AlexL

I do not understand your "in other words". You seem to assume that atomic and subatomic particles should have essentially the same properties we quite successfully use in describing balls falling from balconies; but: (1) there is no logical necessity for this to be the case, and (2) it is not the case. First, I am speaking for myself: I do not necessarily endorse the views of Bob or others on the subject. Second: for an attempt of an interpretation which dispenses with the observer and observation as the starting point of the quantum theory, try Mario Bunge, Philosophy of Physics, 1973, available in good science libraries. Read a few pages from the first chapter and see if the general approach makes sense to you; I bet you will be surprised... Of course, as always, a critical reading is in order. And having studied some QM helps very much at a better understanding of the arguments, but for the purpose of judging the general philosophical approach, is nor absolutely necessary. Alex

Without intending to enter into a debate about Quantum Mechanics, please consider: - the possibility that your request about predicting the exact location of the electron is meaningless - the possibility that the notion itself of the exact location of the atomic electron is an anticoncept - the possibility that it is not QM itself that is meaningless, but some (or most) of its philosophical interpretations - that the axioms of existence, identity, etc. would not be contradicted if the notion of the atomic electron having an exact position and momentum to an arbitrary precision and at the same time, proves to be meaningless. Alex

An article prompted by lectures given by Dr. Yaron Brook in Israel: http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid...icle%2FShowFull Also about Dr. Yaron Brook himself and his lectures: http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid...icle%2FShowFull

In a debate I am having with a colleague, I claimed that most of the increase in the standard of living from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution to the one we enjoy today is due to privately funded research. Is his position defensible? Can anyone point me to references on the subject? Thanks Alex

A careful distinction should be made between sovereignty and property. The text below is essentially what I posted on HPO in April 2004. What the United Nations did in 1948 was to give sovereignty over some territories, and not ownership, to a Jewish, respectively an Arab, state. Ownership and sovereignty are completely different concepts. Sovereignty is about which (or whose) legislation is valid for people living inside a territory, and ownership is about who can acquire, use or sell something. For example, here in Switzerland we have land which is owned by Swiss, but also some by Germans, British, Italians, Austrians, Spaniards, Americans, Russians, Romanians and what not. It is owned by these people because they bought it. Germany, UK, etc. has no say about how this land is used, sold or bought; only the owners have. All this land is, however, under Swiss sovereignty, that is all people who live on this land are subject to the Swiss law, and the rules of ownership are also Swiss. Now, sovereignty may change, for example when a territory is included in another country, but this does not cancel the ownership. Any civilized, or even semi-civilized, country has/had the concept of ownership and made this distinction. It was the case of the Ottoman Empire, which ruled in the geographic region called Palestine until 1918, and also UK, which did it between 1918 and 1948. Accordingly, if the Jews wanted to settle in Palestine, they had to buy the land which was owned, from the respective owners. Which they did, especially massively after about 1870. It wasn't possible otherwise, because the Ottoman, respectively the British Empire did have and did enforce the concept of ownership, and prevented theft of private property. If these arguments are not sufficient, I provided elsewhere(*) a quote from a work by a reputed historian, Paul Johnson, which directly acknowledges the fact of land buying be Jews in Palestine. Now, when the Jews established a state, the state of Israel, in 1949, this fact did not suppress ipso facto the titles of ownership on land and other property detained by non-Jews. And if there were cases of property theft, these are to be solved, and possibly punished, in the courts, according to law. If what you mean is that the Bible cannot *give* something to someone, this is correct: the Bible is not a property title. This is not what really happened: as shown above, what was given to future Jewish state was the *sovereignty* over a portion of land, and not *ownership*. At the same moment, sovereignty over another portion of land was given to a future Arab state, which also never existed before, but some people refused it. Moreover, the sovereignty which was given to them, was taken not from a state called Palestine (which never existed), but from UK (or, more exactly, UN). In any case, in the last at least 200 years there was no Arab sovereignty over whole or part of the region now called Palestine. ================ (*)In Paul Johnson's "A History of the Jews" I found many oblique references of land being purchased from, primarily Turkish, but also Jordanian and local Arab owners, the Rothschilds being big contributors. A more direct reference is this: The scale of the settlements pushed up the price of land, and Jewish settlers and agencies found the Arabs hard bargainers: "every dunam of land needed for our colonization work [had] to be bought in the open market", complained Weizmann, "at fantastic prices which rose ever higher as our work developed. Every improvement we made rased the value of the remaining land in that particular area, and the Arab landowners lost no time in cashing in. We found we had to cover the soil of Palestine with Jewish gold". (p. 435, HarperPerennial, soft cover, ISBN 0-06-091533-1) There could be better references in this book, but this is what I found in the first 10 minutes of search.

