We are completely dependent on mechanized farming to feed the 7B people in this world.
The agreement does not require third world countries to not use modern agricultural machinery, nor does it forbid them from using transportation systems like trucks to haul goods.
What it does is finance the construction of non-CO2-producing facilities in their countries. So instead of building a coal power plant because it's cheap for them to build, we help fund the construction of hydro/solar/wind/storage/etc.
In return, cities like Miami and New Orleans continue to exist instead of being destroyed by the ocean.
So, we pay a few billion over the next 20 years, or we pay a few trillion over 10-40 years from now. That's not a difficult choice....if you do not let ideology blind you.
Why should the US be expected to pay for everything for the rest of the world?
We aren't.
The agreement involved developed nations, including the US, that had generated an enormous amount of wealth via burning fossil fuels.
We'd like developing nations to not go down that same path, because we fucked up the atmosphere when we did it.
In order to get them to not go down the same path we did, we're going to have to help them skip over the "burn shitloads of fossil fuels" stage in their development.
Compromise is built from negotiating parties looking out for their own self interests, then giving in on some items to get others. You want win-win agreements
They get help building non-polluting energy sources, we get Miami and New Orleans continuing to exist. The deal was is win-win. It was just negotiated by that dark-skinned fellow, so it must be awful.
Iran deal are two prime examples
Oh really?
Let's compare negotiations. Iran stopped enriching uranium, sent what they had enriched to Russia, and submitted to inspections by the UN. Yes, the Iranians are allowed some lead time when the UN wants to inspect a new site, but you can't hide an enrichment plant in 20 days. They leave around detectable levels of radioactivity that take far longer than 20 days to clean up. Iran stopped it's nuclear program, and everyone, including the US has produced zero evidence that Iran violating the agreement now.
And now: North Korea. Trump just negotiated a "deal" with North Korea to stop their nuclear program in return for the US no longer conducting military exercises in South Korea.....with zero enforcement mechanisms. We stopped our exercise, and North Korea is upgrading their nuclear research facilities instead of closing them.
If you are looking for terrible negotiators, I suggest you take a gander at the person who went bankrupt running a casino. Twice.
Has anybody asked what would be done with the oxygen produces from electrolysis?
It's released in the atmosphere. Other oxygen will combine with the hydrogen when it is burned or run through a fuel cell.
Now, you would have a supply of oxygen coming out from this plant, so people may come up with a localized use for it. But in the long run it'll end up back as water.
Could hydrogen gas replace hydrogen gas for heating, removing CO2 producing Nateual gas/Methane?
Theoretically. However, burning hydrogen produces far less heat than burning natural gas or methane (2H2 + O2 -> 2H2O is less energy than CH4 + 2O2 -> CO2 + 2H2O). So it's not clear if you'd use this for direct heating by burning it.
Abolishing it would instantly disenfranchise 90% of the states
90% of the states are already effectively disenfranchised. A Republican in CA effectively can not vote for President. Same with a Democrat in TX.
presidential elections would be effectively decided by NYC and LA/SFO
Population of Los Angeles County: 10M Population of San Francisco County: 870K Population of the counties that make up New York City: 14.5M
Population of the United States: 325.7M
So, your argument is 7.8% of the population would have complete control over presidential elections, and that would be bad.
Population of Ohio: 11.6M Population of Florida: 20.9M
11.6% of the population already has complete control over presidential elections, thanks to the electoral college. Isn't that bad? Shouldn't a presidential candidate care about the millions of Republicans in CA or the millions of Democrats in TX?
Theoretically, small states are protected by over-representation the Senate. In reality, we have not expanded the size of the House since the 1910s, so small states are currently over-represented in the House, the Senate and the Presidency. Shouldn't at least one position in our federal government not be determined by small states?
While that article doesn't specifically say they've killed anyone, antifa has been linked to injuring police (what did you expect when you're starting riots) and destroying property
How many federal buildings have they bombed? How many people have they shot while they were attending church? How many people have they run over with cars?
