Karl

Your manufacturing disappeared because you businesses couldn't compete. The US and all western countries are living in debt. It is no longer about how much you can produce, but how much loan money you can obtain and how little you will have to pay back. Too much subsidised protectionism in the US created an uncompetitive, stagnant place. Remember that China was already slave labour, indeed it was far, far worse as Mao forced people to farm where they starved. When the revolution began, the factories boomed and the poor began working in these new factories and living standards increased rapidly. Living standards are still increasing, to the extent that some businesses cannot get the workers they want and are returning to their home countries. In China companies organise jobs fares, in the UK this is all about workers selling their talents to prospective employers, but in China it's the businesses that must sell themselves to prospective labour. Wages are advertised on chalk boards and regularly increase during the day as employers get desperate.

Depending of course if the so called 'economy' is actually working out well for people generally. The reason it's called 'the economy' is the same reason the 'Government ' is called the government. It means somebody is busy planning how things will work by using intervention and force, it is therefore their economy and not some naturally occurring market place of producers and consumers. Laissez Faire capitalism has no intervention, so, a producers value is the judgement of the market and not related to tax income, licensing, minimum wages and state regulations. Mexican immigrants, like everyone else in a managed economy have very different measures of value as decided by the controllers.

There is no dichotomy. Just put the horse before the cart and it flows really nicely. The universe can expand and collapse, perhaps it will turn into a bacon butty or a slice of pizza, but it will remain the universe however it is arranged.

The universe doesn't exist IN anything because there is no outside it. It is the universe, it is the totality of all causality and all nature of things. If you can stop thinking of the universe as a single thing for a moment and accept that it is the totality of all things then you can perhaps get a sense of what I'm saying.

Which applies to the universe as a whole. If the universe needed a God to create it, then God also requires a creator. If God did not require a creator, then neither does the universe. Some will defer to God as the universe, or some aspect of the universe, but it's clear there was no creator of the universe.

So was Greenspan, which is particularly galling considering he was one of Ayn Rand's acolytes. Apparently Ayn Rand said that Greenspan and Piekoff had serious deficiencies. Peikoff was too moral and insufficiently practical; Greenspan was practical and insufficiently moral. Peikoff said of Greenspan that he was a truly brilliant man that he admired a lot, but that though he (Peikoff) had worked to increase his practicality, Greenspan had done nothing to attend to his morality and had succumbed to temptation.

Yes, though it should be said that scientists that stick to their specific fields and apply reason are often considered Neanderthals. Just as in every other subject we find the belief that reality can't be known. That A is not A all of the time and a thing is not always itself. It leads to economic policies that ignore philosophic economic reality and substitute trial and error on the principle that 'what didn't work last time, may work better this time with a couple of tweaks' and that economics can't account for everything because it didn't predict the exact date of the crash, or the exact decline of the stock market.

And that, of course is for scientists to discover, but they are completely off target if they think they can discover why the universe began. This the reason philosophy precedes science by providing the context. I have heard scientists say the universe is infinite without the slightest sense that infinite means not greater than some number, but a number beyond all numbers. Nothing more exists than exists no matter how large the number is, it is always finite. The problem is that we have accepted Kantian philosophy and that is now driving scientists away from reason and towards pragmatism. Reason is considered old fashioned and quaint, so they dismiss it when formulating theories. The result has been that science has occupied the place of philosophy and scientists are no longer growing their metaphorical trees in philosophic soil, they are now trying to grow soil from trees.

Its a moot point anyway. God doesn't exist so any attributes are immaterial.

As long it is an existent thing and it what it is then that is fine as far as it goes. Where I will challenge is in the whole thing in terms of the universe. It is unnecessary to say the universe is anything other than the universe. It isn't possible to differentiate the universe because the universe is everything. It is all differentiated and undifferentiated and any other kind of thing.

It tends towards zero. This is why such a thing is often referred to as black hole. Going back to the cakes/no cakes analogy. There is no real definition of a singularity, it has become a kind of magic box in which cakes appear from out of cake shaped spaces. If we say a singularity is a thing. Then it really is pointless to assign it to the universe. Super massive or super small it remains the universe however it is, was, or will be. To say the universe exploded out of a thing which wasn't the universe denies the universe.

I appeared to agree with your equivocation :-) I did not agree with you. If you define 'singularity' then let's see if I do agree, or infact, have you been using a word of which you have decided to have a foggy conception.

No one said that a God would be human. Apparently it's omnipotent and omniscient which is a far cry from man. All I'm saying here is that if you call the universe a singularity, then you aren't denying the universe only changing its name in order to create an equivocation. It's like the old joke 'when is a door not a door? When it's ajar'. A religious person can simply pop God into the equivocation and call it the creator of the Big Bang. A singularity is nothing more than a hyper compressed universe. It does tend towards zero, but it never is zero. When people talk about the singularity they are trying to imply a full zero out of which the universe exploded. The equivocation is dependent on the local quantification I.e there are cakes on the plate, now I've removed them the sum is zero, but, there maybe zero cakes, but there isn't several cake shaped nothingnesses where the cakes were. This is what is being implied by 'singularity'. A universe shaped nothing.

Why not simply discard the 'big bang' as it makes no difference whether there was or wasn't one and a singularity is still something and as that was all of everything, it was simply a hyper compressed universe, but a universe never the less. It always existed and always will exist. You are only splitting hairs to suggest that because you wish to call something by another name other than the universe, that this makes it different. So, why not call it God ......ah ha.

It is what it is, a thing is a thing and no other thing, A is A..... :-) If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, looks like a duck, it's probably a duck.

Thomas Aquinus did, but at least he tried to do so using logic. The prime mover argument-which you are kind of in favour of accepting as regards the universe. :-)

Now you are sounding more like an objectivist :-)

I disagree. We have free will and the ability to conceptualise. Animals don't think about death, they cannot conceptualise it. Although animals do have free will, they are not aware that they do so. Most creatures hust go through life on a kind of automatic pilot, they suffer of course, they feel pain and fear, but they cannot conceptualise their demise. They simply die and that's that, they never have to think to survive in the way humans are forced to. We are fear of death because we consciously value our lives. Animals don't hold the concept of value, they just get on with survival. Humans know they will die, they hold that concept but animals never consider it except in a perceptual sense.

A touch of frustration that the OP didn't garner agreement. I'm all for someone closing threads with a summation, to often they ramble on and no one has a clue if anything relevant has emerged in totality, but, in actual fact, it is usually more about individuals who read a post and it prompts them to think differently. Mostly we are never going to get an answer to the question proposed. Just my 2c.

And who created this supreme being ? I mean nothing comes out of nothing, you said so yourself ? So this being must have been created by some other supreme being, who must have been created by another supreme being. Your argument simply creates infinite regression. So, no such God is required or exists. The universe does not need a designer. The universe is the universe-all and everything and all causality.

Yes, if its not biased. Let's all close our threads with 'yeah I was right you lot suck'. Smells strongly of a sore loser to me.

Even your summary is incorrect.

Anyone with sense should have been stacking a percentage in PM.

Goodbye Norma Marblehead

All fiat that is inflated will eventually become worthless paper. Watching the UKP fall to 1.30 whilst Gold goes 1350. Why put money into banks when Gold outperforms any kind of savings scheme ? Problem is, there is do much debt amongst the 99% that no one can afford to save.