The Jewish IQ in the US changed dramatically within one generation; for example, in 1915, the Jews from Russia averaged at about 85, according to Thomas Sowell's "Ethnic America", Chap. 4: "As late as World War I, soldiers of Russian - mostly Jewish - origin averaged among the lowest mental test scores of any of the ethnic groups tested by the U.S. Army." The 85 figure is from Sowell's "Race and Culture", chapt. 6 Alex

From http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/202 The man who sparked the flat tax revolution is former Estonian Prime Minister Mart Laar. He governed his country from 1992 to 1995 and from 1999 to 2002. When the historian became Prime Minister in 1992 at the age of 32 he knew nothing about economy. Laar’s area of expertise were Europe’s 19th-century national movements. “It is very fortunate that I was not an economist,” he says. “I had read only one book on economics — Milton Friedman’s “Free to Choose.” I was so ignorant at the time that I thought that what Friedman wrote about the benefits of privatisation, the flat tax and the abolition of all customs rights, was the result of economic reforms that had been put into practice in the West. It seemed common sense to me and, as I thought it had already been done everywhere, I simply introduced it in Estonia, despite warnings from Estonian economists that it could not be done. They said it was as impossible as walking on water. We did it: we just walked on the water because we did not know that it was impossible.” [reference found at http://gabriel.mihalache.name/bop/archives...08/28/18.09.03/ ] Alex

After the failure of the Israeli Kibbutzims (communes): "...there is one big improvement in [our] lives ... [we] are freer. We don't have to ask the people in charge for permission all the time anymore". Full article at: http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pag...p=1074657885918 Selected quotes: The kibbutz movement, which is 96 years old, has been on an uneven march away from collectivism and toward individualism in recent decades. Even the most traditional, socialistic, Hashomer Hatzair kibbutzim have introduced consumer choice, allowing members to dispose of their income any way they want, which would have been rejected as heresy 20 years ago. Among kibbutzim that have abolished income equality, the next major change on the horizon is the division of property and other assets among the members, which will make it impossible, or at least absurd, to speak of them as kibbutzim at all. The socialist ideology they [the "founders generation"] were raised on has been utterly rejected by their country, and at least modified by their kibbutzim as well. They can't earn a living, they can't "keep up" economically on their own power. And while the kibbutzim are recovering economically after nearly drowning in debt in the late Eighties and Nineties, they are still, on the whole, running somewhat behind the national average in per capita income. "Too many of the kibbutzim were living on borrowed money. An old kibbutznik would tell himself, 'Well, the kids have left, but the system still works.' After 1985, it became much more difficult to say that," says Gavron. "There was a huge trauma over what happened at Beit Oren." In 1987, Beit Oren, a kibbutz in the Carmel Mountains that had always had economic difficulties, collapsed... [T]he founders interviewed were bred on the primary socialist principle of "all work and all workers have equal value," ... All held to that value over the decades of their kibbutz membership. As for the emphasis on the group over the individual that was the social order of the kibbutzim, all ... saw the justice in that, too. "I laugh at people who say [the kibbutzim's method of arriving at decisions] is bolshevism. It's the opposite of bolshevism. People sit together and discuss and the majority decides. Here, for instance, there are always some people in favor of changing to differential salaries, but they're always in the minority." ... Rubinov reached his kibbutz in 1936 in his early 20s...: "When I got out of the car that took me to Na'an, they told me to take everything out of my suitcases, and they put these clothes over here and said, 'This you take,' and put those clothes over there and said, 'This you leave.' They told me to go to 'that room over there.' I knew this was how it would be. But what was worse was the laundry. "Every Friday," Rubinov continues, "they would take the underwear down from the lines and hand it out. How? They'd go around with a cart and put whichever underwear came to hand on the member's shelves. They didn't ask whether it fit or not, and this irritated me terribly." After a while, Rubinov started to complain. He fought to have the underwear numbered according to its wearer so that each member could always have underwear that fit. "They told me, 'Why are you talking such nonsense. You won't last as a kibbutznik. You want your own things. You have bourgeois ideas,'" he recalls, snickering over the term "bourgeois." In the Forties or Fifties, he can't remember when, he won – Kibbutz Na'an's underwear began to be numbered. "I still remember – my number was 166," he laughs. Until about age 30 he drove a tractor, which he enjoyed, and then the kibbutz told him to study to become a teacher, which he did. Work assignments were not a matter of choice, which irritated him terribly. "They put a note in your metal cup every day that told you where you were to work. It was like you weren't a human being, you were a part in a machine. The kibbutz took away your sense of being an individual. You were a notice in a metal cup," he says. Sometime in the Fifties or Sixties, after becoming a kibbutz teacher and member of the Histadrut Teachers Union, Rubinov did what he'd wanted to for a long time – he found a teaching job outside the kibbutz and left, staying away for a semester. "But I went back because my wife [Leyka, who died in 1984] didn't want to leave. She kept saying, 'Soon, soon,' but she never did it, so I went back. If she had come with me, I would have left for good." ... the overwhelming majority of adult children of older kibbutz members in the last 20 years, all left to make lives of their own. Fridberg sees the advantages of the radical change to differential salaries that took hold this year. ".... People don't want others to live off their work, and there was some of that in the kibbutz." The couple notes that among the members who started out with them at Nahsholim but later left, nearly all are now much better off financially than they are. "Those people were able to give their children more than we could," Hava says with a wistful smile. But, the wistfulness gone, she adds, "When I joined the kibbutz movement .... I was taught that a person has to contribute to society. We contributed." Alex