The answer on the political right to both questions is more than one in the last 30 years. The answer on the political left is zero in the last 30 years.
Heck, on the last question there actually have been Republicans proposing legislation to make it legal to run over protesters with your vehicle.
That's what makes this a false equivalency. There already is political violence in the US, but "both sides" are nowhere near the same level of violence.
If it's possible for illegals to obtain what passes for welfare benefits in the US, then perhaps the US benefits system needs to be fixed
The vast majority of US benefits require that you show citizenship or a green card (permanent, non-citizen resident).
There's a tiny bit of benefits available to everyone, but that's things like emergency room treatment at a hospital. You can't live on them.
However, the vast majority of Republicans believe "welfare" 1) still exists (it ended in the 1990s), 2) is far more generous than it actually is, and 3) that there are more programs than actually exist. They have believed this since the 1980s and are not going to return to reality any time soon.
Trump only demanded that the existing laws on the treatment of illegal immigrants be enforced.
This is actually false. Seeking asylum in the United States is legal. We are required by federal law and treaties to allow people to seek asylum.
What Trump and Company started doing to create this crisis was arresting people for entering the United States without letting those people request asylum. They can do this because you technically have to cross the border before you can request asylum.
Which means yes, there are laws on the books that conflict with each other. The Obama administration dealt with this by letting asylum seekers actually reach the officials you need to see in order to request asylum. The Trump administration has decided to deal with this by arresting asylum seekers before they can request asylum.
Maybe in Hipster Central, SoCal... But out here in the real world 1% of the infrastructure isn't even in place.
Your house doesn't have electricity?
Also my time isn't free. Spending an hour recharging just go to the 5 miles to home is a huge waste
What are you doing when your car is parked overnight? 'Cause that's when it will be recharged >95% of the time.
If someone manages to produce hydrogen from seawater cost effectively, battery cars are effectively dead.
Storage. Hydrogen leaks through everything. It even leaks through the metal that the fuel tank is made of. This isn't a solvable problem, since it's basic physical properties of the relevant molecules.
Having your fuel tank drain itself while you're on vacation and your car is parked for a couple weeks is a rather inconvenient thing. Self-discharge on a battery isn't nearly as big a problem....and you can leave the car plugged in to top itself off.
I estimate you'd need on the order of 3 trillion gigajoules of electricity to return the Earth to average interglacial concentrations of atmospheric CO2.
This is not really a remediation system. It's a way to get some hydrogen we can use as a non-CO2-releasing fuel, with a bonus of some CO2 capture.
We'll get an equilibrium. Some of it will react as you describe. Some of it won't. It depends on exactly how much bicarbonate we are shoving into how much ocean.
What if the drones are being used to monitor the progress and the direction of the fire in order to protect a home-owner's property.
First, that's the point of having "unauthorized" in the law. If the drone has a legitimate reason to be there, it can get authorized.
Second, your property is not more valuable than other people's property that gets destroyed because you grounded the firefighting aircraft just so you could have a look-see.
Third, your drone grounding the firefighting aircraft is a fantastic way to harm that home-owner's property, since you are interfering with the ability to fight the fire.
Fourth, this entire premise is idiotic. "Monitoring" the fire does absolutely nothing to protect the property.
And to be frank, the risk is minimal. Forests are huge, and even if a drone is flying while a air tanker is dousing flames, the odds are very slim of the drone impacting the aircraft.
I'm always amused at the people who cavalierly volunteer other people to take on additional risk. "But I want cool video to put on the Internet" is a really shitty reason to add to that risk.
It should be a misdemeanor. Impact should be a felony.
Good news! The proposed law lets prosecutors charge a fine, misdemeanor, or felony based on what happens with the drone.
I wonder what the FAA thinks about this. They're the ones who control the airspace. Not the State of Colorado.
:facepalm:
Perhaps you should actually read the summary this time. You'd notice that these people who represent Colorado in the federal government are proposing a federal law.
We have a very closed ecosystem called earth so we have absolutely no idea what other forms of life could evolve in vastly different environments.
