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“For the first time since the mid-20th century, over 95 percent of this year’s planned new electric-generating capacity in the United States is zero-carbon.” https://www.whitehouse.gov/cea/written-materials/2024/04/11/the-next-phase-of-electricity-decarbonization-planned-power-capacity-is-nearly-all-zero-carbon/

Magnetic attraction. If you have a bolt screwed into the beam, all that holds it in place is actually electrostatic attraction, because that is what is responsible for the chemical bonding in the metal that enables it to keep its shape and resist deformation under stress. There is no difference in principle. Don't be fooled by how biological muscles work. Those do expend energy to hold a weight in a static position, but that's to do with the biochemistry of muscle fibres. My example of the bolt screwed into the beam is what you need to consider. That does not expend any energy, not even if the bolt supports a 1 tonne weight suspended from it! Or think of a concrete support holding up a weight. If you did that by your muscles, you would get tired, but the concrete is not doing any work to hold the weight up. Work is only done if something moves under the action of a force. So a crane lifting a weight does work against the force of gravity. But if the operator stops work for lunch and leaves the weight hanging there from the cable, no work is being done. So there's no energy accounting to do in the case of the magnet. A magnetic force or an electrostatic force can both equally hold something in position against the force of gravity, in the right circumstances. There have been a few on this forum. My favourite was Tom Booth's "ice engine". He got banned in the end but that was for failing to take in anything anybody said, not because he was proposing a perpetual motion machine. Unusually, that was a perpetual motion machine of the 2nd kind. But it was a crank classic in that it was all based on Tesla [groan]. I had not realised that among his many eccentricities, Tesla thought you could run a heat engine using ambient heat. There was also, on another forum, aJapanese who thought an IR photovoltaic cell could be put in a fridge, light a bulb and cool the fridge. So that was another 2nd kind example. Tom Booth was interesting in that he had researched the history of thermodynamics and put me onto a paper by Sadi Carnot (in translation) in which he, Carnot, was applying the idea of caloric, i.e. before the modern concept of heat even existed, and nevertheless was able to get the right answers!

The advantage of considering the energy changes in a physical system is that it is often the simplest and most powerful way to analyse it, without the need to get bogged down a mass of in tricky mechanical calculations of forces etc. I learned this in the 6th form at school. The "reflexive insistence" you refer to is simply people applying this principle, to save getting into the weeds of mechanical calculations. Such calculations, though far more complicated, would in any case rely on other laws of physics (laws of mechanics and electromagnetism), which are on an equal footing with the laws of thermodynamics. All are equally as reliable as each other, so it really doesn't matter whether you choose the mechanical route or the energy route, from that point of view. But free energy cranks are all the same, really. They come up with a contraption that is just complicated enough to exceed their powers of analysis - and then claim they have broken the laws of thermodynamics. Magnets are often involved, as magnetism is particularly poorly understood by such people. (Tesla often comes into the picture too, though thankfully not in this instance.) By all means build your machine. It won't output more work than the work input. That is guaranteed.

Simple application of the laws of thermodynamics will tell you that the energy input cannot be less than the energy output. If this device is an attempt to get more out than you put in, it won't work.

As others have pointed out it's a terrible video. Pointing a camera straight at the sun with no filter is a lousy way to see an eclipse - all you get a bright splodge. As to your (strangely naïve) question, you can measure the speed of motion of the clouds, relative to the zone of maximum brightness, by comparing its position with 2 clear areas in the cloud. At 0:05 there is a clear area above the zone of max brightness and one below and a bit left of it. On my screen, these areas have moved ~5cm relative to the zone of max brightness by the 1:05 mark, i.e the clouds are moving at 5cm/min relative to the sun, on my screen. The magnification (zoom) of the camera also changes. On my screen these two clear areas are 2cm apart at the start of the video, 4cm apart at 0:13, 6cm apart at 0:15 and 10cm apart at 0:44, indicating an increase in magnification from 1 to 2 to 3 and finally to 5x. So at 5x, the rate of apparent motion of the clouds will be 25cm/min, i.e. ~4mm/sec. Later he zooms in even more, leading to an even faster rate. But he's holding the camera unsteadily and tends to keep it trained on the clouds, rather than fixing it on a stand so that it points steadily at one point in the sky, where the sun is. So that makes it look as if it is the sun that is "moving" diagonally down and right, whereas in reality it is the clouds that are moving up and left. And obviously, if you magnify the image by 5X or more, the rate of relative motion, of clouds w.r.t sun, will increase 5x or more too. So there is nothing strange going on here. As with the credulous stories some of us have seen previously of spontaneous combustion, or people being strangled by their own thymus glands, a bit of analysis is all one needs to make sense of it.

