Recently, whenever I come across a headline that has a certain grand sounding ring to it, I have come to expect it to promote something like a Forbes article about something well-known and fairly trivial, that they try to pump up a bit in order to attract naive souls; click-porn, in a word.
To state that there are things in the universe that we can never know about is obvious for many reasons:
1) Our model of the universe is a theory - which is to say, it is a tool that we know is inherently flawed, in that it is forever an approximation to reality. To a scientist this is what makes it exciting: there is always more to discover. But, there are some things about the universe we never will discover, probably.
2) A model is also a system of local statements - a 'system of axioms' if you like - Kurt GÃdel has a thing or two to say about this:
There are statements, in any model, that are undecidable - meaning one cannot figure out, using only logic and the theory itself, if those statements are true or false. Whether it will always possible to extend a theory so that a given, undecidable statement becomes decidable, is possibly not yet known.
- and so on. In this article, they have resorted to a bit of speculation about inflation, but they didn't need to. it is already obvious that there probably are things in the universe that are so distant, that light has not had enough time to reach us - ie more than around 13 or 15 billion lightyears. We will never be able to observe the light from the stars that may or may not exist out there. On the other hand, one might speculate that quantum entanglement or something might overcome those distances, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
As for the 'decline' of Europe, they may be decreasing in number, sure, but they are definitely increasing in wealth (positive economic growth) with the effect that wealth and power is becoming concentrated in the hands of fewer individuals. Raw population size is a poor measure of the well-being of a country, otherwise India and China would be the best places to live.
Which brings us neatly back to the original issue: An increasingly elderly population in Europe will have to rely on the productivity on a dwindling number of people of working age, unless we invite immigrants in and allow them to take part in our societies on an equal footing. We haven't really done a very good job of it so far, but it isn't too late. Plus, of course, we have to delay retirement for most people - we simply don't have the resources to support a large population of retired people. And just to forestall the comments: I am approaching 'retirement age' rapidly, but I, for one, am more than willing to go on as long as I can hold it together. Now, if only employers will wake up and change their attitudes as well.
If it was simply a message here and there, why fire him? It was probably dozens of messages all day long.
OTOH, if it was because of his performance, they would not have to refer to his use of company resources as an issue; to me, it smells more of him expressing some views or intents that were sufficiently alarming to warrant firing him. In Europe - at least where I have worked - an employer can't just fire you on a whim; unless there are very serious, disciplinary problems, you have to go through a procedure where you essentially try to rectify the problems, and only if that fails can you fire the employee.
Company equipment or not, I don't think it's ok to record my conversation without my consent or knowledge.
Privacy is something you have a right to in your own home, really. Not that I necessarily agree, but that's he way it is - the employers argument is that you are not only using their resources to do it, but any communications can, in principle, be traced back to the company, so in the extreme case the company could end up somehow being associated with something they do not agree with. A bit like using company letterhead for your private letters. No, I don't like it either.
Even moreso for those who say "We need our guns to protect against the government" while also saying "We need more government surveillance to protect against the terrorists." You're making the exact government you're claiming to need guns to protect against!
Well, try to see it from their point of view: to them and their masters, this is a win-win situation. They get the surveillance they need to keep tab on what people do, so they can target their advertising and other propaganda, and theyr get to sell more weapons. Where's the downside?
That reminds me of a Beatles song (sorry for going off topic): 'Across the universe' - it's the line 'Thoughts meander like a restless wind Inside a letter box', which I for years heard as '...like a wrestler's wind in side a letter box'. I kept seeing, with my mind's eye, Hulk Hogan sneaking around in Holywood at night, farting through people's letter boxes. Childish, I know, but there you are...
What I still can't grasp is this: apart from certain niche applications, why would anybody want a 'smart lightbulb'? And the wider question - isn't the whole IoT thing a solution looking for a problem to solve? So far, I can't for the life of me see a convincing reason to invest in the gadgets that have been proposed so far - kitchen appliances on the internet? Thermostats? I suppose home-surveillance might be somewhat interesting, but wouldn't it be rather light hearted to connect cameras looking at your private life etc directly to the open internet? "Oh, look, they've got a rather good collection of Royal Doulton statuettes, and a nice TV. And they always go away over the weekend..."
