> The debt is already so large that this barely affects the momentum.
The idea that a 66% increase in the deficit "barely affects the momentum" is absurd reflects either your ignorance or your bad faith. Apply that logic to your personal spending and see how long it takes before you're bankrupt.
A 66% increase in the monthly deficit, in this case, amounts to about a 0.4% increase in national debt, by my back of the napkin math. I agree that it’s a dumb move, but I don’t think GP was wrong to say that it barely affects the momentum.
You’re free to disagree, but it will help the discussion if you can find a way to do so without the ad hominems.
Yyyyeeesss... that’s rather my point, that we’ve accumulated so much debt at this point that this doesn’t really move the needle as much as it sounds like when you ignore that accumulation and look only at a single month.
Again, I’m not arguing that it’s a good idea. It is irresponsible, for sure. But the scale of it is akin to somebody with $10k in credit card debt opting to go out for dinner once.
Valuable for who? Open source (at the margin) is more valuable for everyone--except the inventor, for whom it is not as valuable. So the inventor keeps the design proprietary, and keeps more money for themselves.
But, as is often the case, decisions that are optimal at the margin can often lead to suboptimal outcomes in aggregate.
I'm not convinced that's the case in IC fabrication, but its not impossible.
It's been a long time since my QM course, but, assuming by unitary you mean deterministic, then the answer is that time evolution of a particle's state is NOT deterministic. It is probabilistic. For large collections of particles, the probabilities come to overwhelmingly favor a single average state, but the state of any single particle remains non-deterministic.
This is in contrast to, for example, classical statistical mechanics where individual particles are considered to behave deterministically, but we simply lack the ability to measure their behavior. In (the Copenhagen interpretation of) QM there is no underlying determinism at all.
You might not like this idea (it's certainly non-intuitive), but decades of experiments have shown that the alternatives are all, most likely, wrong.
You are not too far off, as a first approximation you can say unitary means deterministic. But you are wrong with the time evolution not being deterministic, time evolution in quantum mechanics is deterministic. What seems not to be deterministic in the general case are measurement outcomes, that is where we take the Born rule, square the probability amplitudes, and get the probabilities for the different measurement outcomes.
But here lies the incompatibility I am asking about, time evolution is unitary and is in a sense incompatible with the Born rule stating that different measurement outcomes are possible. You can not have unitary time evolution and different possible measurement outcomes starting from the same initial state, at least not in a really obvious way.
The Bell Theorem shows that any local hidden variable theory wouldn't match the experimental data we already have.
There's other options for getting around the weirdness of the Copenhagen interpretation that aren't ruled out by the data we have, but most of them are even weirder.
The many-worlds interpretation is arguably simpler than the Copenhagen interpretation because it gets rid of the collapse postulate. And depending on how literally you take the Copenhagen interpretation, it may not even be self-consistent. At best it provides no explanation how the apparent collapse of the wave function happens, at worst it suggests that the world evolves according to two fundamentally incompatible laws, unitary time evolution and probabilistic projection onto eigenstates during measurement.
I don't want to argue for the many-worlds interpretation, I don't really like - and I am aware that this is a somewhat stupid thing to say about a physical theory. But I also have to admit that it makes sense from a point of simplicity and consistency and compares favorable to other interpretations.
This sounds like semantic befuddlement (though, not on Wheeler's part; he was just engaging in wordplay).
Physical laws are not 'laws' in the sense that nature is required to abide by them. They are simply features of natural behavior that have been so overwhelmingly observed that we treat them as axioms.
An example of this is the 'law' of conservation of mass. Strictly speaking, nature does not follow this law. Nuclear reactions and subatomic interactions do not conserve mass. They conserve other quantities, but not mass in and of itself.
The idea that there is no ultimate law of physics is not novel or interesting. It's obvious on its face, unless you do not properly understand what 'law' means in the context of physics.
Law of physics implies a casual relationship in nature. Saying there are no laws of physics is saying nature is acausal. B always follows A for no reason other than it just happens to do so in our universe. This is the Humean view of causation, which is constant conjunction instead of there being a reason that A results in B.