The laws of physics apply in those other environments too. And those laws create certain effects in chemistry. Those effects are required for life to appear, because you need something not-alive that can still organize somewhat before something alive can form.
So yes, we can say that liquid water (or maaaaybe liquid ammonia) are required for life, because those are the chemicals required to create the environment where life can form.
We have big mouth celebrities with big out-sized opinions openly wishing death to Trump. I don't recall much of that during Obama's time.
Again, your ideological agreement provides excellent blinders.
Big mouth celebrities not only openly wished death to Obama. For example, Hannity, O'Riley and Ted Nugent on multiple occasions. Nugent was invited to the White House by Trump, demonstrating just how unacceptable these threats are.
I don't remember congress-critters advocating for mob violence against Democrats either.
Again, your ideological agreement provides excellent blinders.
Steve King is the most vocal here, with many members of the "Freedom Caucus" also advocating violence.
Oh, there's also this guy named Trump who has encouraged his rally attendees to beat protesters. But hey, he's not important or anything...
But I guess if you want to go back into history we can
...and make sure we jump over all those inconvenient years....
Lets start with the Weather Underground. You know the group with Bill Ayers that thought 30 million problematic US Citizens would need to be killed in order to achieve a communist utopia.
And they were treated as an outrageous fringe group by the liberals of the time. Y'all are watching Fox News 24/7 right now.
Or how about the Jim Crow years where Democrats fought tooth and nail to keep laws from being passed to halt discrimination against blacks. Or how about the KKK being formed by Democrats in order to intimidate blacks
So it turns out political parties are not required to always hold the same ideological position. Shocking, it's true!! There even used to be a time when Republicans were so hostile to "State's Rights" that they refused to let those states leave the Union and fought a war to keep them!!!
More recently, you'll find there was this thing called the "Southern Realignment". The South was so pissed off about the civil war that they refused to vote for anyone from the Republican party, regardless of that person's politics. The result was the Dixiecrats - Democrats in name, but significantly different ideology from the rest of the party.
Then 1964 happened.
Democrats passed and LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act. And the racists abandoned the Democratic party (or a very small number woke up to the fact that they were wrong). And suddenly Republicans started winning all across the South. So much so that Nixon had this fantastic idea called the "Southern Strategy" of using racist dogwhistles to help his campaign. And he won big. So Reagan came along and copied him - it's not like "Welfare Queens" were ever portrayed as white, despite far more whites being on welfare than blacks. Cocaine was used by whites, "crack" was used by blacks because of price. Guess which one was treated as the terrible, evil, monster-creating drug that would be the downfall of civilization if we did not destroy?
So no, you do not actually give a shit about political violence. You're quite happy at political violence against those you ideologically disagree with, as demonstrated by your inability to remember it and your dishonest attempt to pretend the political parties have not changed since the 1860s.
You're "worried" now because the political violence might be aimed at you this time.
Well, buttercup, perhaps if you gave enough of a damn to take off your ideological blinders before now, we might not be in this place.
But we both know that will not happen. Instead, you'll turn on the TV and watch guy who openly called for my death because I don't think 4-year-olds belong in cages. Or even better, you'll vote for him.
There's nothing special about zero degrees unless you want to assume "all life requires water in its liquid state"
Well, it does.
Water has unique properties that is utterly vital for life. For example, water freezes from the top-down because ice floats. That top layer of ice provides insulation that keeps the water underneath from freezing. If ice behaved like every other solid, water would freeze from the bottom up, killing everything in it before it had the chance to evolve a way to survive freezing.
And that doesn't get into the many other features of water that appear to be critical for life to exist at all.
There's some people postulating that ammonia could perform a similar role in colder planets. But this has it's own problems, such as ammonia being larger than water and not as polar. Something might have found a way to make ammonia work, but it seems unlikely.
there's also nothing special about chemical reactions, or even chemicals, if you're an intelligent magnetic eddy living on the surface of a neutron star.