Sorry to go slightly off-topic; I sometimes envy those that can enjoy music for sustained periods of time. Listening, even to my favourite music (renaissance and baroque lute), makes my feel stressed out after a short while. However, there is one project I would like to accomplish - but it's hardly for beginners, I suspect.
I have a large conservatory in which I grow orchids, mostly. One of the problems you get in a space enclosed in glass is that important parameters like temperature, humidity and air movements can vary enormously in different locations, and it would be interesting - useful even - to have a simple network of cheap sensors, that would measure these and report them to a computer (which could be a RaspberryPi). Unfortunately, I don't have enough practical knowledge about electronics to know where to begin. I know what I could do with the data - I could have hours of fun analysing them.
I think, just like other subjects that were once taboo, like homosexuality or drug experiences, people will not surprisingly imagine all kinds of stupid things, because they have no actual experience of it and feel powerless against it. It doesn't help, when idiots in the entertainment industry exploit these false notions to create 'demons' for their storyline. The only way I can think of to combat this, is increased insight - for example through television.
People with mental illnesses are not "crazy" - at least not like they are portrayed in the media. I'm not sure it is always as simple as "some chemical imbalance" - things so rarely are. And many people live with something on a spectrum from a very wide category of "normal" to what in the extreme case is called "psychotic" - as an example, most of us have this little "voice" in our head, that sort of works as an internal commentator; to me it is a sort of conversation with myself, where I discuss aspects of what I do and feel. It is probably not difficult to imagine a situation where your life becomes full of trouble, and you start blaming yourself for bad decisions you've made - now your inner conversation becomes an argument, and you don't want to listen to that voice. Given enough stress, you may be able to convince yourself that this is not something that origniates from your own mind, and it begins to look like the kind of auditive hallucinations that are typical of paranoia. In this situation, therapy may help by educating yourself about what is really going on and by helping you make peace with your hostile inner voice.
Guidelines are for those who seek guidance; you may not be interested, but official guidelines are important in many cases, as for example in health care. And since it isn't law, you are free to ignore it as you see fit.
But we're all going to die after 80 or 90 years of life, so how do you want to spend those years?
Well I would prefer to spend as much of my life being as physically healthy and as clear minded as possible. I don't really have a thing against recreational drug use - I have done my bit in my time - but it too becomes a dull routine after a while, and it does take away from my general well-being. It certainly doesn't deserve being called 'exploring the bounds of life'; if you want to do that, try something that will really challenge you, like learning something new - a language, playing an instrument (and doing it well), wood carving or mathematics. Or go and explore a place you've never been to. Step out of yourself; taking drugs is just so much navel-grazing.
Yeah, we all know there's no such thing as climate, and anyone who claims so is a communist, democrat libertarian out to take away our guns and SUVs;-)
*Sigh* - I would so like to be mistaken once in a while, when I guess that any comments I make on certain subjects, like freedom, democracy or gun control, provoke a long list of acrimonious responses. Let me explain - and please note, I am not using hostile language, just like I didn't in my original comment.
So, I said 'morally right' to emphasize that I'm not talking about legal - quite often what is legal is not the same as 'right' or 'fair'. Legal has, at least in principle, a precise meaning: 'consistent with the law', and it can be tested in the court of law. Moral concepts like 'right', 'fair' and similar are not as precise and cannot. In essence, what I was asking was, 'Should they be doing this, really?' - and I did ask, it wasn't a statement of opinion, and it wasn't rhetorical. Perhaps the answer is 'Yes, it is right, because...'.
And the mention of the word 'Muslim' is a scare tactic? To me, the word just means 'somebody who confesses to believe in Islam'; what's the big deal? But one can hardly read the news without seeing how immigration from Muslim countries have for decades caused the locals to protest, with more and more hysterical claims about how "They" are going to impose their religion on all of us, which means that using them as an example in this context serves to illustrate another perspective. But you are right about my not being American - I live in London, I come from Denmark and I particularly enjoy the fact that London is full of immigrants, I really do. Amongst my closest neighbors are: a Sikh family, a couple of Polish families, Muslims, Hindus, etc. Oh, and some British as well. They are good neighbors.
