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Has anyone done this joke yet?

Wow, so much to unravel here. Yes. The scientific background was in the open. So it would be just a matter of time. And then the point Swansont mentioned: That is true, more or less. But Japan simply did not capitulate. So the war could have taken much longer, taking many lives of American soldiers. Yes, but only after Germany was defeated. Heisenberg was in charge. The infamous meeting between Heisenberg and Bohr in 1941, gave the latter the impression that the Nazis were making serious work of the atomic bomb, and brought this impression to the US. Yep. I have seen the 'atom cellar' in Haigerloch: Does not quite compare to Los Alamos, is it? I would not put my hand in the fire for this, but it surely was a reason: Truman said something like this about the Soviets and the atomic bomb: "Now we have a real hammer on those boys". Another reason might have been to have a 'real live test'. A hint for this is the second bomb. One of the A-bombs was a U-235, the other a plutonium bomb. Wouldn't it be interesting to compare their effects 'in the field'? About the capitulation of Japan: there was a struggle between the civilian government and the military. The government wanted to give up, the military wanted to fight until the bitter end. One of the struggling points was the position of the emperor. The US wanted an unconditional capitulation, the Japanese government found that the position of the emperor could not be discussed. In the end the Japanese government made a very unusual proposal: let the emperor decide. In the meantime the first atomic bomb was dropped. If this fact had an influence on the decision of Hirohito is not known, fact is that he chose to capitulate. His speech in which he called for the capitulation was recorded, to be brought to the Japanese radio studios. Radical militaries tried to steal the recording on its way to the radio station, but they did not succeed. Hirohito's speech was broadcasted, and Japan capitulated. And the US more or less let the emperor untouched. Had the US made it known that the emperor could stay earlier, Japan might also have capitulated earlier. Maybe the A-bombs would not have been necessary. Main source: Bert Röling, who was a.o. member of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (also called the Tokyo Tribunal, similar to the Nürnberg Tribunal in Germany). Hmmm. Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch were hardly Nazis, they were Jewish and fled Germany in 1938. Otto Hahn: Fritz Strassmann: So four of the 'main characters' were definitely not Nazis. Equating 'German' and 'Nazi' is simply wrong, also during WWII.

I asked our benevolent overlord Dave about the ad settings, and apparently Google AdSense enabled "vignette" ads without asking us. He's turned them off now. Hopefully that's the end of the issue and they don't find another more irritating thing to turn on.

From a different perspective, it appeared you were badgering a newbie, @Benjamin Karl, who was not making a claim but rather requesting opinions on the claims made in a video. Whose points he courteously summarized when asked to. While he could be encouraged to dig deeper for other sources, I am not sure that your tone was that of a friendly guide in that quest.

I agree. The political right and maga-class has been getting beyond ridiculous in ostracizing people who refuse to tow the party line and repeat the lies, casting out anyone deemed to be "others." It demands a level of purity nobody can ever maintain, and it's pretty sad that their views can't hold up to even remedial scrutiny.

The solution is for people who are not themselves autistic, and who evidently don’t understand what autism even means, to stop proposing “solutions”. I am autistic, and I am not a problem that needs to be solved.

“what makes this fee revolutionary is that it will apply to emissions that don’t happen on European soil. The EU already puts a price on many of the emissions created by European firms; now, through the new Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, or CBAM, the bloc will charge companies that import the targeted products — cement, aluminum, electricity, fertilizer, hydrogen, iron and steel — into the EU, no matter where in the world those products are made.” https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/food-environment/2024/big-boost-europe-carbon-neutral-goals-cbam This removes incentives to move carbon-intensive industry out of the EU, since that won’t sidestep tariffs any longer. The tariff accounting includes the electricity used for production, so there’s an incentive for business exporting to the EU to use green energy

The CEO of IKEA is now the Prime Minister of Sweden. He is currently assembling his cabinet.

45 years ago President Carter has helped me to escape from the USSR.

I guess "Wanktank" might sound too much like a collection device...

Alkonoklazt has been suspended for a week because staff would like a break from all the rebellion against the system.

Perhaps we can dispense with the notion that he’s a genius, and stop paying attention to his nonsensical ramblings.