There's nothing special about physical existence if you're a ghost either. That doesn't mean ghosts exist. Unless you can demonstrate a way that a magnetic eddy could become intelligent, you're just throwing out random bullshit. For example, how does it manage to maintain it's integrity, especially in the presence of the much stronger magnetic field around it? We know how things on Earth maintain their integrity when immersed in water, and it's simple, random chemistry that gives rise to it. What simple, random part of magnetism would result in a long-lasting self-organizing eddy?
No, wee think we know how to efficiently search for other technological life even if we technically can't do it yet
No, we really don't. We used to think we'd find them via radio emissions. But the one example we have (us) is getting quieter as technology advances. We have cell towers everywhere but they are way, way, way less powerful than the giant AM radio stations we used to have.
Since radio falls off at 1/d^2, you'd have to be extremely close to the source in cosmological terms to detect even our old AM and TV signals. The roughly 70 light year bubble around us where you can detect our radio signals due to how long ago we started using high-power radio is pretty close to the maximum distance it is going to be due to the weaker signals we now use. Even a 100 light year bubble is a very, very, very small distance when you're talking about interstellar civilizations.
And it's quite silly to assume an interstellar civilization would use radio to communicate. It's too slow to hold a civilization together. 8.6 years to send a message to Proxima Centarui and receive a response, and that's the closest star to us. On that timescale, the two star systems would massively diverge in culture and would no longer consider themselves part of the same civilization relatively quickly.
We see no attempts by anyone to apparently communicate with other civilizations
We've been looking for radio signals Why would they communicate via radio?
If you take us as a reasonable example of a normal location in the universe, communication via radio (or any light) with the nearest star would take more than 8 years (transmit + receive time). Which means if we did send people to Proxima Centarui, we wouldn't have one interstellar civilization. We'd have two single-solar-system civilizations. If communications takes that long, the two societies are going to diverge a lot.
On structures, we can barely resolve planets and do so via the transitory effects on their star. If there is a Dyson sphere, we won't see it because we won't see the star. If there's a ring world, we won't see it because the effects on the star are not transitory.
And that assumes Dyson spheres or ring worlds are practical enough and useful enough to be built. That's not actually clear - even with magical levels of technology, we couldn't build a Dyson sphere around Sol. There isn't enough stuff in the solar system.
There is probably no other expansive, technological civilization in the Local Group.
No other detectable expansive, technological civilization in the Local Group.
One of the assumptions of Fermi's paradox is that an advanced civilization would be communicating by RF, and that their RF signals would be extremely powerful.
But we have little reason to think this is actually true. We have one example (us) and we are using weaker and weaker RF as our technology advances. Giant AM radio stations have been replaced with lower-power FM stations, and then even lower-power digital radio stations. Even RADAR stations are weaker than they used to be. Cell towers are ubiquitous, but way, way, way less power than radio stations.
Then there's also the fact that RF is an extremely poor way for an interstellar civilization to communicate simply due to the distances involved. For example, sending a message to Proxima Centarui and receiving a response would take more than 8 years. Communications that slow is going to result in widely divergent societies. Which means you don't have one interstellar civilization, you have many single-solar-system civilizations.
So if there actually is an interstellar civilization, it's not using the technology we are looking for. We'd have to find an incidental emission (say, explosions from a giant space battle). With the size of space, we can pretty much guarantee we will not be looking in the right direction at the right time to see that emission, and the incidental nature would make the signal so extremely weak that we'd probably miss it even if we were looking in the right direction.
You realize multiple doctors who provide abortions have been murdered, right? That a church was recently shot up? That the Secret Service had to investigate a lot more threats from 2008 to 2016 than previous administrations?
If you are just now fearing political violence in the US, your ideological agreement has provided excellent blinders.
Slashdot Mirror
We are completely dependent on mechanized farming to feed the 7B people in this world.
The agreement does not require third world countries to not use modern agricultural machinery, nor does it forbid them from using transportation systems like trucks to haul goods.
What it does is finance the construction of non-CO2-producing facilities in their countries. So instead of building a coal power plant because it's cheap for them to build, we help fund the construction of hydro/solar/wind/storage/etc.