Still, my question remains unanswered - is it right to move into an area as an organised mass of people with the express purpose of "changing things"? And if so, why is that right? I don't think answers like "Why not" and "It's legal" etc are good enough - because they basically swipe any thinking off the table. So, try to convince me that you are right.
Why indeed? The scientific community in the West are fond of Latin and (classical) Greek, because those languages were until quite recently and important part of everybody's higher education. Historically, Latin was the language of the elite - it was used by the church in the middle ages and became the shared language in a Europe consisting of many languages and dialects - try to sample, for example, the current, German dialects to get a mild taste of how difficult it must have been to communicate across regions in Europe at the time. And since the church and the monastried became institutions of learning (and later universities), a major part of getting an education was to learn Latin. It clung on until very recently in some cicles - I remember reading in the forewords for one of the latest editions of the Flora Europaea, that he editors had been through a major discussion about whether to publish it in Latin or English (in the end they decided for English). A lot of the rules governing scientific communication was decided on at a time when Europe played the dominant role, so Latin/Greek still plays a major role in things like biological nomenclature - hences the ever more strained names of dinosaur species discovered in China; it's hard to fit the square peg of Chinese words into the narrow, round hole of Latin.
So that's why Latin - but there is no reason to expect that Latin - or indeed English - will forever be the dominant language in science. A lot of very worthwhile research has been published in both Russian, Chinese and other languages, and not all of it has been translated to English. There is still a lot of Russian maths being 'discovered', for example. And there is also Ramanujan, an Indian whose mathematical genius still hasn't been fully understood - how many other geniuses are there, that we in the West haven't heard of yet?
Quite apart from the question of whether this is feasible, I think am important question is whether this is morally right? People who have lived in a cplace for generations generally get up in arms if a large group - say, muslims - suddenly stream in and want to change things; the same will apply with any other large group. They are simply newcomers, who want to impose their views on people. And, of course, isn't there something contradictory in trying to impose "Freedom" on anybody?
Does not explain why one is called thermonuclear and the other not.
No, I thought about that after I had clicked send - the crucial difference is that in a fission reaction, the explosive reaction starts with "cold" Uranium, plutonium,..., but in a thermonuclear, the big explosion does not happen until a very high temperature has been reached, hence 'thermonuclear' instead of just 'nuclear'.
I guess I'm dumb, how is a pure fission warhead not thermonuclear?
Not dumb, but you could have looked it up on Wikipedia. Never the less:
- Fission works by splitting the nucleus of large atoms, such as Uranium or Plutonium. This works according to a surprisingly simply principle, called the chain reaction, which gets stronger, the more concentrated the active element is. This means that if you take a large enough mass of the right element and squeeze it together in a small enough volume (and quickly enough), then it will explode.
- Fusion works the opposite way, by fusing together light nuclei; the perhaps surprising thing is, fusion releases energy when you fuse light nuclei, but not when the nuclei are heavier - I think it is around iron that it changes. Fusion on ly happens at very high temperature and pressure, hence the name "thermonuclear". Incidentally, the process of fusion in a hydrogen bomb is set of by a fission device.
But look the subjects up - wikipedia is probably a good place to start.
And here we go; that didn't take long. Do go on - I have long ago resigned to the fact that this whole subject is nothing more than a soap opera with the usual, highly stylised posturing and silly primadonnas doing stupid things, just in time for the cliff-hanger at the end of today's episode.
But to those who are willing to engage their intellect: this is obviously not about the constitution, but about big money interests, that are allowed to overrule the interest of civil society. There is no reason to think that if people who want guns and those who don't, were to sit down and talk it over, they would be able to reach a sensible, workable compromise, where more or less all Americans that are not totally out on a limb would be able to buy a gun will be able to, while stopping most of those who are for obvious reasons not the kind to be trusted with anything sharper than a wooden spoon. I would think that by far the most of the people who are now gun enthusiasts, will still be able to own guns, completely independently of which political or religious views you have.
