Wesley Clark Support Warp Drive, Time Travel

Hop David wrote:

The current budget defecits are a result of Repubs
acting like Dems, and having a weiner of a Repub President who's also
acting like a Dem...

Wait. Aren't these the same repubs who stopped the Clinton spending
spree? Why are they all of a sudden acting so differently?

Because there's a Republican President. Having their first taste in 40
years of what it's like to control the House, Senate and Presidency...
the Republicans have turned into a bunch of damned Democrats.

On fiscal matters, having one side control Congress and the other
control the White House seems to have some logic behind it; they fight
each other to a standstill, and accomplish nothing (which, when it comes
to taxes, is the best that can be reasonably hoped for). Of course,
during times of war, having them fight each other into inaction is not
so good.

--
Scott Lowther, Engineer
Remove the obvious (capitalized) anti-spam
gibberish from the reply-to e-mail address

They don't see people from ship B arriving but they notice that they
have changed
timeline.

You can't notice a changed timeline because you would have no previous memory
with which to compare the new timeline with. There is no way to remember the
original timeline.

Tom

I don't think the universe cares if it is observed or not. It can perfectly
well observe itself.


Does a Universe that cannot be observed matter? There may be plenty of
universes where life cannot exist, yet we cannot be in them to observe. I
understand that it would be impossible to life to develop in a 2-dimensional
universe. 2-dimensional planets orbiting a two dimensional star must orbit in a
perfect circle if they are to stay in orbit, any deviation and the planet will
fly off into space or crash into the star. 4-dimensional universes have similar
problems, but just because life can't develop there doesn't mean that such
universes don't exist, but we cannot see them because one of the necessary
requirements to observe a universe is to be able to live in them.

In a similar sense many alternate universes with the same set of physical laws
but different histories are also possible, but since those histories don't lead
to us, we cannot observe them or prove that they exist. Or perhaps the universe
comprises all possibilities, but we can only see those possibilities that have
occured in our past. This would allow for two-way time travel, but not actual
travel into our own past. The mere act of traveling backward in time would
change the past so that it was no longer our past.

Do you have evidence that the future is predetermined? Because if their is only
1 timeline, there is only one possible future.

Tom

Scott Lowther wrote:

Cutting taxes can be a way of increasing revenue, not decreasing
revenue. Just as increasing taxes is a way of decreasing revenue, as
California is finding out.


As I've said before, easing government burden is the way the way to spur
productivity. Bush is pretending to ease government burden but he and
the Republican Congress are building a new era of, not big expensive
government, but BIG, HUGE, KING MIDAS EXPENSIVE government.

So rather than easing government burden, he is just deferring the bill
to the future.

My earlier cartoon
http://clowder.net/hop/etc./Bush.jpg
remains completely correct in my view.

You and Rand claim it's dishonest saying cut in tax rates != tax cut,
because cutting tax rates spurs productivity and results in a net tax
increase.

Well my contention that Bush's tax rate cuts are a sham are borne out by
employment statistics. His tax rate cuts have _not_ made us more productive.

Hop
http://clowder.net/hop/index.html

Joann Evans wrote:
Explorer8939 wrote:

Are you guys seriously trashing Clark because he is not sufficiently
good at being a politician?


I don't speak for others, but that's what I'm doing in this
particular instance.


Please, if you want good politicians,
that's what you will get.


I *always* want good politicians. I don't, however, always get them.
Partly from the lack of a universal agreement on what constitutes
'good.' Partly because being an effective campaigner doesn't always
translate into being good in office.

I disagree that contemplating the possibility of ftl will be that much
of a political albatross. Bush's views on Creation Science don't seem to
hurt him that much.

Hop
http://clowder.net/hop/index.html

[in reply to]:
Only the fact of the "Republican Revolution" in '94, when the Repubs
finally had the balls and the numbers to stand up to the Dems,

Geoffrey A. Landis wrote:
And *increase* government spending.

To which Scott Lowther
retorted:
But they fought down increased taxation. While it's Not Good that Repubs
are also spending whores, at least they're not as bad tax whores.

You apparently don't understand the nature of taxes. "Cutting" taxes
while increasing spending does not reduce the tax burden any more than
"cutting" your cash spending while maxing out all your credit card
debt means you're spending less.

The immediate result of the "Republican revolution", where the
Republicans took control of Congress in 1994, was a significant
INCREASE in government spending over the levels from the Democrat
controlled Congress. Unless the Republicans plan on repudiating the
national debt, that is de-facto a tax *increase*, not a cut.

Check the numbers.

--
Geoffrey A. Landis
http://www.sff.net/people/geoffrey.landis

Henry Spencer wrote:
In a relativistic universe, there's no distinction between the two.
As Geoff Landis said in the Interstellar Propulsion panel at Torcon:
"It's a feature of the universe that faster-than-light travel and
time travel are the *same* *thing*."

