NYT is spouting every headline they can imagine to shift votes toward Trump, and not just lately. Their entire editorial focus is to cast confusion on Democrats’ prospects. They should be recognized as firmly partisan and no longer serving a journalistic purpose. Unfortunate, but that’s the times in which we live.

The statistic of low Firefox use is based on accessing US government websites. Could it be that there is significantly LESS government site access by the population of users that prefer Firefox? As a corollary I recently read that game companies observed significantly HIGHER bug reporting from Linux users on Steam, not because there were more Linux-related bugs, but simply because that set of users were more likely to initiate bug reports. Of course Firefox is not Linux and Steam is not the world, but a statistic from a relatively narrow segment of the internet should not be assumed representative of the whole.

lmao

Swimming pools are normally constructed empty. They were withstanding surrounding soil before they were filled, and concrete strength increases with age (for about 90 days, typically). On the other hand, a sunken structure like a pool that is roofed over, becomes a “confined space”. Unlike a typical structure, heavier-than-air gases cannot escape from the pool. Such gases could originate from the drain system or flow from leakage outside the pool area. For examples, leaking propane or various gases from sewer lines in the vicinity. A sunken greenhouse would almost certainly be a building code violation for that reason. If you build it, ventilate it by means both active and passive and do not enter if you can’t verify that ventilation is working.

Declining birth rate is not a problem that requires fixing, it is a mercifully wise collective decision by intelligent creatures who’ve become educated and aware enough of their place in the biosphere to recognize the destructive effects of their own overpopulation. The idea that declining birth rate is decidedly NOT economic - lower birth rate does not arise among the poor and uneducated in the world.

There is no problem in today’s world that would be mitigated by increasing birth rate. I live in a region where there is a burgeoning elderly population and sometimes people say - we need more young people in this economy! But that does not mean that having more babies here is any help: by the time they are adults, the wave of excess elderly people will be gone. Economic crises are far more immediate than generational solutions - if a region lacks workers, economic forces are more effective to relocate workers than biologically growing new ones. Of course, governments often fail to anticipate needs and adjust migration policies in a timely way, or housing policies, or other such issues that create barriers contrary to the economic forces.

yes captain

This is an interesting issue - I worked as a high school teacher for a while and all the “real” teachers were always discussing the idea of critical thinking and how to teach it. It seemed to me the critical thinking lessons were simply the assignments to do something the students did not know HOW to do. The admonition “Well? Figure it OUT!” was the driving command. So in a way, life’s challenges are everyone’s lessons in critical thinking whether they realize or not. To be sure, we can prepare children better or worse for those challenges - in some degree by whether they learn rote facts in school, or spend more time in actual problem-solving and learning to do collaborative activities.

Isn’t a program of instructional videos antithetical to the concept of free thought? ;)

It is entirely logical to nationalize package deliver! We should have an organization that follows regular routes all across America and delivers whatever packages, etc. people need! We could call it something like UPS; maybe USPS?!

I get about as many deliveries by parcel post as by UPS. Nothing can stop the US Mail

The problem of democracy has always been the short attention span of the electorate. People make emotional decisions; “throw the bums out” - which of course it is sometimes right to be frustrated and take a new direction - but sometimes cooler heads must be allowed to prevail. We democratically chose to have that non-democratic institution, no different than various other government institutions that we put in authority over our day-to-day activities (police, and a whole range of other government “services”, even the IRS!).

You would think “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” -DJT Jan 2016 would have pretty much filtered the US population into two camps long ago. The “swing” population that is reflected in every poll since then is a gaggle of . . . I don’t know . . . forgetful? inattentive? I am trying not to be invective, no matter what.

Monsanto of the Sea?! This article fear-mongers vague “unintended consequences” as an ethical shortcoming of what they admit seems like a pretty solid concept for sequestering carbon - while never once mentioning the major unintended consequences of NOT trying to sequester carbon.

Capturing carbon in biomass is always a somewhat risky proposition by itself, because biomass can decompose and re-release the carbon. But even if the permanence is low right now, developing the skill of seaweed farming or any other carbon removal technology is a win - we can figure out how to increase permanence later as we scale up. No technology is fully developed at inception.

This is what I find so interesting about the topic! Hard determinism is constrained by causality. Although the future is fixed, the events that transpire are causally linked to the past, and we seem like active agents of decisions. So since I am not a gambler, I never participate in wagers even though the outcomes are predetermined (or in my case the lack of wagers is predetermined). We are having this discussion in the context of the atheism community, so I think it is worth mentioning that there seems to not be much space in either hard determinism or a multiverse for the sort of spiritual-guidance and enforcement mechanisms proposed by religions. And yet, there may be a kind of mysticism to ponder whether we consider ourselves a more or less thick outcome slice, or whether we are agents of cause in a predetermined block time.

