many documents. Murder is often refered to euphemistically in these documents so don't expect them to say, "We intend to kill so and so many Jews." Rather, expect terms like "special actions" and "treated accordingly". The camps themselves testify to the meaning. The euphemisms testify to the fact that these same Nazis' knew that what they were doing was wrong. We have the testimony of thousands of conteporary witnesses who tell us of the gas chambers and crematoria.
 
There is no excusing the genocide. What is more, there is no excusing the genocide deniers such as David Irving. When I first read your post I thought, "I hope no one replies to this post since it doesn't deserve a reply." Perhaps the lessons of history need to be reviewed lest they be forgotten.

My god! How easily we forget. There are easily obtainable images of Zykon-B on the web, as well as images of Nazi stockpiles of the poison. That the "final solution" was ordered by Hitler and carried out by the SS is an historical fact supported by many documents. Murder is often refered to euphemistically in these documents so don't expect them to say, "We intend to kill so and so many Jews." Rather, expect terms like "special actions" and "treated accordingly". The camps themselves testify to the meaning. The euphemisms testify to the fact that these same Nazis' knew that what they were doing was wrong. We have the testimony of thousands of conteporary witnesses who tell us of the gas chambers and crematoria.
 
There is no excusing the genocide. What is more, there is no excusing the genocide deniers such as David Irving. When I first read your post I thought, "I hope no one replies to this post since it doesn't deserve a reply." Perhaps the lessons of history need to be reviewed lest they be forgotten.

I don't understand how I am supposed to live without privately owned land. What is the alternative? Are we supposed to share all land in common? The agricutural revolution would never have happened. Without privately owned land wouldn't we all be nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes reduced to a neolithic subsistence?

Referring to "Christians as some monolithic group is the same sort of floating abstraction as "society". Saying Christians do this or that is equivalent to saying society does this or that and is absurd. Your hatred of "Christians", which is itself a form of otherism, permits you to behave in a unprincipled way concerning related issues. What is more, any law that creates protected classes, such as the civil rights laws of the 60's, violates the principle of Equal Protection. We should be protected from laws that do injustice. People should do as they please. The parts of the civil rights laws that strike down unjust laws are good. The rest is a violation of individual rights. In damning laws that allow people to act according to their own conscience and in advocating the status quo, you seem to be unprincipled in this area of thought.

This author makes some interresting points about how war changes nations. Among the ideas presented are the Hobbsian idea that governments that hold absolute power are preferred to the human natural state which is brutal and short. The alternative is the Kantian idea that democratic governments are better because they are less likely to go to war. Another historian said that war makes nations and nations make war. In this sense, perhaps the disease of war is a product of the nation state.

The last part of the book concerns the way the US and other governments spy on their own citizens and keep secret much of the operations of the state. This reverses the 4th ammendment of the US, part of the bill of rights, which was based on the premise that government should know little about the people but the people should know about how their governments are run. After all, knowledge is power.

The book points out that J Edgar Hoover regularly spied on people and used the information against them to accomplish his own political ends. What the IRS scandal and the Snowden revelations tell us is that Hoover was piker.

This book is a good read.

This author makes some interresting points about how war changes nations. Among the ideas presented are the Hobbsian idea that governments that hold absolute power are preferred to the human natural state which is brutal and short. The alternative is the Kantian idea that democratic governments are better because they are less likely to go to war. Another historian said that war makes nations and nations make war. In this sense, perhaps the disease of war is a product of the nation state.

The last part of the book concerns the way the US and other governments spy on their own citizens and keep secret much of the operations of the state. This reverses the 4th ammendment of the US, part of the bill of rights, which was based on the premise that government should know little about the people but the people should know about how their governments are run. After all, knowledge is power.

The book points out that J Edgar Hoover regularly spied on people and used the information against them to accomplish his own political ends. What the IRS scandal and the Snowden revelations tell us is that Hoover was piker.

This book is a good read.

Alternatively, the universe could have the topology of a torus so that on certain opposing trajectories the javelins would wind about the torus coming close multiple times and yet never colliding.

Interesting...
 
Back to the error in the above:
 
Upon thinking about the stones in the buildings you immediately think of a large heavy stone, and a small lighter stone falling next to each other.  You imagine that the lighter stone is falling slower than the heavier one and visualize it lagging behind the heavy one, the gap becoming ever increasing.
 
Then a thought comes to your mind... what if you tied the lighter slow stone to the heavier fast stone, would the slow stone "hold back" the fast stone?  You imagine the string becoming taught between the heavy stone "trying" to fall faster and the lighter stone "trying" to fall slower. Would the result be an average speed, or would the string break? Then you imagine bundling them tightly and ask yourself would the bundle fall at an average between the natural speed of the fast stone and the natural speed of the slow stone acting against each other?
 
Then you come to the realization that two stones which are tied together could be thought of as a single thing, a "bundle" of stones. If thought of as a single bundle, it has a weight greater than either of the two stones of which it is composed and should therefor fall even faster than either two alone...  but then again, when thought of as two stones working against each other they should at an average (or some intermediate) speed between the two... or in any case slower than the single bundle.
 
It seems as if the bundle must fall at two mutually exclusive (different) rates...This clealy starts to become disconcerting to you.
 
You then remember that from your experience watching your uncle make sculptures with the stone, that in fact the common stones used for buildings in your village are sandstone.  You remember your uncle showing you that in fact the stone is made of an incredible number of very little grains, and pebbles, which are packed closely together.
 
