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The autism connection has been peer reviewed and the author of that has been discredited and struck off. He, to cut a long story short, had a financial interest in pursuing this position. Unfortunately, this myth has persisted and been magnified by the internet. Google 'andrew wakefield autism'

! Moderator Note I think discussion is the wrong approach for someone who is convinced they "know" something. There's no room for learning when obsession sets in, and it clearly has blocked reasoned thinking in your case. You tend to ignore and pretend not to understand when a reply doesn't support your way of thinking. The most appalling strategy you have is to jump to other questions IMMEDIATELY after being told something that should make you STOP and reconsider your whole perspective (stars aren't stationary). You don't bother to take data on board so you can turn it into useful information, or correct flawed thinking on your part. This learning strategy is practically guaranteed to spiral downward into more and more confusion and misinterpretations. It doesn't help you learn what your species has discovered about the universe. History shows you'll ignore this warning and continue to guess about science while mainstream explanations are offered, and then complain that nobody answers you. This is a form of soapboxing or preaching, and it's against our rules. You're going to start receiving Soapboxing warnings if you keep it up. Suspension and banning could follow. Whether this is all an act or not, it ends now. We don't allow conspiracy, we don't allow trolling, and we're not well set up to teach you the basics you seem to lack. This is a science discussion forum.

I think you might mean authoritarianism. Facism has a set of additional characteristics. Crucially in this context is that the latter typically has a form of corporatism rather than exert total economical control. I do not think that follows. Throughout history there have been man-made starvations that were not created by communist (or even authoritarian) regimes. For a counterexample take Churchill's policies, which contributed to the starvation of about 3 million folks. As whole, it is true that in authoritarian regimes (regardless whether they are following free market ideals or not) are more likely to accept loss of human lives to further their goals. However, I think that is a bit of a different argument.

Exactly. Just like we're seeing with solar electric right now, the profits aren't high enough to attract investors to cheap electricity. Our main choices are either nationalize the effort and keep it super cheap and available to everyone, or be willing to subsidize whatever profits and restrictions private investors feel is best for them. And remember that they're going to push back when it comes to servicing remote areas that cut into their profit. The folks who need access to cheap energy most get screwed when profit is first and foremost.

Where you want nationalisation is in infrastructure because there's no opportunities for real revenue growth and competition, and the only way for investors to see 'growth' is by artificial means for prices to rise.

The world is a messy place. In the entire world you would be hard pressed to find two people who agree on all issues. What is worth killing a person for you might be unknown or totally fair to me. The acceptance of protests changes with time, who is in charge, and which way the wind is blowing. Something that is critical today may be a minor annoyance tomorrow, simply because something more critical now has our attention. We will try to set levels of acceptability for protests, and those levels will change over time. From my perspective I don't get bothered by much. I accept that I will like some things and not like others; that I will be inconvenienced on occasion; that people will disagree with me; and that I may not like the final outcome. Debating generalities may be useful but it is not very practical. All you can really do is decide how you and like minded individuals will react to different situations.

Russia likely sees Sanders also as more dovish and less likely to act militarily to constrain their expansion and actions than his other democratic rivals.

Oh, good Lord ! Not here too; is there no escape ? We don't wanna play no more, Bmpbmp1975.

Part of it, too, is just Russia’s desire to make democracy look bad. They figure the more polarizing the candidate the better as it makes our system of government no better than theirs. BTW - Looks like Bernie won Nevada today. Basically, more republican.

