Apr 152018
 
 April 15, 2018  Posted by at 9:50 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,


 

Russia Claims OPCW Manipulated Skripal Findings (AFP)
To Opt Out Of Facebook’s Tracking, I’m Going To Have To Join Facebook (Wired)
Tesla Is The Worst Car Manufacturer In The Developed World (F.)
New Lawsuit Alleges Musk Knowingly Lied About Model 3 Production (ZH)
Subprime Stages Comeback As ‘Non-Prime’ (CNBC)
247,977 Stories In The Vacant City (NYDN)
Judge Rules Exxon Can’t Stop Probe Into Whether They Lied For Decades (Ind.)
World May Hit 2ºC Warming in 10-15 Years Thanks to Fracking (NC)
‘There Is No Such Thing As Past Or Future’ (G.)
Time is Elastic (Rovelli)

 

 

Curiouser. You’d think Russia doesn’t just make up an entire Swiss lab.

Russia Claims OPCW Manipulated Skripal Findings (AFP)

Moscow on Saturday accused the chemical weapons watchdog of manipulating the results of its investigation into the poisoning of a former Russian spy, saying his samples had traces of a nerve agent used by the west. Britain says former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were last month targeted with a nerve agent of the novichok family, which was developed in the Soviet Union. The attack shredded ties between Russia and Britain and led to a crisis in relations between Moscow and the west including a huge wave of tit-for-tat diplomatic expulsions. The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons has said it confirmed “the findings of the United Kingdom relating to the identity of the toxic chemical” without naming the substance involved.

On Saturday, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, claimed the UN-linked Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) had sent the Skripals’ biomedical samples to Swiss experts who found they contained traces of the nerve agent BZ, used by the west. “According to the results of the examination, the samples had traces of toxic chemical BZ and its precursors,” Lavrov said, citing what he said was “confidential information”. “Russia and the USSR never developed such chemical substances,” he said. “In this regard we are asking the OPCW why the information which reflected the conclusions of specialists from the Spiez laboratory was completely omitted from the final document.”

Read more …

Not a discussion we should leave up to Facebook. Or Congress.

To Opt Out Of Facebook’s Tracking, I’m Going To Have To Join Facebook (Wired)

Now I know what you’re thinking. What kind of person has never been on Facebook? I’d like to tell you it was all about privacy, but the truth is, I just had a bad feeling about it. You see, I went to Cambridge, so I was one of the first to get the chance to join what you insist on calling your “community.” And almost instantly, it was clear that it turned people into wankers. (Bigger wankers. This was Cambridge, after all.) If I remember correctly, in the early days everyone was desperate to have a higher friend count. Then it was obsessive tagging in photos. Yes, even in its earliest days, your system brought out the worst in people.

It’s not easy, not being on Facebook. At first, it was the parties. At a certain point, people stopped sending email invites. They just assumed you were on Facebook – and, if you weren’t, you didn’t find out. I’m 35 now, so I don’t get invited to parties, unless they’re for small children. Instead, I miss out on work, because I can’t contact people or share my articles. When you finally make journalism pivot to Facebook Groups, I’ll be completely screwed. I considered joining many times. But every time I aired the thought, I got the same reaction: “Don’t! It’s the worst!” I wasn’t sure if I remembered this correctly, so I called a few people to check. All agreed: they hate your service, but they have to use it, because everyone else does. (One person objected. She works in your London office.)

Every other social network, even Twitter, has a core of fans that genuinely wish it well. You’re the sole exception. Then I got into tech, and privacy, and data protection, and I learned that you were throttling internet freedoms in developing countries, and letting random strangers see your users’ most intimate details, so I started becoming one of those paranoid people who uses a VPN all the time, and puts a scrap of torn-off Post-It note on their laptop camera. Just like you! But you probably knew all this about me anyway. Which brings me back to my question. In your testimony to Congress, you said: “Anyone can turn off or opt out of any data collection for ads, whether they use our services or not.”

But, as you should know, while that’s possible for someone on Facebook, for me, a non-Facebook user, it’s not. Your illegal trackers follow me across 30 per cent of the internet, building a “shadow profile” you store in a nonanonymised format in your “Hive” analysis database. You claim to do it “for security purposes” (let me tell you, if Facebook’s security requires you to surveil the world’s population, then you have made a desert and called it peace). But reporters – and people who used to work in your advertising team – say the information is collected to improve the friend suggestions you’ll give me in case I do ever sign up. It’s one more growth hack on a whole site of them.

