Leaderboard

We could find out as early as today what exactly was in the warrant. That is, unless Trump objects to it being unsealed. And even that may only delay things. He could object, the Judge issues a stay to give his attorneys time to present their arguments, and then he'd rule on that objection. He could very well overrule Trump's objections. (For example, if Trump tried to argue privacy issues, the judge could rule that it's too late for that since he is the one that made the warrant public knowledge in the first place.) All these Republicans were howling about "Show us what was in the warrant!", And Garland's response was, "Well Trump has copies, and he is free to make them public if he wishes. We were just trying to respect his rights. But, if that's what you really want, okay." But that's not what they really wanted. They just wanted to howl about the warrant not being unsealed. In addition, If Trump objects, and his objection is upheld, then it will be Trump keeping it secret, not the DOJ. (Garland did the legal equivalent of "I am rubber, and you are glue...")

Not to worry - none of the classified information had pictures so Trump wasn't interested.

That would be Ivana, who is dead and buried. And also in poor tate; my apologies.

More likely to me is it was another grift to secure LARGE sums of money in exchange for info, most likely from the Saudis (who have also already given more than $2 Billion to Jared Kushner for extremely questionable reasons) and potentially even Russia. The DoJ tried less severe means first, including a subpoena this spring that Trump and team ignored. Their lack of compliance is a direct reason for the escalation.

! Moderator Note It was worth a try, thanks for the attempts at reason by the reasonable. Thread closed.

Because he intended to remain president or be president again, and either use them to control/threaten/ruin other people, or retain control (however illusory) over some aspect of governance, or conceal transactions/exchanges of a criminal/treasonous nature by himself and various minions. It's quite possible he intended to, and thought he could sort out those documents and choose the ones he actually needed, then perhaps return the rest, or arrogate them to his own "library" for that long, rambling, utterly unreadable ghost-written Trump's Compf - but lacked the requisite level of literacy to complete the task. Just speculating! He has lots of toilets in that big, pretentious house, right? Good thing they contained it! Otherwise, we might be still be hearing the W word.

Yes, Minister! Despise the civil service as we may, that's who runs the government. Break up the government agencies, as the constitution-changing red states https://www.npr.org/2016/02/04/465593798/rewrite-the-constitution-several-states-are-trying-to intend to do; decapitate them and put incompetent cronies in charge, as some presidents do; defund and defang them as some administrations do - and the country simply stops working. There are two further complications: the layers and separate powers of governments - municipal, regional and national jurisdictions - alongside the public-private divide of responsibility means that many issues fall through the gaps between them. An even bigger one: Co-ordination and prioritization of policing efforts. That is a huge problem in all government business everywhere. Downloading their responsibility on a for-profit (for sale!) agent. Whereupon, everything from health-care to road construction to dam maintenance and garbage collection declines in quality as it increases in cost.

On first reading I thought only mass was involved, but on more carefull reading I see that you have incorporated density difference. I have now had the time to sketch out some maths.

These things can be estimated. I once calculated that a large number of people (a million?) driving in the same direction would change the rotation rate by a tiny amount. Leaf growth would slow the rotation down in the spring and speed it up in the fall, with a larger effect in the northern hemisphere owing to the larger land area. The mountain growth has to come from mass moving from some other area; as the tectonic plates push up on the mountains, there is subduction somewhere else. I = 2/5 MR^2 for a sphere of uniform density, and since we're going for an order-of-magnitude estimate, we can use this. 2/5 * 6e24*6.4e6^2 = 10^38 kgm^2 and we know that Iw is going to be constant; the angular speed compensate for changes in the moment of inertia (I'm doing this without the morning caffeine having taken effect, so check my math) There are ~3 trillion trees in the world, and some don't shed leaves. Let's say 10^12 participate (north vs southern hemisphere) and they drop 10 kg of leaves 10m, on average. dI/dr is 2 * r dr, or ~10^8, and we have 10 kg, so our moment changes by ~10^9, meaning a part in 10^29 reduction in the rotation rate. Not measurable. The mass of mountains is much higher, but the change in elevation is smaller. Not sure what the area in question is, but keep in mind that people estimate the change in rotation rates after earthquakes, which move a lot of mass around, and these estimates are of order a few microseconds per day. https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-details-earthquake-effects-on-the-earth They also found the earthquake decreased the length of day by 2.68 microseconds. ... To make a comparison about the mass that was shifted as a result of the earthquake, and how it affected the Earth, Chao compares it to the great Three-Gorge reservoir of China. If filled, the gorge would hold 40 cubic kilometers (10 trillion gallons) of water. That shift of mass would increase the length of day by only 0.06 microseconds and make the Earth only very slightly more round in the middle and flat on the top. It would shift the pole position by about two centimeters (0.8 inch). Consider snowfall storing mass in higher latitudes for a few months and then melting. Droughts and floods likely have a bigger effect than the Three Gorges dam mentioned here. A bigger effect is possible if a mass is rotating, since that mass will have angular momentum. A hurricane/typhoon for example. ~200 million tons of water but rotating, some parts much faster than the earth. Any angular momentum it has has been traded with the earth's rotation.

I'm speculating here, but I would imagine that that's because on a small dense object, if you raise up by one metre, that's a greater percentage of the distance from the centre of gravity than a metre on a large less dense object. Because on the less dense object, you are starting from a 'higher' surface.

The argument still stands. Orthonormal is a particular case of orthogonal. Orthonormal=orthogonal and normalised. More specifically, a gravitational singularity is a region of spacetime in which any components of the Riemann curvature tensor become infinite. Read carefully @Markus Hanke's previous post. You do not invent the properties of the metric. You postulate the other (non-gravitational) fields. Then you obtain the energy-momentum tensor. Then you symmetrise it (with techniques like, eg, Belinfante's symmetrisation technique), because the canonical energy-momentum tensor is generally non-symmetric, and the source of the gravitational field must be symmetric in the space-time indices. Then you postulate boundary conditions, as Markus told you. Then you solve for your metric. Having done all that, you're still not home-free, because the particular coordinates that you use to solve for the metric can have false singularities, ie, singularities of your coordinate map that are not physical. So you must obtain the Riemann tensor and try to identify the singularities there. You have a lot of ground to cover still before you can meaningfully talk about your singularity. I hope the comments here you find helpful. The metric is not gauge-invariant. It's the Riemann tensor that's gauge invariant. This is in close analogy to electromagnetism. The vector potential in EM doesn't really give you the physics (except for the Aharonov-Bohm effect or the "holonomy" of the field). Infinitely many vector potentials give you the same physics. It's Faraday's tensor plus the holonomy which gives you the complete physics of electrodynamics. There is only one Faraday tensor (the E's and the B's) that define the physics. Gravity displays remarkable mathematical similarities to EM. It has a huge gauge arbitrariness. In modern GR we say space-time is not defined by a metric, but by an equivalence class of infinitely many metrics, all gauge-equivalent to each other. The matter is even more subtle. Sometimes you find a coordinate map that solves the equations. But the map has singularities of itself --fictitious. Then you introduce a change of coordinate maps that fixes the coordinate singularities. Example: Kruskal-Skezeres coordinates being a well-known example.