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TheVat

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Everything posted by TheVat

  1. Time, perhaps, for some candid self-reflection.
  2. It would be 1/c, wouldn't it? Because the field is there, and the switch and light are 1 meter apart? Electrons do not actually flow (just jiggle a tiny bit in an AC circuit), energy is propagated by the EM field around the wire. I think MigL has it correctly. I will watch, and check my work. I don't know if the video will make this point, but there is no hose. I am pretty sure energy from a utility goes through a bunch of step-up and step-down transformers, which means there is no hose continuity. Only field continuity.
  3. What Pete said. Would only add: if you were a defendant, would you want your ordeal to be mass media entertainment? Being a name, and still photo, in the press is one thing. Being an involuntary reality TV star, with a camera trained on you to capture your suffering, is another. Cruel treatment of someone whose guilt has yet to be determined.
  4. TheVat replied to StringJunky's topic in Politics
    I think the duty to retreat, as part of a larger ethos of not provoking violence, can be warped in various ways. An example would be someone carrying an assault style weapon and then taunting people in a crowd. Rittenhouse appeared to be carrying a weapon in part to intimidate, and to provoke, so it is worth asking in what sense his retreats reflected an overall good faith attempt to avoid violence. It seems plausible that had he opted not to bring a gun, and confined himself to verbal acts, there would have been fewer corpses at the end of the day. Wisconsin's law, of course, is an inept one in dealing with the larger picture of what provokes violence. Its purview is too much in the moment.
  5. TheVat replied to StringJunky's topic in Politics
    Given that the Constitution only asserts a right to peaceful assembly for the redress of grievances, it poses no obstacle to banning firearms (or other weapons) at public demonstrations. In fact, six US states already do so. It may be seven now, as IIRC Washington recently passed a new law on this. Several other states allow their cities to ban weapons at demonstrations within their jurisdiction. This should be a trend, given the polling results posted earlier.
  6. Wait, MigL repeats my infrared herring joke (made in the post previous to his) and he gets the plus ones for it?? Do not quite follow the pecking order here, but it's not my cup of tea.
  7. The thread topic is how albedo levels impact warming, and not on the CO2 aspect of it. So it is not about greenhouse gases and infrared re-radiation but rather about visible light being reflected and never heating surface in the first place. I could be wrong but I think the perception was you were bringing in an infrared herring. If not, then sorry to waste time on this.
  8. TheVat replied to StringJunky's topic in Politics
    I suspect MigL was being sarcastic about the standing one's ground. Wisconsin law, among its many flaws, is an "in that moment" interpretation of threat and what created it. Which means that any negligence and provocation leading up to a threat situation is somewhat ignorable. You still get defense points for responding to a credible threat of harm even if you yourself created the threat situation. It is a horrible festering turd of legislation.
  9. TheVat replied to StringJunky's topic in Politics
    He had it coming...
  10. TheVat replied to StringJunky's topic in Politics
    A classic logical phallus-y.
  11. And the phrase "excuse me for injecting some science, " should come from someone well acquainted with three distinct aspects of radiative forcing. Absorption, reflection, and longwave re-radiation. From wiki... Radiative forcing on Earth is meaningfully evaluated at the tropopause and at the top of the stratosphere. It is quantified in units of watts per square meter, and often summarized as an average over the total surface area of the globe. Radiative forcing varies with solar insolation, surface albedo, and the atmospheric concentrations of radiatively active gases - commonly known as greenhouse gases - and aerosols. Almost all of the energy that affects Earth's climate is received as radiant energy from the Sun. The planet and its atmosphere absorb and reflect some of the energy, while long-wave energy is radiated back into space. The balance between absorbed and radiated energy determines the average global temperature. Because the atmosphere absorbs some of the re-radiated long-wave energy, the planet is warmer than it would be in the absence of the atmosphere: see greenhouse effect. The radiation balance is altered by such factors as the intensity of solar energy, reflectivity of clouds or gases, absorption by various greenhouse gases or surfaces and heat emission by various materials. Any such alteration is a radiative forcing, and changes the balance. This happens continuously as sunlight hits the surface, clouds and aerosols form, the concentrations of atmospheric gases vary and seasons alter the groundcover.
