TheVat

After staying off the thread for ten pages, looking in I'm sorry to see the same truism in play, that reversing discrimination is equivalent to discrimination. I think this truism is what messed up AA here in the States. In the Johnson admin, it was straightforwardly defined as reversing racial discrimination. Then, to fend off all the right-wing salvos of "this is more discrimination" most colleges and businesses shifted to diversity as the core goal of AA. The notion of dorms populated with people from all classes and ethnicities had that nice anodyne feel that appeased moderate conservatives. (at least, for a while)

Haha! Yup. I see Nikki Haley also weighed in, with one of those "maybe it's a crime...but it's not the BAD sort of crime" dismissals. I think it would be terrible for the country to have a former president in prison for years because of a documents case. So I would be inclined in favor of a pardon. - Nikki Haley I love the way she called it a "documents case," as if this is nothing but a harmless and bumbling packrat - sorta like one of those people who has a coffee table full of overdue books from the library.

Thanks for asking. (I used to tinker a bit with old cars) With lower voltage, high amperage that flows from an automobile battery presents a strong danger of burns rather than shock. It won't toss your heart's sinus rhythm in a blender, so it is not likely to be life-threatening. Also worth noting that the high-voltage portion of the car ignition system IS a shock hazard. The wire from the coil to the distributor, and the wires from the distributor to the spark plugs, don’t run at 12 volts, but at tens of thousands of volts. On a car with a high-energy ignition system, the voltage level is high enough that it can potentially interfere with your heart rhythm. So you wouldn't want to handle the coil or plug wires without wearing rubber gloves.

I also thank @exchemist for his fact-check on the interstate fireball sightings. And I am surprised that intelligent people can ignore the human penchant for pranking, fakery, and tall tale telling - which is often on display after any dramatic atmospheric phenomenon tweaks the public imagination. I would only add that a second Avatar movie, which happened to feature ten foot tall aliens was released about four months before this Vegas sighting. Like Agent Mulder, @Alex_Krycek wants to believe. 🙂

Also amusing is the way the other announced GOP candidates for 2024, who we presume are running AGAINST Trump, are all hastening to make sure we know they are FOR and WITH Trump, in this his darkest hour. I especially liked Vivek Ramaswamy's threading of the Trump Base needle, where he simultaneously implies Trump's likely guilt of federal crimes and makes sure he is showing maximum support for pardoning him in the future.... Vivek Ramaswamy, an entrepreneur and activist who is running against Donald J. Trump for the Republican nomination, told reporters outside the courthouse in Miami on Tuesday that he had reached out to other presidential candidates to urge them to commit to pardoning the former president if they win in 2024. - NY Times

It's a crime if a DA determines it may be obstructing an investigation. Someone saying they saw a ten foot alien is not going to be prosecuted unless it covers up an actual crime. And the statement can't be disproved, any more than someone reporting they saw a Yeti or the Virgin Mary. All you need is a campfire, some marshmallows and a flashlight. It appears to be a genuine piece of evidence of an intelligent forum member imagining grainy visual distortions are aliens. They appear to be visual artifacts not uncommon in nighttime videos. Nothingburger.

Oh, you know, private universe stuff. The universe doesn't like to talk about those days.

I looked at the PNAS paper. It studied the mechanism of curled hairs in thermoregulation but said that the evolutionary aspect was speculative. Curled hair could have other adaptive value, and the thermoregulation is just a Gouldian spandrel. (straight hair is prevalent on the Indian subcontinent and SE Asia, a situation which doesn't support the idea that there would be adaptive pressure for curly hair in hot regions) https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2301760120 They concluded Maximal evaporative heat loss potential from the scalp is reduced by the presence of hair, but the amount of sweat required on the scalp to balance the incoming solar heat (i.e., zero heat gain) is reduced in the presence of hair. Particularly, we find that hair that is more tightly curled offers increased protection against heat gain from solar radiation.

Do you think they can be kelped?

