exchemist

What has your question, about the choices made in a single US presidential election, got to do with your general assertion about "hidden authoritarianism" in Western democracies?

Lotti Messa del Primo Tuono, which I will be singing a month from now and an excerpt from "Who Do You Think You Are" about the actress Minnie Driver's parents and grandparents. She was illegitimate, her father being having had a family with someone else. He was an RAF gunner in WW2, aboard a bomber in the failed Battle of Heligoland Bight. Seems the plane was damaged and only just made it back he rescued the pilot from the wreckage after crash landing - and ended up being invalided out of the RAF into a psychiatric hospital, after being proclaimed a hero of the action. He must have recovered as he ended up director of a city financial company later on. Quite an interesting story, which Minnie didn't know at all until she researched it. She seems a nice woman, actually.

Not a chance, mate. This is the same idiotic"pothu" rubbish you've been hawking round the internet for the last 6 months. Forget it.

In that case your definition of "elite" has to encompass the political parties themselves, as it is they - usually at local level - who decide who the candidate for their party should be in their constituency. This is not - at all - the same "elite" as the financial "elite" you were talking about earlier. I think you need to clarify who is in your "elite" and who is not, because at the moment it looks like a woolly concept you can use flexibly to object to any system for selecting representatives.

Those examples, if true, do not indicate democracy is an illusion. Government is always imperfect, like anything else. But in a democracy the people can throw out and replace those that make decisions that are sufficiently bad for a sufficiently large portion of society. Most government policies will make at least some people unhappy, but that's just the reality of life. Under any system of government. If you claim Western government are ruled by a financial aristocracy you need to say what you mean by that. After all, government finances have to managed if the country is not to go bankrupt. So yeah, governments have pay attention to central bankers, the bond markets and so on. That, again, is just reality in the adult world.

I’m not sure the law is quite dead yet. There have been plenty of judgements against Trump’s administration, e.g. most recently the termination of that absurd plastic bimbo Lindsay Halligan. A lot will hang on this forthcoming Supreme Chicken judgement on tariffs. If they do not uphold the constitutional rights of Congress on that, then the US will be well on the way to despotism.

Brilliant. 😆

Hmm, Project Anchor. Missing W perhaps?😁

Lack of any evidence for its physical existence, I suppose. Pauli described the pilot wave concept as an "uncashable cheque", as it makes no observable predictions that distinguish it from regular QM. As it has no predictive value it seems to add nothing as a scientific model and can thus be dispensed with on the basis of Ockham's Razor.

Senile. 25th amendment?

This isn't science news.

Ah yes, the natural F trumpet, a bastard to play I imagine, but can make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck. But I love the duet between the violas in the 6th. As with the alto voice there is something earthily sexy about it, compared to the violin. And that off the beat 3rd movement is almost impossible not to dance to.

According to Wiki these worms concentrate Cu in their bodies to a surprising degree, as it would normally be toxic. I wonder if this adaptation may be related to them living in mud and thereby being exposed to a lot of minerals from finely divided sediments.

How about Brandenburg 6? My favourite of the set, I think, though 3 runs it close.

Dead right. The actual paper is here: https://www.cell.com/matter/fulltext/S2590-2385(22)00153-9?utm_source=EA from which it can be see that this is Cu²⁺, acting as a binding agent by complexing with 4 imidazole units. The key structure appears to be shown here: Looks like another case of lazy journalism, leading to a misleading impression that these things have Jaws-like metal teeth when they don't. I'm not sure what "totally metal" is supposed to mean, but "containing 10% copper ions" wouldn't be as clickbaity.

Hoho, he'll be getting a few unsolicited pizza deliveries at home.

People in general no longer necessarily live in the same town as their parents. The children look for the best work opportunity and establish their families where they find it, while the parents often move when they retire, somewhere more rural, somewhere with good climate or whatever. It's not realistic to expect parents and adult children to live in the same household or only a few streets away.

What hasn't been eaten by the worm, you mean?

My father at the end of his life used to pee in a bottle, which was sometimes emptied in a sink rather than down the toilet. I still think a fridge is a more reliable test than a toilet.

Good point. The app can't react if the battery is flat. I like the fridge door idea because just about everyone living anywhere will open a fridge at least once in a 24hr period, even if they are ill and confined largely to bed. Seems there are such things on the market: https://www.agespace.org/tech/elderly-monitoring-services

Well, stuff does have to be paid for, you know. 😉

Oh that's interesting. So the phone app reacts if it is not moved for 12 hrs. That's very good - seems to do the job nicely. I might keep that in mind for a few years from now, to alert my son. But that immediately raises the question of what the extra benefit is of this Chinese app.

What's the point of alerting emergency services to someone who has been dead for 48hrs? Much more useful, surely, would be an app that notifies a keyholder if the fridge door has not been opened for, say, 12hrs.

Hmm, not sure what FAG ductwork means in a US context😳. Does this mean a ducted warm air system is common in the US, rather than hot water radiators? I think @studiot is the person with experience of transitioning to a heat pump system. I explored it a bit but was told there wasn't a big enough heat pump for a house like mine so I'd need a supplemental boiler on top, at which point I gave it up. I was also given conflicting advice about whether a heat pump could work with the existing radiators, which are designed for a gas-fired hot water system. Some said yes, but others said that heat pumps put out heat at a lower temperature (in order to stay efficient) so bigger radiators are needed. That for me would be the kiss of death as I have about 20 of them spread across 3 floors. Also I've been told the system needs to run all day, not just run on a timer for periods when the house is occupied. Everyone says heat pumps work well with underfloor heating pipes, but that is really suitable for new builds, not retrofitting to a Victorian place like mine. The steam (haha) seems to have gone out of the UK government's earlier talk of encouraging a switch to heat pumps. It may be that age of our housing stock makes it too hard to implement for many people. But for new houses it ought to be mandatory - and I think it will be in a few years' time.

Yes, electricity is typically 4 x the cost of gas in the UK. This is historically understandable, due to the far greater infrastructure needed to generate and distribute electricity and of course the fact that a lot of it is generated with an efficiency of <50% from fossil fuel. However what seems criminal nowadays is that the development of renewable generation, and the investment this necessitates in the distribution network, is all loaded onto electricity bills, while the legacy fossil fuel we are all trying to reduce dependence on incurs none of these costs. It's a political hot potato of course, as in the UK most people use gas for heating and we can't have elderly poor people freezing to death in their homes because they can't pay the gas bill. But I feel we really do need to start cross-subsidising since at the moment all the incentives are to retain the old gas boiler.