Ummm. . . all that stuff is happening because the Fed is printing money, lots and lots of money, not anything Obama is doing. Only contribution Obama is making is spending a lot of borrowed money in concert with Congress.

Printing money is a sure fired way to drive up a stock market. Its not really due to stocks going up as much as the currency being devalued. One reason the deficit is going down is all the capital gains rolling in from the artificially inflated stock market.

They are also engaging in financial repression, holding interest rates artificially low to punish savers while they save the butts of debtors, and this is stoking a new bubble in the housing market.

We are pretty much headed for twin bubbles in the stock market and housing market. When they pop its going to be 2008 all over again or probably worse. There is also an outside chance all this stimulus is going to provoke an inflation spike or hyperinflation if the bubble don't pop before the inflation really kicks in.

The one thing in the Fed's favor is the EU, Japan and China are printing money like there is no tomorrow too, so all the major world currencies are being devalued at the same time. The world is awash in electronic money generated out of thin air, or actually out of elections in a few central bank computers. Its not real wealth.

At least computers generating bitcoins have to work at it. The Fed is generating like $80 billion a month with absolutely no effort.

"I wonder what it would look like if it explodes"

Nope, it was most definitely "I wonder what it will look like when it explodes" and I found thinking it that way to be jarring in its own right. Ten minutes later I had the answer. Large numbers of people were watching and it caused a level of intensity of emotion and feeling among large numbers of people that the intensity was enough to function at a different and atypical energy level.

"Perhaps you should consider studying in the field of neuroscience, or perhaps deep in to the fields of physics"

I'm too old to change career tracks, I have absolutely zero interest in working in the repressive hamster cage necessary to do research in those fields, living in an ivory tower or playing research paper games. Those fields require a lab, equipment and a lot of money. As soon as you hit string theory and multiverse we simply don't have any way to do experimental research because everything is at a level beyond our current ability to measure anything.

Probably the only ones doing viable research on the subject are Zen masters, though they may also be masters of self deception.

I'm just not opting in to the reductionism that thinks just because we have huge digital computers that they are the right tool to simulate biological intelligence. You might actually be able to fake some of the mechanics but its going to be wildly inefficient and contrived, and I think critical peices will be missing, probably the parts that we call "soul".

"I think it's FAR more likely that your mind lied to you."

Ya know you actually don't have a clue what it was but you do seem to have that special kind of arrogance that makes you think can just fill in the blanks about something for which you have no actual information and make it fit your world view.

It was 10 minutes before the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded while watching the pre launch with no sound. The thought flashed through my head quite vividly, "I wonder what it will look like when it explodes". You could maybe explain it away that I'd deduced that conditions were ripe for it to explode but since I didn't really know anything about the O ring issues and cold at the time I had no basis for deducing that there was much of a chance it would explode beyond the fact that all launches have some chance of exploding.

It is a chronic characteristic of our species, especially the arrogant, intelligent ones like yourself that we think we have it all figured out and that everything falls to Occam's Razor. Time after time it turns out that we actually don't know it all, in fact we don't know much about a lot of things.

The people most likely to make the leaps of discovery are the ones who have no regard for "conventional wisdom". I wont be placing any bets on an AI, any time soon, to come up with an original insight on anything. You seem to have a lot in common with the brand of intelligence I would expect an AI to produce.

You completely forgot my original point. I was not arguing for god or a "mystical presence". I am simply arguing that our understanding of our universe and existence is still primitive at best. Everytime we've thought we had it all figured out we've been proved wrong. We will most probably be proved wrong again and again.

" complex things are usually just made up of a LOT of very very simple things behaving in very very simple ways"

That is simply not true. We started out with fire, earth, air and water. We then moved to atoms, elements and molecules. Then to subatomic particles. Then to quantum mechanics which is decidely not simple. Now we are at dark matter, dark energy and string theory which are extreme increases in complexity if they prove out. Likewise we went from no understanding of mechanics to Newton and calculus to Relativity. Those are not simplifications either. Out understanding of physics today is vastly more complex than ever.

"While precognition may appear to stand at a different level to these sorts of changes,"

Precognition is completely different from a drug induced mystical experience. Precognition suggestions time doesn't operate on the simplistic level we think it does.

I used a lot of touch feely language in my first post not out of emotion but because its simply impossible for me to empirically prove my theory, I know it, and I'm admitting it. It would have been even worse if I'd sat there and tried to assert my theory as though it was a hard fact.

I find the reductionist approach to be too simplistic to explain the wonderous magic that is life, intelligence and time. The reductionist approach may prove to be the winning answer, but it will certainly be disappointing if our existence is really that mechanized.

I once experienced a vivid instance of precognition and it permenently moved me out of the camp that our existence is as simple as the reductionists try to make it.

I didn't say that it was limited to human brains, it is most probably in brains of other animals, it may even be in plants. Its quite possible you can manufacture an artificial brain with this spark. I just doubt you will be able to do it with a relatively crude simulation on a digital computer or accomplish it when we still have very little grasp of the mechanics of the dimensions in which we live.

