Nope, everyone (including her) though she'd be dead within a week of her husband passing, but it's been a few years now. Married for like 75 years, since they were really young, but no kids or grandkids or anything. No one had her lasting this long.
Do you think it is possible to maintain solar/wind for an extended period of time given the reliance on rare earth minerals that it would create? Also one argument that I haven't heard answered is how to handle the non-biodegradable old solar panels/windmills that need to be replaced.
These things definitely can be implemented but are they sustainable? Not a rhetorical question, I'd actually like to hear some opinions on this.
"reliance on rare earth minerals" There are plenty in the ground. Some in hard to get to (politically/socially) places. They can be recovered from devices if that is a design criterion.
Windmills are generally made from metals which are recyclable, silicon is the major ingredient of solar cells - most common mineral on the planet. But they can be recycled too.
There is a lot of toxic waste generated using current technology, these are developing technologies which gives us a opportunity.
Having a fetish for the free market will not help. All this requires planning, and markets do not make plans.
Does RH wait to confirm an order until they find a counterparty or does their system just accept it and then find someone to clear it with after the fact? If it's the latter, and they find themselves in a situation of extreme volatility/zero liquidity, they could end up holding the bag.
If they process an order 'late' the price change could swing in their favor and they would end up netting the difference. FXCM got caught for this in FX years ago, skimming fractions of pennies off the trades for millions in profit. I'd be interested to know if those late trades always went in one direction.
Rh was probably losing money on widening spreads. If a client buys and holds and volatility increases and spreads widen, when the client closes out the trade, Rh will eat the difference in the spreads. If a client opens a short position and spreads widen, RH will make a net gain when the client closes out. I think this is why they halted people from buying and probably why they closed out the trades for clients, I would guess it was during periods of lower volatility.
I don't know how legal it is for them to do that but when volatility is high like this that's when a broker like RH can really go under.
I think his point is that it would be more helpful to everyone if people remained agnostic to things that they haven't properly investigated instead of actively denying them simply because the research hasn't been done yet. This kind of attitude keeps a lot of people from researching fringe subjects some of which may have something there. But people are discouraged from looking and ridiculed for their interest because there's no evidence to support it (yet). It's a self-reinforcing cycle and not very productive.
Pretty sure every child on the planet has been told to “take a breath” in the middle of a temper tantrum. The assertion that people have dismissed this particular idea is obviously not true, but is also a hard thing to prove in the general case as well.
In many things related to mindfulness, breathing, yoga, and meditation, we in western culture have a bad habit recognizing the value of a very small part of a larger practice and then writing off the rest as spiritual mumbo-jumbo. For example, everyone knows that "taking a breath," helps your child to calm down. But we don't often go further into breathing practices, partly because they start to bump up against spirituality, because we as Very Good Scientists are naturally skeptical and usually biased against that.
Mindfulness is another example that we're just a little farther along with. It's now becoming widely known that being mindful for 5-15 minutes a day will lower your stress levels or help you control emotions or rise in the corporate ladder or help with other sorts of problematic behavior. But what happens when you go further? 2500 years ago, people knew that meditating for 1-2 hours a day leads to dramatic, permanent, and wildly transformative changes to your perceptions of reality and your relationship with the sensate world. But words like "awakening" are spiritual mumbo-jumbo so we apply our natural scientific skepticism, largely ignore the deep parts, and do our society a disservice.
So on one hand, you're right that we don't just completely dismiss these things. But on the other hand, we do often dismiss the important parts.
>then writing off the rest as spiritual mumbo-jumbo
Because a lot of it _is_ spiritual mumbo-jumbo.
The books "The Mind Illuminated" and "Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha" occasionally get recommended on here and are pretty mainstream books, supposedly backed by "brain science" and written by two PhDs. Let me give an excerpt from "The Mind Illuminated":
"The first practice involves cultivating the so-called “higher knowledges of the mundane type.” These are:
1. The “higher powers,” which are said to allow a yogi to perform miracles such as walking on water, or walking through walls. [...] 4. Knowing the minds of others, which is a form of telepathy. 5. Recollecting past lives"
And this isn't presented as a "oh, here's this historical context", it's presented without any real comment next to the jhanas.