What can I do to stop you? I’ve installed tracker blockers on my browser, but, since you killed the media business, a lot of my favourite sites make me disable them. And your trackers work in the apps on my phone. Unless I go full tin-foil hat (and it’s tempting), you’ve basically left me with one option. To opt out of Facebook’s tracking, I’m going to have to join Facebook. So yeah: fuck you. Because, of course, this is exactly your plan. Forcing people onto Facebook is what you’re all about.

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“..that is a terrible way to produce a consumer product, and a terrible way to generate returns for shareholders.”

Tesla Is The Worst Car Manufacturer In The Developed World (F.)

I visited my first auto plant in 1992, and have been fortunate enough to visit plants in most countries where cars are made. I have seen workers sleeping under half-finished bodies in Brazil, seen employees trying to make doors fit by using rubber hammers at a now-closed Ford facility in New Jersey and, noted, that, yes, they do have beer in the vending machines at many German auto factories. To see a rack of die castings sitting outside exposed to the weather at a facility that is, according to Google Maps, 10.7 miles away from the actual Tesla assembly facility in Fremont is just mind-boggling. Tesla is the worst car manufacturer in the developed world. Bar none. Note that I didn’t write “designer” or “marketer,” but manufacturer.

Musk had zero auto industry experience when founding Tesla and CTO J.T. Straubel—who according to Tesla’s 10-K filing personally holds Tesla’s important patents—developed a love for electric vehicles by rebuilding golf carts. It’s just astounding to me that the markets are affording a $50 billion valuation to a company that can’t perform the most basic task for which it was incorporated. Famed VW purchasing chief José Ignacio López de Arriortúa famously walked into a plant and repeatedly pointed at boxes of yet-to-be-used parts and yelled the word “capital.” When capital is tied up in byzantine manufacturing processes that stunts the development of cash flow. It’s all connected. This is why Tesla has such dire cash flow problems.

This is why I believe—sorry, Elon—Tesla is going to have to issue equity this year. My favorite automotive mantra is “quality is designed in.” That’s the most damning piece of information in the CNBC article, actually, more damning than the pictures of parts racks. Here is the quote: “Current and former employees from the company’s Fremont, Calif. and Sparks, Nevada factories blame Tesla for spending less time to vet suppliers than is typical in auto manufacturing. These people said the company failed to comprehensively test “variance specs” with some vendors before embarking on Model 3 production.”

Tesla has cut corners in building up to current production, and published reports this week indicated Tesla was alerting suppliers of an incredibly fast 19-month design-to-job one timetable on the upcoming Model Y crossover. So, it would seem corner-cutting is continuing, and that is a terrible way to produce a consumer product, and a terrible way to generate returns for shareholders.

Read more …

He better hope he wins this one.

New Lawsuit Alleges Musk Knowingly Lied About Model 3 Production (ZH)

A new securities class action lawsuit filed in late March 2018, which names Elon Musk as a defendant, alleges that the Tesla CEO knew that the Model 3 was not going to be able to be produced as the rates he claimed – and that the company was not going to be able to meet production goals due to – get this – the production lines not even being assembled. The lawsuit alleges that this didn’t prevent Elon Musk from going out and telling the investing public otherwise, hence the allegation of securities fraud. First, the allegation that Musk was told by his own employees that the Model 3 couldn’t be mass produced by the end of 2017, which was the company’s stated goal.

Then, after claiming in May 2017 that the company was “on track” to meet its mass production goal, it’s alleged the company hadn’t even finished building its production lines, clearly meaning it wasn’t “on track”. The lawsuit alleges that Musk knew the line was “way behind”. The suit alleges that the company was building Model 3’s by hand at a “pilot shop” at the same time Tesla claimed to be on track for “mass production”; it also claims that it was “evident to anyone who visited the facility” – including Elon Musk – that the line wasn’t built and that “construction workers were spending most of their shifts sitting around with nothing to do”. We also read in the lawsuit that Tesla’s Gigafactory, at the time in question, was allegedly capable of producing only one battery pack per day – and that the production of one battery pack took “two shifts” to complete.