In return, cities like Miami and New Orleans continue to exist instead of being destroyed by the ocean.
So, we pay a few billion over the next 20 years, or we pay a few trillion over 10-40 years from now. That's not a difficult choice....if you do not let ideology blind you.
Why should the US be expected to pay for everything for the rest of the world?
We aren't.
The agreement involved developed nations, including the US, that had generated an enormous amount of wealth via burning fossil fuels.
We'd like developing nations to not go down that same path, because we fucked up the atmosphere when we did it.
In order to get them to not go down the same path we did, we're going to have to help them skip over the "burn shitloads of fossil fuels" stage in their development.
Compromise is built from negotiating parties looking out for their own self interests, then giving in on some items to get others. You want win-win agreements
They get help building non-polluting energy sources, we get Miami and New Orleans continuing to exist. The deal was is win-win. It was just negotiated by that dark-skinned fellow, so it must be awful.
Iran deal are two prime examples
Oh really?
Let's compare negotiations. Iran stopped enriching uranium, sent what they had enriched to Russia, and submitted to inspections by the UN. Yes, the Iranians are allowed some lead time when the UN wants to inspect a new site, but you can't hide an enrichment plant in 20 days. They leave around detectable levels of radioactivity that take far longer than 20 days to clean up. Iran stopped it's nuclear program, and everyone, including the US has produced zero evidence that Iran violating the agreement now.
And now: North Korea. Trump just negotiated a "deal" with North Korea to stop their nuclear program in return for the US no longer conducting military exercises in South Korea.....with zero enforcement mechanisms. We stopped our exercise, and North Korea is upgrading their nuclear research facilities instead of closing them.
If you are looking for terrible negotiators, I suggest you take a gander at the person who went bankrupt running a casino. Twice.
Has anybody asked what would be done with the oxygen produces from electrolysis?
It's released in the atmosphere. Other oxygen will combine with the hydrogen when it is burned or run through a fuel cell.
Now, you would have a supply of oxygen coming out from this plant, so people may come up with a localized use for it. But in the long run it'll end up back as water.
Could hydrogen gas replace hydrogen gas for heating, removing CO2 producing Nateual gas/Methane?
Theoretically. However, burning hydrogen produces far less heat than burning natural gas or methane (2H2 + O2 -> 2H2O is less energy than CH4 + 2O2 -> CO2 + 2H2O). So it's not clear if you'd use this for direct heating by burning it.
Abolishing it would instantly disenfranchise 90% of the states
90% of the states are already effectively disenfranchised. A Republican in CA effectively can not vote for President. Same with a Democrat in TX.
presidential elections would be effectively decided by NYC and LA/SFO
Population of Los Angeles County: 10M
Population of San Francisco County: 870K
Population of the counties that make up New York City: 14.5M
Population of the United States: 325.7M
So, your argument is 7.8% of the population would have complete control over presidential elections, and that would be bad.
Population of Ohio: 11.6M
Population of Florida: 20.9M
11.6% of the population already has complete control over presidential elections, thanks to the electoral college. Isn't that bad? Shouldn't a presidential candidate care about the millions of Republicans in CA or the millions of Democrats in TX?
Theoretically, small states are protected by over-representation the Senate. In reality, we have not expanded the size of the House since the 1910s, so small states are currently over-represented in the House, the Senate and the Presidency. Shouldn't at least one position in our federal government not be determined by small states?
While that article doesn't specifically say they've killed anyone, antifa has been linked to injuring police (what did you expect when you're starting riots) and destroying property
How many federal buildings have they bombed? How many people have they shot while they were attending church? How many people have they run over with cars?
The answer on the political right to both questions is more than one in the last 30 years. The answer on the political left is zero in the last 30 years.
Heck, on the last question there actually have been Republicans proposing legislation to make it legal to run over protesters with your vehicle.
That's what makes this a false equivalency. There already is political violence in the US, but "both sides" are nowhere near the same level of violence.
