caze
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Everything posted by caze
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the french presidential system, with the fractured nature of the parties there and the runoff thing, means that the president never has any popular support, people only vote for the winner to vote against the other guy. macron only really courted the votes of the middle class, the level of populism is pretty low there, people are either conservative or socialist. melenchon and le pen were the only populists.
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huh? populist? macron? wut?!?
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he probably only listens to billie bragg and ewan maccoll
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Extending the March 29th deadline would require the agreement of the EU 26, I think they'd probably allow it, but maybe only at the last minute, I've heard a few of their people asked about that and they don't want to commit to anything before the UK decides what they're doing with the current agreement. I suppose the UK could withdraw the Article 50 notification with the notion of having another referendum in the future and possibly re-triggering it, effectively extending the deadline. It does look like a lot of people have changed their minds, polling on a 2nd referendum is 60%ish now, most of them will surely be remain. A lot of the original leave votes were protest votes, not really ideologically driven to leaving the EU, and a lot of them probably won't bother this time or will have switched sides. Brexit fatigue will affect the leave side more than remain I think, even many hardcore brexit folks seem to be wavering now, like this guy: https://velvetgloveironfist.blogspot.com/2018/12/deal-or-no-deal.html
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yeah. there'll be a european court ruling soon, but a preliminary opinion by one of the judges says it can be unilaterally withdrawn, the EU or other individual nations can't do anything to prevent that. it would take an act of parliament though, and needs to be done before march 29th. so if there ends up being a general election the timing could get very tight.
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lol:
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there's an argument to be made that there's no good reason to send people outside of the solar system, because of the time it'll take to get anywhere, so robot only missions make sense there (even long term). there's plenty of reason to send people to Mars though, and not just because we should be colonising it (along with the Moon, and building lots of space habitats). robots just aren't smart enough to do all the work we need to do there, it's very slow and laborious when you have to program all activities explicitly in advance and have to just hope they work ok because you can't adjust anything while it's in progress due to the time lag. we've gotten quite good at doing that kind of thing, as the recent nasa missions have proven, but progress is very slow and there's a limit to what you can accomplish with it. we'll still need lots of robots and other automated stuff for Mars, because it's a dangerous environment and it's better to get them to do the construction and mining and so on, but they'll need to be controlled on site, often in real-time. we're nowhere near close to implementing autonomous robots capable of complex intelligent behaviors.
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If they did find life on Mars there would be a very robust quarantine protocol put in place when returning (as there already is when sending stuff there, to stop us contaminating Mars with our microbes). And even if there was life, it's highly unlikely it would be dangerous to us, pathogens evolve to fill a niche where they can live off other organisms, they're harmful because they hijack the cellular processes of other lifeforms; if there's anything left on Mars it would be very simple, living off chemical, not biological, processes. There's evidence of microbes on Earth which might lay dormant for thousands of years, so there's maybe a tiny chance there's some dormant stuff buried deep underground maybe (but very unlikely after millions rather than thousands of years), but even then it's a pretty tiny chance that stuff would be especially harmful. we also have a few advantages native americans didn't have when it comes to dealing with pathogens. if we're lucky we'll find evidence of past life, but that's about the best we can hope for probably.
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I'm not anywhere near an expert, nor am I trying to appear like one (not sure how you got that from my pointing out a few basic facts that can be easily found in freely available public sources, stuff you'd learn if you just casually paid attention to science journalism over the years). This is an interesting and important subject, and this is an internet discussion forum, the point of which is to discuss things.
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only the mars one mission of the current planned missions is one-way only. space x's plan depends on multiple reuse of the rockets to cut down costs, they're not just planning on sending a single rocket with a bunch of people. they won't even send the first crewed mission without first validating the fuel generation/refueling/return aspect. nasa's last concrete plan was just a boring rehash of the moon missions, go there, drive around a bit, come back (that was cancelled, their current plans are for a station in moon orbit followed by manned return to the moon, and unspecified manned mars trips after that, but that would almost certainly include a return plan too). mars one isn't credible though, might even be an outright scam, so all the serious manned missions involve coming back. I think the chances of finding viable microbes on mars are pretty slim anyway.
