TheVat

May I suggest you don't require the participant to fill out the apportionment section twice? The first go-through is already annoying enough in requiring one to do the math by keeping up with one's total and then weight each answer in currency amount. I wouldn't have changed my original answers (I am a biologist, and follow endangered species coverage) so it was a nuisance that there was no "same as above" option. Also, too many choices of donation size makes the process really slow. Perhaps better to have the choice be binary - donate or not donate. It would still be clear that, say, most people care more about tigers than snakes. And you wouldn't force people to endlessly scroll back and forth to remember what their amounts were in the first apportionment. JMO.

This topic is a compelling case for just making an omelette.

If you have any other 6" possessions you feel like bragging about, I humbly request that you restrain yourself. Consensus building is what he ran on in 2020, and was his MO in the Senate years. So one can hope.

They don't call them "echo chambers" for nothing. The power they have to gaslight people (especially those who don't stray from one platform, and don't regularly clear cache and cookies) is creepy. The other distortion that bothers me is from platforms that favor brevity, like Twit(ter). Many issues are complex, and reducing one's thoughts to 288 characters may lead to shallowness and sloganeering. (For zen wisdom, it might be okay, and I do sometimes see very pithy stuff that is valuable)

Electrics have disappointed me somewhat, since you have to drive them 15-25,000 miles to break even on carbon. (the car you already have doesn't require any mining, smelting, fabrication, etc) If, like me, you walk and bike a lot and put only a couple thousand miles on a car per year, then it's quite a few years before you net lower carbon footprint. And, to worsen the carbon picture, selling your old IC car means someone on a tight budget can now afford one and starts driving yours and quite possibly putting higher miles on it. The upside of that gloomy picture, however is that electrics look to be fairly long lasting, so when I die someone will be able to buy an affordable used EV.

Class and ethnicity get quite muddled in the USA. Personnel people can form biased opinions of candidates whose speech patterns suggest to them a lower class upbringing. If they reject, it is correlated with ethnic groups that have higher poverty rates. So a Black person may come into an interview knowing they are fighting the "bigotry of lowered expectations." An interview subject who looks like Gwyneth Paltrow could have a verbal stumble and the interviewer may interpret that as nervousness. A Black prospect has the same verbal stumble and the interviewer might see that as poor communication skills. IOW, though the bias here, on the surface, appears to be racial, it is also about class: Gwyneth is presumed to belong to a "higher" class than LaShondra. Racism, in the US, attaches class. IOW bias and bigotry are about perceived clusters of traits (fairly obvious statement). If a Black prospect walks through the door and speaks in a posh British accent (RP, "Received Pronunciation"), that's going to alter the perception of a biased American personnel director who has been using skin color as a marker for a certain class origin. It's not what gets asked in an interview, it's more what colors (NPI) the perceptions at the outset of the interview. Even without ethnic differences, speech patterns are very hard to ignore. Imagine two ethnically European prospects are late and one rushes in, saying "There seemed to be some sort of street festivities and Third Avenue was utterly impassable," and the other says, "Man, they got some big do goin on down there," it's likely the hearer may settle into some class assumptions.

A bunch of names are redacted in that post, which I am guessing is some sort of "meta" joke. I think the prior restraint issue will torpedo this legislation in federal court. What do YOU think , @Orion ? In your own words?

Have to admit, there is something kinda nihilistic about it. Makes me think of that (possibly apocryphal) American major in Vietnam who was quoted as saying "We had to destroy the village to save it." Great teeshirt, btw.

Seems to me a central problem here would be defining poverty and its causal powers. While economic disadvantage can lead to learning disadvantage (home has fewer books and other cultural amenities, parents have less disposable income for music lessons, travel, etc), it is by no means certain. Mom could be a poet who reads to the kids every night and pushes creative writing and books and so on. Dad could be a champion of work ethic and showing kids all sorts of skills around the house. The examples are endless. And a wealthy family could have a child who is lazy, entitled, and opts to goof off. You really need to look at the individual and try to get a sense of how they respond to challenges. Bias arises from the ignorant application of broad categories to individual human beings. So it's never justified.

It gets worse... https://thehill.com/policy/international/597482-ukraine-says-russian-forces-disconnected-chernobyl-plant-from-power-grid I still can't tell if this is all a deliberate attempt to intimidate (as in Herman Kahn's "play crazy" which @iNow mentioned last week) or if it's a lot of raw recruits in the invasion force with poor supervision, firing artillery and rockets wildly. Maybe some of both?

Should we expect a letter mailed to law enforcement, composed of glued-on letters cut out from magazines? Stop me before I post again!