Identity is about who we are and how we identify ourselves to others. I could tell you I identify as a father, and while I could share pictures of me with my kids or submit to a paternity test to meet your arbitrarily high threshold in the name of science, most commonly we simply accept my statement as true since it’s ME telling YOU how I identify MYSELF. Likewise, I might identify as a baseball fan. I could produce tickets to the games I’ve attended and post all the games I’ve watched on TV in the past year and even all the times I’ve participated out on the diamond with friends, but most commonly my saying “I identify as a baseball fan” is sufficient based on my say so alone. You don’t ask to test it and submit it for peer review. Perhaps I was born in Russia then later moved to Germany. I could show you my passport and citizenship papers, but if I tell you I now identify as German, that really ought to be enough no matter how much you love the motherland and hate that I’ve defected. Perhaps I was given the name John at birth, and now tell you I instead identify myself as Bruce or Loretta. You don’t get to tell me I’m not allowed to do that like some entitled overseeing brat. And on and on and on ad infinitum … I could identify as a reader, or an audiophile, or as an art lover, or a car collector, or a weapons expert and cigar aficionado, a brewer, a builder, a lover of memes… and you wouldn’t sit here demanding that I produce scientific evidence to support these. It’s about ME telling YOU how I identify MYSELF, and you don’t get to tell me I’m wrong no matter how forcefully you disagree with the identity of myself I’ve expressed. It’s simply not your place. End program. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200. YOU have no say in anything related to MY identity, and gender identity is obviously no different.

“For the first time since the mid-20th century, over 95 percent of this year’s planned new electric-generating capacity in the United States is zero-carbon.” https://www.whitehouse.gov/cea/written-materials/2024/04/11/the-next-phase-of-electricity-decarbonization-planned-power-capacity-is-nearly-all-zero-carbon/

For a moment, I thought that looked like this. But it's probably just me...

I think blaming Netanyahu is justified, just read through some international Israeli articles on that matter. He torpedoed paths to peace (regardless how strenuous they might have been ) and allowed money to flow to Hamas with the stated intention to weaken proponents of a two state solution. So at least factually there is some culpability, if folk co-developed a situation where terorists can thrive. So it does not seem one-sided, as I don't think anyone here is justifying Hamas. One could argue whether ge should be No1 or 2 or wherever, but faultless he and hardliners are not. The one-sided argument seems to me that it is all the Palestinians fault, without formulating what their alternatives were (beside thriving through blockades). If someone blamed all the Israeli as you did with Palestinians, you might have point, but I might have missed those, if they existed. And if you really want to narrow culpability to the direct actions only, then non combatant Palestinians should be equally excluded. Yet those are still dying. Finally, you seem to attribute intentions to posters. I am critiquing your arguments and extrapolated to what seemed to me the conclusions. I have made no assignment of guilt to posters, as that would be silly. Unless Netanyahu posted here or followers of Hamas. Palestinians and Israeli civilians are victims and it is hard for either group to take up responsibility either way. Both are not dying at the same rate historically, though. That is the issue with these actions and the seeming conclusion if executed unchecked. The US wars were a lesson I that regard.

And it was obvious that heavier things fell faster than lighter things, up until it was actually tested. You claimed it was a fact, not that it was obvious (to you) Other things that seem obvious that prison time reduces the odds that someone would re-offend, or that the death penalty is a deterrent, and people claim these things are true. But those “obvious” things don’t hold up to scrutiny. “A large body of research finds that spending time in prison or jail doesn’t lower the risk that someone will offend again. In some instances, it actually raises the likelihood that they will commit future crimes.” https://daily.jstor.org/rethinking-prison-as-a-deterrent-to-future-crime/ The death penalty does not deter crime “there is no credible evidence that the death penalty deters crime more effectively than long terms of imprisonment. States that have death penalty laws do not have lower crime rates or murder rates than states without such laws” https://www.aclu.org/documents/death-penalty-questions-and-answers#:~:text=A%3A No%2C there is no,than states without such laws. So yes, I expect that issues of deterrence have been studied. And they have been. “Research shows clearly that the chance of being caught is a vastly more effective deterrent than even draconian punishment.” “Increasing the severity of punishment does little to deter crime” https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/five-things-about-deterrence So apparently there are studies. If it’s a “great incentive” one might expect clear evidence of the deterrence. The bottom line is that if you claim something to be true, you have to be prepared to back it up. Others do this regularly, and it’s required by the rules. It’s exhausting having try and get you to do this when you’re posting an opinion that you’re asserting as fact. It takes time to debunk you and it’s not fair that you can just spout BS and move on. It’s a fundamentally dishonest debate tactic, and common enough that it has its own name - Brandolini’s law, aka the bullshit asymmetry principle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini's_law

