TheVat

Yes, there could be a soft coup. One impediment to that, which is similar to the state-level issues I mentioned previously, is that we have fifty states and fifty election processes. Election oversight is at the state level, with a lot of election authority and responsibilities extending down to the county level. The states do have to comply with the federal Constitution, but not with the federal executive. Our decentralized electoral system is, from what I've heard, unique among the world's democracies. It is messy, but it is also a migraine for a would-be autocrat. (am guessing a serious attempt to work around that would have to involve a declaration that some states are somehow in violation of federal law, and then sending enforcement of some kind to take over polling stations - sort of a semi-soft coup, perhaps?)(the frog boiling you mention might consist in first sending "federal advisors," then gradually giving them more of a supervisory role via a series of executive orders which are responding to an "emergency" )

Yep. That's why the focus on Trump as a Russian mole (rekindled today, I see, by a former KGB officer*) or a cult figure with some special charisma or just personifying a social pendulum swing on some hot button issue....is becoming a set of distractions from what you are noticing: the wider systemic problems for representative democracy. (*) https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/donald-trump-recruited-kgb-codename-34727486

One thing that makes a simple coup more challenging here is the amount of autonomy that individual states have, and the Posse Comitatus Act disallowing the military to deploy on US soil (unless a governor requests it, or deploys National Guard reserves within a state). While there are ways around this, you would have a lot of plates spinning with 50 states, and a couple dozen governors who could be mobilizing their state reserves against outside forces, or even peeling off sections of the federal Armed Forces using Constitutional authority. For a walking trouser load of excrement like Trump who thinks he can easily extort minerals from Ukraine with some half-baked protection racket, or imagines a round of bullying will turn Canada into a 51st state, or thinks randomly firing experienced civil servants will create lean and effective government, a military coup probably sounds easy, just make some phone calls, throw in some vague promises, and voila. I will enjoy watching this ambulating turd get buried deep in the litter box when reality comes knocking (or maybe I should say "comes meowing," to keep my metaphors on track). IOW, I do not think our military will unite behind him, at least not to the degree that nationwide martial law requires.

Given the winters there, I'm going with blue.

Not clear why a new kind of disorder needs to be hypothesized here, when good old NPD and sociopathy seem to cover many such behaviors pretty well. For that matter, people can believe in toxic philosophies without requiring any pathology to account for it - put them in a place where they can rally people to a cause and stage a coup, and suppression of dissent and grandiosity will be natural options for them. Power can corrupt without any pathology required.

You are operating with your own idiosyncratic definition of consciousness, which seems to bear little relation to the term as it is defined in cognitive sciences or philosophy of mind. If you start defining terms any way you want, then yes, I suppose you could conjure aware magnets. Since this is a science forum, there is an emphasis on consensus on what terms mean, hence my attempt to post the SEP summary of some commonly adopted definitions of consciousness. For example... What it is like. Thomas Nagel's (1974) famous“what it is like” criterion aims to capture another and perhaps more subjective notion of being a conscious organism. According to Nagel, a being is conscious just if there is “something that it is like” to be that creature, i.e., some subjective way the world seems or appears from the creature's mental or experiential point of view. In Nagel's example, bats are conscious because there is something that it is like for a bat to experience its world through its echo-locatory senses, even though we humans from our human point of view can not emphatically understand what such a mode of consciousness is like from the bat's own point of view. (the encyclopedia entry also describes a half dozen other ways of defining consciousness, some focused on more objective behavioral aspects, some on the perceptual, some on access to information, and some on a sort of meta-cognition - the point to make here is that we must decide which focus to discuss, when approaching the possible consciousness of very simple neural networks like a bee's brain)

Big umbrella term. SEP provides an overview of the conceptual range of the word. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/#ConCon

I know this is more a memoir of growing up than a book about chemistry, but Oliver Sach's book, "Uncle Tungsten", does introduce the reader to chemistry in a way that conveys the fun and fascination. And you pick up some concepts along the way, in a fairly painless way. Kate Biberdorf's "It's Elemental," is also a good beginner's intro.

My recent tactic with the Musk manchild is to minimize my time reading or chatting about him or speculating on his cognitive abilities (reading only on a "need to know" basis). I hear the critiques of late stage capitalism, though. Have to wonder at what point will the income gap between the 99% and the 1% trigger social upheaval and revolution - or are they now only to be found in history, now that the Digital Age provides such attention span shortening tools to pacify the masses?

A bit OT maybe, but is half of that reserve Lake Superior? So the US already has access to that. Trump can send us all up to Duluth and Sault Ste Marie with those plastic straws he's going to bring back. And is too stupid to grasp that lithium, graphite, titanium, and uranium are none of them rare earths. He keeps calling them that because no one is going to correct him - sycophants don't do that. The rest of your post states the worst case scenarios - much of that depends now on swing congressional districts where MAGA policies will be doing the most damage. I still see some chance that the 2026 midterm elections could end the House majority and toss a big wrench in P2025. It's a US territory, like Guam and Samoa.

There's some pretty interesting theorizing out there, on how early anaerobic metabolism could get started. Iron-sulfur world is one example. (this is another one depending on hydrothermal vents, of which I'm a fan) Looks at how complexity can become self-accelerating, which could be a key development. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron–sulfur_world_hypothesis The carbon fixation metabolism became autocatalytic by forming a metabolic cycle in the form of a primitive sulfur-dependent version of the reductive citric acid cycle. Accelerated catalysts expanded the metabolism and new metabolic products further accelerated the catalysts. The idea is that once such a primitive autocatalytic metabolism was established, its intrinsically synthetic chemistry began to produce ever more complex organic compounds, ever more complex pathways and ever more complex catalytic centers....