Or, a nice bit in "Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha", talking about pyschic powers:
"On the other hand, it does seem to be possible through powerful intent, strong concentration ability, appreciation of interdependence and careful experimentation to manipulate what we might call “this world”,as well as those in it, in very unusual and profound ways. Yes, I am referring to such things as telekinesis, mind control, reading other peoples thoughts, pyromancy, and all of that. The more you get your concentration and insight trips together and the more you look into the magical aspect of things, the more you will learn about what I will call the magical laws of the universe and how to use your will to manipulate it."
You know why people are skeptical of things like "awakening"? Because it's sold in the same breath as all the religious parts, making it impossible to discern which is what. If the cost of getting to 'the deep parts' means having to not dismiss such obvious bullshit like pyromancy, I think society will do fine with such 'disservice'.
I agree that it's difficult to get to the core practical side of these things. Buddhism and related religions/philosophies have had a lock on meditation for so long that it can be hard to disentangle the real stuff from the stuff that got made up along the way.
So when you reach for The Mind Illuminated, which is a 400 page book, and trivialize the 390 pages of good pragmatic instructions on improving concentration and insight skills because you read 10 pages of spiritual mumbo-jumbo, you're missing a powerful opportunity.
The fact is that if you sit quietly and pay attention to your breath for a couple hours a day, some very transformative stuff will eventually start happening all on its own. No books or religion is required. But as a society, we mostly aren't willing to do that because of attitudes like that displayed in your post. We're making progress, though. Brains of advanced practitioners are being put in fMRIs with surprising results, and things are happening slowly. My point was that we shouldn't throw out the baby with the bathwater in the name of being good scientists.
>So when you reach for The Mind Illuminated, which is a 400 page book, and trivialize the 390 pages of good pragmatic instructions on improving concentration and insight skills because you read 10 pages of spiritual mumbo-jumbo, you're missing a powerful opportunity.
This is just so crazy to me. We have a book that claims to be scientific while making absolute absurd statements without any comment, why wouldn't we dismiss it? It's a bit hyperbolic, but imagine if "Introduction to Electrodynamics" included a chapter on how to use magnets to communicate with god. To me it would absolutely ruin what is otherwise an amazing resource, because it fundamentally ruins my ability to trust the source. It doesn't matter if the rest of it is actually legitimate and good, either they're unable or unwilling to separate what is legitimate knowledge and what is religion.
Honestly, I'm actually rahter disturbed by the book's reception. It's a well received best seller that even on the (supposedly) skeptical HN is praised without a caveat. Not only that, but if you look into a lot of meditation forums, a lot of people into meditation do genuinely believe in the supernatural stuff. I can't imagine a better sign to show that we're not skeptical enough.
>The fact is that if you sit quietly and pay attention to your breath for a couple hours a day, some very transformative stuff will eventually start happening all on its own.
Sure and if you state it that way, I'd wager most people wouldn't dismiss it. The issue is that 99% of the time, this is not how it's sold.
>But as a society, we mostly aren't willing to do that because of attitudes like that displayed in your post
Sure, but without this attitude it's also a lot easier to fall for (intentional or unintentional) bullshit of all sorts. I used to be really into chaos magick (same deal basically, natural 'brain hacking') and I'm pretty sure without this attitude I would have turned into of the crazies who thinks their self inflicted psychosis means they have the powers to alter reality.
The fact that most people in meditation forums either outright admit believing the supernatural stuff or are incredibly evasive about it (just like with chaos magick), says more than enough in my opinion.
>My point was that we shouldn't throw out the baby with the bathwater in the name of being good scientists.
We shouldn't, but we should also be as skeptic as possible and dismiss people who seamlessly interweave facts and fiction, because that's also how conspiracy theorists and nonsensical "alternative medicine" quacks sell their craft.
These are scientifically unsubstantiated claims but to claim that they are impossible is to go beyond the scope of the current science. We have a default stance on this, the 'null hypothesis' that states that these are not possible, a hypothesis which we have thus far failed to reject. This is not the same as saying that we've proven the null hypothesis to be true, we never really prove the null when we do hypothesis testing - we either reject it, or default back to it.
How can you know that mind control is impossible? If you were truly capable of it, would you advertise it? I know I wouldn't, unless I had a burning desire to end up in a government lab somewhere, which I don't.
Real science always rests on a backdrop of agnosticism, which people often forget and get caught up in emotionally charged ridicule.
