Caring about times within some time limit in a single reference frame is sufficient.

Apple's and oranges. Virtually nowhere is socialist in the one party state sense.

Let's pause for a moment for a meta-level reflection. You're engaging in metacontrarianism, with the relevant uneducated/contrarian/metacontrarian triad being:

Dubai is a country / No, Dubai is part of the UAE / Dubai has a lot of power and autonomy within the UAE.

The trouble with metacontrarianism is that metacontrarians often seem to forget that even if they're right -- that is, even if the third level of the triad is true -- the first level is still wrong. In some sense, you have to pass through the second level in order to legitimately claim the mantle of the third. (Here, "pass through the second level" means not "go through a stage of being at the second level" so much as "understand why, and in particular that, the second level is an improvement over the first".)

I submit to you that if Alice thinks Dubai is a country because she's never heard of the UAE, and Bob thinks that Dubai is the UAE's version of Istanbul, Bob's model of the political geography of the Arabian peninsula is still better than Alice's, even if Carol, who thinks that Dubai is so different from the rest of the UAE that it "might as well" be a country in its own right, has a better model than Bob.

Now, to return to the object level, I don't actually see why Carol's model is better than Bob's. I don't know that much about the internal politics of Turkey, but I assume that Istanbul, being a major city, is culturally and demographically different from most of the rest of the country, wields a lot of influence in the country's politics, and has governmental policies that most other parts of the country don't have. For that matter, the same is true of New York City, whether regarded as a part of New York State or of the United States. In neither of these cases do I see any need to give up the model that has these cities being politically subordinate to the nation-states (or states) that contain them, and I don't see how the case of Dubai within the UAE is any different (or, anyway, different enough). And, conversely, even if Monaco is heavily influenced in its policies by neighboring France, I don't see that as sufficient reason to remove from my model the notion that Monaco is an independent state, because otherwise we might as well say that Canada is part of the U.S., et cetera.

To phrase your result in terms a physicist would use: an all-time integral of a scalar function (happiness) is not Lorentz-invariant. But rather than draw a philosophical conclusion from this I would suggest modifying the equation for total happiness. If I recall correctly the standard method is defining a happiness density (over space), so rather than state "There is X amount of happiness at this point in time" you would state "At this point in time and space there is Y amount of happiness being created/destroyed", and then define the total happiness as an all universe integral (so you integrate over spacetime).

I do hope that I'm not making some elementary mistake (imagine the embarrasment), but this thread seems to fall in the general category of 'attempting to draw philosophical conclusions from a limited understanding of modern physics'. I remember reading material here on LessWrong that warns about this, such as adding up to normality.

So utilitarianism has known paradoxes if you allow infinite positive/negative utilities (basically because infinite sums don't always behave well). On the other hand, if you restrict yourself, say to situations that only last finitely long all these paradoxes go away. If both devices last for the same amount of subjective time, this holds true in all reference frames, and thus in all reference frames you can say that the situations are equally good.

You're arguing issues of cartography, not geography.

I think you missed the argument.

If you have a subculture or other group of people whose experience is strongly correlated with one another, and their conduct repels or silences anyone whose experience disagrees with theirs, then their view of the world will be missing a lot of information and will contain systematic biases.

We have words for this in various areas, such as "groupthink", "filter bubble", "circlejerk" ....

He hates the non-Plus atheists. ("Dictionary Atheists. Boy, I really do hate these guys. You’ve got a discussion going, talking about why you’re an atheist ... and some smug wanker comes along and announces that “Atheism means you lack a belief in gods. Nothing more. Quit trying to add meaning to the term.”" -- source)

I don't think he's saying he hates all non-Plus atheists (whatever that means) here. It seems to me he's saying that he hates atheists who don't see atheism as a part of a broader network of commitments or values, or resist the idea that it should be seen as such. He goes on to say, "there is more to my atheism than simple denial of one claim; it’s actually based on a scientific attitude that values evidence and reason, that rejects claims resting solely on authority, and that encourages deeper exploration of the world".

That actually seems like a pretty reasonable position to me (although "hate" is admittedly a strong word to use in this context). If indeed there are people who see atheism as fundamentally disconnected from general-purpose rationalism, or who don't see the promotion of atheism as a mere corollary of the promotion of a general rationalist worldview, or who object to making the atheist movement about rationality and science rather than mere disbelief in god, then I do think those people are wrong.

It does seem odd to me that there would be a significant number of atheists who adopt this kind of view, though, so maybe Myers is attacking a strawman here.

And yet, NYC is still there, and unlike Rome post-barbarians, has only grown in population.

EDIT: and to expand on my point with Rome, disturbances are very common in great metropolises and imperial capitals; pointing to a blackout from over a third of a century ago as indicating the decline of America is like pointing to the Marian or Gracchian riots in Rome as indicating the fall of the Roman empire. (What, you don't remember either? Exactly.)

Interesting, but this does not exactly mean the concrete is incoherent, more that QM isnt playing ball.