The worker buyouts and layoffs in the federal government are really not helping. Also, the forcing of telecommuting staff back into the offices will probably cause some disruptions in work. There's also a hiring freeze at SSA, and new legislation, the Social Security Fairness Act, which is slowing things down. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/social-security-administration-ssa-social-security-fairness-law/

The name "heat pump," is a good reminder of what it does. I would guess that reversing an AC window unit for heat is ineffective due to its engineering specs - it is designed only to pull heat from air at or above comfortable room temperature.

Mentioned at another forum, reminded me how great was this performance. To steal from the YT comments section: this is music played by a man who can't walk, composed by a man who can't hear. (so why ever bother feeling sorry for yourself) The Rondo, here, is probably the best known movement of any violin concerto, next to the first movement of the Mendelssohn concerto in E min.

There are also hypothesized abiogenesis accelerator environments, such as around seabed hydrothermal vents, which are areas conducive to chemosynthesis, possibly the first kind of metabolism on Earth.

Bear in mind that some of us are pretty busy these days, not just with life in general, but being blasted by the new administration with a gushing firehose of flaming crap and trying to get some sense of what's happening to our country. I did want to respond to some of your comments. A lot of feral cats do end up being euthanized, so I think one could argue that adoption has multiple knock-on effects including avian species protection, improving quality of life for both the cats and the humans who accept them as companions, rodent infestation control in houses (thus reducing use of poisons, and also possible spread of disease from rodent feces), etc. I don't see simple binary answers to the thorny questions of what moral weights we give each benefit or detriment. Being vegan is not usually construed as an absolute moral rejection of carnivory in all species - that would be ridiculous. A vegan can eat no meat, but that doesn't create a world where natural carnivores like felines can be converted to veganism. Given the control we humans have over ecosystems, we do have to consider our obligations of sound stewardship. Should an excess of predators on avian species, disrupting an ecological balance, be handled primarily with culling the predators, leaving them alone, or domestication and feeding with processed foods that use waste scraps from industrial food production? I am perhaps too biased (cat lover) to arrive easily at some objective assessment.

You are reminding us that Kennedy wanting to gut the FDA will potentially increase contaminated seafood shipments. I was also imagining Trump drinking lots of raw milk, to underscore his support of Kennedy. Pasteurization is for pussies and losers!

Depends on what is planned. Our government made few plans or regulations for affordable housing. The free market failed to supply them. So we are about 3.5 to 6 million homes short, depending on metrics used, resulting in massive problems including homelessness, people unable to move to economic opportunity centers due to housing costs (so they move to affordable backwaters with dead end jobs), people who are rent-poor/house-poor (bulk of income goes to shelter, causing hardship in affording other basic amenities), people living in substandard and sometimes health-damaging units where no other option is available, NIMBY political pressure from the spoiled affluent (further worsening the problem and fostering enclave mentality), and developers struggling with haphazard and antiquated zoning laws. So, yes, planning has its place.

Dear Mr Not an Actual President, Please follow all the health advice of your newly-appointed Secretary of HHS. Sincerely, Paul Brainin Thevat

The bobbles? I read the one (Marooned) that was serialized in Analog. Good stuff. He died of Parkinson's last Spring, RIP. I also liked A Fire Upon the Deep, in his Zones of Thought series. A former GF met him at a sci-fi conference, apparently by means of squeezing through a crowd and under David Brin's armpit en route. I cannot vouch for the veracity of this account.

Yes, so hath spoken the High Blargleptarch who announced that this world's end would fall on a Tuesday, in late 2025. Anyone who thought conceptually about the message framework will understand how relaxing each Wednesday through Monday will be, given over to enjoying all manner of earthly delights while they are still there.

What's the difference between Elon Musk and a lemur? Elon made an electric car. The lemur Madagascar. (sorry) But not sorry enough to stop from trying another one: Why does Musk want to make Europe great again? Because he's a MEGA lomaniac.

Washington Post, tracking data from government websites: https://wapo.st/3X0HcEc Within a matter of days, the worst-case scenario seemed to have been averted. Officials told data users the files had been taken down to comply with an executive order and would be restored after they were reviewed and approved. Soon, the entire ACS seemed to be available. Amid the whirlwind of uncertainty, David Van Riper at IPUMS, the Minnesota heroes who collect, harmonize and distribute flagship federal datasets, told us the organization has been working with its peers to “figure out who has what so that we can patch together a backup of the federal statistical system” — especially its more obscure datasets and priceless bits of documentation. Speaking of which, when our friend Federica Cocco, The Washington Post’s econ and business data reporter, asked whether we were backing anything up, we thought of a lesser-known Census Bureau effort: the Household Pulse.

There could be a different issue of degree, however, from homicide. If so, your example might not work as an ethical modeling of, say, using ground up salmon heads to make cat food. I don't find any evidence that fish are developmentally advanced enough to be self-aware and cognizant of mortality, so a sustainable harvest of them used for feeding my furry companions does not seem to be equivalent to a person committing murder. (though I would object to asphyxiation of the salmon as a method of killing them, as I object to any inhumane treatment of an animal) Questioning equivalences is part of what I see as nuance in an ethical discussion, and very much part of the focus of a thread on the ethics of vegan v nonvegan. I hope this clarifies my position a bit.

Pathogenesis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathogenesis:_A_history_of_the_world_in_eight_plagues