... it starts to dawn on you that any single heavy stone is actually a great number of very miniscule and much lighter stones.  If a stone can be thought of as a collection of tiny miniscule stones, then should the stone fall at the slow rate of any one of those single tiny stones??... but then again if tightly packed little stones can be though of as a single heavy stone (the same way the bundle can be thought of as a single thing) then should not the heavy stone fall at a single speed which is much faster than any single tiny stone?
 
While pondering this apparent paradox you realize that the fact that "something can be thought of" in one or more senses is not a principle of how reality works, things simply are what they are and do what they do... and ariving at a conclusion that something must be and do something self-contradictory reveals an error of thought... in particular it is the premise which directly lead to this contradiction which is in error.
 
 
With a smile, you then state to the fellow who originated the principle:
 
"Your asserted principle fails application to single things which are at once heavy and also are composed of a plurality of lighter things, leading to a self-contradiction regarding the speed at which it should fall. In fact since all things around us here (you point at everyday complex macroscopic objects made of matter) are made of divisible matter, no "thing" could fall at a single speed according to your principle, being both a whole heavy thing and a collection of subparts being lighter things. Your principle lacks non-contradictiory compositional application and is therefore incoherrent, quite simply: false."

Who has more virtue, the bhuddist monk who begs for rice so that he can sit, meditate and achieve enlightenment or the rice farmer whose virtue sustains both? In my book, the bhuddist monk is a parasite. The rice farmer has a better understanding of life's imperatives.

That's funny AndieH. I had to laugh at almost every word you wrote. Let's just look at the phrase, "Political power authorizes the creation of markets...." What is this "Political Power" that you speak of? It seems that you use the phrase as a disembodied motive force capable of acts of creation. By an impersonal will, Political Power desires and creates markets. Somehow, this Political Power desires income equality, and while in possession of the power to control markets, will not use that power to further its own privileges but will instead implement policies that strive toward income equality. Ha, Ha Ha Ha. It's never happened in the course of history, even by those possessing the greatest economic planning apparatuses.
 
In terms of a metaphor for the role that governments play in markets, perhaps you might appreciate this: Businesses are the race cars that run on 104 octane fuel and government is the mobster choosing who gets the racing fuel and who gets stuck with 87 octane fuel in order to maximize the bookies rake.

There is little risk to you from taking a class at a community college. I have known students who started with a class in basic arithmetic, advanced through calculus 3, transfered to a university and have achieved great success. Just don't overextend yourself by trying to work overtime and go to school carrying too many credit hours. You only have so much virtue to allocate. Do so in the way that achieves the greatest value to yourself.

DonAthos,
 
May I ask one point of clarrification? If according to my values I weigh each of the building sites as 20% desirable, 50% desireable and 30% desirable, I could make my selection as follows: I could make a pie chart with the given area proportions and attach a spinner. Then I could spin the dial and wherever the arrow fell I would choose to build. Would you classify this method as rational but not volitional? Is it irrational?

This places the issue squarely before us. "Need" is the idol before which human sacrifices are required. The cult of need is prevalent and ascendent, Need should not be a blank check on other people's lives, but a demand for individual responsibility. Since needs are inifinite, the moment you make your needs someone else's responsibility is the moment of compulsory human sacrifice.
 
dream_weaver said:
 
"Is government the antithesis or the procurer of freedom?"
 
If only protecting freedom was the sole role of government.... Government has metastasized to become largely an abuser of our freedoms.

ucwp76,
 
I agree. I did not intend to imply that Dagny was acting as a serf, only that it may have seemed that way from an outside observer. I did point out that she was actually acting out of her interest in running the railroad.
 
Concerning Eddie, another Rand character that acts as a sort of serf is Andrei Taganov. He serves the Soviet Union and the Communist Party in particular at his own expense. Rand puts these words into his mouth just before he commits suicide: "Any man worth calling a man lives for himself." These words are what Eddie Willers never realized.

There have been quite a few excellent posts on this thread but one word I have been looking for is missing: "Serf". Eddie Willers is a serf to TT. A serf is one who belongs to the land and their lord. Eddie belonged to TT, having sacrificed his sense of self. This was his failing and why he stayed with the train despite having opportunity to leave. He deserved his fate.

John M,
 
When you say that Newton and Einstein made their discoveries by thinking for a long time, you forget that they were thinking about physical measurements. For example, Einstein thought about how while moving under the influence of gravity alone, you do not feel accelerated but rather weightless. He reasoned that if you do not feel accelerated, then you are in fact not accelerated. Even so, gravitational paths are curved and so there must be a theory of gravity where gravitational paths are unaccelerated and yet curved. It is a natural outome from Riemannian geometry that on curved spaces there are unaccelerated paths that are curved. It was natural then for Einstein to suppose that the curving of spacetime is caused by masses and the simplest idea is that there is a direction proportion between spacetime curvature and the mass-energy-momentum of spacetime. This leads quickly to the general theory of relativity. So when you say that these men arrived at their ideas by pure thought, that is not strictly speaking true. Their thoughts reflected observable facts. As a case in point, after Einstein derived his general theory, he tested it on a well-known problem with Mercury's orbit and found that his gravitational theory exactly accounted for the observational discrepancies that had been a conundrum for sixty years. This was not abstract thinking disconnected from reality. It was thinking founded in observable reality.
 
You say, "Mathematical formalism (the idea that math is "analytic" or just a matter of the extrapolation of concepts whose definitions we create) was defeated by Kurt Godel's incompleteness proof." It seems that Godel's Incompleteness Theorem implies quite the opposite of what you are saying. For example, Godel proved that you cannot prove the Continuum Hypothesis. Paul Cohen proved that you cannot disprove the Continuum Hypothesis. It follows that this hypothesis is beyond logic and represents pure rationalism since it is also beyond observation.
 
There is a lot wrong with your proposed theory, but this will do for now.