tinwoman wrote: "Seriously, who made the decision that raising taxes on the rich/corporations was political poison? "

The rich! The political class wealthy, such as 90% of the Senate- most of whom are millionaries. Thus, our primary lawmakers are always going to act against our interests. Look at the infernal Baucus health reform bill.

The wealth own or operate nearly all the most powerful lobbies, including the health insurance lobbies, and Pharma, and they are not going to permit our lawmakers to pass anything that inveighs against their economic interests and profits.

It is is time we get rid of capitalism as Mike Moore postulates in his new flick. We can start the ball rolling by halting ALL unnecessary consumption. And start immediately with NO money spent on Halloween, not even for candy and certainly not costumes.

Any kids come to your door, hand out books you've already read from your home library.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics Unemployment rate was gamed by Repukes sometime in the early 90s. The aim was to confect the statistics to keep it below 5% most of the time, and only rarely approaching 6%. The way it was done was to drop people from the unemployment rolls if they have not found a job after 6 months. In other words, looking or not for work- if after 6 months they haven't aced a new job they are relabeled "discouraged". Dems at the time compained, insisting that European nations didn't game their numbers like that, but the Repukes were adamant.

The past year the rate finally broke 6% but that was because of mass simultaeous job losses in multiple areas. Truth be told, that was the only way to get past the gaming. However, I do take the point of William Wolman and Anne Colamosca (from their 1997 book, The Judas Economy: The Triumph of Capital and the Betrayal of Work) that in any given year the REAL unemployment rate is always 4-5% higher than that reported by the BLS stats, precisely because of the gaming.

That means the real current rate is something like 14-15%. This is minus getting into "U6" territory.

People, readers ought not be astonished about economic -statistical gaming. It's done all the time in this country. For example, the consumer price index - the major one for inflation (and determining whether seniors get their COLAs from Social security each year) is always inherently lowballed. The CPI in this regard leaves out medical insurance, food and fuel increase, thus keeps the reported (official) inflation rate artificially low. If the true CPI was used (which is closer to 5% per annum now) senior would surely have gotten their COLAs this year. But the artificial rate allows gov't to skip the COLAs. Neat!

Then there's the national GDP which excludes all "externalities" from its computations. Such as all the billions of dollars worth of unpaid care - given by families themselves, as opposed to life care centers, or nursing homes. None of that is factored in, so essentially, doesn't exist.

'Muricans need to wake up and smell the coffee on how artificial and contrived stats are keeping them in fantasy land.

Zach asked:Doesn't Minkowski's time-space metric infer determinism then, in opposition to quantum fluctuations?

True, but I didn't offer it as a validation of spontaneous inception, only as an example of the diversity of conceptions of time.

Would a quantum fluctuation be analagous to the breaching of an event horizon?

Possibly so. But with the added attribute that the 'breach' originates with the singularity, not the bh's ergosphere!

Gotta go now!

2nd to last paragraph, the 2nd line:

(in this case the photon)

should read:

(in this case the graviton)

Zach asked:In a universe full of black holes though, where are the gravitons?

The gravitons mediate the propagation of gravitational waves. To uncover the gravitons we have to first identify - detect the g-waves. In much the same way, we used the basis of the photo-electric effect to first detect photons. Right now, gravitational wave detectors have not attained the level of resolution needed to disclose the mediating particles (gravitons). They are about five orders of mangitude too low.

Give it time...and hopefully MONEY, to build the detectors we need.

The mere existence of black holes doesn't mean we can also detect gravitons. The reason is that most holes are still detected indirectly, as a result of the x-rays generated when the hole's companion star's outer gaseous envelope is sucked through its event horizon.

Is gravity so weak a force that they can't be identified?

No. As I said, the problem is that the gravitons are QUANTA and must be identified on that basis. This necessitates extremely sensitive detection capacity which we simply don't have yet.

I thought gravity was really an Einstein space-time curvature, and not really a Newtonian force, which is an approximation of 4 dimensional space-time?

Actually, both views are consistent with 4D space-time. You are correct that we ascribe motion in gravitational fields to the curvature of space-time, based on Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. This sense of local curvature causing the motion replaces action at a distance.

Note that detection of gravitons (or gravitinos) need not mean action at a distance.

If gravity is the curvature of space-time, why would it have to travel at the speed of c?

It may not. Don't forget we are talking about two separate things here: the propagation of the field via its mediating particle (in this case the photon) and the motions of bodies affected by the field. The latter cannot exceed c. The mediating quanta may well exceed c, but without violating relativity. (This has to do with the nature of space-like changes in the quantity known as 'interval' )

Certainly, in the vicinity of an infinite curvature radius - say black hole singularity, the graviton propagation would exceed c.