The point was that "republic" simply means "not a monarchy". The state is a "public thing/matter", not a private concern.

The grid has been forced to change faster than the operator would have liked it to in many places, which is a good thing.

In the main, although the Spanish national blackout just over a year ago suggests that maybe it changed too fast. (Hard to use a stronger word than "maybe" because my understanding is that the report on the causes didn't really say anything).

We are a republic for this reason.

No, you are a republic because your founding fathers, probably ascribing James III more power than he really had as a post-Glorious Revolution monarch, decided that head of state should not be a hereditary position.

Whitespace is a HUMAN affordance for a HUMAN audience. If you think it looks kinda okay, that's all that's needed.

There's a bit more to it than that: consistent whitespace means that version control diffs contain relevant changes and you don't need to filter out the changes that just remove some spaces from the end of a line. This is also really a human affordance, but while there are humans in the loop either approving changes or needing to understand when something changed, it's a valuable one. And there's a general principle here which is directly relevant to LLM-generated code, which is that until LLMs have minimising the diffs as part of their goals they're going to produce diffs which take a lot of effort for humans to review.

I'm sure you're familiar with the countdown protocol, all the pre-flight checks, etc. These power up a range of subsystems, motors, etc, so that everything can be verified prior to ignition itself. The complete sequence takes a very long time. Under normal flight conditions, you can't check for absolutely everything (instrumentation is mass, and mass is the enemy) but there's still a lot. However, during an engine test, you can pack a lot more sensors in.

This is where you'd want to be spotting loose connections, pumps that aren't quite even, pressures that aren't as steady as they should be, vibrations that shouldn't be there or do not match expectations, turbulent flows, and so on.

At ignition, it takes between 3-6 seconds to go from stopped to 90% thrust. For humans, that's near-instant. For a computer sensor that's operating a million samples per second, that's 3-6 million readings. A computer performing a billion calculations per second shouldn't have much difficulty in comparing 3 million readings against model predictions and determining if both the values themselves and the rate of change at each point such a sensor exists are all good. Emergency shutdowns during those first 3 seconds are perfectly viable.

Vibrations are the ones that are likely the most interesting, because those are likely to change before something breaks, not sure how fast you can make infrared sensors, but that's also an area where things are likely to alter before point of failure.

Lazy, yes. Bright, no. If you can't trust the average person to figure out that bread that's loaded with salt and sugar isn't healthy, then you can't trust the average person to figure out what a healthy balanced meal is.

The evolutionary pattern was created because food was unreliable and energy demands were unpredictable - but high, due to the large brain. (Possibly larger than it is today, but there seems to be conflicting data there.)

Now, rationing extreme energy foods is certainly one option, but it's not a particularly satisfactory one as the energy demands vary by profession and by time within a profession. You simply can't predict what people will need and there's no way to standardise this.

There is a second option. Intense focus is impossible for beyond about 45-90 minutes at a stretch, or for more than 3-5 hours in a day. Meetings degrade intelligence, according to psychological research, so you want to minimise those. After about 7 hours, work will mostly have negative value. If you increase the amount of high physical activity for at least an hour a day (and potentially longer if the amount of soft work is minimal in the job) then you will improve physical fitness and general health, without having to substantially alter diet. However, that still only gets you so far, because a poor diet still impacts physical and mental health, and can lead to brain decline. (It's a big factor in poor brain health in children in schools.)

A third option, then, is to actually improve meal quality in schools and for workplaces to work with the food industry to provide cheaper/easier access to high quality foods that actually taste good, not merely sensible energy foods. This would seem to be target solution, with in-work exercise to supplement it.

If that turns out to be the case, we get to find out something about what reshaping the brain means.

Whilst that is perfectly true, it is questionable as to whether it is useful or necessary. If a rocket is being tested, then logically it should be heavily instrumented. If it's heavily instrumented, and the instruments are themselves competently designed, there is no obvious reason why the engine can't be auto-cut when problems start to arise. And they will have arisen long long before the explosion.

The values may have independently been "within permitted range", but if the pattern of those values doesn't make sense, then something has gone wrong. There may well also have been subsystems that were insufficiently instrumented.

"They're the experts" is often an irrelevancy - we lost TWO shuttles and crews to political decisions, when the experts on the ground were ignored. DeHavilland lost endless Comets to basically the same blunder, when political decisions by management over the reality of metal fatigue overrode analysis by actual experts. Improper monitoring and inadequate computer controls will be from a burden of costs and time (both political constraints, not engineering constraints). As, indeed, will improperly manufactured parts, improper software (anyone rememebr Arianne IV's mishap due to buggy software?), improperly-defined constraints, and inadequate quality controls.

The experts are usually either well aware of mistakes or afforded no means of detecting them.

I see no reason not to think this was anything other than a management blunder.

For some people's beliefs and values, whataboutism is all they've got to offer.

Well, that and projecting.

The even shout "aieeeeee!" when some something scares them.

If you're willing to settle for only $30 million, that should be enough to obtain a birth certificate and proof of residency in some remote village.

The CIA can't just make arrests on US soil. They actually do need the FBI to do that. That's another form of oversight.

He told his Ferengi superior that he could keep the latinum.

Yeah, I think they forgot to include "stupid" in the long list of his faults.