At the moment literally anybody can go to an arms fair and buy guns with no real restrictions; nobody will know about it, because nobody even keeps a tab on it - even transparent schemes like when a professional arms dealer pretends that he owns, privately, 500 identical Kalashnikovs or whatever, can sell them off without performing any checks, and will probably not even be challenged by the police - how can that be right? Just grow up, people, just grow up.
Let me see - something like 90% of the American population want tighte controls on guns - certainly a solid majority. The President wants to do the right thing, morally and democratically, by introducing some really quite moderate steps to control gun availability. But somehow this is impossible, because one industry, the arms manufaturers, holds the whole country to ransom by paying politicians to oppose anything, however minor, reasonable or even symbolic, that looks like it was against their financial interests. And the really, really amazing thing is - these people and their bought politicians are not rounded up and put on trial for corruption. In all other industrialised countries in the world, what Americans call lobbying, would be called by its right name: corruption.
I won't ask why, and I won't try to argue with people; I know my comments will be attacked wildly and irrationally and I will be called 'troll' and other nice things. It doesn't matter, but I think it is important that people - in this case Americans - with sane, moderate views let their opinions be heards and felt, and that they don't allow the gun extremists to bully them into silence.
The reason that privatization may work is that government employees can't be fired
They can't? Tell that to those who have been laid off because of cut-backs and privatisations. But perhaps that is different in America than in Europe.
Slashdot Mirror
Recently, whenever I come across a headline that has a certain grand sounding ring to it, I have come to expect it to promote something like a Forbes article about something well-known and fairly trivial, that they try to pump up a bit in order to attract naive souls; click-porn, in a word.
To state that there are things in the universe that we can never know about is obvious for many reasons:
1) Our model of the universe is a theory - which is to say, it is a tool that we know is inherently flawed, in that it is forever an approximation to reality. To a scientist this is what makes it exciting: there is always more to discover. But, there are some things about the universe we never will discover, probably.
2) A model is also a system of local statements - a 'system of axioms' if you like - Kurt GÃdel has a thing or two to say about this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
There are statements, in any model, that are undecidable - meaning one cannot figure out, using only logic and the theory itself, if those statements are true or false. Whether it will always possible to extend a theory so that a given, undecidable statement becomes decidable, is possibly not yet known.
- and so on. In this article, they have resorted to a bit of speculation about inflation, but they didn't need to. it is already obvious that there probably are things in the universe that are so distant, that light has not had enough time to reach us - ie more than around 13 or 15 billion lightyears. We will never be able to observe the light from the stars that may or may not exist out there. On the other hand, one might speculate that quantum entanglement or something might overcome those distances, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
Solar's cool and all, ...
Speaking of which - it would potentially be worth putting solar panels on the sunny side of a kite.
As for the 'decline' of Europe, they may be decreasing in number, sure, but they are definitely increasing in wealth (positive economic growth) with the effect that wealth and power is becoming concentrated in the hands of fewer individuals. Raw population size is a poor measure of the well-being of a country, otherwise India and China would be the best places to live.
Which brings us neatly back to the original issue: An increasingly elderly population in Europe will have to rely on the productivity on a dwindling number of people of working age, unless we invite immigrants in and allow them to take part in our societies on an equal footing. We haven't really done a very good job of it so far, but it isn't too late. Plus, of course, we have to delay retirement for most people - we simply don't have the resources to support a large population of retired people. And just to forestall the comments: I am approaching 'retirement age' rapidly, but I, for one, am more than willing to go on as long as I can hold it together. Now, if only employers will wake up and change their attitudes as well.
If it was simply a message here and there, why fire him? It was probably dozens of messages all day long.
OTOH, if it was because of his performance, they would not have to refer to his use of company resources as an issue; to me, it smells more of him expressing some views or intents that were sufficiently alarming to warrant firing him. In Europe - at least where I have worked - an employer can't just fire you on a whim; unless there are very serious, disciplinary problems, you have to go through a procedure where you essentially try to rectify the problems, and only if that fails can you fire the employee.
