obviously

Also, what does it have to do with whether he was a father or not? If he had had no kids, would that change anything? Can it be more acceptable to kill someone who hasn’t had kids? What’s the point in that?

Certainly there are many experiments that can be done by a single person to prove that the Earth is a sphere, but who really has the time (and motivation!) to perform them?

A lot of physics is about choosing the right model for a task. Keep it as simple as possible, but still accurate enough to carry out the calculation you wish to perform.

Since most people aren’t global transport engineers or something like that, there is little to no use to have people think that earth is a sphere. Different than being anti-vaccine, this one here doesn’t really hurt anyone. I don’t see why there’s so much outrage about this.

at a certain point the question isn’t whether a formula is “right or wrong”, it’s about whether what the formula says is “good enough in this situation” or whether a different formula should be chosen.

This is an important topic in physics: choose the right frame of reference, the right simplifications, the right assumptions, … for your calculations to be as easy as possible, yet meaningful.

So i guess to “believe” in a formula is just to recognize and accept its usefulness for a purpose.

When a drug is used in more than a daily frequency,I tend to call it an addiction, yes.

yes and that is why drinking 1 coffee a day is a drug addiction.

that is news to me

Yeah and people who can afford a horse can also afford proper medical care.

I never advocated for people to develop useless or harmful products. I merely suggested that the average person will do exactly 0 (zero) developments in their life which require them to know that the earth is a sphere. So that’s what i meant with “let them believe what they want”, as long as it doesn’t hurt somebody.

Public dissatisfaction aside, doesn’t the government direct benefit from high inflation because it means its debt is cancelled?

no i didn’t mean anti-vaxxers with “these people”

Wealthy and rich have nothing to do with one another.

Wealthy is a person that lives in a stable environment, where they aren’t threatened with death on a regular basis (such as, losing one’s job).

Strikes don’t work in that case. Strikes only make sense in times where there’s a shortage of labor force. But in this case, the opposite is the case: there’s more than enough potential workers, and that’s why wages are low.

The labor market is a market. It has supply (workers) and demand (jobs). High supply --> lower prices (wages). Higher demand --> higher prices (wages). It’s that simple.

Fundamentally, workers in the US, no - wait, actually, worldwide, are fucked. There’s a declining number of well-paying jobs, and the supply of workers has stayed constant or even increased over the last 60 years. Of course, that leads to lower wages. I don’t think we can “innovate” our way out of this one. The only true solution that can pacify the people and avert a civil war is the Universal Basic Income - it guarantees that people can have viable lifes and have “too much to lose”. There’s no alternative - demand it from your politicians!

The most important “medical care” they need is food, lots of food.

Oh, and an absence of bomb shellings every other day.

the only people who belong in the trash bin of history are the people who needlessly shame other people for no good reason; these people haven’t hurt anyone.

from the article:

polling data by the firm Datafolha, for example, indicate that 7% of the Brazilian population – some 11 million people – believe that the Earth is flat

yeah that’s what i’m thinking; this topic isn’t a reason to fight, it’s a topic to agree to have different perspectives. like, the model that earth is flat is out-right valid in certain situations. lots of people don’t need unnecessary complexity.

“It’s not really an education thing,” she says. “It really is about distrusting authorities and institutions. [It] seems to be based on both a conspiracy mentality and a deeply held belief that looks a lot like religiosity but isn’t necessarily specifically tied to a religion”.

[…] Their lack of trust in authority includes not just scientists but scientific bodies such as NASA, all of whom (they think) are part of a massive conspiracy to prevent the flat-Earth truth being revealed. “[They] view the world through this really dark filter where [they] assume that all authorities and institutions and corporations are just there to exploit you.”

Yeah that really resonates with me, an anarchist. You can’t trust authorities, you have to find out things your own way. Especially this part:

Oddly, Landrum says that many flat-Earthers may distrust scientists, but they are not against the scientific method. “The majority of them put a lot of faith, for lack of a better word, in science. There’s a lot of curiosity and a lot of scepticism and a lot of the really good qualities that make scientists.”

how the physics community should best respond

These people haven’t hurt anyone. Why won’t you just let them believe what they want to believe?

dafuq are you serious is everybody trying to change territories now? anybody else wants to say something?

What do you mean “is there anything good about smartphones at all”? It made a ton of money for Apple and its shareholders, that’s the only thing that matters. Who cares that it caused anxiety in a whole generation and ruined social life?