If it's possible for illegals to obtain what passes for welfare benefits in the US, then perhaps the US benefits system needs to be fixed
The vast majority of US benefits require that you show citizenship or a green card (permanent, non-citizen resident).
There's a tiny bit of benefits available to everyone, but that's things like emergency room treatment at a hospital. You can't live on them.
However, the vast majority of Republicans believe "welfare" 1) still exists (it ended in the 1990s), 2) is far more generous than it actually is, and 3) that there are more programs than actually exist. They have believed this since the 1980s and are not going to return to reality any time soon.
Trump only demanded that the existing laws on the treatment of illegal immigrants be enforced.
This is actually false. Seeking asylum in the United States is legal. We are required by federal law and treaties to allow people to seek asylum.
What Trump and Company started doing to create this crisis was arresting people for entering the United States without letting those people request asylum. They can do this because you technically have to cross the border before you can request asylum.
Which means yes, there are laws on the books that conflict with each other. The Obama administration dealt with this by letting asylum seekers actually reach the officials you need to see in order to request asylum. The Trump administration has decided to deal with this by arresting asylum seekers before they can request asylum.
Maybe in Hipster Central, SoCal... But out here in the real world 1% of the infrastructure isn't even in place.
Your house doesn't have electricity?
Also my time isn't free. Spending an hour recharging just go to the 5 miles to home is a huge waste
What are you doing when your car is parked overnight? 'Cause that's when it will be recharged >95% of the time.
If someone manages to produce hydrogen from seawater cost effectively, battery cars are effectively dead.
Storage. Hydrogen leaks through everything. It even leaks through the metal that the fuel tank is made of. This isn't a solvable problem, since it's basic physical properties of the relevant molecules.
Having your fuel tank drain itself while you're on vacation and your car is parked for a couple weeks is a rather inconvenient thing. Self-discharge on a battery isn't nearly as big a problem....and you can leave the car plugged in to top itself off.
I estimate you'd need on the order of 3 trillion gigajoules of electricity to return the Earth to average interglacial concentrations of atmospheric CO2.
This is not really a remediation system. It's a way to get some hydrogen we can use as a non-CO2-releasing fuel, with a bonus of some CO2 capture.
We'll get an equilibrium. Some of it will react as you describe. Some of it won't. It depends on exactly how much bicarbonate we are shoving into how much ocean.
What if the drones are being used to monitor the progress and the direction of the fire in order to protect a home-owner's property.
First, that's the point of having "unauthorized" in the law. If the drone has a legitimate reason to be there, it can get authorized.
Second, your property is not more valuable than other people's property that gets destroyed because you grounded the firefighting aircraft just so you could have a look-see.
Third, your drone grounding the firefighting aircraft is a fantastic way to harm that home-owner's property, since you are interfering with the ability to fight the fire.
Fourth, this entire premise is idiotic. "Monitoring" the fire does absolutely nothing to protect the property.
And to be frank, the risk is minimal. Forests are huge, and even if a drone is flying while a air tanker is dousing flames, the odds are very slim of the drone impacting the aircraft.
I'm always amused at the people who cavalierly volunteer other people to take on additional risk. "But I want cool video to put on the Internet" is a really shitty reason to add to that risk.
It should be a misdemeanor. Impact should be a felony.
Good news! The proposed law lets prosecutors charge a fine, misdemeanor, or felony based on what happens with the drone.
I wonder what the FAA thinks about this. They're the ones who control the airspace. Not the State of Colorado.
:facepalm:
Perhaps you should actually read the summary this time. You'd notice that these people who represent Colorado in the federal government are proposing a federal law.
That is, anywhere where news choppers (presumably approved) have to fly low over a scene.
They aren't. News helicopters are actually flying pretty high, using a strong zoom lens to give you that footage.
The news helicopters keep the low-altitude area free precisely because they would be a danger.
Because drones falling from the sky is what firefighters really need when fighting a fire.
Are you dumb enough to think small birds hang out near wildfires?