OK, let me try this. The government is an agent, a paid agent. Let's make the analogy with a hired detective, which is also a paid agent and see where it leads us. Let's keep in mind that right to property means right to gain, keep, use and dispose as one sees fit. I hire a detective, that is we agree on a specific contract for a specific task with him. Now, I give him some money in advance. What is the property status of this money? Before I gave it to him, it was mine. After I gave it to him, whose is it, that is who can keep, use and dispose of it as he wants? The detective? No, he has no freedom to use it as he wishes; he must use it for one specific purpose, the one set by the agreed contract. Am I still the owner? Well, only if the contract specifies that I can get the money back at any moment. But if I want the job well done, it is not in my interest to have such a whimsical clause in the contract, because such a Damocles sword is not conductive to a good job on the part of the detective. And, anyway, this is only an analogy, and in the case of a government, things don't work that way. So, we can conclude that the money the agent received is, strictly speaking, nobody's property. More precisely, it's use and disposal is not in the hands of a person, but is strictly prescribed by a contract. In a way, the contract itself is the new owner, or, better, "owner", as no leeway is permitted. "Custody" might be a better word. A judge intervenes in case of conflict. For the case of a government, this means that the government has no property in the full sense of the word. The judiciary is the supervisor of the correct execution of the contract. The legislative establishes the content of the contract, etc. Threfore, the Ayn Rand's definition holds as written. Alex

What site ? Privet ! Alex

Just a selection: http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_pau...-ethics_it.html ....an unbridled capitalism which puts the quest for power and profit and the cult of an often soulless efficiency above all other considerations.. http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_pau...estonia_en.html But today a great danger must also be acknowledged: the socalled "idolatry" of the market. This occurs whenever an economic system based on unbridled capitalism dictates policies which plunder natural resources, disregard the dignity of workers, undermine the family as society's basic unit and foster a consumer culture in which "having" is more important than "being". http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_pau...can-rep_en.html We must ... keep clear of the evils that derive from capitalism that sets money before people and makes people the victims of so many injustices. etc., etc. Alex

Take a look at http://www.capitalism.net/Capitalism/CAPIT...%20Internet.pdf You may also visit the links listed in http://www.capitalism.net/links.htm Alex

The library of the Philosophy Dept. of the Bucharest University should have quite a full set of AR's works. If you have an opportunity, could you please check and confirm this to me ? That one is my fault too :-) It was edited by a few students and assistent professors from the Philosophy Dept., with the support of the Soros Foundation (fortunately, he didn't check what was published with his money.) I have 5 author copies. I got the essentially same texts published also in a weekly supplement of a newspaper whse name I cannot remember right now. See also http://www.adevarulonline.ro/literar/2004-07-27-089.pdf I tried something similar, many years ago, through an aquitance of mine who was befriended with the Humanitas's owner, and it didn't work. It was about L. Peikoff's "Objectivism, the Philosophy of Ayn Rand." I can understand that it would be a commercially risky undertaking, though. Alex

I am comming from Romania too (born in Russia, though). Graduated in physics from the Bucharest University in 1969. Since 1981 in Switzerland. Also in the IT profession. I am aware about only one Romanian translation of A. Rand fiction: Anthem. Are there other translations? I translated a few essays which were even published. Who is the third person from Romania in this forum ? Alex