The suit alleges that the company’s former CFO, Jason Wheeler – who is one of more than 50 key executives and VPs to have left the company over the last half decade or so – told Elon Musk personally that they wouldn’t be able to mass produce by the end of 2017. The entire lawsuit is available at this link and some of the most interesting content was first shared by critics of the company on Twitter. The drumbeat of accountability for Elon Musk continues to pound louder and louder as each day progresses, with some analysts calling for the SEC to investigate him if the company doesn’t meet its stated cash flow positive and “no capital raise” guidance for the back end of 2018.

Read more …

Got to find the last sucker.

Subprime Stages Comeback As ‘Non-Prime’ (CNBC)

They were blamed for the biggest financial disaster in a century. Subprime mortgages – home loans to borrowers with sketchy credit who put little to no skin in the game. Following the epic housing crash, they disappeared, due to strong, new regulation, and zero demand from investors who were badly burned. Barely a decade later, they’re coming back with a new name — nonprime — and, so far, some new standards. California-based Carrington Mortgage Services, a midsized lender, just announced an expansion into the space, offering loans to borrowers, “with less-than-perfect credit.” Carrington will originate and service the loans, but it will also securitize them for sale to investors.

“We believe there is actually a market today in the secondary market for people who want to buy nonprime loans that have been properly underwritten,” said Rick Sharga, executive vice president of Carrington Mortgage Holdings. “We’re not going back to the bad old days of ninja lending, when people with no jobs, no income, and no assets were getting loans.” Sharga said Carrington will manually underwrite each loan, assessing the individual risks. But it will allow its borrowers to have FICO credit scores as low as 500. The current average for agency-backed mortgages is in the mid-700s. Borrowers can take out loans of up to $1.5 million on single-family homes, townhomes and condominiums.

They can also do cash-out refinances, where borrowers tap extra equity in their homes, up to $500,000. Recent credit events, like a foreclosure, bankruptcy or a history of late payments are acceptable. All loans, however, will not be the same for all borrowers. If a borrower is higher risk, a higher down payment will be required, and the interest rate will likely be higher. “What we’re talking about is underwriting that goes back to common sense sort of practices. If you have risk, you offset risk somewhere else,” added Sharga, while touting, “We probably are going to have the widest range of products for people with challenging credit in the marketplace.”

Read more …

It’s not about people, it’s about money. Fundamental flaw.

247,977 Stories In The Vacant City (NYDN)

There’s a hidden city in the five boroughs. Though its permanent population is zero, it is growing faster than any other neighborhood. Early numbers from the Census Bureau’s Housing and Vacancy Survey show the unoccupied city has ballooned by 65,406 apartments since 2014, an astonishing 35% jump in size in the three years since the last survey. Today, 247,977 units — equivalent to more than 11% of all rental apartments in New York City — sit either empty or scarcely occupied, even as many New Yorkers struggle to find an apartment they can afford. The Vacant City — let’s call it that, with a tip of the hat to the 1948 movie and old TV series “Naked City” — has tripled in 30 years.

A generation ago, there were just 72,051 apartments in the Vacant City. Back in 1987, when rents were cheap by today’s standards at a median $395 a month, the Vacant City made up less than 4% of rental apartments. Today, the median rent is $1,450, having risen twice as fast as inflation, even while the Vacant City tripled in size. The numbers just don’t add up the way conventional wisdom said they should. For years, development officials, the real estate industry and think tanks have told us that artificially low rents are holding the city back. Higher rents, the argument went, would free landlords to make a reasonable amount of money and serve as an incentive to increase the housing supply.

The new Census gleanings finally put the lie to that reasoning. We have higher prices for sure — but the only part of the city’s residential real estate that has grown is the Vacant City. More apartments are being held off the market than ever. Some remain vacant for legitimate reasons. Almost 28,000 of those unused units have been rented or sold but not yet occupied, or are awaiting a sale. Almost 80,000 are getting renovated, 9,600 tied up in court, and 12,700 vacant because the owner is ill or elderly or simply can’t be bothered. But that still leaves more than 100,000 units — 74,945 occupied temporarily or seasonally, and 27,009 held off the market for unexplained reasons.

Read more …

Shell, Exxon, they’ve all known all along. But they have lots of power.

Judge Rules Exxon Can’t Stop Probe Into Whether They Lied For Decades (Ind.)