1) Why would they? You can't assume they'd care enough about us to do so.
2) If they did care enough, how do we know they didn't check us out?
We have a very closed ecosystem called earth so we have absolutely no idea what other forms of life could evolve in vastly different environments.
The laws of physics apply in those other environments too. And those laws create certain effects in chemistry. Those effects are required for life to appear, because you need something not-alive that can still organize somewhat before something alive can form.
So yes, we can say that liquid water (or maaaaybe liquid ammonia) are required for life, because those are the chemicals required to create the environment where life can form.
You not understanding the chemistry doesn't mean I did not do so.
We have big mouth celebrities with big out-sized opinions openly wishing death to Trump. I don't recall much of that during Obama's time.
Again, your ideological agreement provides excellent blinders.
Big mouth celebrities not only openly wished death to Obama. For example, Hannity, O'Riley and Ted Nugent on multiple occasions. Nugent was invited to the White House by Trump, demonstrating just how unacceptable these threats are.
I don't remember congress-critters advocating for mob violence against Democrats either.
Again, your ideological agreement provides excellent blinders.
Steve King is the most vocal here, with many members of the "Freedom Caucus" also advocating violence.
Oh, there's also this guy named Trump who has encouraged his rally attendees to beat protesters. But hey, he's not important or anything...
But I guess if you want to go back into history we can
...and make sure we jump over all those inconvenient years....
Lets start with the Weather Underground. You know the group with Bill Ayers that thought 30 million problematic US Citizens would need to be killed in order to achieve a communist utopia.
And they were treated as an outrageous fringe group by the liberals of the time. Y'all are watching Fox News 24/7 right now.
Or how about the Jim Crow years where Democrats fought tooth and nail to keep laws from being passed to halt discrimination against blacks. Or how about the KKK being formed by Democrats in order to intimidate blacks
So it turns out political parties are not required to always hold the same ideological position. Shocking, it's true!! There even used to be a time when Republicans were so hostile to "State's Rights" that they refused to let those states leave the Union and fought a war to keep them!!!
More recently, you'll find there was this thing called the "Southern Realignment". The South was so pissed off about the civil war that they refused to vote for anyone from the Republican party, regardless of that person's politics. The result was the Dixiecrats - Democrats in name, but significantly different ideology from the rest of the party.
Then 1964 happened.
Democrats passed and LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act. And the racists abandoned the Democratic party (or a very small number woke up to the fact that they were wrong). And suddenly Republicans started winning all across the South. So much so that Nixon had this fantastic idea called the "Southern Strategy" of using racist dogwhistles to help his campaign. And he won big. So Reagan came along and copied him - it's not like "Welfare Queens" were ever portrayed as white, despite far more whites being on welfare than blacks. Cocaine was used by whites, "crack" was used by blacks because of price. Guess which one was treated as the terrible, evil, monster-creating drug that would be the downfall of civilization if we did not destroy?
So no, you do not actually give a shit about political violence. You're quite happy at political violence against those you ideologically disagree with, as demonstrated by your inability to remember it and your dishonest attempt to pretend the political parties have not changed since the 1860s.
You're "worried" now because the political violence might be aimed at you this time.
Well, buttercup, perhaps if you gave enough of a damn to take off your ideological blinders before now, we might not be in this place.
But we both know that will not happen. Instead, you'll turn on the TV and watch guy who openly called for my death because I don't think 4-year-olds belong in cages. Or even better, you'll vote for him.
There's nothing special about zero degrees unless you want to assume "all life requires water in its liquid state"
Well, it does.
Water has unique properties that is utterly vital for life. For example, water freezes from the top-down because ice floats. That top layer of ice provides insulation that keeps the water underneath from freezing. If ice behaved like every other solid, water would freeze from the bottom up, killing everything in it before it had the chance to evolve a way to survive freezing.
And that doesn't get into the many other features of water that appear to be critical for life to exist at all.