Here's a Venn diagram explaining why Marjorie Taylor Greene's book isn't selling well:

! Moderator Note It's been painfully obvious for a LONG time, but it's still frustrating that you don't bother to source your conjecture the way others do. You seem to think your raw opinions are meaningful without facts and evidential support. This has allowed you to post a whole lot of crap in otherwise scientific threads. You need to stop it. You seem very smart, and you often represent a POV that we need to see, but you ruin it with unevidenced opinion that you assert like it's fact. We can start trashing bad faith posts like that if you can't stop yourself, but we want to let you know our thinking on this.

Define 'comfort' Okay, that's an unusally low temperature. Recommended humidity for occupied rooms is 40%-60% RH because reasons. Air @ 10oC and 100% RH contains 9.4 g/m3 moisture (calculator here) Air @ 15oC containing 9.4 g/m3 moisture is @ 73.3% RH (same resource) If its a contractual obligation job, then dehumidification seems obligatory. However, there are other considerations to bear in mind. Maybe 73% RH is tolerable to you in which case, a modest addition of dry heat would do the job. Same if the initial humidity was more like 85% If the room is humid only because of your breathing/perspiration and it's less humid outside then maybe all that's needed is a small fan to increase the ventilation rate a bit. Most typical occupied spaces are best served with ~7 air changes per hour or they can get a bit clammy. (Up to double that figure for say a computer room) People are walking humidifiers emitting 6-7 MJ/day largely as moisture saturated warm air so there's major shifts in emphasis when dealing with small, busy rooms versus large sparsely occupied ones. Guess it's down to the individual. Personally, I find 50% a bit on the dry side these days, but it is the standard target for the HVAC industry etc (eg industry source) 600W of dry heat input would make a room this size quite warm quite quickly. I checked the site and it does indeed say that. Absolute nonsense. These values are what would be required to prevent condensation on say the inside of a single-glazed window. Following this guidance would be a health hazard for any occupants.

It's a shame you chose to ignore everything that everyone had to say.

I've mentioned this idea before, as a way of producing fish, but it could also fix huge quantities of carbon onto the ocean floor if done at scale. You have a specially designed ship stationed at a very non-productive part of the ocean. ( most of the world oceans are ocean desert ) The ship controls a robotic electrical pump, on the ocean floor. The pump stirrs up sediment, and pumps it to the surface through a thin (but large diameter) polythene tube. When the sediment meets the surface, you get a bloom of algae, which naturally happens whenerver water from the depths upwells. The algae are then the bottom of a food chain, that supports vast clouds of plankton. Besides being fish food, the plankton fix CO2 in their bodies which sinks to the ocean floor when they die, fixing CO2 for thousands of years in a natural way, with no possibility of it getting released in the future. It eventually becomes limestone rock after miliions of years. The money for the pumping could eventually come from fishing licences, taxing the catch that results from the proliferation of fish, in an area where previously there were none. So it could be self financing, once running. So a win-win situation, with carbon being stored and food being harvested from what used to be ocean desert. I realise that this will never happen because of politics and investment problems, but I'm pretty sure it would work. Maybe if the climate really does start giving trouble, it might come into the picture, when the politicians start to panic.

Then our instincts kind of suck given all the war, genocide, global warming, pollution, nuclear weapons, etc.

The current state of the GOP suggests that involvement in sexual offenses is considered a job requirement.

You learned something about him. Absorb it and don't do it again with him. Being family does not automatically mean one will receive honesty. C'est la vie.

There could be 50 reasons he responded the way he did, many of which are perfectly reasonable. My opinion is that you should always assume the most respectful interpretation of a person's response/words/actions/etc. until you have evidence to the contrary.

I did. Back up the thread, eleven posts up. Agreed with Pigliucci on category error, and disagreed with Dennett, Churchland, et al that it's an illusion. There was a whole chat and everything. After two pages touching on subjective experience you stroll in and.... I think my response to that was the soul of restraint, considering. And now I'm done here.

