Ethical questions arise concerning the Johnson and Johnson Covid 19 vaccine that was made reportedly using stem cell lines from aborted humans. Is it morally acceptable to make vaccines, ultra-soft kid gloves, lampshades, or cosmetics with aborted human body part ingredients, or should human decency respect the dead including those aborted proto-humans.
Nazi scientists were of course not recalcitrant about exploiting anything to advance their purpose. maybe they believed they could socially engineer a better human being. One of those Hobbs and Shaw movies had such a premise in it.
Another concern is the phenomenal possibility of evil in first aborting humans and then using them to engineer vaccines that are from a corrupted source. If Satan exists he might be amused at debasing all of mankind with such self-degradation.
When people take shortcuts to goals that aren't necessary they admit the possibility of deleterious unintended consequences and that should be avoided if one is being cautious at all.
The nature of public debt seems to have changed since the Reagan administration allowed vast deficit spending for that time. Cutting taxation without balancing the budget has been a Republican tradition since the 1980s. Lafferian supply-side economics theory was that economic growth would bring in enough revenues with lower taxes to make up the difference yet it didn’t.
When the United States went off the gold standard it took a few years to realize what a free floating currency implied. Some people still think along the pre-Nixon era paradigm wherein one needed to have a real budget with a real balance and debt mattered. Money theory may have evolved since then. As a non-economist I am as uncertain about what the rich and powerful are doing with the national budget as the next guy.
Well- some people are certain yet incorrect, and a few may be certain and right, yet who to believe in reading what the experts have to say about it with conflicting opinions?
I have different ideas about it all the time. My most recent theory is that when the Federal Reserve gave more than 20 trillion dollars in zero-interest or low interest loans to big banks in quantitative easing since 2008, and the rich had the ability with the marginal reserve rate of 9% or so to electronically mint 9 or 10 dollars in electronic loans for every dollar they have on deposit, yet instead held on to most of the money and didn’t loan it out, they were keeping inflation down. If they were to flood the market with 180 trillion dollars right away that would perhaps devalue the dollars.
The dollar is an abstract medium of exchange. Real capital might be in real properties and skills rather than in the currency of exchange itself, so the value of a dollar may be relative, as is the public debt. If the point of the Federal Reserve is to allow the dollar to be an effective lubricant of business that will keep society healthy, the quantity of dollars available and amount of public debt become less meaningful than if they had some absolute value for-themselves like the number of propane bottles one has in a cabin when the temperature outside is 30 below zero in which case if one has a lot of empty bottles (regarded as debt) or full bottles owed to another cabin, it really matters.
The value of the capital on public exchange may be somewhere around 200 trillion dollars or more. Global wealth is concentrated and ordinary Americans have just a tiny fraction of it, yet the plutocrat class and 1%ers have somewhere more than 60% of the wealth in the U.S.A. (or more). In my opinion the levels of public debt are another aspect of the new relative value of money- the government could even evolve to a different medium of exchange if it would be of value to the rich.
Bad government fiscal policy one would think must be harmful to the nation. Many people including myself tended to support David Stockman’s ideas rather than Arthur Laffer’s, yet monetary relativity has won that ideological contest easily, and people seem happy enough with floating currency and perennially unbalanced budgets.
The Republican party sometimes seems deaf and sadistic in being opponents to clever, practical measures to reform the economic opportunities for the bottom 25% of income earners so they would never be absolutely poor nor struck in poverty. Innumerable practical measures and structures could be made to support relief from poverty for any American that cared to, yet like monetary theory based on the gold standard that seems anachronistic, some political beliefs concerning poverty and what people could do to help themselves if they tried are obsolete in the modern economy.
With the rich seemingly able to influence inflation any time they like as a fractional release of their own money supply, and with the amount of money needed to improve the life of the poor being such a small figure comparably, ideas that affect determinations of the level of unemployment and amount of public spending seems to be first and foremost determined in regard to how changes and constants would affect the 1%.
Probably it would be possible to progressively reduce public debt, yet the federal budget would also need to be balanced at that would require agreement on how to restructure the federal budget. Republicans want to cut spending to the poor, increase military spending, cut taxes on the rich and move along lines that are minimal maintenance of the state- and that figure is about 7–8% of the nation’s annual income. A healthy budget with a level of public spending on socially valuable goods and services might be 20 to 30% of the national income- regardless of the wealth and standard of living of the nation their are some that would be against the latter. Republicans are happy enough with a broken federal budget ongoing with monetary elasticity and relativism enabling them to continue to pile up cash and snap purchase corporations and buy into business opportunities worldwide. Plainly though, real wealth is in the physical things in themselves as well as intellectual capital and social structures to support a system that is in itself in great need of ecological economic reform and value theory evolution to restore wilderness and ecospheric health where possible while, simultaneously relieving poverty and transitioning displaced workers to new and satisfying roles. Tasks a little more challenging than walking and chewing gum at the same time.