A risk pool is basically a group-oriented strategy, which is more akin to public ownership than private. I disagree that regular insurance is anti-socialism. It's a pretty straightforward capitalist deal made between private entities, and value can be determined and agreed upon by both parties. As long as the terms of a claim are clear, everybody benefits. The weirdest part about it is that you're technically betting something bad will happen to you, and the insurer is betting it won't. Health insurance is a whole different matter, imo. It should never be handled privately, and should always be part of a publicly-owned program aimed at health and not profit, using as large a portion of a country's population as possible to reduce costs and maximize effectiveness. An effective social system is like a tapestry. It's easy to pick apart individual threads and break them, but the whole is very strong, beautiful, and resilient. On the other side, you'll have those millions to pay out because you've saved millions on different aspects of your society. If the US did more for working class folks, there would be less crime. If we went back to socialist approaches to our legal system, and got rid of jails-for-profit, we could reduce our prison system drastically (currently, the US has about 1/20th of the world's population, but it's hybrid privatized system has 1/4th of the world's prisoners). You'll have even more millions because people will have access to better healthcare, where studies show us we'll spend less because we'll catch more before it gets bad, and people won't resort to ER care because they can't afford insurance. Sick people are bad for your economic concerns. To me, it's really simple. Private, public, state ownership, they're all tools to use for the right job. Private ownership drives growth, so it's great for things you don't mind having potentially unlimited growth for. But you don't do that with things like roads and energy, because you only need so many/so much of those things. Education is another good example, since the vast majority only need to know what will help them have the life they want. As for socialism putting a "strain" on the economy, that sounds like the argument of someone who owns a private road construction company. It goes like this: "I employ hundreds of workers at my company who keep our city streets maintained." "Yes, but your roads have tons of potholes because you let us drive on the asphalt before it's cured." "It's for your convenience that we keep construction wait times to a minimum." "But you charge us to re-pave every other year. In Germany, the road crews close off the section of road they're paving for three months to let it cure." "THREE MONTHS! Americans would never stand for that!" "The Germans only have to re-pave a road every 10 years. Because they treat the roads as more important than the profit or the economy, they spend far less for far better roads. The Autobahn is world-famous." If we went back to public services for energy and other areas where it makes sense, the overall population would have a LOT more money to spend. Historically, it's not the wealthy who spend it if they got it. Wealthy folks are sitting on their cash right now, but if the middle and working classes were to get a break on utilities or education, they'd go right out and spend that savings on something they've wanted. Rather than it being a drain, policies based on socialism would boost the US economy considerably, imo.

Good question, do you mean if Betelgeuse's next peak in brightness will be as bright as previously recorded peaks? I do not yet have an opinion: I made a plot from Betelgeuse brightness data from 1997. From that we see that the maximum brightness in each cycle does not deviate very much. So given the lifespan of stars and the rather consistent behaviour in the data I've available I have no reason to predict that anything special is happening in the next cycle. But note that the last minimum deviates a little and that we at this time we are near the minimum brightness, It has just recently been suggested that the brightness is increasing again. Hence I will not try to predict the next maximum brightness from recent data yet. Data and plot thanks to https://www.aavso.org/ *) Someone with more data (and skills of course!) may draw other conclusions. This is my interpretation (since OP asked me). For more reliable info, search for peer reviewed papers.

One policy does not 'make' Socialism. It is best described as 'pooling resources to achieve common good'. Does that mean it can't be misapplied or abused ? Of course not ( look at USSR, Maoist China, Pot's Cambodia or Venezuela for obvious examples ). But so can Capitalist policies. Or even Democracy itself, for that matter. Canada has Employment Insurance, and it is not a strain on the economy. The right mix of Socialism, to ensure equal opportunity for all, and Capitalism, to strive for the better, is the way to go. The trick is finding the right mix which will appease all people.

We have it in the US, too. It’s called unemployment insurance. Why is “the economy” the primary concern, and not the people?

But it does miss the point of the OP, whilst technically a volcano and a cloud fits (as per the OP), they don't contain obvious life (clouds maybe) or the ecosystem to maintain life. Indeed, and this thread is much more interesting and amenable whithout that sort of input. I think life and it's ecosystem are co-dependant and inextricably linked, and so are qualitatively no different.

I’ve been trying hard to see things from his perspective, but my anatomy prevents me from getting my head that far up my ass.

So then you agree... Inflicting inconvenience/harm on one group in an effort to affect another separate group, IS unethical and wrong ? Thanks Dim, I just hit 5000 posts. WHOOHOO ! ( that was my mission for this morning )

The best way to deal with a new virus is to stop it at source, so the action of the authorities will automatically be disproportionate to the actual risk. That leads (in this case) to hysteria, mostly because it's dominated the news even though, in terms of population, it's only affected a handful of people; the worst thing we can do is (be hysterical) add to the hysteria, because that creates fear and fear is the mind killer. So if you want to help those poor people who are directly affected by this, take a step back, don't be afraid, and use the intelligence we all know you have.

Good point. In my case it's generally mixed with gin. Alcohol isn't going to help the immune system at all. So a G&T probably isn't a good idea overall. Having said that, I really hope quinine ( or chloroquine) works as a treatment for coronavirus. It's cheap.