I would add the tooth fairy, Santa Claus, and Link from Zelda to this list. One can be an agnostic atheist or an agnostic theist, but calling oneself merely agnostic misuses the term. Agnosticism is about knowledge. (A)theism is about belief. We all believe or don’t believe, and agnosticism supplements those labels, but cannot replace them.

A lot of people who find the holocaust horrible today, would have participated at the time. We're all a product of our social environment. I'm 73. When I was young, it would have been unthinkable that homosexual people ( the polite expression at the time ) could marry or adopt, or even hold a public position. You could hear the words "nigger" or "coon" in sitcoms, admittedly spoken by lowlife characters. But to say "fuck" on the air was unthinkable. Now you hear fuck all the time, but the racial slurs are absolutely barred, even in jest. All good stuff, but they are just examples of fundamental culture changes that are all good. But the people haven't changed, it's the culture that's changed. Take people born today, transport them back to the Nazi era, and they would do the same. Nazi Germany grew out of desperate times. People act differently under pressure. They tend to pick on anyone who stands out as different, and blame them for their problems. It's still happening in India, Bangladesh, Burma, China, and not too long ago in Northern Ireland. Those are just examples, not the whole picture. The common factor is human nature, it hasn't gone away, and it's not just Nazis on Jews.

Holy feck, did you just troll me? Dude, no one who advocates a set population for the planet is advocating people dying. This is about family planning and a demographic shift to smaller families being a viable choice and one that is rewarded. i.e. fewer new people being born. I'll thank you also to skip the forced sterilization strawman, too.

Saying it's relevant is not to say reducing population is THE solution, only that it may be part of a suite of solutions that protect arable land, wetlands, beaches, parks, wilderness preserves, watersheds, airsheds, oceans, etc which are vital to having a nurturing planet. Working against this common sense suite of solutions are toxic ideologies and religious beliefs, which sometimes foster a notion that my group is special and chosen and we should have large families and lots of room to push out the less-special people. And, allied with that, is the anthropocentric view that we can also push out other species who just don't matter as much. One reason I avoid trying to define a global carrying capacity is that quality of life is not easily rendered in numbers and constant over all bioregions. Phoenix is already overpopulated at a couple million, and is already massively dependent on resources imported from other areas, and struggling grimly to find enough water. The Mekong delta OTOH could probably handle more people, with its society having a more low-carbon lifestyle and immense biological richness and fecundity all around. That said, I haven't heard of too many places where ordinary people (not local business and tourism boosters) are crying dear god we just need more people! I live in a relatively sparsely populated place, and yet even here there has been a decline in many metrics of livability. My city is already prone to spells of poor air quality due to the bowl effect of hills, and the metro is a mere 120,000 people. It is dirtier, less walkable, the creek for which the town is named is threatened by runoff, traffic is ugly, people are less friendly, housing prices are insane and there is the unmistakable impression that if we could just stop growing for one freaking minute and catch our collective breath then we might be able to catch up on some of these problems. It is just not normal and healthy for human civilization to go from 3 billion people to 8 billion in less than my lifetime. Yes. I too have pointed this out in other threads. Western nations spread their rapacious level of consumption, both by stripmining resources of developing countries, and by selling a Western lifestyle to them. And places where population increase is rapid do then experience a double-barrelled blast of social and ecological problems. And there is the sad paradox of bringing in vaccines and reducing child mortality and better crop yields....all supposed to improve life...and then you have a disruptive rapid surge in population that later struggles to sustain itself when drought years come. This happened in the USA too, when too many people came in and grew crops on land really only suited for grazing sheep or cattle. The result was an eco disaster called the Dust Bowl. Millions of Californians are descended from the torrent of refugees it created.

I don't assume that. I think the human population is underutilized, mismanaged, and kept barely above slavery in many parts of the world. I think the outrage of overpopulation is being manufactured by those who hoard resources and demean the labor of people. Rather than giving the resource hoarders more control over our reproduction, I'd like to try more cooperation and less competition, and try to distribute resources more efficiently and effectively for a larger percentage of the population. No more food rotting on docks because there's no profit in getting it to starving people, which will make them healthier and more able to continue their own prosperity. I'd like to start a cycle like that, because we know where the "overpopulation" cycle leads.

