Isn't the ocean, like... big?

I thought the pacific ocean was like, half the planet? And a couple of miles deep?

How far down are these cities sinking?

It's an interesting situation in Ukraine.

Ukraine has essentially run out of artillery shells and anti-missiles. That's not an absolute measure, but effectively Russia is missile striking all the infrastructure in Ukraine, notably power generation facilities, with impunity.

The Russians are also slowly taking territory. You might have heard about the recent fall of Avdiivka, which is officially a win for Russia except that Ukraine made it a very expensive piece of real estate. I've heard one estimate that Russian casualties are 10:1 against Ukrainian, so it's really a win for Ukraine. Except that Russia has so many people it can throw into the war effort it might not make a difference.

On the flip side, Ukraine has damaged several oil processing facilities inside Russia 200 miles East of Moscow. Two soldiers carrying small drones in a backpack can hike across the border, deliver a small munition (probably more than a hand grenade but not much more) right to the vertical distillation column using video feedback for targeting, and the distillation column is an integral part of the process and the most difficult piece to repair.

Ukraine has taken some 14% of Russian oil processing offline using this method, which is a huge bite out of Russia's federal budget. Also, Russia now has to allocate resources to protecting vital infrastructure all over Russia.

Ukraine has also had good luck with water-based drones: put a bunch of munitions on a motorboat with a GPS and video feedback for targeting, paint it black and send it at night, several hundred miles with pinpoint precision to sink a warship. Russia discovered experimentally that all of their anti-whatever guns are intended for incoming missiles and other ships, and so they can't point down low enough to hit a small motorboat within striking range. You have to get the crew to shoot at the drone from the deck with rifles and hope you hit something important.

Ukraine has basically kicked the black sea fleet out of the western half of the black sea using this method.

Of note, these drones are being built in Ukraine by Ukrainians. They're not donations from other governments.

Ukraine now has lots and lots of military observers from various countries across the world looking in on the military aspects of drone warfare, which is a completely new tactic for war. If it takes an anti-missile costing $100,000 to take out a drone costing $1,000, that's an obvious advantage to the side using drones.

And no one has tried drone swarms yet either, and I think that would be the next logical step. Exhaust your opponent's anti-missile shield over the city with one wave of cheap drones, then send in the second wave with incendiary munitions to set everything on fire all at once.

And all for the price of 1 anti-missile missile.

Thought problem for the physics mavens here.

The event horizon is usually described as requiring an escape velocity faster than the speed of light, and anything that falls in can't get out.

Suppose an object came in on a parabolic or hyperbolic course, in the manner of a meteor or comet going around the sun. Ignore tidal and time dilation effects for the moment because that's something the object will experience and I want to view this from a reference frame outside the black hole.

Suppose the orbit of the object goes inside the event horizon at an angle, so that the object wouldn't intersect the singularity at the middle.

Would it come out again?

In Newtonian terms the object would speed up as it approached the black hole and crossed the horizon, and it could never exceed or attain the speed of light, but would get kinetic energy in excess of it's actual speed. Things appear heavier as they are accelerated, and more and more of the energy is put into mass while the velocity only approaches the speed of light.

Coming around the object the same process happens in reverse, so the object isn't travelling at escape velocity but the pull from the singularity takes mass energy instead of slowing the object down. Without slowing down appreciably, the object should pop back out of the black hole and continue on it's original course.

Is there a good reference that points out the fallacy in this argument? I'm just a little surprised that there's this area in space that will grab anything that flies by and suck it in permanently. Especially since the black hole has roughly the same mass as a regular star, so flying around in the vicinity should be no more difficult than flying around in the vicinity of a typical star.

(I've been looking into whether the universe is computable, and the existence of boundary discontinuities 'kinda throws a wrench into those theories.)

Is there a good reference online that explains this?

I wish you wouldn't dox people like that.

He writes a comic, it's funny, and he pokes fun at your team. Lighten up, allow other people to say things, and respond.

The only purpose for doing it is to cause him suffering.

For any people here with a background in philosophy, this meets the definition of evil: doing something to someone else that, if it were done to you, would cause you suffering.