It's possible that FTL is possible without violating causality. There
could, for instance, be a preferred frame of reference. Perhaps the
one in which the cosmic microwave background is maximally isotropic.
Or perhaps the one in which the Big Bang was the same amount of time
ago. Maybe signals can travel at any finite positive speed relative
to that frame of reference. This would mean signals can go back
through time in other frames of reference, but not in a way that could
let you relay a message back to your present location before you sent
it. Maybe you could send a message in 2003 that will get to Alpha
Centauri in 1999, but no reply could get back to us until 2004.

Another way to get FTL without violating causality is if there's a
preferred *direction* in space. Maybe it's possible to send signals
at any finite positive speed in that direction, but no other. This
too would allow FTL without violating causality.

Another way to get FTL without violating causality is if there's some
way of increasing the speed of light over a finite volume of space.
If there's a limit to how quickly this can be done, and if the speed
of light falls off gradually back toward its usual speed as you leave
the region rather than there being any sharp edges, this would also
allow FTL without violating causality. In a sense, gravitational
waves do exactly this, albeit to too small and too temporary a degree
to be useful.

(If the above text looks familiar, it's because I recycled it from the
last time you made that claim. No, I don't think that kind of FTL
is *likely*, but it is *possible*. FTL and time travel are *not*
necessarily the same thing.)
--
Keith F. Lynch - - http://keithlynch.net/
I always welcome replies to my e-mail, postings, and web pages, but
unsolicited bulk e-mail (spam) is not acceptable. Please do not send me
HTML, "rich text," or attachments, as all such email is discarded unread.

Geoffrey A. Landis wrote:

[in reply to]:
Only the fact of the "Republican Revolution" in '94, when the Repubs
finally had the balls and the numbers to stand up to the Dems,

Geoffrey A. Landis wrote:
And *increase* government spending.

To which Scott Lowther
retorted:
But they fought down increased taxation. While it's Not Good that Repubs
are also spending whores, at least they're not as bad tax whores.

You apparently don't understand the nature of taxes. "Cutting" taxes
while increasing spending does not reduce the tax burden any more than
"cutting" your cash spending while maxing out all your credit card
debt means you're spending less.

Wow. What an astonishingly bad analogy. Cutting taxes can make the
economy grow... it can increase the total amount of money avaialble to
be taxed in the first place. One person cutting his cash spending does
not mean he'll make more money.

--
Scott Lowther, Engineer
Remove the obvious (capitalized) anti-spam
gibberish from the reply-to e-mail address

Hop David wrote:

Scott Lowther wrote:

Cutting taxes can be a way of increasing revenue, not decreasing
revenue. Just as increasing taxes is a way of decreasing revenue, as
California is finding out.


As I've said before, easing government burden is the way the way to spur
productivity. Bush is pretending to ease government burden but he and
the Republican Congress are building a new era of, not big expensive
government, but BIG, HUGE, KING MIDAS EXPENSIVE government.

And what evidence do you have of that? The fact that we're spending more
on military and related programs, while we happen to be at war?

--
Scott Lowther, Engineer
Remove the obvious (capitalized) anti-spam
gibberish from the reply-to e-mail address

In Scott Lowther wrote:
Geoffrey A. Landis wrote:
You apparently don't understand the nature of taxes. "Cutting" taxes
while increasing spending does not reduce the tax burden any more
than "cutting" your cash spending while maxing out all your credit
card debt means you're spending less.

Wow. What an astonishingly bad analogy. Cutting taxes can make the
economy grow... it can increase the total amount of money avaialble to
be taxed in the first place. One person cutting his cash spending does
not mean he'll make more money.

That statement, true or false, doesn't particularly address the point.

"Cutting" taxes without cutting spending is, in fact, DEFERRING taxes,
not cutting them. It's charging up the government debt. That is
EXACTLY like putting expenses on your credit card and thus charging up
personal debt.

Now, if you like, you may state that the illusion of cutting taxes may
stimulate the economy. Sure. Sometimes taking on debt can mean you're
making inventments that will mean you'll make money in the future. Or,
the 'cuts" change the distribution of money in the economy, which can
increase investment. The things that you buy with the debt can cause
prosperity, which will return in the form of taxes later.

This is essentially the Keynsian argument. It may even be true in some
cases, although it doesn't seem to be true in this case, where the
increased debt burden is at the moment turning out to be a big drag on
the economy.

But nevertheless, increasing spending and saying "we'll pay for that
later" is not the same as decreasing spending.

--
Geoffrey A. Landis
http://www.sff.net/people/geoffrey.landis