I felt I could have patented some of my ideas as well, yet couldn’t afford it. When the Star Wars program appeared I thought of applying the electro-magnetic smart-pebbles kind of thing to automobiles and engineless cars and sent the idea to N.I.S.T. to apply for a grant to patent my thought and they wrote back saying that I wanted to develop a concept rather than patent a ready to go concept. The wheel motor configuration did have many possibilities with electro-magnetics pushing and pulling it around.
Volvo developed the idea perhaps first a few years later. Of course the idea was used for weapons to from the pistol by an Australian inventor to naval artillery.
When an idea is released to the public and can be produced by anybody there is competition to sell a product at the best profit and the lowest price/mass production element enters in. Elon Musk released his hyper-tube concept for anyone to build- a paradigm I wrote about in a short story named ‘Vank Island’ a decade earlier with an electro-magnetic powered module moving through a tube from Alaska to Europe.
People have mentioned that releasing patent exclusivity quicker allows faster social implementation of ideas. Consider the Gillette shaving foam from a can that is self-heating. It is a brilliant product that has been suppressed since the 1970s when it first appeared because it is better than anything else. If the patent had expired after 3 years it would be used in about every can of shave cream and Gillette would be stuffed with wealth more than it is as every producer sent them 5% in perpetuity (or maybe a half century). [the patent on The Hot One may have expired]
Since I discovered the impossibility of patenting and producing an idea in the U.S.A. I have stopped trying to invent anything, and if I have a new idea I drop it into a short story, novel or article online because after three years from publication nit cannot be patented and anyone could use it.
I don’t believe the Trump administration harmed U.S. foreign policy. I tended to like it except for his shabby treatment of the Kurds. Maybe an exception would be his maladroit environmental policy, yet that is more of a multilateral, general kind of thing rather than of traditional international relations.
In a sense he should have won the Nobel peace prize for his work getting Arab nations to normalize relations with Israel. Mr. Trump was a traditional Republican seeking the good of U.S. business and skilled at foreign policy. His primary business fault was again in not being cognizant of ecological economics or the extirpation of American wilderness, and of course he was clueless on eliminating poverty in the U.S.A. except through the trickle down approach.
Preparedness is next to cleanliness, or godliness, or being unprepared was it? Americans could be able to withstand future weather events with training. One will play in the big game as well as one has trained.
Like navy seals Americans could go for swims before dawn in as cold of water as they can find. They could build concrete dome homes able to withstand tornados, and if built on springs like the deep black room at Colorado Springs, they could endure earthquakes with a little dramamine.
Americans could develop hydroponic gardens indoors in geodesic greenhouses. They could recycle the water for the plants and warm their homes with Earth heating and cooling. The Earth is never cold except as compared to hot summer temperatures, and the deeper one goes the warmer it is. There are fundamentally no good reasons why an American using modern building methods from the eco-intelligent construction community would need to rely on the grid for climate survival- in fact doing so is a lazy, silly idea that unfortunately many cannot afford to break from as they are wage slaves to those sending trillions of zero or low interest loans to the rich so they can hide those e-dollars for-themselves to keep inflation down yet snap purchase a bargain overseas should one arise.
Americans should have alternate mass transit infrastructure projects to dampen the effects of shocks to the inefficient automobile transportation system that is reliant upon the grid for electrical charging or volatile, combustive fuel supplies that poison the air we breathe when jogging and a dirty truck blasts past.
American scientists could develop a better artificial fur for hats in case another terrible northerly drifts into the south freezing the southern way of life in its tracks. Northerners could develop better hyper-tube ground transport to the south in case -45 f becomes tiresome.
Americans could have a special water-bladder bag that would fit into a bathtub and safely store 40 gallons of water when there is a prospect for grid and transport system failure. That bag might have a drain release feature and a little bubble-wrap type insulation to keep it from freezing too easily.
In order to make America great again each household should have a pair of four-buckle galoshes that can transform sneakers into cold-weather boots. They should have a set of yellow and dark green sunglass lenses from the dollar store to be able to walk in blizzards or droughts without getting hit in the eye by snowflakes or too bright of sunlight or dust.
It is an interesting question. I wonder what field besides that of professional educators would use such fuzzy logic to classify a statement or proposition?
"Characterize the following research questions as: descriptive, causal, prescriptive, or normative. Briefly explain answer. What factors increase women’s political representation in developed democracies?"
Apparently descriptive questions imply a true or false answer is possible while a normative question suggests that some state of affairs ‘ought’ to be. It’s is a value judgment and subjective.
Causal questions might ask for a cause or reason that something occurs and since David Hume wrote to discredit the relation of cause and effect the notion idea has been troubled.
In my opinion proximal causes as in legal arguments concerning why some x occurred or was done by agent y are generalities and somewhat non-technical philosophically inasmuchas they cannot be absolutely, logically exhaustive description of the state of affairs.