Just stop. Instead of suffering, try causing more good in the world.

Faxing is better. Powders and simple devices can be sent by letter, and politicians have to watch out for that.

Faxing means you're likely to be in a place that has a fax, ie a business, and if you put your thoughts on a letter with corporate logo then that's even better.

And yeah, faxing is very old school, but it's still used in a lot of down-to-earth places, the kind of grass-roots companies that politicians like to cultivate.

Do that and you'll get slammed. Suppose you call someone out who *didn't* use AI to write their paper, or suppose you call out someone who used the AI as a crutch, rewriting the AI sentences in their own words.

That's a recipe for controversy, and your reputation will/might/could take a big hit.

You mean like racist?

NATO membership requires each country to spend 2% of its GDP on defense. There are currently 32 NATO member countries, and of these only 11 are meeting this goal.

In particular Germany and France, which are #1 and #3 in Europe by GDP (UK being #2) spend less than the requires 2%.

Right now the European countries are scrambling to give weapons and armor to Ukraine. Germany is ramping up production of armaments, but will be missing it's target production by about half this year.

If Europe had kept to its NATO obligations, it would have far more weapons and armaments to spare for Ukraine, about twice as much as they've given to date.

It's looking now like Ukraine will not be able to win the war. They are out of artillery shells, and can do just about nothing except try to withstand the Russian onslaught. All because Europe got caught flat-footed after decades of poor future planning and cheating on their neighbors.

The situation is complex and nuanced, but suggesting that European policy has been sane these last few decades does not track with reality.

(And this completely ignores Europe dismantling their nuclear reactors in favor of complete reliance on Russian natural gas.)

I've looked into the details.

If standardized tests are biased against blacks, they would underpredict the success of socially boosted blacks in college, and they don't.

There were some concerns about racial bias in the 70s, with examples and counterexamples (examples of questions that blacks would easily get, but that whites would have difficulty with). I remember one specific question, "given this sentence, which choice (a,b,c,d) would be an appropriate next sentence?" and the question read: "Elton just got a new LD." and the correct answer was "He showed it to his fox." (Note that this was late 70's culture references.)

The racial biases are a concern for the SATs, they have guidelines that work to remove them, and have succeeded.

This was addressed, and modern tests are engineered to avoid this type of bias.

We have *tons* of data on this, dropping standardized tests for several years is not necessary. DEI guidelines have been applied by numerous institutions over the past several decades. We absolutely know the answer here.

The problem is that you are not trying to solve inequality, you are trying to solve inequity.

Blacks are under-represented in successful societal positions such as doctors, lawyers, legislators, business owners, and so on, and this has been touted as evidence for discrimination - strong discrimination at all levels and at an intensity that is difficult to relate to observed reality.

You're assuming that discrimination at the college level is something that should be fixed, when in fact there is no discrimination evident in the tests and in fact you should be looking further back.

Inequity is a multivariate problem based on several factors, one of which might be predjudice. Other variables might be a) preponderance of single-parent families, b) black-on-black violence, c) poor nutrition (probably related to poverty) leading to lower IQ, d) legacy discrimination such as red-line neighborhoods, e) cultural disadvantages ("acting white" is disparaged, smoking is encouraged, being tough and violent is encouraged, f) teenage pregnancy, and so on.

A multifactoral analysis can tease out the various reasons for inequity and can place a value on the relative "strength of effect" of each factor. Then we can look at how each factor works, address the factors in major order, and ask for success measurements.

I have a list of potential solutions that we can try; for example, it might be useful to have a public relations campaign (in a like manner of the "don't do drugs" campaigns) against being a single parent.

I never, ever, post my suggestions or even talk about it to people, because it goes against the narrative. Stating certain pure facts is considered racist, and no one wants to hear about the potential for solutions.

Not enough blacks (proportionally) have college educations. The solution is to lower the standards.

The answer is yes, but not in the way you think.