I think the idea of creating intelligence with a digital computer is a variation on the law of the instrument. Just because you have powerful digital computers doesn't mean they are the right tool for at least part of this job.

You may be able to simulate all the basic mechanics of a brain and an organism by modeling all the neurons and synapses, but I suspect that the soul and the spark of sentience probably rests in quantum mechanics, string theory, multiverses, or something similar that we presently don't understand. You can build a Watson, you may be able to pass a Turing test but it wont have intuition or inspiration. Nor will it be alive or a real intelligence. It certainly might pass for an "artificial" intelligence.

There has been massive hero inflation in recent years. Heroes have been devalued to the point you need a train load of heroes to save a little old lady from an out of control semi.

Not sure if the devaluation was due to 24/7 news networks, unscrupulous policians or social networks. Probably some of each.

People should be given all the leave they want to deal with newborn children. They ABSOLUTELY SHOULD NOT BE PAID by their employer while they are doing it unless they are using sick leave and vacation time like everyone else. Paid leave for a life styule choice is wrong at every level. Its especially unfair to coworkers who, for whatever reason, are not having childern. Its also unfair to shareholders and customers.

This strikes me as a case of CEO, who just had a child, whose perspective has been warped in favor of people who make the same choices she is making.

If you make paid leave a mandate at a governmental level you are nearly insuring employers will balk at hiring employees who are likely to have children and become a ball and chain on the payroll, taking off huge amounts of time with pay and requiring him to also pay a temp to cover for them.

Actually the current Fed campaign to hold interest rates artificially low for years going on a decade is in fact a form of "looting my pockets". Economist refer to it as "financial repression". In addition they rig the inflation rate computation and report it much lower than it really is, primarily by leaving out food and energy. They've also printed trillions of dollars since 2008 so they are debasing the currency, and are paying basically nothing on savings deposits so they are in fact stealing from people quietly but very efficiently.

Your only option to not be victimized in this way is to pour your money in to relatively dangerous stocks and commodities too, and get out before the current bubble pops and the the next crash. Real estate used to be a fairly safe investment but in recent years has become dangerous as well due to bubbles⦠caused by the Fed holding interest rates too low for too long.

Central bank actarions are proving to be a very effective tactic to make people invested in the stock market, which are disproportionately 1%ers very rich and is causing another huge increase in income inequality.

The only reason the dollar isn't completely destroyed at this point is the EU, China and Japan are all printing money furiously too. Since everyone is doing it all currencies are being debased at the same time which makes it look like all is well.

Central banks printing trillions and using it to bankroll government sovereign debt is almost certain to not end well, like Weimar republic and Zimbabwe not well, just give it time.

A pretty fair percentage of frontiersmen probably faced a fairly equal proposition of killing or being killed, some of them probably killed natives but I doubt all did.

The really organized and effective genocides usually originated from expansionist governments and their militaries.

Possibly, but you would need to do the math on how long it will take you to reach the point you can maintain a self sustaiing colony there. Until that happens you are completely dependent on Earth's governments to allow the launches you need to survive. You will be dependent on Earth for a long time for things like computers.

If someone actually managed to sustain a colony on Mars the next question would be how long it would be before Earth's governments try to exert control over it. As inept as they've been at venturing in to space you might have some breathing room, but as long as they control your launch pads to get supplies from Earth you are vulnerable.

I imagine seasteading would be a more viable option but sitting on a platform in the middle of the ocean probably wouldn't be the greatest life and being heavily dependent on supply ships coming from countries who might decide to cut them off also might be unpleasant.

The Amazon might be an option for a while but the rate at which its being deforested, especially in Brazil, I imagine you will probably be bumping in to loggers, ranchers and farmers and its only going to continue to shrink.

Why don't you name some of the countries and we will evaluate how really free they are and how insulated they are from the reach of the U.S. government.

"If you don't like the "state" you live under then move or change it."

There really aren't any places to flee to any more. Most governments are turning oppresive, corrupt and are trampling civil liberties. Computers and networking are making it extremely easy to make a police states these days. When East Germany and the U.S.S.R. did oppresive police state it was man power intensive, its much easier now. There is almost no effective defense of civil liberties being mounted any more. Once your government stacks the courts in their favor there is almost no peaceful path to oppose stripping your civil liberties. The U.S. can and frequently does use "state secrets" provision to shut down any challenge to its power. Y

ou can pretend ballot boxes in the places that have them will make a difference but they seldom do.

In particular, the reach of the U.S. government has extended to most of the nooks and crannies on the planet, with the possible exception of places like China, North Korea and Iran which are sufficiently oppresive without any help from the U.S. The U.S. has military bases and FBI offices in a staggering number of countries. They've used rendition all over the world to snatch people, sometimes innocent people, off the streets to torture . With drone bases in the middle of all of the hard to reach places the U.S. will soon have total global coverage and the ability to assassinate by drone anyone, anywhere, with no judiicial oversight.

Its the down side of living on a small planet with no frontiers left and a civilization with accelerating technology development.

There isn't any place to go if you want to escape.