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Eloquently put!

The answers I heard to some questions above about fighting the fire, in no special order: Paris' firefighters are highly regarded professionals who use(d) to be quick and efficient. But recently they took very long to extinguish a building fire that seemed banal to my untrained eye. The explanation I heard from the media, that the building was in second position from the street and this prevented using the normal equipment, was ludicrous, as about every street in Paris has two rows of buildings. Hydrants, trucks... are abundant and in good state. Driving in Paris is an odyssey for normal people but the mean delay there for firefighters in France is 13 min from call to operation, less in Paris. They have the keys and tools to remove all obstacles. The streets around Notre-Dame aren't by far the most crammed in Paris. I too heard that water bombers would destroy the old walls. I'm not fully convinced, because dropping the water from higher altitude reduces the impact force, and helicopters could do it more gently. Tanking is possible at an airport. But there is one other reason: the water bombers are based in Gardanne and would have taken roughly four hours to arrive in Paris. Plus some risk of being shot down if someone is unaware, since overflying Paris is forbidden. The firefighters' water jets couldn't reach the roof, this is BAD. They had 400 people quickly at the site, that must be >50 trucks, and I saw ONE water jet at a time and quite late. Essentially everything that could burn, did. The wood structure continued to burn for about 1.5h after the firefighters arrived, until the complete roof was lost. They couldn't do much more than taking artefacts out of the cathedral. It must be a very bad feeling for the professionals. The media commented "the towers were endangered, the firefighters saved them" and I vaguely suppose this is communication: the towers were not at risk, but the politicians had to report some sort of victory. Most buildings in Paris are 7 storeys tall by law, because this is how high the fire brigade reaches. Notre-Dame's roof is much higher. Taller buildings have their own means to extinguish fires, the cathedral didn't. In that sense, the fight was lost before it began, yes. And it was fool. I heard that an automatic extinguishing equipment would be too heavy for the old walls. My limited understanding is that skyscrapers have water reserves at the top, which may be difficult to add to a cathedral, but it should be possible to feed sprinklers from a tank on the ground, with a good pump or a pressure vessel. A first detector raised an alarm an hour before but people didn't find any fire. No more details. After the second alarm, reacting with extinguishers and buckets wasn't allegedly possible any more. I don't quite grasp how a fire might remain silent for an hour among old dust and dry oak wood, nor how it propagated among oak over >50m in two hours, but I have no experience for fires of that size. 900M€ presently, or 1G$. This is 16* the amount donated after the cyclone Idai in Mozambique and around plataformamedia.com

Fine. I don't know how to recognize sentience. And you just told me that you have OBJECTIVE -- your word -- criteria. Your quote was: "I think AI can become objectively sentient." So just tell me what these objective criteria are, that I may be similarly enlightened.

I had never noticed Trump's connection with "PRO" wrestling, or more properly called "WWE" for "World Wrestling Entertainment," until I saw "Last Week Tonight" with John Oliver. "PRO" really means "FAKE" wrestling. Is anyone familiar with real wrestling, the kind of wrestling they have in high school, college and the Olympics? Are there any fans of real wrestling out there? Are there fans of WWE out there? What is the appeal? WWE is a choreographed dance that looks so fake, by the standards of special effects in movies, but is good enough for the fans. Trump's base always says, "We don't take Trump literally, we take him seriously." That is what the WWE is ALL about. I would like to see a study of Trump's base to see what percentage of them are fans of WWE. Trump is as openly fake as the WWE. In WWE there are 2 traditional roles, the "face" or protagonist, the decent guy who plays by the rules; and the "heel" or antagonist, who fights dirty and breaks the rules. Sometimes the fans cheer the face and boo the heel, but they also will boo the face and cheer the heal. Trump is the heel of American politics and his base loves everything about him. They think he acts the way he should, like a street fighter who never quits, and always comes back with something nastier. Also the "ends justify the means." The ends are "MAGA" and the means are "by any means necessary," even fighting dirty, cheating, and using help from Russia. Here is John Oliver's bit about WWE: "In professional wrestling, a heel (also known as a rudo in lucha libre) is a wrestler who portrays a villain or a "bad guy" and acts as an antagonist[1][2][3] to the faces, who are the heroic protagonist or "good guy" characters. To gain heat (with boos and jeers from the audience), heels are often portrayed as behaving in an immoral manner by breaking rules or otherwise taking advantage of their opponents outside the bounds of the standards of the match. Others do not (or rarely) break rules, but instead exhibit unlikeable, appalling and deliberately offensive and demoralizing personality traits such as arrogance, cowardice or contempt for the audience. [Does this sound like Trump?] Many heels do both, cheating as well as behaving nastily. No matter the type of heel, the most important job is that of the antagonist role, as heels exist to provide a foil to the face wrestlers. If a given heel is cheered over the face, a promoter may opt to turn that heel to face or the other way around, or to make the wrestler do something even more despicable to encourage heel heat." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heel_(professional_wrestling)