A Massachusetts judge has ruled that ExxonMobil cannot stop a probe into whether the oil giant misled shareholders for decades about the dangers of climate change and its impact on their business. The judge, in a Friday ruling, found that Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey has grounds to pursue its civil investigation into the matter even though Exxon is not technically an in-resident corporation. The judgement follows after a federal judge in New York dismissed a similar lawsuit aimed at ending the climate change probe late last month. In that lawsuit, Exxon argued that Ms Healey and her New York counterpart, Eric Schneiderman, were pursuing their climate probes in bad faith. The judge dismissed the argument as “implausible”.

“For the second time this month, Exxon’s scorched earth campaign to block our investigation has been entirely rejected by the courts. In its decision today, our state’s highest court affirmed that Exxon is subject to our laws, and that our office has authority to investigate,” Ms Healey said in a statement following the decision. “Now Exxon must come forward with the truth, what it knew about climate change, when, and what it told the world. The people of Massachusetts — and people everywhere — deserve answers.” New York and Massachusetts first began their climate change probes after news reports in 2015 found that Exxon had known for years that reducing greenhouse gas emissions is necessary to combat climate change impacts, but did not reveal those concerns to shareholders or the public.

Exxon has denied that their public policies were in any way inconsistent with what their scientists’ findings that climate change poses a serious risk to its business and to the environment.

Read more …

It’s used to be 2100. Now it’s 2030.

World May Hit 2ºC Warming in 10-15 Years Thanks to Fracking (NC)

In 2011, a Cornell University research team first made the groundbreaking discovery that leaking methane from the shale gas fracking boom could make burning fracked gas worse for the climate than coal. In a sobering lecture released this month, a member of that team, Dr. Anthony Ingraffea, Professor of Engineering Emeritus at Cornell University, outlined more precisely the role U.S. fracking is playing in changing the world’s climate. The most recent climate data suggests that the world is on track to cross the two degrees of warming threshold set in the Paris accord in just 10 to 15 years, says Ingraffea in a 13-minute lecture titled “Shale Gas: The Technological Gamble That Should Not Have Been Taken,” which was posted online on April 4.

That’s if American energy policy follows the track predicted by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, which expects 1 million natural gas wells will be producing gas in the U.S. in 2050, up from roughly 100,000 today. An average global temperature increase of 2° Celsius (3.6° Fahrenheit) will bring catastrophic changes — even as compared against a change of 1.5° C (2.7° F). “Heat waves would last around a third longer, rain storms would be about a third more intense, the increase in sea level would be approximately that much higher and the percentage of tropical coral reefs at risk of severe degradation would be roughly that much greater,” with just that half-degree difference, NASA‘s Jet Propulsion Laboratory explained in a 2016 post about climate change.

A draft report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was leaked this January, concludes that it’s “extremely unlikely” that the world will keep to a 1.5° change, estimating that the world will cross that threshold in roughly 20 years, somewhat slower than Ingraffea’s presentation concludes.

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Hawking’s successor.

‘There Is No Such Thing As Past Or Future’ (G.)

Rovelli’s work as a physicist, in crude terms, occupies the large space left by Einstein on the one hand, and the development of quantum theory on the other. If the theory of general relativity describes a world of curved spacetime where everything is continuous, quantum theory describes a world in which discrete quantities of energy interact. In Rovelli’s words, “quantum mechanics cannot deal with the curvature of spacetime, and general relativity cannot account for quanta”. Both theories are successful; but their apparent incompatibility is an open problem, and one of the current tasks of theoretical physics is to attempt to construct a conceptual framework in which they both work.

Rovelli’s field of loop theory, or loop quantum gravity, offers a possible answer to the problem, in which spacetime itself is understood to be granular, a fine structure woven from loops. String theory offers another, different route towards solving the problem. When I ask him what he thinks about the possibility that his loop quantum gravity work may be wrong, he gently explains that being wrong isn’t the point; being part of the conversation is the point. And anyway, “If you ask who had the longest and most striking list of results it’s Einstein without any doubt. But if you ask who is the scientist who made most mistakes, it’s still Einstein.”

How does time fit in to his work? Time, Einstein long ago showed, is relative – time passes more slowly for an object moving faster than another object, for example. In this relative world, an absolute “now” is more or less meaningless. Time, then, is not some separate quality that impassively flows around us. Time is, in Rovelli’s words, “part of a complicated geometry woven together with the geometry of space”. For Rovelli, there is more: according to his theorising, time itself disappears at the most fundamental level. His theories ask us to accept the notion that time is merely a function of our “blurred” human perception.