Consider that the entire Universe exists be-cause of the expansion of a singularity (if cosmology is accurate and that is an assumption), therefore that is the original cause of Billy Bob robbing the 7–11 store last night? The cause would need to be advanced up the line to a closer space-time connection. As in ‘Billy Bob robbed the 7–11 last night because his girl needed a Covid 19 vaccination and he was trying to save her from certain death from the South African variant he read was going to arrive in town and he needed the cash to bribe a front-line worker to let her assume her fake identity and get the shot.’ That cannot be considered a very accurate cause in some senses, for instance if he hadn’t been forced out of work by an employer that didn’t like his political opinions he would have had the cash to bribe for a shot for his girl, therefore the former employer is at fault, or was the cause of the robbery?
Anyway causality is a tricky slippery slope. I think people use pragmatism about causality and just cancel out equal terms on both side of the formal logical equation to determine if what remains is the real or even meaningful cause of something.
In the field of big data analysis predictive and prescriptive analytics are use in processing and writing code evidently.
Predictive analytics would seek to determine what will occur I guess while prescriptive analytics would attempt to shape events.
One example would be the riots at the capitol of January 6, 2021. The electorate could be considered the big part regarded as datums. Some might use big data analytics to predict the outcome of events about crowds of a given size, security at the capitol and other variables. A use of prescriptive analytics might be to determine how to shape events or to shape the description of events so the public considers the riot a faux pas by political tramps or an insurrection.
Big data analysis joined with mass media has several axis for utilizing analytics with all four of the elements mentioned.
On the question of how or why females can have political representation in a democracy, one would need to disambiguate the question initially to clarify the meaning of ‘representation’ before dropping it into the algorithmic engine of big data processing. That is- can a man be a representative politically for women or need the representative be a woman?
If one shapes the question well then using logical processes with it is possible. Personally I would like the generality of adding causes from historical review and put those into a logic box and test them against nations that had accomplished female political representation in a democratic environment.
When one use computer code for analysis, specific values or variables are required in flowing electrons or quantum states through test conditions, forks and so forth along the logic tree. There is a reiteration of specificity unless non-specificity is placed with another tree of branches, forks and test conditions, and that sort of thing is itself specific and determinative as a definite causal agent of further processing. Even if one tries prescriptive iterations to determine a result one might ask if the basic algorithmic method doesn’t imply that necessarily.
The idea of using will to make things happen is perhaps a less rigorous analytic or algorithmic tool. The main point of analysis is of course that it is accurate.
The new normal of Democrat intifada for years with a storm of accusations and declarations that Trump voters are deplorable haters would follow re-election of Donald Trump in 2024. I believe it can’t happen because he revealed himself in his last year in office to be a true environmental troglodyte, and that loses support of intelligent voters after a while that sympathize otherwise with conservative court appointments, secure borders and a few more planks.
Democrats would in effect react like little kids that cover their ears and hum or sing very loud when a sibling is bothering them. They will invent falsehoods to disqualify. Grownups would call a riot and occupation something less than insurrection. Even the situation in Burma or Myanmar isn’t yet called an insurrection by the media. Those require an actual military plan, arms and personnel tantamount to an effective coup.
Each party has poison pills that make them unacceptable except to extremists, although these days the media tends to regard political opposition to Democrat planks as extremism. All of that works to concentrate wealth and enslave the populace.
With concentrated wealth comprising an ad hoc plutocracy for-the-world collusion on political, economic and social goals is assuredly possible. The basic problem my lie in the electorate rather than the stars though since electing people instead of good ideas, chasing after race and goals with unequal protection of laws and so forth make democracy very ineffective and getting governing priorities done. Republicans are environmental troglodytes yet they don’t mind alternating leadership much with Democrats that reinforce their concentration of wealth and corporatism goals about as well as themselves.
Easy answer for that; if the state were split in two the Panhandle to Lituya Bay and Yakatat would be a new state and the rest of Alaska would be Alaska. The two regions are fairly separate as it is and environmentalists and reasonable people don’t want more, destructive shoreline roads to be built to connect them.
Some people regard the panhandle as too warm to be Alaskan, and at low altitude it is as warm as the Aleutians (that should remain with the large part of Alaska). Juneau or Petersburg could be the capital of the South Alaska and Fairbanks should be the capitol of Alaska- although the people of Anchorage might say it’s too cold there.
Maybe negativism is easier to produce than positivism. People may advance criticisms without providing anything constructive. Evil in the Biblical paradigm is natural disaster while wickedness is the right term for humanity. Therefore evil might be the man caused natural disaster of over-consuming the world ecosystem bring natural disaster responses to the world from the famous global warming to pandemics (too promiscuous of demographic travel ending natural environmental firewalls).
If humanity is mired in the original sin of thermodynamic need to consume energy to exist and thoughtlessly consumes the environment without regard to sustainability, if social inertia and poor, unreflective leadership reinforces maladaptive economics, evils ensue. Even worse, political use-truth values will repress free speech that dissents from the wrong macro-social economic structure’s most wicked facticities.