Pretty close tie between Ada Lovelace, Rachel Carson, and Emmy Noether. Carson pretty much rocked my world when I was a child in the sixties and increased my interest in biology and ecology. Her book The Sea Around Us was the first science book I owned. LOL, @CharonY

What a terrible idea. Buy oil from one fascist tyrant to make up the small shortfall of oil (what, three percent of our oil?) from another fascist tyrant? Three percent - we can't sell breaking out the bikes and scooters (it's March, folks) as a patriotic act and expanding the arsenal in the war on obesity? Or bring bigger federal subsidies for purchasing hybrids, electrics, and fuel miser IC cars? If we mean to go Green, and move away from fossil fuels, this seems like the perfect two birds/one stone set-up.

So many possible flashpoints now. Would Russia try to seize the Suwalki corridor if it felt Kaliningrad exclave was threatened? What if NATO were to flip Vlads territorial logic back on him, point out that the exclave is not really historically part of Russia? Or what if Putin saw NATO movements around the exclave and misinterpreted them as directed towards a land grab? Another random thought - how does a NATO ally deliver fighter jets to Ukraine without, erm, you know? Or do Ukraine pilots go to that donor country and pick them up, fly a sortie from there? IIRC, Poland is looking into something like that. Does that send Vlad off the rails and he declares war on the donating nation? Seems likely. All this "we're helping the war but hey we're not really in the war" stuff seems like thin ice to me.

I was. I remember thinking Jaynes was fascinatingly wrong, and thus a good stimulant to the field. Events in the RW conspire atm, but will get back to your question tomorrow I hope.

I see a good case for cultural selection, as societies grow in size. Those which deal with, say, crop failures by tossing virgins down volcanoes tend to collapse more rapidly than those which respond by assigning members tasks like meteorological observation, experimenting with mulching materials, methods of water diversion, trying different seed stocks, etc. IOW, societies where a religious hierarchy and metaphysics dominates life intensively may be less likely to thrive. Societies where both faith and reason are allowed some scope will do better and lead to more divisions of labor that allow innovation. Brain architecture doesn't have to change at some deep anatomical level, culture just needs to allow both hemispheres to actively engage.

I suspect that the empirical evidence for efficacy of torture is roughly on a par with the evidence for the efficacy of virgin sacrifice.

Thanks. Had not thought much about the decay heat, especially in the first hour or two. That's a pretty significant burn with the short lived isotopes. And money does seem like a factor, for sure. Putting that cost into high quality batteries might make more sense.

This from an AP News report prompted me to wonder about the apparent need for an external electricity source in many nuclear plants to run the coolant pumps... So, with these designs, if you lose grid electricity, you go to diesel backup, and if that fails, you better have batteries. What I have never fully understood is why designers, from the start, wouldn't look at this system producing massive steam and think, for safety's sake, we will put in some emergency shunt to a steam turbine that could provide emergency coolant pumping. So the pumps run directly off the plant's heat. As it cools, there is less steam, and there is less need of the steam to run the emergency pumps. I'm not suggesting the plant run off its own power, and understand the problems with that. But the ability to do so temporarily, in an emergency, would seem useful. Diesel generators can get flooded with seawater, broken by crazy or poorly trained armies with artillery, etc.

Last Spring they were detecting a rise in neutron emissions, and there were concerns as to whether or not it would subside on its own... https://www.science.org/content/article/nuclear-reactions-reawaken-chernobyl-reactor We really need to move to the smaller, modular generation of reactors.

Thanks, yes the Russian U (y) is an "oo" sound, not an "uh," and I should know that. @String Junky needs accurate teeshirt info. Now he just needs teeshirt weather. 😀

If my clock is accurate, our UK members include some serious night owls! And the breaking news is not terribly soothing for anyone wanting to sleep. Фук Путин

These are precisely the points I was making to my son, and he was asking, well what if he does this, or what if he does that, and there was a pause where we both had to grapple with what could be so heinous an act, so blatant a war crime, that it would be worth it to cross the line into direct intervention. I really don't want to find out the answer to this, but... crikey! Shooting at nuke reactors is a pretty blatant threat to all of Europe and beyond. And certainly has potential for serious loss of life, as well as ruined food supplies, etc.

Asking members to support assertions with evidence is never tedious. "Volodymyr is a twat" is just venting, but saying stuff like Volodymyr started the war and lied about Russia calls for factual support of some kind.

My son and I were chatting about the pros and cons of a no-fly zone and other more direct challenges yesterday, and the reasons to avoid any on-ramps to WW3. We both wondered how far Putin could get with his "watch out, crazy badass with nukes!" strategy. This kind of attack might be pushing the envelope, as they say. Yep. My wife was in her last trimester with our (aforementioned) son when Chernobyl went boom, so we were pretty aware of the possible global implications of large radioactive plumes. I seem to recall a conversation about some imported cheese from Denmark and its production date.