They released his fingerprints

There's a kernel of a good idea here, though. We need to massively invest in global desalination and transport of the fresh water which results to address the real issues of drought and crop failure which will drive suffering, poverty, and mass migration for many generations to come. Desalination can help with a lot of the risks we and our children are about to face, but it requires huge investment and policy support to achieve.

But words “are” not more words. What they are is labels for objects, actions, ideas etc. that allow us to share our experience and thought with others. While all, or almost all, words are serious, certain combinations of them can be silly.

By acknowledging it’s a war we can’t win and will never end, decriminalizing essentially all drugs, and replacing investments in private prisons with investments in rehabilitation centers, low cost housing, food programs, and vocational training. What would happen if we did this? The lives of many tens of millions of people would be better, including those in no way associated with modern day addicts. Sell it to the left by speaking of its morality and humanity. Sell it to the right by speaking of its direct connection to personal freedom and autonomy. Sell it to the middle by speaking of its higher ROI across metrics.

I usually hear collectivism used as a broader term for any system where the welfare of the group is put before that of the individual. Everything from ancient Scandinavian societies up to modern Marxism. Collectivism is egalitarian and seeks to achieve economic equality through control of production and distribution. Decisions always defer to a group rather than an individual. If it's a company, workers share in profits and participate in decision making as equals. Statism specifically means, IIRC, a system where a central power structure controls social and economic affairs. Authoritarian governments tend to be statist. They can be a perversion of an egalitarian collectivist society, in many instances, with power concentrating centrally. In thr original collectivist meaning of communism, the concept of a "communist party" would tend to be contradictory.

Hardly. These observations have been standard stuff for most of my lifetime (I'm 68). That's why you find the better run economies in Europe tend to practice a form of mixed economy, sometimes referred to as social democracy. In short, people have learnt what to take from the ideals of socialism and blend those with regulated market economic mechanisms to get the necessary feedback from consumer to producer. What has become equally clear over the last couple of decades is that inadequately regulated market mechanisms can also fail to deliver for citizens. The water and railway companies in Britain are examples, as is the health system in the USA. What we are also now seeing, with the new transnational IT entities such as Amazon, or Zuckerberg's empire, is that it is becoming a struggle to prevent the development of international monopolies which hand an unacceptable degree of control to producers, while disempowering consumers, just as much as any state-planned enterprise in the old USSR. It seems to me issues like these are the real food for thought nowadays.

Where I was playing they had all three. I know it sounds 'woke' to some, but there is a real effort in special needs areas to stop defining people by their disabilities or certain aspects like being non-binary. For example, to stop saying a Down Syndrome kid and just say he is a kid who happens to have Down Syndrome. I agree the term 'trans kids' is a problem as that then makes being trans such an outsized part of who they are, instead of them being kids who like sports, school, riding bikes, whatever. When people are labeled there is a tendency to forget all the other things about that person. I agree with @StringJunky though that this will for the most part go away after a while. Just like being gay, in a mixed marriages, an atheist, an unwed mother, and all the other things that are no longer an issue for most people.

Interesting article. Thanks for posting it. One would not expect nitrogen-containing compounds among the minerals. About the only example on Earth is saltpetre (KNO3 or NaNO3), which is derived from decomposition of organic material. This is because nitrogen is generally speaking most stable as N2, a gas, due to the great strength of the triple bond (excellent overlap of the 2p orbitals in this small molecule, leading to 2 very strong π-bonds as well as a strong σ-bond). So one would tend to find nitrogen in the atmosphere rather than in solid minerals. (This is in contrast with oxygen, which of course happily forms a huge series of silicate minerals, oxides, etc.) All the elements up to and beyond iron will have been present in the dust and gas from which the solar system condensed so, rather than formation, this issue is more about fractionation, i.e. which ones became concentrated in particular planets, and then in what part of the planet (atmosphere, crust, mantle core). Sulphur forms a range of compounds with iron, some of which are not of fixed composition, i.e. solid solutions or alloys. From the article it seems they think sulphur is a major ingredient in the Martian core due to the composition of iron meteorites and also, I presume, their assessment of the density of the core from seismology.