The plus side is that you don't have to deal with causality, which is a tricky concept. Hume persuasively argued that causality is neither empirical nor a result of logic. The downside is that all necessity is totally arbitrary. It just so happens ... As such, there is no reason for anything we observe. Just descriptions.
You are postulating here a priori that causality governs the movement of the universe. That is a philosophical position on how to interpret physical observation, but whereas archetypal temporal cause-and-effect phenomena is frequently observed, there are yet many physical phenomena that you and I regard as fact don't have obviously observed temporal causes. For example, we observe the Big Bang as well as the accelerating expansion of the universe, but don't have good explanations for their temporal cause. And everything in the universe is temporally caused by the Big Bang...
So what I'm trying to say here is that your claim here that causality governs the actual laws of nature is suspect, both because your comment has not been elaborate enough to specify what you mean by causality, and because one of the most popular notions of causality, i.e. temporal causality, seems, to a first approximation, not be a good model of the observable physics: it postulates a temporal cause for the big bang, but no time prior to the big bang is observable.
A law _implies_ a causal relationship because a law is thought to model a universal relationship (B always occurs when A). How you interpret the causality depends on your metaphysics. It can be descriptive based on constant conjunction, if you're so persuaded.
Scientists will state that B happens BECAUSE of A, when A is thought to be a necessary condition for B. That's the causal implication.
What, then, causes the phenomenon that fields interact with particles?
Historically, there has been a multitude of ideas and phenomena that have been labeled as causation. Aristotle, back then, identified four notions of causation, and the modern reader immediately will feel that some of these notions themselves are still too general. When you make a claim like "nature obeys causality", you need to be more precise in what you refer to by nature and causality, else your claim is far too ill-defined to mean much of anyting.
It's not obvious on its face, as it must be "properly understood" as you say. It takes years of education before people realize that the known laws of physics are just approximations or historically refined by discovering new details.
"conservation of mass" is either utterly trivial ("Nothing comes from nothing... except stuff that does") or has grown its asterisks over time.
> It takes years of education before people realize that the known laws of physics are just approximations or historically refined by discovering new details.
It's in high school chemistry textbooks. Typically in the first chapter or two. I'm assuming the audience of this site has taken at least one chemistry class in their life. Whether or not they paid attention is their own problem.
It's subsidized by those volunteers' time. Time that could otherwise be spent on other things.
Granted, there's nothing nefarious about this, but there isn't anything necessarily nefarious about the fact that anything you get for free is being paid for somewhere else. Just potentially nefarious, if you don't know what's paying for it.
There's also the fact that Walmart achieves low prices by strong arming suppliers into giving them lower quality goods masquerading as the "same" model.
Buying anything that you expect to keep more than a year is a waste at Walmart, even if its cheaper.
Just curious, do you have any links to evidence on this?
Full Disclosure: I'm a WM Associate, but am speaking on my own. This type of behavior is against our Code of Ethics, and would be sent to investigation.
Obviously, Walmart doesn't say, "give me lower quality goods". Walmart says, "give me goods for lower price than last year, or we'll cancel our order", which then pushes suppliers to cut corners for Walmart orders.
> Just curious, do you have any links to evidence on this?
I THINK this is along the lines of your request. I read this when it was published (2006) and didn’t reread it when I searched for it now. Describes a culture of lowering quality to achieve sales at prices dictated by WM, as I recall. Sorry, want to be more complete but unable at this moment.
i have often heard a claim that electronics manufacturers sometimes have a "walmart" version of certain products which are made with cheaper parts but sold in almost-identical packaging to the version that they stock at other retailers. i haven't been able to find any specific examples, though, so i don't think it's true. or, at least, it isn't a common practice.
many electronics manufacturers, however, do create "black friday" versions of their products. this is well-documented. i think this practice is the origin on the claim made by the GP.
The idea that a 66% increase in the deficit "barely affects the momentum" is absurd reflects either your ignorance or your bad faith. Apply that logic to your personal spending and see how long it takes before you're bankrupt.