Company equipment or not, I don't think it's ok to record my conversation without my consent or knowledge.
Privacy is something you have a right to in your own home, really. Not that I necessarily agree, but that's he way it is - the employers argument is that you are not only using their resources to do it, but any communications can, in principle, be traced back to the company, so in the extreme case the company could end up somehow being associated with something they do not agree with. A bit like using company letterhead for your private letters. No, I don't like it either.
And the supply of Bin Laden videos, always a ratings booster, has been rather spotty lately.
I wouldn't be so sure - see what I discovered on my Linux box:
$ ls -lp /bin ... /etc/alternatives/ksh ...
total 13720
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 21 Jan 9 2014 ksh ->
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1504944 Jan 8 2013 ksh93
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 140 Sep 26 2014 laden
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 165296 Sep 8 2014 less
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 10128 Sep 8 2014 lessecho
Sinister, wouldn't you agree?
Did you know that Donald J Trump has a full secret service retinue, bought and paid for by the taxpayers?
What? And they haven't killed him yet? What's happened to people's sense of duty in this country?
Even moreso for those who say "We need our guns to protect against the government" while also saying "We need more government surveillance to protect against the terrorists." You're making the exact government you're claiming to need guns to protect against!
Well, try to see it from their point of view: to them and their masters, this is a win-win situation. They get the surveillance they need to keep tab on what people do, so they can target their advertising and other propaganda, and theyr get to sell more weapons. Where's the downside?
Well, to be fair, I can see how he might inspire everybody to want to get off this planet as fast as possible.
That reminds me of a Beatles song (sorry for going off topic): 'Across the universe' - it's the line 'Thoughts meander like a restless wind ...
Inside a letter box', which I for years heard as '...like a wrestler's wind in side a letter box'. I kept seeing, with my mind's eye, Hulk Hogan sneaking around in Holywood at night, farting through people's letter boxes. Childish, I know, but there you are
What I still can't grasp is this: apart from certain niche applications, why would anybody want a 'smart lightbulb'? And the wider question - isn't the whole IoT thing a solution looking for a problem to solve? So far, I can't for the life of me see a convincing reason to invest in the gadgets that have been proposed so far - kitchen appliances on the internet? Thermostats? I suppose home-surveillance might be somewhat interesting, but wouldn't it be rather light hearted to connect cameras looking at your private life etc directly to the open internet? "Oh, look, they've got a rather good collection of Royal Doulton statuettes, and a nice TV. And they always go away over the weekend ..."
Sorry to go slightly off-topic; I sometimes envy those that can enjoy music for sustained periods of time. Listening, even to my favourite music (renaissance and baroque lute), makes my feel stressed out after a short while. However, there is one project I would like to accomplish - but it's hardly for beginners, I suspect.
I have a large conservatory in which I grow orchids, mostly. One of the problems you get in a space enclosed in glass is that important parameters like temperature, humidity and air movements can vary enormously in different locations, and it would be interesting - useful even - to have a simple network of cheap sensors, that would measure these and report them to a computer (which could be a RaspberryPi). Unfortunately, I don't have enough practical knowledge about electronics to know where to begin. I know what I could do with the data - I could have hours of fun analysing them.
I think, just like other subjects that were once taboo, like homosexuality or drug experiences, people will not surprisingly imagine all kinds of stupid things, because they have no actual experience of it and feel powerless against it. It doesn't help, when idiots in the entertainment industry exploit these false notions to create 'demons' for their storyline. The only way I can think of to combat this, is increased insight - for example through television.
People with mental illnesses are not "crazy" - at least not like they are portrayed in the media. I'm not sure it is always as simple as "some chemical imbalance" - things so rarely are. And many people live with something on a spectrum from a very wide category of "normal" to what in the extreme case is called "psychotic" - as an example, most of us have this little "voice" in our head, that sort of works as an internal commentator; to me it is a sort of conversation with myself, where I discuss aspects of what I do and feel. It is probably not difficult to imagine a situation where your life becomes full of trouble, and you start blaming yourself for bad decisions you've made - now your inner conversation becomes an argument, and you don't want to listen to that voice. Given enough stress, you may be able to convince yourself that this is not something that origniates from your own mind, and it begins to look like the kind of auditive hallucinations that are typical of paranoia. In this situation, therapy may help by educating yourself about what is really going on and by helping you make peace with your hostile inner voice.