I should be in bed, but it's Friday tomorrow so work can kiss my ass, I'm listening to this instead. Enjoy.

I am astonished and disappointed by you too.. so even you are not bothering with reading news from Wuhan, Hubei, China and world.. You even did not know what family I was talking about during reading my post! Unbelievable! (but you would probably know what rubbish D.T. wrote the last time on Twitter, right? Everybody lost mind on this world completely. Priorities completely up-side-down) https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/18/coronavirus-kills-chinese-film-director-family-wuhan-covid-19 In this case fatality rate is not absolute function. Where you get y=f(x), with x depending on age, but it depends on availability of medical staff which will take care of person during illness.. Too many people will be infected = entire medical staff is a way too busy and tired of work to handle any more infected so infected patients are left alone and simply die.. Age of patient is meaningless if there is nobody to take care during illness.. Availability of medical staff depends on quantity of infected people. During annual flu only absolutely seriously ill are taken to hospitals. During this epidemic the all infected are taken to hospitals (which limits their availability to other patients).

I was not attacking you personally but your attitude, to so serious subject as this one, which was (and still is) clearly disrespectful.. The same attitude had Wuhan and Hubei authorities just six weeks ago..

Too simple. That rule means nobody can do anything (for fear that someone else objects). All rights granted to any individual or group constitute an infringement of the rights of others. Your right to walk down the street without fear of being killed infringes on my right to kill you. My right to have a barbecue infringes on your right to enjoy fresh air But your right to enjoy fresh air infringes on my right to enjoy a barbecue. In the end, it comes down to compromise. Is the right to protest more important than the right to easy holiday travel? Well: you only get to have a holiday because, in the past, people protested about not getting one.

This is relevant: https://www.sciencealert.com/earth-s-core-is-2-5-years-younger-than-its-crust-thanks-to-the-curvature-of-space-time

you could buy one.

That would be awesome to see that, last election I actually thought Hillary would take it. Does anyone feel that the whole impeachment puts a damper on trumps possibility to take a second term?

A. Measurements on the astronaut clock ( A). On Planet X the light clock of the astronaut, will run twice as slowly as on Earth, due to ”time dilation”. According to your answers above, it follows that the actual speed of light on Planet X, measured by this clock, is twice as low as on Earth. That's correct But also in your opinion, the speed of sound is there twice as low as on Earth? Why? It takes twice as much time to cook a pancake here than on Earth? B. Measurements on the local clock (B). If the ticking frequency of clocks on Earth and of the local clock on Planet X are identically tuned, based on a common reference standard, which in our example is the rotation of the Earth or a distant pulsar, flashing at a frequency of 1 sec., then these clocks will measure time in the same units, i.e. on the same scale. Your answers regarding local clock B are in contradiction to the answers related to clock A, because you show here that the speed of light, measured by the local clock B on the same scale as for clocks on Earth, is twice as high on Planet X than on Earth. The same is for the speed of sound, which is twice as high here as on Earth? Also the cooking time of a pancake is shorter by half than on Earth. All of the above is not true. Taking your answers for both clocks A and B, where do you see here the gravitational time dilation, as GR claims? The “time dilation” cannot be equated with the slowdown of ticking of light clocks, because this slowdown is due to the decrease in the speed of light as the gravity increases. Only your answers for questions 1 and 2 are correct for both clocks A and B. Sorry, but the relationship between the clocks has nothing to do with the passage of time as such. If you have a clock in room A that is fast, and in room B a clock that is late, it does not mean that in room B the passage of time is slower than in room A. If any two clocks measure a divergent values of the passage of time, it only means that the clocks are not synchronized with a common reference standard. After synchronization with the reference standard, both clocks will measure the passage of time in an identical scale, regardless of the value of gravity at the location of each. Material particles are only a condensed form of electromagnetic energy. Life dilation of muons and other elementary particles during movement is just a confirmation of the above fact. So I repeat here again, during movement, only light clocks slowdown, and not all type of clocks as SR claims, and this is clearly presented in the article The interpretation of time dilation is incorrect. The links to this article and to the program VETER for verification of SR theory, has been so far stubbornly removed by the moderator. I am very sorry for the Moderator of this forum for the fact that due to my respect for all who read this thread and want to know the details, I attach here this "prohibited" link once more : THAT'S A BIG NOPE Let's not be afraid of the truth, gentlemen. Thank you very much Markus for your comments.