We see the world only through a glass, darkly; we are watching Plato’s shadow-play in the cave. According to Rovelli, our undeniable experience of time is inextricably linked to the way heat behaves. In The Order of Time, he asks why can we know only the past, and not the future? The key, he suggests, is the one-directional flow of heat from warmer objects to colder ones. An ice cube dropped into a hot cup of coffee cools the coffee. But the process is not reversible: it is a one-way street, as demonstrated by the second law of thermodynamics. Time is also, as we experience it, a one-way street. He explains it in relation to the concept of entropy – the measure of the disordering of things.

Entropy was lower in the past. Entropy is higher in the future – there is more disorder, there are more possibilities. The pack of cards of the future is shuffled and uncertain, unlike the ordered and neatly arranged pack of cards of the past. But entropy, heat, past and future are qualities that belong not to the fundamental grammar of the world but to our superficial observation of it. “If I observe the microscopic state of things,” writes Rovelli, “then the difference between past and future vanishes … in the elementary grammar of things, there is no distinction between ‘cause’ and ‘effect’.”

Read more …

Extract from Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time.

Why do things fall? Because “..the movement of things inclines naturally towards where time passes more slowly..”

Time is Elastic (Rovelli)

Reality is often very different from what it seems. The Earth appears to be flat but is in fact spherical. The sun seems to revolve in the sky when it is really we who are spinning. Neither is time what it seems to be. Let’s begin with a simple fact: time passes faster in the mountains than it does at sea level. The difference is small but can be measured with precision timepieces that can be bought today for a few thousand pounds. This slowing down can be detected between levels just a few centimetres apart: a clock placed on the floor runs a little more slowly than one on a table. It is not just the clocks that slow down: lower down, all processes are slower. Two friends separate, with one of them living in the plains and the other going to live in the mountains.

They meet up again years later: the one who has stayed down has lived less, aged less, the mechanism of his cuckoo clock has oscillated fewer times. He has had less time to do things, his plants have grown less, his thoughts have had less time to unfold … Lower down, there is simply less time than at altitude. Einstein understood this slowing down of time a century before we had clocks precise enough to measure it. He imagined that the sun and the Earth each modified the space and time that surrounded them, just as a body immersed in water displaces the water around it. This modification of the structure of time influences in turn the movement of bodies, causing them to “fall” towards each other.

What does it mean, this “modification of the structure of time”? It means precisely the slowing down of time described above: a mass slows down time around itself. The Earth is a large mass and slows down time in its vicinity. It does so more in the plains and less in the mountains, because the plains are closer to it. This is why the friend who stays at sea level ages more slowly. If things fall, it is due to this slowing down of time. Where time passes uniformly, in interplanetary space, things do not fall. They float. Here on the surface of our planet, on the other hand, the movement of things inclines naturally towards where time passes more slowly, as when we run down the beach into the sea and the resistance of the water on our legs makes us fall headfirst into the waves. Things fall downwards because, down there, time is slowed by the Earth.

Read more …

Home Forums Debt Rattle April 15 2018

Viewing 20 posts - 1 through 20 (of 20 total)
  • Author
    Posts
  • #40039

      • Russia Claims OPCW Manipulated Skripal Findings (AFP) • To Opt Out Of Facebook’s Tracking, I’m Going To Have To Join Facebook (Wired) • Tesla
    [See the full post at: Debt Rattle April 15 2018]

    #40040
    koso_man
    Participant

    It is quite amazing how Rovellis hypothesis is so similar to the the Ashari/Maturidi tradition in Islamic Theology. The only difference being they stated these things 1000 years ago!

    #40041
    koso_man
    Participant

    Anyone curious to know about the history of Islamic thought concerning the nature of time might find this paper to be of interest.

    https://ctaps.yu.edu.jo/physics/mbaltaie/time-in-islamic-kalam.pdf

    #40042
    V. Arnold
    Participant

    koso_man

    Thanks so much for that link. The little I’ve read so far is very interesting.
    I am aware that ancient Islamic scholars were very advanced in science and mathematics.

    #40043
    Chris M
    Participant

    Zerosum might like this:

    Being a bully is how empires die.

    #40044

    It is at least somewhat funny that the only people who cheer the Syria attacks are the ‘liberals’, the crazy McCains and the MSM, while Trump’s own base turns against him and wants the US out. I don’t think he can afford to lose his base.