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invest in a dictionary, learn the meaning of words. stop believing in satanic ritual abuse hoaxes while you're at it.
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That it has an atmosphere at all is great, as they can easily extract the individual components in it (which is mostly CO2, but enough nitrogen and free oxygen to be useful for providing breathable air) and use it to create the pressurised living quarters (greenhouses can even be tailored to their crops with different pressure and composition requirements, they won't all require human breathable air, plants don't need nitrogen for example; and microbes, algae, and, or plants can be used to feed off the CO2 to create more oxygen too). There are also various non-biological means for creating oxygen from CO2, the next Mars rover, due to land in 2021, has an experiment on board to test one method out. Mars also has abundant water, mostly in the form of ice (most easily accessible at the north pole, but also under the CO2 ice cap on the south pole, and also as permafrost across the whole planet), but we also found subsurface liquid water lake this year (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-44952710), there's bound to be more of these kinds of things, as well as other areas with large quantities of subsurface water ice and glaciers. Radiation isn't a big deal either, habitation structures would be buried under a few feet of Martian regolith, which would be all that's needed to lower levels to Earth-standard. The Martian atmosphere already removes quite a lot of the radiation, there's far less on the surface than would be experienced in transit to the planet. Time spent out on the surface would probably have to be rationed so levels are kept within reasonable limits, this has all been worked out already. Eventually larger structures will be built, probably with superconducting materials generating a force-field to keep the radiation at bay. Living there would be far from comfortable for the first few decades of course, but if being difficult put humans off doing things we wouldn't have left the savannah in the first place. For the kind of people who are going to be doing this stuff, the thrill of exploration and being part of something so momentous will more than make up for the lack of creature comforts. Cutting funding to space exploration to focus on other problems is such a dumb thing people keep saying, and so easily disproved it's annoying that anyone still believes it. You do realise we can both strive to solve problems on Earth and also continue to advance in other ways at the same time, right? And not only are they not mutually exclusive, but space research and exploration, like any other form of human advancement, can have big knock-on effects in other areas too (especially when it comes to tackling climate change: from increasing our understanding of planetary science, to techniques for creating new crops and microbes, both for agricultural uses and also geoengineering for helping to reverse/slow climate change). The amount of resources we currently allocate to space is relatively tiny as well (really we should be massively increasing funding in fact). Space mining will eventually become a requirement for Earth as well, so all this work has to be done at some point, ideally we'd want to be able to do it before it becomes an urgent necessity. But even if it was taking away from our ability to fix other problems, which it isn't, we should still be doing it anyway, just in case shit on this planet goes completely tits up (whether due to our own idiocy, or some other disaster completely outside of our control).
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They're also making a live action version of Cowboy Bebop. ugh.
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could the core still be liquid? given the lack of a magnetic field... or could there just be something interfering with the convection currents preventing the magnetic fields lining up and reinforcing themselves? I have no idea how any of this works...
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It would be interesting to see what those idiots who thought he'd be better than Clinton think now... the ones who were Bernie supporters. Obviously anyone who was a Republican from the start is a lost cause.
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Nicolas Roeg, great director (Walkabout, Don't Look Now, Bad Timing, Eureka), was 90. didn't realise he was the cinematographer for some great films prior to his directing too. https://www.theguardian.com/film/gallery/2018/nov/24/nicolas-roeg-a-life-in-pictures
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incredibly dumb interview. boomers did not ruin america, in fact they had it pretty shit for most of their lives relative to kids today. they did not inherit some kind of utopia, they had far more crime, shitter access to education and healthcare, what they actually did was create a society with a far better standard of living for their children than what they grew up with. also nonsense saying they didn't have to deal with any kind of generational trauma because they weren't involved in WW2, they had Vietnam instead. other shit they had to deal with: the oil crisis, stagflation, mass social and political upheaval (including the assassinations of JFK/MLK/RK, race riots, no civil rights LGB folk either). fucking vox.