  12. An entertaining look at human energy - mood, motivation, mitochondria, and everything else. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/11/08/energy-and-how-to-get-it
  13. TheVat replied to StringJunky's topic in Politics
    Bingo. And this observation was the core of the Huber family's statement on the verdict.
  14. TheVat replied to StringJunky's topic in Politics
    This may be a Canuck v USA slang issue. "Ya think, " in US parlance indicates agreement, with an undertone of "seems pretty obvious!" Which was in response to your saying something like "having ideological people carry open firearms" to such an event was a bad idea.
  15. TheVat replied to StringJunky's topic in Politics
    What is the evidence that Huber was doing anything but trying to disarm an emotionally unstable teenager on a shooting spree? How was that raising hell or breaking the law? Huber responded heroically to a clear-cut public danger and was murdered. Police, who were, contrary to sanity and any valid procedure, herding the crowd towards the vigilantes, did nothing when Rittenhouse gunned down the first victim. And nothing when Huber tried to stop him. And nothing when he maimed the third victim. And then allowed Rittenhouse to walk away. Who are the real lawbreakers here? Ya think??
  16. TheVat replied to StringJunky's topic in Politics
    Especially Wisconsin, which has very permissive laws regarding both carrying a long-barreled rifle and the standards for self defense. Though we can rightly condemn his actions, his provocations, and that an immature teenager was provided a gun, the law of that state provided reasonable doubt on his responsibility for what happened. What needs to change are the laws that smooth the way for RW vigilantism.
  17. TheVat replied to DrmDoc's topic in The Lounge
    I learned today that an American teenager can illegally arm himself with an AR-15, then go out in the streets and act out his cowboy fantasies by taunting, goading, and then killing two people and wounding another, with zero legal consequences.
  18. The maxim correlation is not causation seems pertinent here.
  19. The sister website to this one (same URL except it's dot com) has several new JP threads started. Mostly some guy named Victor who posts a video and says look at this great video! Really sad that people waste their time on this dude's verbal flatulence. The main virtue of this thread is that it spins off other discussions that are not about JP and his misinformation factory.
  20. Synopsis: the earth seems flat to a person because it is very large and you don't notice the curvature. How do you like my thinly coated spam?
  21. LoL the revised Maslow hierarchy.
  22. This is a case where US justice is more performative than anything else. There is abundant evidence that he is mentally ill and his condition allowed others to use him as a tool for their ends. Interesting that the Far Right plotters would make a mentally ill man their standard bearer. He would be better off in treatment rather than a cage, but that doesn't satisfy the felt need to make prominent examples.
  23. Haha! And when all else fails, reference MS-13. Whatever your critic stands for, make sure it includes rolling out the red carpet for Salvadoran murder gangs. And make sure your nearest Murdoch owned media outlet runs a continuous feed of MS-13 horror stories.
  24. https://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-American-Model-United-States/dp/0691172420/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?ots=1&tag=thneyo0f-20&linkCode=w50&_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= Nazism triumphed in Germany during the high era of Jim Crow laws in the United States. Did the American regime of racial oppression in any way inspire the Nazis? The unsettling answer is yes. In Hitler's American Model, James Whitman presents a detailed investigation of the American impact on the notorious Nuremberg Laws, the centerpiece anti-Jewish legislation of the Nazi regime. Contrary to those who have insisted that there was no meaningful connection between American and German racial repression, Whitman demonstrates that the Nazis took a real, sustained, significant, and revealing interest in American race policies. As Whitman shows, the Nuremberg Laws were crafted in an atmosphere of considerable attention to the precedents American race laws had to offer. German praise for American practices, already found in Hitler's Mein Kampf, was continuous throughout the early 1930s, and the most radical Nazi lawyers were eager advocates of the use of American models. But while Jim Crow segregation was one aspect of American law that appealed to Nazi radicals, it was not the most consequential one. Rather, both American citizenship and antimiscegenation laws proved directly relevant to the two principal Nuremberg Laws―the Citizenship Law and the Blood Law. Whitman looks at the ultimate, ugly irony that when Nazis rejected American practices, it was sometimes not because they found them too enlightened, but too harsh....

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