There's some people postulating that ammonia could perform a similar role in colder planets. But this has it's own problems, such as ammonia being larger than water and not as polar. Something might have found a way to make ammonia work, but it seems unlikely.
there's also nothing special about chemical reactions, or even chemicals, if you're an intelligent magnetic eddy living on the surface of a neutron star.
There's nothing special about physical existence if you're a ghost either. That doesn't mean ghosts exist. Unless you can demonstrate a way that a magnetic eddy could become intelligent, you're just throwing out random bullshit. For example, how does it manage to maintain it's integrity, especially in the presence of the much stronger magnetic field around it? We know how things on Earth maintain their integrity when immersed in water, and it's simple, random chemistry that gives rise to it. What simple, random part of magnetism would result in a long-lasting self-organizing eddy?
No, wee think we know how to efficiently search for other technological life even if we technically can't do it yet
No, we really don't. We used to think we'd find them via radio emissions. But the one example we have (us) is getting quieter as technology advances. We have cell towers everywhere but they are way, way, way less powerful than the giant AM radio stations we used to have.
Since radio falls off at 1/d^2, you'd have to be extremely close to the source in cosmological terms to detect even our old AM and TV signals. The roughly 70 light year bubble around us where you can detect our radio signals due to how long ago we started using high-power radio is pretty close to the maximum distance it is going to be due to the weaker signals we now use. Even a 100 light year bubble is a very, very, very small distance when you're talking about interstellar civilizations.
And it's quite silly to assume an interstellar civilization would use radio to communicate. It's too slow to hold a civilization together. 8.6 years to send a message to Proxima Centarui and receive a response, and that's the closest star to us. On that timescale, the two star systems would massively diverge in culture and would no longer consider themselves part of the same civilization relatively quickly.
We see no attempts by anyone to apparently communicate with other civilizations
We've been looking for radio signals Why would they communicate via radio?
If you take us as a reasonable example of a normal location in the universe, communication via radio (or any light) with the nearest star would take more than 8 years (transmit + receive time). Which means if we did send people to Proxima Centarui, we wouldn't have one interstellar civilization. We'd have two single-solar-system civilizations. If communications takes that long, the two societies are going to diverge a lot.
On structures, we can barely resolve planets and do so via the transitory effects on their star. If there is a Dyson sphere, we won't see it because we won't see the star. If there's a ring world, we won't see it because the effects on the star are not transitory.
And that assumes Dyson spheres or ring worlds are practical enough and useful enough to be built. That's not actually clear - even with magical levels of technology, we couldn't build a Dyson sphere around Sol. There isn't enough stuff in the solar system.
There is probably no other expansive, technological civilization in the Local Group.
No other detectable expansive, technological civilization in the Local Group.
One of the assumptions of Fermi's paradox is that an advanced civilization would be communicating by RF, and that their RF signals would be extremely powerful.
But we have little reason to think this is actually true. We have one example (us) and we are using weaker and weaker RF as our technology advances. Giant AM radio stations have been replaced with lower-power FM stations, and then even lower-power digital radio stations. Even RADAR stations are weaker than they used to be. Cell towers are ubiquitous, but way, way, way less power than radio stations.
Then there's also the fact that RF is an extremely poor way for an interstellar civilization to communicate simply due to the distances involved. For example, sending a message to Proxima Centarui and receiving a response would take more than 8 years. Communications that slow is going to result in widely divergent societies. Which means you don't have one interstellar civilization, you have many single-solar-system civilizations.
So if there actually is an interstellar civilization, it's not using the technology we are looking for. We'd have to find an incidental emission (say, explosions from a giant space battle). With the size of space, we can pretty much guarantee we will not be looking in the right direction at the right time to see that emission, and the incidental nature would make the signal so extremely weak that we'd probably miss it even if we were looking in the right direction.
Silly Slashdot poster. This tyrannical government is doing what gun owners want!
You realize multiple doctors who provide abortions have been murdered, right?
That a church was recently shot up?
That the Secret Service had to investigate a lot more threats from 2008 to 2016 than previous administrations?
If you are just now fearing political violence in the US, your ideological agreement has provided excellent blinders.