Abundant energy opens up the possibility of recycling by plasma separation. Basically, you vaporize any matter and create a plasma, then force the plasma into a separation channel, such as a magnetic field, where the different elements and the different isotopes of each element go to different cachements.

Much of nuclear waste is unburned fuel, which if separated and remixed would provide for more fuel without having to mine more uranium.

Of the remainder, much of it could be of use in research or medical applications if it could be purified, and plasma separation would do that handily.

And finally, if the unneeded radioactive isotopes could be concentrated, the safe storage problem becomes easier. Concentrate all the radioactive isotope in one batch, let it go 1 half life, then separate and concentrate for a new batch. Instead of waiting dozens of half lives for a huge amount of waste to become safe, you wait dozens of half lives and get half as much waste at each iteration.

I've often wondered if fusion separation could be used to recover, for example, copper and gold from human garbage. IIRC, the Kennecott copper mine ore is 0.6% copper, and is scheduled to run out in 2032. E-waste probable has more than that in copper, and probably other useful elements. Fusion separation would be wildly energy intensive, but the heat energy required might be able to be recovered to help power earlier sections of the process.

Fusion could supply that energy.

For comparison, hydrogen bombs are roughly 1000 times the power of the first atomic bombs - that's how much energy is available if we could figure out how to tap it.

The observations noted that Oumuamua was long and thin, with its length about 6 times its diameter.

Like a pencil.

Just about every other asteroid we've seen has been a round-ish rock, or two roundish rocks sticking together.

Avi Loeb has *suggested* that the asteroid might be a probe from an extra-solar civilization. This comes from Bayesian deduction, where you try to guess the prior information based on the current information.

In other words, if a normal space rock is roundish then what is the explanation for this rock being *not* roundish?

There's no known natural explanation for the formation of a long thin rock in space. Maybe possibly it could be the result of an impact, but that's a highly unlikely scenario. This leaves open the possibility that the explanation is that the object is of non-natural formation.

He didn't publish a paper on Oumuamua, he's only suggesting that inspecting *this* asteroid might be more interesting than inspecting any of the myriad *other* asteroids in the solar system that we've found.

Lacking a natural explanation for the unusual shape, maybe we should go and have a closer look?

Why everyone has to insult and disparage Avi Loeb for making suggestions is beyond me. If you don't believe him then fine - ignore him and move on with your life.

Maybe refrain from judging him and let him manage his life in the way he sees fit.

Sounds like an ironic twist, but is it relevant?

Take a look at the court filing. Regardless of whether Musk *encouraged* OpenAI to go for-profit, it seems clear that the original purpose was to make something AI that was open-source.

Here's the relevant quote from the court filing:

Here's something completely revolutionary that people could play with and make better... last year at this time the LLaMA model leaked and about 10 years of improvement and development were made in the succeeding 3 months. By open source people.

I thought everyone here was a supporter of open source?

It looks a lot like Musk has a good argument to make in this case.

It's not the age, it's the ability. For all the bad things you can say about Trump, he's still active, personable, and can carry on a conversation with people. Biden, not so much.

If you make an arbitrary cutoff point, then you're depriving yourself of perfectly capable candidates in the future. Additionally, the motivations for this is very likely aimed specifically at Trump and not a principled stance on good governance.

If you really want a ban of over 75, then let the rule take effect 12 years from now. Then you won't be called out for partisanship against one candidate.

I'd be open to banning anyone that can't pass a cognitive ability test, but there's no way - absolutely no way - that this could be administered fairly. Lots and lots of ways this could be abused, such as giving the test to weed out fringe candidates such as Vermin Supreme and Lyndon LaRouche, or giving a soft test to one candidate and a hard test to another, what to do if the candidate objects to the results and demands another test, and on and on.

(To be clear, I'm not a fan of Lyndon LaRouche or Vermin Supreme but at the same time I don't want anyone to be denied the opportunity to run for president based on something that could be unfairly hacked.)

There's just no realistic way to require a competency test for the US president.

And all the age restrictions touted by the media are political heuristics(*).

(*) Heuristic: Specific to the situation at hand, but not correct generally.

Apropos of nothing, would this be before or after the trial?