    #40045
    koso_man
    Participant

    V. Arnold, No problem mate.

    The Islamic civilization was not just advanced in the fields you mentioned but also in the fields of philosophy, ethics, law, education etc
    .
    If you ever go to a University graduation and wonder why graduates are dressed like 10th century Muslims, the reason is the whole idea of Public Universities came to Europe from the Islamic World (probably by way of Islamic Spain). The first ever public University was founded by a Muslim woman in the 9th century.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatima_al-Fihri

    Which kind of destroys the myth propagated by both Islamic extremists and Islamophobes that Islam discourages the education of women

    #40046
    V. Arnold
    Participant

    Re: Rovelli
    Without saying so; Rovelli seems to be describing gravity: If things fall, it is due to this slowing down of time. Where time passes uniformly, in interplanetary space, things do not fall. They float.
    But, then again, maybe not…

    #40047
    V. Arnold
    Participant

    koso_man

    No, I never believed Islam did not want educated women.
    As with Christianity; Islam hs been perverted by zealots and power hungry loons.
    I own a Koran which I read far too little.
    My own bent is towards Buddhism; which by the way, has also been invaded by extremist zealots.
    Best stick to ancient teachings in all belief/philosophic systems.
    Us moderns are prone to perversions, treachery, and power. Not to be trusted…

    #40048
    V. Arnold
    Participant

    Raúl Ilargi Meijer

    I’m an American (north) and have no idea what those loons are doing/thinking.
    Good luck trying to understand the insanity…

    #40049
    zerosum
    Participant

    Re.: Islamic civilization (Thanks for that paper on time)
    We, (the common people), (the non=elite); are just coming out of the dark ages.

    The web is helping us acquire knowledge that use to be only available to the wealthy and the powerful.
    That knowledge does not make us into elites.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalam
    Even though seeking knowledge in Islam is considered a religious obligation, the study of ‘Ilm al-Kalam is considered by Muslim scholars to fall beyond the category of necessity and is usually the preserve of qualified scholars, eliciting limited interest from the masses or common people

    #40050
    zerosum
    Participant

    @ Chris M

    “Being a bully is how empires die.”

    If your are being bullied and cannot defend yourself, console yourself because …you have no other choice

    https://biblehub.com/deuteronomy/32-35.htm

    … Vengeance is mine …

    #40051
    koso_man
    Participant

    V. Arnold,

    I appreciate your open-mindedness and it is very heartening to see that there are still people out there that haven’t allowed themselves to by affected by the constant scaremongering from the news stories, demagogues and organisations that are blinded by geopolitical shenanigans that come and go.

    Considering your inclination towards Buddhism, I think you might find this book of interest, ‘The Common Ground Between Islam and Buddhism’ written by Reza Shah Kazemi with an introduction by the Dalai Lama.

    Here is the PDF of the book – https://www.islambuddhism.com/docs/CommonGround.pdf

    God says in the Quran in the Chapter of the Bees “For We assuredly sent amongst every people a messenger, (with the Command), “Serve Allah, and eschew evil”: of the people were some whom Allah guided, and some on whom error became inevitable (established). So travel through the earth, and see what was the end of those who denied (the Truth).”

    In the Chapter of the Believers, the verse which is directed specifically to the Prophet Muhammed (Peace be upon him) says “Verily! We have sent you with the truth, a bearer of glad tidings, and a warner. And there never was a nation but a warner had passed among them”

    These verses was and is still used as a proof by the scholars that along with Judaism and Christianity, earlier dispensations, such as Hinduism, Buddism etc might have also been Divinely inspired and therefore historically (although there have been undoubtedly instances of shameful persecution by Muslim rulers of other religious groups ), the majority of the Ulema (scholars) considered that Muslim rulers had a religious obligation to protect these religions and their practitioners as long the Jizya tax was being paid.

    Obviously in a modern context the whole concept of religious minorities in the modern Muslim nation state paying the Jizya tax is up for interpretation, but the point is, in a pre-modern context this enabled the Islamic Civilisation to undoubtedly be one of the most tolerant pre-modern Civilisations in recorded history.

    #40052
    koso_man
    Participant

    Zerosum, I think that the principle behind wanting only qualified people to study certain things is a healthy one. The Web as you call it (a very interesting term), most of the time, only gives us the illusion of knowledge.