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Mandy, really liked it, after watching the trailer I was expecting it to be some kind of weird post-apocalyptic thing, but it was mostly just an 80s horror throwback with nice visuals and a great soundtrack. Cage was great.
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you've mistaken my pointing out that his certainty that the world is doomed is not supported by the evidence as optimism. I'm pretty realistic about what might be in store for us regarding climate change, and there are many possible scenarios which involve various different timescales for sea level/temperature rise, this is even according to the IPCC themselves (and there should be some scepticism about their projections too, there's a big difference between finding the cause for things that have actually happened and trying to predict the future based off possibly faulty or incomplete models, and the inherent problem of predicting the behavior of chaotic systems in general, of course that also leaves open the possibility than it could be much worse than their projections too). you're completely right that most countries are not reacting like they should be, especially with regard to the current trend of prematurely closing down nuclear plants which still have 20-40 years left on their intended lifespan (which just effectively adds many more years to the lifespans of coal and oil plants). we need to very quickly phase out all coal plants, and get started on oil plants too, this doesn't look like it's going to happen any time soon though unless there's a real change of political will. it's not all bad new though, Taiwan just voted to overturn their governments plan to phase out nuclear: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/11/24/pro-nuclear-activists-win-landslide-electoral-victory-in-taiwan/#5a4d11bb29a0 people will slowly come round to a pro-nuclear stance as it becomes increasingly obvious that targets can't be met with a renewables-only strategy. "environmentalists" will then have to come to terms with their complicity in the failure to effectively react to climate change, they are as much to blame as christian fundamentalists who believe god gave them the world to do with as they see fit. and when I said the planet will cope that doesn't mean we as a species are going to be fine, even with the least bad projections there are going to be serious consequences for millions of people. the planet itself, and life in general will be fine though, it has dealt with much worse in terms of CO2 concentrations in the distant past, it has dealt with many mass extinction events. if shit gets really bad then we'll have to adapt to the new environment, I see no reason to believe we won't be able to, even if it's going to be very bad for large numbers of people. You actually believe this? which bit, the space mining bit? of course, why wouldn't I? we already have the technical knowhow to go there and bring stuff back, work needs to be done regarding the mining technology, but seeing as we're not likely to run out of anything on earth for another 50-100 years (and much much longer for most things) there's plenty of time to figure that stuff out. the main barrier is the cost though, not the technology, but once stuff starts getting scarce down here that argument goes away pretty quickly. also yes re agriculture, ppl thought we were all doomed to mass starvation from population growth prior to the 50s/60s too, before the green revolution radically improved crop yields. there are many different avenues to continued improvements, both in terms of traditional agriculture (hardy GMOs), but also growing stuff indoors: lab grown protein, hydroponics, etc.
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Most of the problems he mentions don't actually exist though, we haven't hit peak oil, gas or coal (coal use has declined, because we're thankfully using it less), and aren't likely to any time soon. The bit about titanium was nonsense, and we're not going to run out of other metals or plastics or other resources any time soon either. Once resources do start to become scarce we can just mine asteroids and the moon. He exaggerates the degree of extinction and the impact of modern farming practices too, agriculture is very productive and has massive scope for further improvements. His arguments for reducing consumption/living standards are the usual genocidal malthusian bilge. The only real problem is climate change, and that isn't going to cause civilization to collapse, just make things shitty for a lot of people. The planet will cope fine, and we'll adapt if we need to.
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take heart from the fact that that video is filled with fake news.
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Elon Musk's Starman - Is this shitty future real wtf
caze replied to YO303's topic in General Banter
that is a great channel, thx -
new Deadwood movie was set to be filmed there too.
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