TheVat

Ethical questions raised by this thread may also pertain to how we respond to domestic surveillance. Reading in Politico this a.m. about how ICE plans to expand their surveillance was sobering. At what point would wire cutters and opaque spray paint (or hacker attacks on SM monitoring) be contemplated as ethical violence against fascism? https://www.politico.com/news/2025/12/26/ice-high-tech-surveillance-lower-privacy-guardrails-00705401 ICE also plans to expand its use of social media surveillance, WIRED reported in October, scouring billions of online posts to find leads for immigration enforcement operations. As the agency upgrades its tools, it has also sent signals it wants to expand its mission from finding immigrants to tracing critics and stopping threats to its agents... ...Privacy advocates argue that this new technological capability — and the mission of tracking threats against agents — widens ICE’s surveillance scope beyond immigration enforcement in dangerous ways.... ...“ICE is already well beyond their initial responsibility and is fully into the realm of political policing of protesters and dissidents,” Matthew Guariglia, a senior policy analyst on surveillance and technology at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has been tracking the growth of government surveillance capabilities. “They’re building up this mass automated surveillance infrastructure,” he added, “and the question we have to be asking is: What is it for?”

And a jolly stateless Bakuninmas to you. 🧔🥳😵‍💫

Here you go. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uninhabited_island Note that some have no fresh water, or forbidding climates. Pack extra socks.

I see others have suggested either kakistocracy or subordinate refusal to do a proper cover-up. Grand Cheetoh can't replace everyone on the lower rungs of agencies. Virgin Islands? Not anymore. (sorry)

Thanks, Genady. Good to hear from you. The way the US fed government is going, we're all going to be on "Island Time" pretty soon. I hope that, if you visit the US, they don't require you to show five years of your social media activity, which new rules are asking for some visitors. I'm sorry, I don't recall your citizenship status - maybe it's not a problem.

Haha. I stand by what you said, too. And no worries, making Canada a US state would require a degree of competence that I'm not seeing in Metamucilini and his lackey cesspool. Me, too, and you would think (as Ghideon noted) it's a poor business model. Really shabby way to treat a customer. Imagine that approach IRL. You go into a store and another customer starts punching you; clerk runs up and throws YOU out.

Also humorous is the notion that Scotch whiskey would be transported in a tanker ship. That'd be quite the party, somewhere. A couple shots of tanker Scotch and you won't even notice that metallic tank aftertaste anymore. 🤪

Search engine: how the retina changes with aging in mammals The results of this or a similar search will refer you to scientific studies published in journals, information pages at eye clinic websites, popular magazine articles, etc.

Still, this sounds like a DDOS attack, which is directed and not just background radiation from Santa's robotic elves eager to sell us Laplander porn or freeze dried reindeer steaks or whatever. It didn't take out other sites at random, did it? And it came a day or so after several of us had posted some highly critical comments on the Letters to the President (US) thread. (Nothing quite as effective as shitty government to ratchet up Kafkaesque levels of paranoia) This is my post (uh oh), and note the three following it, especially MigL's last line. https://www.scienceforums.net/topic/135496-messages-to-the-president/page/4/#findComment-1305023 You see why I'm wondering about what @exchemist referred to as "some shadowy organisation." I agree with him, it seems unlikely, but still...

And yet you keep coming to this website and engaging in extended conversations with us on a vast range of issues and interests. Odd.

Worthless? Now, now, perhaps it runs on zero point energy. Why let a basic QM violation stop us from releasing some ZPE? 😜

Dear malignant manchild of the United States, Thanks for your gross violation of the memory and legacy of John F. Kennedy, by putting your name above his on the Kennedy Center. Though you are an inflamed ass pimple on the Presidency, you have shown your superiority to JFK at petty and puerile political games and narcissistic posturing. In this very narrow category of achievement you are a BIG WINNER!! However, I would ask you to honor the basic concept of a memorial dedication of a building by kindly dropping dead. Thanks!

Which is the problem I referred to with Russell. Physical spacetime is expected to be quantized because physical coordinates are slightly noncommutative, right?

OP seems like something related to Zeno paradoxes. Bertie Russell, based on Cantor, offered a solution known as the "at-at theory of motion". It has problems too.

ESP all, o clod in a spot - sue firey Walmart, ram lawyer, if EU stops an idol collapse.

"Weight down upon the Swami raver...."

Seems like an imaginative sci-fi pastiche of Robert Sawyer (see his "Wake" trilogy) and JL Borges. Some day maybe.

One could distinguish between knowledge and information, however. Infinite universes would require infinite information to describe every particle, field, and state, yet that could be reducible to a finite algorithm. This gets into Shannon's information theory and probably for another thread. With recursion and looping, it could be in principle a possibility that all those universes of knowledge could be compressed to some lines on a single sheet of paper. Whenever you wanted to turn your attention on, say, Percival Shmeebly in Universe #3456790, you would just run the algorithm and then decompress the resulting Shmeebly History string. So there could (again, in principle, not necessarily in reality) be vast inhuman minds somewhere which can in principle become Percival Shmeebly whenever they cast their attention that way and want the full realistic Shmeebly experience. Basically you don't have to know everything all at once in order to attain infinite knowledge. Sincerely yours, Percival J. Shmeebly

You're still stuffing photons from everywhere (including a hot radio telescope) back into the star and splitting helium. Metaphorically speaking. As KJW and Swanson keep pointing out, our causality is asymmetric. My problem with trying to imagine some reverse causality with gravity is that it's like trying to have Ricci curvature "the other way." Scorched shuttle parts rising up out of the Australian Outback and going up into space. With something like beta decay it's much easier, with a distant neutrino and an electron from my Geiger counter converging on a more stable nucleus in some radioisotope lump. Still makes no sense thermodynamically.

As with other waves, so take the analogy of EM for example: observation is of light moving away from a star, but not photons out of nowhere converging onto a star, splitting helium into hydrogen in the core. Both are valid solutions but....well, thermodynamics. Entropic arrow.

Brilliant. But wonder what chilling Rhine water will do to riparian and deep water ecosystems. Many flora/fauna are temperature sensitive. They being Germans, I have some hope they worked this out, maybe the volume of water used and chilled isn't enough to make a significant difference. ETA: it looks like the fraction is tiny. Rhine flow rate gets up to over a million liters/sec along the Upper Rhine where Mannheim sits. And near three million at the Nordsee. (BTW, do not trust Google AI on river flow rates - go directly to technical sources)

If you're planning to be naked, probably best to choose the Amazon rather than Alaska. Heh.

Also prepared for conspiracy theories to blow up all over, so long as we have no information on who murdered Rob Reiner yesterday, a prominent Trump critic. ETA: As I typed this, I checked the newsfeed and now see they're arresting Nick, their son, as a suspect, so maybe this won't get spun out so much. Still a horrible thing. I so admired his movies and his political activism and just him as a really great guy. ETA: If you are a decent human being, and have any hypertension tendencies, do not read the utterly vile and sickening SM post from Trump today on Reiner's murder. I couldn't finish reading it. And the White House official website REPOSTED it.

I should remember to tell our damp mop and brooms how much we love them. Don't want them rising up like in that Fantasia scene.

By all reports Nye still sports bow ties, Even during a marriage not wise Like a raging Godzilla Blair dowsed his garden with weed killah And hacked his emails with unflattering lies. https://www.bostonherald.com/2007/11/21/bad-chemistry-for-ex-lockhart-lover/