Glass blocks some UV, so a couch left on a sunny porch will fade faster than a couch by a sunny window. (some modern windows are fully UV-blocking and marketed as not fading upholstery and drapes) The exception is some grades of quartz glass, which will pass UV. You might want that for germicidal purposes, but don't leave your couch near such a window.

Interesting idea. Since nomadic societies tend not to develop high technology, because they travel light and expend a lot of their time/energy on making camp and living off the land as they pass through, it seems likely that an interstellar nomadic society would have come from a non-nomadic civilization on a planet -- which then adopted a nomadic mode as they moved into space. (or some segment adopted that mode, leaving behind others who prefer a more settled life) The nomads search the galaxy, looking for the perfect martini.

Slow trees that develop articulated appendages and muscle, handle combustibles and smelt metals, fabricate machinery, run advanced physics laboratories and particle accelerators, and all the other stuff that leads to technology for interstellar propulsion and spacecraft design? I don't see this at all. Pehaps I am misunderstanding the analogy to trees?

Mother-in-law. I can well imagine a stochastic parrot would have trouble with that.

I remember years ago when senator Harry Reid was saying there were ET spacecraft materials in the hands of the military but he couldn't get in to see them. Nothing came of that, either. If a foreign government made an experimental craft of some new material, and the US recovered a fragment, what would be learned from materials analysis and would it differentiate the sample from ET sources? Say it was a new carbon composite - would an ET necessarily use carbon and other elements with different isotopic concentrations that would provide a definitive signature? Shellenberger is a fan of shoddy science and often busy attacking environmentalists and climate scientists. He seems kind of a nut.

I suspect the tall being was Britney Griener - she seems to be everywhere lately. The cop cam greenish object looked like a fireball. Or could have been a bolide that exploded near the ground, generating the "crash" sound.

OpenAI should really think twice before releasing its stochastic parrots into the wild. Not that it doesn't provide some amusement. Perhaps it will be remembered as the Magic 8-Ball of our time.

Yeah, all those liberal white folks think alike, and in simplistic terms! So many straw men here, my gardening needs are covered for the next 30 years.

Something a bit deceptive in that drawing. LOL. Yes, it is simple.

Those forums have been distracting (and tedious to follow, so I gave up), so am glad you posted again.

Just curious, bit of a digress, but wouldn't eliminating involuntary servitude (a broader category than chattel slavery) eliminate military conscription? I suppose they've got a clause in there somewhere...

Way off base there. I learned the old-faahioned way: listening to black people, and working as a social worker for a decade. In the US. Where understanding systemic racism and discrimination is rightly considered to be essential to having America live up to its Constitutional principles. The only way your hypothesized Self-Reliant Minority can get political traction to fix things in the US is to coalition with other groups who share their goals. 12‰ of the US population is not going to remedy 400 years of discrimination without another 39% (or at least, a strong plurality in some cases) lending some support. And given how the voting system deck is stacked, probably more than that. Progressives here are mostly committed to coming together to help Dr. King's dream along, and not shaming each other on personal experience credentials. I also have never been a woman seeking reproductive care, or gay. Are you suggesting I shouldn't bother to march with them, too, or donate money or publicly express support? I'm curious what sort of America we'll have if white guys like me sit meekly with our hands folded while all those discriminated minorities try their luck on tje streets and in the courts.

Strawman, as regards the US. That you think equal justice and equal opportunity is some sort of paternal problem solving, rather than a provision of the basic tools to thrive in society, indicates you have no clue what minority groups in the US want. Or what their obstacles are. As for fighting for your own grievances to be resolved, those are nice noble words, but here in the US, the problems are severe enough that no group minds all hands on deck helping out or at least voting progressively. When someone has a jackboot on their face, it is not condescension to step in and help the removal. Nothing says condescension quite like hagiography.

So when you sit one out, it's because neither candidate seems better. But when a black voter sits one out, they are just lazy. How weird you cannot imagine a demographic often ignored by politicians (e.g. both candidates may favor building a freeway and splitting your hood down the middle and saturating it with diesel soot) may have members who conclude voting is pointless. As @CharonY noted, your post seems to validate the OP article's view on ingrained racism.