It was a common internet thingy. On IRC you would need to provide a unique nickname and the command for it is nick. Might have other origins, too.

Sometimes slick jokes are a way to drum up support.

A few things should be added to lay the foundation for further discussions. First gonochorism (the term to describe a sexual system where there are male and female members) does not always have to be linked to sexual dimorphism (the term to describe differences in appearance between male and females of a species). Sexual dimorphism is often a consequence of the respective reproductive strategies. Among hermaphroditic species, one can actually also distinguish between various forms. The one OP is thinking about is considered simultaneous hermaphroditism, i.e. all individuals producing sperm and eggs, but there are also species who are sequential hermaphrodites. I.e. producing egg or sperm at different points in their life. Studies trying to figure out fitness benefits have been investigating closely related species in which all three strategies are found, e.g. in certain worms. Here, it was found that the different species had different reproductive characteristics, that likely have benefits under different conditions. Generally, they found a trade-off between fecundity (how much they reproduce) and survival. Simultaneous hermaphrodites had the highest survival rate, but least fecundity (and smallest eggs, indicative of lower maternal investment), whereas the opposite was found for sequential hermaphrodites. The gonochoristic species was somewhere in-between. Taking that all together (survival rate, reproduction over total life cycle etc.) it seemed that the dichoristic species had overall the highest fitness. They had higher fecundity in the early stages of life cycle. They outperform simultaneous hermaphrodites, which have lower fecundity. While sequential hermaphrodites are more fecund, they are delayed until their female phase, and during the whole life cycle they are not able to compensate the early advantage. Essentially they are able to reach sexual maturity faster, likely as they only need to produce one form of gametes. The disadvantage of that gonochoristic species pay is that they produce males, that cost the same as females (as eggs) but do not directly contribute to future generations (the limiting factors are the eggs). Hermaphroditism is speculated to be a primary advantage when population densities are low and it is difficult to find a mate. There are also evolutionary developmental consideration. Transition from hermaphrodite to gonochoristic species is comparatively easy, as it could be reasonably executed by suppressing the development of one sexual function. Conversely, there are more steps involved in transition from gonochorism to hermaphroditism. I.e. once gonochorism outcompetes hermaphroditism in the evolutionary history of species, it is very unlikely that they hermaphroditism will develop, even if it became more advantageous.

I think the answer is a resounding yes. Mammals have been around for 200 million years and birds have been around for 150 million years. Sounds like it's working out just fine.

Poland may offer a lesson to would-be Far Right autocrats. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/04/14/abortion-poland-maga/ The United States is not alone in confronting a right-wing authoritarian movement that, in addition to undermining democratic institutions and lashing out at the news media (“enemy of the people”), makes curtailing women’s reproductive freedom central to its agenda. The experience of Poland, in which a right-wing government virtually eliminated access to abortion and later paid for it at the ballot box, is instructive as Republicans try to flee from the harsh implications of their antiabortion ideology.... ...Polish voters last year threw out the right-wing government after eight years of authoritarian rule. Women disproportionately carried pro-democracy forces to victory. “Almost 75% of eligible women voted — a 12% increase over 2019,” wrote political scientist Patrice McMahon for the Conversation. “The election also saw a record number of female candidates (44%) and the largest percentage of women (30%) voted into Poland’s Sejm.” Their activism largely centered on abortion. When the right-wing Law and Justice party (PiS) took office in 2015, McMahon wrote, “Poland had one of the strictest abortion laws in Europe. After the ruling government tightened abortion restrictions further, Polish women took to the streets.” Lo and behold, “A breakdown of the women’s vote finds that many women voted for leftist and centrist parties that made women’s rights and liberalized abortion laws a priority.” The democratic coalition leader Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s party is now proposing loosening (albeit not eliminating) abortion restrictions.