    For instances, if i needed to have a heart operation and you gave me the option between two surgeons who would undertake such an operation, one who had studied in an authoritative institution and had acquired his education by people who themselves were qualified to ascertain that this person was indeed qualified to open up somebody’s chest, and the other one being somebody who had spent years watching youtube videos, reading books such Surgery for Dummies etc, I know that it would probably take me less than 5 seconds to pick the first person rather than the second.

    Likewise when it comes to complicated issues such as Theology, or Islamic Law, the scholars rightfully placed conditions on who was or who wasn’t qualified to study certain things.

    Theology entails interpreting sacred texts, sacred texts are comprised of language, language is by its nature metaphorical. Therefore, in order to read, analyse and study and finally, interpret something as momentous as Divine Scripture, the scholars of Islam placed certain conditions, one of which was that a person had to be a master of Grammar for instance. To me this seems sensible, logical and necessary.

    Now look what’s happening today in the Muslim world, in a time where knowledge has been ‘democratised’…you have people, usually, frustrated by social, political or economic factors going on the internet or buying books, reading things that they usually don’t understand or more dangerously, misunderstand and all of the sudden, blowing yourself up in a cafe and killing innocent bystanders becomes something that is permissible in the religion. Something that any religious scholar of any note would completely and utterly condemn, not based on placating the West, but based on their religious training.

    The idea that you espouse, namely that there should be no preconditions to learning knowledge is exactly what has allowed for these crazy groups to come out of nowhere, claiming that they’re acting based on what they’ve read in the Quran or in the Hadeeth. It’s absolute madness!

    As far as ACCESS to knowledge, which i think is far more important, the religion is unique in that anyone who wants to set out on the journey, should be allowed to do so, which is why historically, some of Islams greatest scholars were former slaves or came from extremely disadvantageous backgrounds in terms of poverty and so forth, again, something that is hard to find in any other pre-modern civilisation.

    #40053
    koso_man
    Participant

    Oh and Zerosum, regarding the paper on time, my pleasure!

    🙂

    #40054
    zerosum
    Participant

    @ koso_man
    All the good sayings have been co-opted by the religions.
    Communication is hard. It can mistaken and misunderstanding.
    For instance: I read a sub-thread in your words, you are of the opinion that the elite should control the non-elite.
    Hummmm!

    #40055

    VA,

    Yes, Rovelli (re-)defines gravity in space time, that seems to me to be the core there. You don’t fall because -in space- there’s gravity, you fall because you’re “naturally inclined towards where time passes more slowly”. That is quite the statement.

    Seeing the Islam thoughts on this is new to me, and I should read more, but surely very interesting. And why wouldn’t people have figured the connection between space and time eons ago? It takes time for you to fall down a mountain. Einstein’s biggie is that the speed of light never slows down or accelerates, but even that is true only in a limited realm.

    Rovelli realizes that that whole thing collapses on a sub-atomic level.

    Years ago, as a singer, I had a band, horns and backup singers and all, that I called The Theory of Everything. Hope someone will stand up to let the theory have a better faith than the band. It’s just that I’m not sure that is possible at all.

    As I said, Rovelli moves in Einstein’s field of beauty and simplicity, but there’s no guarantee a grand unified theory can ever be accomplished -by man-.

    Maybe for ‘our’ world to continue -birth and death and tragedies and all-, we need for the subatomic world to not be subject to whatever laws govern us.

    #40056
    zerosum
    Participant

    Time discreteness: Yesterday, today, tomorrow

    https://ctaps.yu.edu.jo/physics/MBAltaie/Time-in-Islamic-Kalam.pdf

    Discreteness applies not only to material bodies but to space, time, motion, energy (heat) and all other properties of matter.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_particle

    A point has position, location, in time and occupies 3 dimensions in space and has a duration in 3 dimension. It has volume.

    Today, energy (heat) is referred to as EMF. It does not have volume. It occupies volume.

    #40057
    V. Arnold
    Participant

    Raúl Ilargi Meijer
    Thanks for that reply. Hope, at this time, seems all there is “out there”; a thin gossamer thread at that.
    This has been a most interesting comment section, very enlightening, to say the least.
    @ koso_man
    Thanks for the PDF link; it will be used.

    #40058
    Chris M
    Participant

    Zerosum,

    Well said.

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