TheVat

What is a "conceptual concept" and how does it differ from a concept? The one thing we do not do when thinking of "circle" as a geometric concept is to think of a specific size. That's the point of abstract thinking about objects: it strips away concrete qualities, leaving the core meaning, i.e. that which is common to all such objects. Common to all circles is a continuous line at a constant distance from a center point.

Would be interesting to take a more random sample, see how many proved true. I hypothesize it would be a small percent. Some of the ones on that Readers Digest list aren't really conspiracies. The FBI surveillance of Lennon was agents following a well-established routine, SOP with those profiled as left-wing influencers and activists. We can deplore it as a bad agency policy, but it doesn't really fit the definition of conspiracy. Same with the Dalai Lama - the CIA regularly compensates foreign "assets" for working with them, and I think that's been widely understood to be part of their SOP for decades. The Big Tobacco suppression, however, would qualify as a conspiracy - a covert and organized effort to silence people and destroy evidence.

AFAIK, RICO cases often extend beyond the investigating state, and involve multiple parties - I'm not sure who all would be charged (Rudy G?) or if Willis would handshake with the feds on this. IIRC, the federal RICO statute lists both offenses that are federally prosecutable and also ones that can be at the state level. Some states go on to clarify further or expand on the state offenses by passing their own RICO statutes.

Just saw this. Sorry to start a separate thread - for some reason, I didn't see this one. I also wonder if more challenging security questions would help in the new user registration form....maybe just make registration a bit more work, not so much as to drive away real members but enough to make spammers not want to bother.

Just wondering if there's a way to, without revealing too much to a spammer who might read the thread, to maybe come up with innovative procedures to deflect spammers when their activity level (like the last half hour or so) verges on a DDOS attack. They (the discount airfare kamikazes) must have filled all the logon ports - I couldn't logon for about 20 minutes. Could IT-savvy members PM an admin, if they know any handy tricks? Or is it already sorted?

You see what happens when I strip away the veil of lies? Immediately the forces of anthropophagy and pod living rush to dismiss it. Do you think it's just a coincidence he shares a name with the leftist Mexican revolutionary who wanted to redistribute land to peasants? 😀

I've seen quite a few studies finding negative health and cognitive effects from working night shifts. Good luck with the search engine.

I have heard that University College-Cork is part of an international cabal that is trying to bring a world government based on socialism and population reduction through legal cannibalism. "Critical thinking strategy" is just a guise for indoctrinating children into pod living, eating their parents and siblings and surrendering all property to George Soros.

Why would that be easier? How much trouble is it to type a logon name, especially when any web browser will store a logon name for you and input it automatically?

How does something a few meters across form a mirror image of Earth's magnetic field?

"We Also Walk Dogs" - by RAH, yes.

The potential RICO charge in Georgia seems like potentially the biggest one, in terms of raw criminality and of having incriminating evidence. Or perhaps tied with the potential treason charge at Mar-a-Lago where he allegedly showed top secret documents to foreign visitors. Those could bring some serious jail time. (btw, anyone else have this weird urge to buy discount airline tickets?)

Odd to list Whitehead but not Russell. And if you are into science, you need McTaggart, Feyerabend, Kuhn, Duhem, Popper, Searle, and Carnap, as well as WVO Quine. Quine cannot be read in a vacuum. Your post is hard to interpret, since you offer no overarching scheme or focus for your choices, while offering a lot of humble reminders that you are being subjective and shallow. I would also warn you that philosophy cannot be.... Almost everyone on your list devoted their life to seeing beyond aesthetics and subjectivity. A good starter list, for the historical arc of the major currents of thought up to the 20th century might be Plato, Aquinas, Hobbes, Spinoza, Descartes, Kant, Hume, Berkeley, Hegel, Locke, Mill, Bentham, Wittgenstein, Russell, Heidegger, Husserl, Sartre, Camus. (these were the major figures covered for me in getting a philosophy minor at undergraduate level)

What chord sounded when they dropped the piano with picric acid covered hammers down a mineshaft? . . . . A flat minor.

Defining what an EoR co. is would be helpful. They handle all the local legal issues, employing people for your company when they are located in another country, right? Probably depends on how many people you want to hire this way, what you can afford, etc.

Isn't the gauss for lifting any significant mass up in the thousands? Earth is 0.25 to 0.65 gauss.

Interview with director of the AI Now Institute - a helpful background read. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/04/artificial-intelligence-government-amba-kak/673586/ Paywall-free version: https://archive.is/6ibxW

And giant feedstock boats that suck up floating plastic in the oceanic gyres, like the North Pacific Garbage Patch, would also be a welcome innovation. Or just ban all the plastic crap. Which would mean the petrochemical industry unleashing the Hounds of Hell upon all who dared challenge them, so....never mind.

FIFY

Clicked on the Open AI link, but it demanded my phone number which is a deal killer for me on sites that require login. (bank and SSA excepted) At very least, they need to offer a guest mode that let's you try it a couple times before they go asking for personal information. As for age-blocking, that's not going to be possible. If parents have concerns, they need to work out how to put filters on at their end. Haha! Or V I Lenin and J Lennon?

I saw that research about ten years ago. One of the papers: https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/soap-operas-and-fertility-evidence-brazil Everything I've seen that relates to human population biology points towards culture (and women moving into the workforce* and gaining social equality, as part of cultural change) as a huge force in determining family size. I had friends who lived in a very Mormon community in Utah, and one reason they left was the unrelenting social pressure to have big families (they were a professional couple, who had decided not to have children and focus on their respective careers). The woman was constantly hounded about when she was going to start cranking out babies. Utterly nuts. *non-domestic labor

Haven't read replies below your post yet, but want to quickly toss in a vote that whenever someone makes an honest and serious attempt to consider overpopulation and how population could be reduced, that we allow reasonable discussion of sane and humane scenarios before using the Nazi bogeyman as a rhetorical device.

Seems like space habitats follow the rule of all real estate: location, location, and location. Particle radiation (which is the major form of ionizing radiation that space habitats must fend off somehow) will be varying considerably between an EO colony, a Lagrange point like L4 and somewhere in the Kuiper belt. It's my understanding that GCR (galactic cosmic rays) is the dominant source for daily exposure, while SEP (solar energetic particles) are episodic, like bad weather, coming from CMEs that would happen to come the colony's way. And their threat would be far less in the Kuiper Belt. Ergo, an EO colony would have magnetosphere protection (a MEO, Medium Earth Orbit, e.g. would lie in a safe zone between the inner and outer Van Allen belts), a Lagrange colony (beyond the magnetosphere) would need SEP storm shelters, and also general GCR shielding, and a Kuiper condo would need just the GCR shielding. A plus for the Kuiper colony, is that they have an easier waste heat dump, which I'd think make shielding problems easier. But really it seems like the orbital colony, inside a magnetosphere, has the simplest situation, although other complexities arise I'm sure.

I'm also a little concerned that this case will steal some thunder and spotlight from the two far more significant cases upcoming, where Trump actually tried to subvert democracy and institute fascism. The current indictment is a bit of petty sleaze, pretty low on the Trumpian Peccadillo scale, when you look at some of his other crimes. OTOH, if as @Janus mentioned, unsealing the charging document reveals larger felonious acrivity, then let's make some popcorn...

And this doesn't help: https://apnews.com/article/tornadoes-disasters-extreme-weather-why-af8acdcb330cff39d689efc187cd17b7