But all that aside, it's not really about believing or not believing in whatever the claims are. These disciplines are all based on the 'doing' aspect - you do it, and if you feel the slow transformation of your character, then great. Whether or not you become a pyromancer is actually not important, most of these disciplines actually discourage these things even though they believe in them. Their stance is that different strange abilities may come and go but clinging to them is more destructive to progress than anything.
>These are scientifically unsubstantiated claims but to claim that they are impossible is to go beyond the scope of the current science.
Proving things impossible is beyond the scope of _any_ science, that's just how epistemology works.
>How can you know that mind control is impossible?
I can't. I also can't know with absolute certainty that climate change is real, that the earth isn't flat, that vaccines work and don't cause autism or that bill gates isn't a satanist using covid pandemic to implant people with mind control microchips.
I have seen absolutely no evidence for any of it and all the believers seem to be absolute lunatics, so the chance of it being true are low enough that I'm pretty comfortable with acting like I know it for certain.
>If you were truly capable of it, would you advertise it?
Well, I'd say writing about your experience with your abilities in a book certainly counts as a form of advertisement! I also don't really see what there'd be to worry about if it's true that these powers could simply be learned.
>But all that aside, it's not really about believing or not believing in whatever the claims are.
>Whether or not you become a pyromancer is actually not important, most of these disciplines actually discourage these things even though they believe in them.
Sure, they might see it like that, but I don't think it makes sense for anyone else to view it this way. If someone is either lying or deluding themselves, I think that's pretty important information to consider! If someone is, say, an anti-vaxxer that doesn't mean everything they're saying is false, but it certainly makes it seem pretty reasonable to dismiss what they're saying until they've provide some actual evidence.
Similarly, why shouldn't I be skeptic of people who are claiming supernatural powers while not being able to offer any evidence? Especially because they're not making it clear where knowledge ends and religion begins, possibly because they themselves don't know.
I'm just saying that there should be a kind of agnosticism which 'pure' science is very conscious of and therefore chooses its words carefully when it says things like 'we have not found evidence for x'. This is very different from saying 'we have disproven the possibility of x', but this is the way it is generally understood by the general public. Healthy skepticism is important, but it often devolves into emotionally charged ridicule (see Richard Dawkins for an example) which has nothing to do with objective science at all.
you're not going to get very far by advocating that people apply skepticism to their own belief systems when they haven't shown the willingness to do so. you're going to find stupid human tricks anywhere you find humans.
The most convincing explanation that I heard was that by building up a tolerance in your body to carbon dioxide, you actually train your body to oxygenate itself better. CO2 dilates blood vessels and helps transport oxygen where it needs to go so it's not just a waste product.
When you're short on breath, the feeling is not actually due to a lack of oxygen but due to an excess of carbon dioxide. This is why just by starting to exhale after holding your breath, you immediately feel better, despite not having inhaled any additional oxygen. By holding your breath all the time you teach yourself to tolerate more CO2.
For some weeks I'd practice holding my breath all the time say while I'm driving or working, holding on each breath (maybe 20-30 seconds until my diaphragm starts to try to breathe involuntarily), maybe an hour at a time or more, but I find you need at least 20 minutes or so to feel an effect that lasts longer than a few minutes. You do get to a point where you really feel different throughout the whole day and your breathing slows down naturally.
I don't see why science is so resistant to researching disciplines involving the breath. Breathing is literally your most important source of energy, common sense would tell you there is something there to unpack.
I've deeply wondered about the question regarding why science and modern medicine have largely ignored breath as a topic of health. Part of the explanation I believe is that it doesn't make anyone any money. But, this can't be the total explanation. It's frankly astonishing. Studying someone's breathing habits should be part of routine medical exams and general wellness check ups. No M.D. that I have ever been to has ever brought it up, and when I've asked them about it, they shrug and give me a weird look, as if I'd asked them about UFO sightings. It's phenomenally strange.
So, the answer to that for you would be to just not go. Thailand is more than just one beach. Many people enjoy this party, I met one girl in Thailand who was a local and loved it, I don't see why you'd be happy about other people not getting the opportunity to do something they enjoy.
I am happy about people doing the things they enjoy, but I’m still free to think that this kind of parties are not good for the environment and for the development in tourism in Thailand, as they favor a type of mass-tourism based on drugs and alcohol binging that has nothing to do with discovering the beauty and the people of one of my favorite countries in the world.