Did I bring up quantum? Well, if I did it was in the context of explaining Bell’s “solutions” to the EPR paradox. He thought there were three, as I recall, and he ruled one of those out. He ruled out hidden variable. So multiverse or hard determinism were all he had left. He did not care for hard determinism but he did not say why, as far as I know.

in your quantum multiverse, there is an important distinction to be made between mechanically-random and quantum-random; but in my hard-deterministic universe, the distinction, while maybe of some metaphysical interest - is immaterial, since both mechanisms are striving to predict an inescapable outcome. ;)

So, we are wrestling, I think, with the phenomenon of causality. Conditions observed at time 1 are necessary to the conditions that are observed at (later) time 2. We observe the cause-effect relationship all the time - it seems to be a fundamental property of the universe. Until the 20th century, there was quite a bit of philosophical focus on determinism because the laws of physics seemed so strictly and universally applicable that physicists began to suspect a sufficiently complete observation of conditions at time 1 might predict all future conditions - even for very complex systems. Of course, we know that is not correct now; the predictive power of our theories has been constrained by such effects as quanta and chaos. But being unable to predict the outcome is not the same as the outcome being in doubt, as anyone knows who has ever watched a good detective movie. I do not know how causality is related to hard determinism - principles like quantum mechanics and chaos mathematics seem to make the path of the universe forward in time unpredictable, but they say nothing about whether we are in semi-block time (everything up until the present exists and the future does not yet exist), or block time (everything from the beginning to the end exists).

To take your example of coin flips; in the pre-20th view, a sufficient analysis of forces, positions of air molecules, etc. would give one a precise calculation of the outcome of the flip. In the post-20th view, the coin flip is unknowable until the end because not only do unmeasurably small errors in measurements make it impossible to collect sufficient data for complete analysis, but the outcomes of interactions are indeterministic. And yet, the coin lands heads or tails. So you might say (correct me if I am wrong!) that either both outcomes exist, but in different universes and when we, the observers “collapse the quantum state”, we are resolving what might have been into what is (an almost supernatural ability?), or we are perceiving a bifurcation of the universe into two separate ones; the “heads” universe and the “tails” universe. I would say that we live in block time and that our inability to predict the coin toss is a limitation on us, not the universe. The outcome of the toss is a condition in spacetime that is eternal and unchanging, and we will respond to it in the way it is.

In the matter of quotes about morality, some of which I made tongue-in-cheek and some of your own invention, regarding judgement for how one lives or doing good or bad–I’ll just say I have no desire for a moral principle in these considerations. The universe seems entirely impersonal and the only so-called spiritual reality we have is what we carry in our own thoughts. I think of the choice between multiverse and hard determinism as possibly an Occam’s Razor sort of choice. Can we explain the universe by referring to this one that we perceive directly, or do we need to refer to a vast host of others we cannot?

In regard to moral principles, I think there is no comfort to be had by those seeking such, within this discussion. If I say, the outcome is predetermined, so I cannot change it, so I will act from my own selfish desires - another can call me immoral. If you say, all the outcomes exist so make choices based on probability of good, then don’t the bad outcomes exist equally and the choice does not matter? In that case there can be no morality because just like in hard determinism there can be no choice. I think the middle road somehow exists; we are agent’s of causality within this one universe and it turns out how it does because of the things we do in it. The fact that we do them of necessity or of free choice is our own internal mental consideration.

I find my hard determinism so much more comforting - there was always a 100% chance I would end up right here! I am right where I am supposed to be, where I *must * be. All those other outcomes, probable or improbably though they may have seemed, they had zero chance! Mere figments of my imagination.

OK, but if I am put in a box with a radioisotope, a sensor, a hammer and a vial of poison; and I survive the ordeal; my reality will be as real to me and my wife as the other reality where she goes to my funeral too early. Each of those realities - those universes will be equally whole and complete; except for this aspect of thin-ness? If an outcome has a very low probability, in a quantum event, so that it would be remarkably “thin”, it will still be a whole separate universe with all the rights and privileges, etc.? So is thin-ness perceptible from within a universe or only a property observable from some higher vantage?

the things which happen on quantum level can affect the larger outcomes - a photon is emitted or it isn’t and we can choose actions based on that outcome. In a lot of situations, large numbers of quantum events contribute to the outcome - and I believe they refer to that as “quantum degeneracy”, basically it does not matter which quantum event(s) contribute; the outcome will be the same. So a rock behaves in ways that belie its quantum composition. But we do not know where the dividing line is; where quantum degeneracy ceases. It might happen in the nerve system that single quantum events cause bifurcations in outcome chances.

hmm . . . the existing universe; thinner in what respect? the total probability of all outcomes is 1, but in each individual spacetime, there is also an outcome probability of 1 for the future that actually transpires . . . much to contemplate here.

I think it IS that great a leap - all the steps before have been steps of magnitudes - we kept finding it was way bigger. But the multiverse idea is one of parallelism - that our universe is one of infinitely many; each way bigger that we could imagine. There IS an economy of stuff in at least THIS universe - a finite quantity, albeit mind numbingly much. My ancestors mutter “enough is enough!” lolz