Meritocracy is what leading institutions do to achieve world class research, which is one reason why the best research is increasingly NOT happening in the USA. Meritocracy is color blind, and whatever is between one's legs does not enter the calculus of whether an idea is valid or not. Interestingly, they talk about the achievements of this institution what happened in the 50s-90s, not what they've done since 2010.

I will give DEI one thing: what it does, if properly implemented, is bring in people with diverse and varied life experiences. I'm even willing to admit that might be advantageous; oftentimes a different point of view is valuable. However, it also brings in a lot of distractions and people who occupied the bottom rungs of their class scores, and grading curves shifted lower due to underachievement--but the administration will not accept most of the class failing. The optics would be HORRENDOUS.

If I find myself or my family members needing to go under a knife, I do not want my surgeon and anesthesiologist to be diverse. I naturally want them to be the best, the most experienced professional in their field. Recognizing that it's not possible to always get those people, we have to accept that we may get someone with middling competency, who passed at the bottom of their class. Fine, they are called doctor as well. What we should not accept lowering of those standards just to bring in an underrepresented, underperforming doctor. Sorry not sorry.

Same with pilots. I don't care if the pilot of my plane is an albino, trans, polka-dotted moomoo-wearing Eskimo, as long as it doesn't distract they them performing their duty. I want them to be a GOOD, safe, competent pilot, who earned their position because they demonstrated merit, not because they were shoehorned and kept in the job by a DEI cultist in HR despite numerous repeated near-misses.

Now, yes, there are predictions that you could get a supermassive black hole launched into space, especially during a galaxy merger if the velocity of the smaller black hole exceeds the escape velocity of the combined galaxy.

But I'd be wary of assuming that it's a launched black hole, unless we can find the merger it comes from. There may be ways for such a black hole to form that cause the stars to be launched away rather than the black hole being flung, and if a galaxy isn't rotating fast enough to be stable, one could imagine that a sufficiently small galaxy was simply consumed by its central black hole. Both of these would seem to produce exactly the same outcome, if all we have is the black hole itself and a velocity.

I'm not going to say either of these is likely in this case, or that astronomers haven't examine them (they almost certainly have), but rather that we should be cautious until we've a clearer idea of what the astronomers have actually been able to determine or rule out.

It's not that much of a change, though. The USA has only ever paid lip-service to its "allies" and always seen Europe as competitors. It's not a shift from "friend" to "enemy", just from "competitor" to "enemy".

No, the executive tells the civil service what it needs to do, but the civil service is wholly independent.

Yes. Each team gets exactly three bananas to drop in "banana mode" for each race. However, banana mode can only be activated if the car is at least 2.17 seconds ahead of the nearest trailing car, unless that trailing car is outside an 18 degree cone whose vertex is at the nose of the lead car. Banana mode cannot be used if a driver has more than 16.5 MJ of energy in the liquid fuel tank, or less than 3.27 MJ of energy in the hybrid battery, nor can it be used if there are less than 37.3km of travel on the current set of tires. Both the lead and trailing car must have a velocity of at least 82.3m/s for banana mode to be active. At most one banana can be dropped between any two pit stops.

You do not appear to understand what a republic or a democracy is, so I'll ignore the last sentence.

"Independent" does not mean unaccountable to the people. The President is independent of Congress, and vice versa, but both are accountable to the people. Well, the current president doesn't seem to think so, but legally he is.

The civil service is not a part of the executive but is a co-equal branch.

You are correct. In principle, presidents have no authority whatsoever to dictate how an agency runs. The executive branch should have zero authority over the civil service, which is intended to constitute a fourth co-equal branch of government.

In the US, in principle, the status of the civil service as co-equal to, and independent of, the executive should be added to the Constitution and enshrined in law for good measure. Not that that would help much with the current SCOTUS, but a Constitutional change might possibly persuade the current government that absolute authoritatian control is not as popular as Trump thinks.

That is the idea that, in Britain, entities like the NHS and the BBC have operated under. Charters specify the responsibilties and duties, and guarantee the funding needed to provide these, but the organisation is (supposed) to carry these out wholly independently of the government of the day.

It actually worked quite well for some time, but has been under increasing pressure and subject to increasing government sabotage over the past 20-25 years.

It's also the idea behind science/engineering research funding bodies the world over. These should direct funding for grant proposals not on political whim or popularity but on the basis of what is actually needed. Again, though, it does get sabotaged a fair bit.

Exactly how you'd mitigate this is unclear, many governments have - after all - the leading talent in manipulation, corruption, and kickbacks. But presumably, strategies can be devised to weaken political influence.

I rarely use semicolons; decades ago my teachers always used a red pen to replace them with a period and capitalize the next word. I eventually just gave up and complied with their grammar regime.

Except the workforce doesn't become optional in any case. It becomes absolutely redundant, and it will be eliminated.
In a globalized capitalist society without any guardrails, it can be assumed that if there is a way to optimize something to provide greater shareholder value / CEO pay and bonuses, it will be done. Just as if something was cheaper to produce in Asia, virtually all of that work will be done in Asia; if AI does something, anything less expensively than a laborer, that work will be moved to AI. That is not to say that some workers may be kept around as tokens, or objects of abuse--bullying robots just doesn't have the same feel.; they will be like the caucasians employed in Hong Kong. Look at us! We are doing well enough to employ a useless white guy!

In this world, It's a constant race to the bottom, consequences be damned. If AI cuts the legs off the working class, and ultimately the whole economy topples as a result, they will not care, so long as the financial quarter before the collapse was the best, most profitable quarter ever.

230 prevents sites from being prosecuted. So, right now, they do b all moderation of any kind (except to eliminate speech for the other side).

Remove 230 and sites become liable for most of the abuses. Those sites don't have anything like the pockets of those abusing them. The sites have two options - risk a lot of lawsuits (as they're softer targets) or become "private" (which avoids any liability as nobody who would be bothered would be bothered spending money on them). Both of these deal with the issue - the first by getting rid of the abusers, the second by getting rid of the easily-swayed.

USENET predates 230.
Slashdot predates 230.
Hell, back then we also had Kuro5hin and Technocrat.

Post-230, we have X and Facebook trying to out-extreme each other, rampant fraud, corruption on an unimaginable scale, etc etc.

What has 230 ever done for us? (And I'm pretty sure we already had roads and aqueducts...)

I'd disagree.

Multiple examples of fraudulent coercion in elections, multiple examples of American plutocrats attempting to trigger armed insurrections in European nations, multiple "free speech" spaces that are "free speech" only if you're on the side that they support, and multiple suicides from cyberharassment, doxing, and swatting, along with a few murder-by-swatting events.

But very very very little evidence of any actual benefits. With a SNR that would look great on a punk album but is terrible for actually trying to get anything done, there is absolutely no meaningful evidence anyone has actually benefitted. Hell, take Slashdot. Has SNR gone up or down since this law? Slashdot is a lot older than 230 and I can tell you for a fact that SNR has dropped. That is NOT a benefit.

Maybe originally, but now the demand for gasoline far outstrips the amount naturally found in crude oil. That's why they invented cracking.

If one day there ever were an excess of light components in oil, they could simply transform it into higher-weight molecules. Along those lines, one of the biggest uses for natural gas is for building polymer chains.