Singapore isin't a Western nation or a fully developed on, and they have extremely high economic growth (around 10%), so that's not comparable to stable Westerne economies.

Whether Singapore is considered "Western" or not is irrelevant. The disagreement was over whether the "economic crisis" forced the current US Government to run up large amount of debt. Singapore shows that not only is it possible to face a global economic crisis without running up large amounts of debt, but that doing so can leave you better off in terms of unemployment. And to claim that Singapore isn't a "developed" nation is quite strange. Singapore has a per capita GDP of $50,300, while the US only has a per capita GDP of $46,400, Germany has a per capita GDP of $34,200, and France has a per capita GDP of $32,800. Are you going to argue that the US, Germany, and France aren't fully developed?

Furthermore, economic crisis did indeed cause large debts, because it caused the tax income for the state to drop, and the rest was loaned because Western nations do not wan't to reduce spending.

The economic crisis only caused large debt increases if going out to eat everyday causes me to take on debt (because I refuse to cut back elsewhere in my budget). The fact remains that there were viable alternatives to multiplying the debt (alternatives that actually worked better in the case of Singapore).

Although nothing seems to have consensus in economics, many economists made the decision not to cut spending, which can make the economic crisis even worse. I think that was even a common agreement amongst most Western nations.

The fact that Western nations listened to the economists that told them that current events justifies them increasing their own discretionary power and ability to give handouts to their allies instead of listening to economists that told them otherwise doesn't surprise me one bit.

You can compare those, because the large debts weren't caused by the "economic crisis". The fact that most Western nations also ran up debt doesn't mean the economic crisis caused the debt increase, only that they chose the same response to the economic crisis (which probably has more to do with increasing their own discretionary power than with lowering unemployment).

Singapore didn't run up huge levels of debt and has a much lower unemployment level than the countries that did run up debt. They could have chosen otherwise, but didn't.

operate solely on a substrate of neurons in the physical brain.

As opposed to ...? Ion channels? Quantum phenomena? Multiple interacting brains? Non-neuronal tissue? Neuronal-but-extracranial cells? Soul? Beings outside the observable universe, running the simulator?

What is this belief supposed to be distinguished from?

He didn't increase the projected level of debt for the US as much as the current president.

Yes, well, I think it's safe to say that quite a few cryonics patients and orgs are concerned about that. There are complex technologies to prevent it, but also a simple one, widely available if you have any local cryonics group. It's called crushed ice, and a lot of stores will sell it to you.

I think people shy away from wireheading because a future full of wireheads would be very boring indeed. People like to think there's more to existence than that. They wan't to experience something more interesting than eternal pleasure. And that's exactly what an FAI should allow.

Somewhat offtopic, but I'd like to see someone writing a GreaseMonkey script which hides the name of the commenter and the current score level on all comments, so you're not being influenced by the status of the commenter and/or the current score level on that comment. The commenter name could be seen with a mouseover so you can reply to it though.

Isin't it more sane to donate money to organizations fighting against existential risks rather than spending money on cryonics?

Oops, sorry, I wrote an incorrect explanation, having relied on confabulation of fading memories too much. Here is a reworked one:

In the simplest case, air pushes the propeller forwards, but it doesn't significantly rotate it. The propeller is a sail. If it were a normal cart moving faster than wind with propeller not attached to anything, it would be the same direction of the rotation (but our propeller rotates faster). At the same time, the propeller is rigidly connected to the wheels, which allows it to rotate faster than the headwind would make it. As a result, it is pushed by the wind from behind rather than resisted, which accelerates the cart, which lends power to the propeller to keep on rotating faster than it otherwise would.

It is a bad intuition to see propeller as throwing the air backwards at speed higher than the difference of cart's speed and the speed of the wind, as the cart is essentially fueled by the resulting hind-wind, not the other way around. Also, the propeller only needs to go a little bit faster than it would because of the headwind.

When an airplane crashes, the wreckage is preserved in painstaking detail, often re-assembled in warehouses in exactly the configuration it was found at the crash site, in order to determine exactly what went wrong.

You would think that when a 47 story skyscraper spontaneously collapses, a wholly unprecedented event, that this engineering failure would be investigated even MORE thoroughly. But instead, it's simply melted down in blast furnaces, over the objections of the victims' families and, among others, fire engineering magazine, which said something like "this destruction of evidence must stop immediately".