Guidelines are for those who seek guidance; you may not be interested, but official guidelines are important in many cases, as for example in health care. And since it isn't law, you are free to ignore it as you see fit.
But we're all going to die after 80 or 90 years of life, so how do you want to spend those years?
Well I would prefer to spend as much of my life being as physically healthy and as clear minded as possible. I don't really have a thing against recreational drug use - I have done my bit in my time - but it too becomes a dull routine after a while, and it does take away from my general well-being. It certainly doesn't deserve being called 'exploring the bounds of life'; if you want to do that, try something that will really challenge you, like learning something new - a language, playing an instrument (and doing it well), wood carving or mathematics. Or go and explore a place you've never been to. Step out of yourself; taking drugs is just so much navel-grazing.
Yeah, we all know there's no such thing as climate, and anyone who claims so is a communist, democrat libertarian out to take away our guns and SUVs ;-)
If Cuba won't return the missile...
Well, it's still early days. They will probably return it once they have analysed it throughly; possibly in the form of finely ground powder.
... south korea: pick up a copy of whatever Biebers got out this year while you're at it...
Look, let's not go overboard, OK? I know, the set off a H-bomb, but we should be proportionate in our response.
*Sigh* - I would so like to be mistaken once in a while, when I guess that any comments I make on certain subjects, like freedom, democracy or gun control, provoke a long list of acrimonious responses. Let me explain - and please note, I am not using hostile language, just like I didn't in my original comment.
So, I said 'morally right' to emphasize that I'm not talking about legal - quite often what is legal is not the same as 'right' or 'fair'. Legal has, at least in principle, a precise meaning: 'consistent with the law', and it can be tested in the court of law. Moral concepts like 'right', 'fair' and similar are not as precise and cannot. In essence, what I was asking was, 'Should they be doing this, really?' - and I did ask, it wasn't a statement of opinion, and it wasn't rhetorical. Perhaps the answer is 'Yes, it is right, because ...'.
And the mention of the word 'Muslim' is a scare tactic? To me, the word just means 'somebody who confesses to believe in Islam'; what's the big deal? But one can hardly read the news without seeing how immigration from Muslim countries have for decades caused the locals to protest, with more and more hysterical claims about how "They" are going to impose their religion on all of us, which means that using them as an example in this context serves to illustrate another perspective. But you are right about my not being American - I live in London, I come from Denmark and I particularly enjoy the fact that London is full of immigrants, I really do. Amongst my closest neighbors are: a Sikh family, a couple of Polish families, Muslims, Hindus, etc. Oh, and some British as well. They are good neighbors.
Still, my question remains unanswered - is it right to move into an area as an organised mass of people with the express purpose of "changing things"? And if so, why is that right? I don't think answers like "Why not" and "It's legal" etc are good enough - because they basically swipe any thinking off the table. So, try to convince me that you are right.
Why indeed? The scientific community in the West are fond of Latin and (classical) Greek, because those languages were until quite recently and important part of everybody's higher education. Historically, Latin was the language of the elite - it was used by the church in the middle ages and became the shared language in a Europe consisting of many languages and dialects - try to sample, for example, the current, German dialects to get a mild taste of how difficult it must have been to communicate across regions in Europe at the time. And since the church and the monastried became institutions of learning (and later universities), a major part of getting an education was to learn Latin. It clung on until very recently in some cicles - I remember reading in the forewords for one of the latest editions of the Flora Europaea, that he editors had been through a major discussion about whether to publish it in Latin or English (in the end they decided for English). A lot of the rules governing scientific communication was decided on at a time when Europe played the dominant role, so Latin/Greek still plays a major role in things like biological nomenclature - hences the ever more strained names of dinosaur species discovered in China; it's hard to fit the square peg of Chinese words into the narrow, round hole of Latin.
So that's why Latin - but there is no reason to expect that Latin - or indeed English - will forever be the dominant language in science. A lot of very worthwhile research has been published in both Russian, Chinese and other languages, and not all of it has been translated to English. There is still a lot of Russian maths being 'discovered', for example. And there is also Ramanujan, an Indian whose mathematical genius still hasn't been fully understood - how many other geniuses are there, that we in the West haven't heard of yet?
Quite apart from the question of whether this is feasible, I think am important question is whether this is morally right? People who have lived in a cplace for generations generally get up in arms if a large group - say, muslims - suddenly stream in and want to change things; the same will apply with any other large group. They are simply newcomers, who want to impose their views on people. And, of course, isn't there something contradictory in trying to impose "Freedom" on anybody?
Does not explain why one is called thermonuclear and the other not.
No, I thought about that after I had clicked send - the crucial difference is that in a fission reaction, the explosive reaction starts with "cold" Uranium, plutonium, ..., but in a thermonuclear, the big explosion does not happen until a very high temperature has been reached, hence 'thermonuclear' instead of just 'nuclear'.
I guess I'm dumb, how is a pure fission warhead not thermonuclear?
Not dumb, but you could have looked it up on Wikipedia. Never the less:
- Fission works by splitting the nucleus of large atoms, such as Uranium or Plutonium. This works according to a surprisingly simply principle, called the chain reaction, which gets stronger, the more concentrated the active element is. This means that if you take a large enough mass of the right element and squeeze it together in a small enough volume (and quickly enough), then it will explode.
- Fusion works the opposite way, by fusing together light nuclei; the perhaps surprising thing is, fusion releases energy when you fuse light nuclei, but not when the nuclei are heavier - I think it is around iron that it changes. Fusion on ly happens at very high temperature and pressure, hence the name "thermonuclear". Incidentally, the process of fusion in a hydrogen bomb is set of by a fission device.
But look the subjects up - wikipedia is probably a good place to start.
Because of the Constitution? Correct.
And here we go; that didn't take long. Do go on - I have long ago resigned to the fact that this whole subject is nothing more than a soap opera with the usual, highly stylised posturing and silly primadonnas doing stupid things, just in time for the cliff-hanger at the end of today's episode.
But to those who are willing to engage their intellect: this is obviously not about the constitution, but about big money interests, that are allowed to overrule the interest of civil society. There is no reason to think that if people who want guns and those who don't, were to sit down and talk it over, they would be able to reach a sensible, workable compromise, where more or less all Americans that are not totally out on a limb would be able to buy a gun will be able to, while stopping most of those who are for obvious reasons not the kind to be trusted with anything sharper than a wooden spoon. I would think that by far the most of the people who are now gun enthusiasts, will still be able to own guns, completely independently of which political or religious views you have.
At the moment literally anybody can go to an arms fair and buy guns with no real restrictions; nobody will know about it, because nobody even keeps a tab on it - even transparent schemes like when a professional arms dealer pretends that he owns, privately, 500 identical Kalashnikovs or whatever, can sell them off without performing any checks, and will probably not even be challenged by the police - how can that be right? Just grow up, people, just grow up.
Let me see - something like 90% of the American population want tighte controls on guns - certainly a solid majority. The President wants to do the right thing, morally and democratically, by introducing some really quite moderate steps to control gun availability. But somehow this is impossible, because one industry, the arms manufaturers, holds the whole country to ransom by paying politicians to oppose anything, however minor, reasonable or even symbolic, that looks like it was against their financial interests. And the really, really amazing thing is - these people and their bought politicians are not rounded up and put on trial for corruption. In all other industrialised countries in the world, what Americans call lobbying, would be called by its right name: corruption.
I won't ask why, and I won't try to argue with people; I know my comments will be attacked wildly and irrationally and I will be called 'troll' and other nice things. It doesn't matter, but I think it is important that people - in this case Americans - with sane, moderate views let their opinions be heards and felt, and that they don't allow the gun extremists to bully them into silence.
The reason that privatization may work is that government employees can't be fired
They can't? Tell that to those who have been laid off because of cut-backs and privatisations. But perhaps that is different in America than in Europe.