I can't be bothered. @Kenosha Kid have fun.

There's a wiki page on observers with respect to quantum mechanics. Humans aren't required.

Having China and the US agreeing about something important is a welcome change from cold-war sabre rattling. — Wayfarer

Maybe read a book if you want a welcome change, instead of following politics! :yum:

Nothing cynical about. I have experience negotiating with 27 EU members and that's already a problem. I know what's going on in this field because former colleagues are doing the legwork. We're looking at another decade of useless wrangling about definitions. I suspect we'll have an energy revolution despite governments not thanks to them.

A former colleague of mine is involved in this show, which in the end it is. There's no system of accounting for carbon emissions and it's not going to be negotiated here either. That's left to career civil servants who have been at it for at least 4 years. Every negotiation, countries try to introduce exemptions, loopholes, set off mechanisms etc. just to avoid having to do fuck all.

We already have our targets from Paris and we already have stated commitments. We actually don't need COP26. We need every country to just follow up on what they've previously promised.

This latest statement from China and the USA doesn't mean anything. It has the same value as the love letters exchanged between Trump and Kim.

A devil who cheats on his wife, grabs pussy, cusses — James Riley

These aren't problems, they are nice to haves. Give me whatever big asshole is available to keep the welfare state viable in the Netherlands, instead of austerity, and I'll vote for him.

Without really understanding why, I really liked causal sets. I know too little to make an informed choice. I'm reading up on it. Interesting stuff: http://jamesowenweatherall.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/3CausalSets_v12.pdf

This discussion was merged into Cryptocurrency

There's an established meaning in political science what neo-liberal policies entail and that's basically the free capitalism thinking of the time of robber barons: minimal government and everything that goes with that such as deregulation and low taxes.

What? You've never fallen asleep during the plot of a movie? Closed your eyes on your book despite the resolution being close? Farted in public? Never been jetlagged? I'll talk to you when you're 83 and have problems going to the bathroom on your own.

I don't mind being critical about Biden but this is just bullshit.

If plank space is caused then there is a prior or underlying reason for its being. If plank space is uncaused, then there is no reason for its existence, besides the fact that it exists. And if something could be that has no prior causality, then logically, you can't conclude any reason why it exists. Meaning you cannot conclude that time did not exist prior to plank space either. — Philosophim

Just because something cannot be caused in a classical mechanical view of causality does not mean there's no reason why it exists. The problem is you keep talking about time and causality surrounding circumstances that aren't subject to those notions. It's incoherent to consider questions about time and causality surrounding the planck epoch.

Why is this news?

In addition to the alternatives to classical causality, I think there's 4/5 options open to causality/time at planck scales:

1. Time is fundamental and therefore causality is too and causality follows time.
2. Time is an emergent property and therefore causality is too and causality follows time. http://thescienceexplorer.com/universe/connection-between-dark-energy-and-time-was-discovered-physicists
3. Time is indistinguishable from causality and fundamental or time follows from causality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causal_sets
4. Time is fundamental but causality isn't.
5. Causality is invariant from time. https://mathworld.wolfram.com/CausalInvariance.html

Considering the symmetry of physical laws you'd think moving forward or backward in time is entirely possible, which is just another way of breaking causality. The mathetmatics don't care as far as I understand Feynman's explanation of it (The Character of Physical Law). Randomness can result in a decrease of entropy as well, it's just very unlikely. I don't think we really understand at this time why that is; why we only observe "moving forward in time" and an overall increase in entropy.

I strongly agree with your point that asking what came before the planck-epoch becomes incoherent because there was no notion of time to refer to on the basis of the no-boundary theory and therefore non notion of causality in the classical sense. There are options open for causality at planck scales though, which aren't base don the classical notion. Not that I have an inkling how likely any of that is. Just interesting stuff I found when researching my short story earlier this year.

In string theory, the idea is some dimensions are curled up and therefore "tiny". Meaning that only at very small scales we may hope to find proof of additional dimensions. Whatever they are, it is inconsistent with what we know about existing dimensions to think a dimension could "contain" entire timelines. The ability to construct a timeline is a consequence of spacetime (and not just the 4th dimension, you need all 4) but they are different things.

Regular base rate fallacy. How stupid can they get?

Don't gaslight me. There wasn't anything snarky about my questions.You simply aren't able to answer them. You've convinced yourself about a political system fit for nothing and fail to explain every time I've asked about it how to deal with specific problems. You don't have any idea what you're talking about with respect to political science, law or ethics. Come back when you can talk about actual solutions instead of just complaining about how shit everything is. Everybody can criticize but actually coming up with solutions is where the actual thinking is involved. If you can't evolve your thinking beyond "government bad, freedom good" then there's nothing to talk about. My questions are supposed to elicit you to think beyond weak criticism and you simply aren't capable of doing it.

Uhuh. So no plan, just naive wishful thinking. Got it. Good to know we can ignore whatever you have to say about global warming from here on out. Come back when you have actual solutions and we can have an actual discussion.

I suppose it is established by tastes, learning and experience. — NOS4A2

And nobody ever disagrees? How do you resolve disagreements?

One can develop a conscience and through it direct his actions in a manner that suits it. — NOS4A2

Is "he" the polluting neighbour? What do you mean with "direct"? Ask nicely? He asks you if you own the air or the water. "No? Then fuck off."

Describe to me what should happen moving from today to whatever target you think should be met with respect to global warming and how that would presumably come about.

And how do your propose is it established which activities hurt the environment and which don't? And what about your upstream neighbour polluting the river and air because it doesn't affect him?

I think I've asked this before once or twice but what is your solution to global warming? You've never replied so I'm left so far with three conclusions: Either you don't have a plan, can't be bothered to explain it here or believe global warming is a hoax. Would be nice to clarify.

That's enough guys. @James Riley please keep the personal stuff out of it.

All I know is that it predicted a global proletariat revolution and that never happened and isn't likely to now. — frank

Marx isn't consistent on that at all actually. Like many things he did evolve his thinking and didn't think a revolution would be likely or necessary.

I recognise most of what you say. We do like visualising our characters and NPCs in our group. I think the visual aid does help with imagining how they talk and their mannerism. And our combat was always theatre of the mind but when things became unclear we'd be able to draw a map. That's what the VTT is for if we go online.

And probably 5e isn't the best to begin with but with time strapped players, it's better to use what we know then learn a new system. My character is a tiefling sorcerer named Leithe, an acronym for The Lie. Black Dragon draconic ancestry.

I'll be DM. The players will get trapped as their real selves in a virtual world by me, making my character both PC, DMand antagonist. The game will focus around self-actualization of the character or the player. Each has expressed their dreams and aspirations, anyone taking steps to fulfil them will get either XP or other benefits - making them more powerful but either in magical in game ways or "real life" scientific ways as they distort the virtual world, depending on which actualisation they pursued (which can also happen accidentally). They are unaware of this mechanism at first and will have to discover it. Depending on which way they move (actualising as character or as a person) will get them either stuck in the world or free from the system in the long run. It's intended to raise the pill question I suppose. Since my self actualisation is "playing god" Leithe wants to remain in the system as much as possible. And that's where he starts lying, trying to nudge players to actualize as characters instead of themselves.

Another fun resource is artbreeder.com to make portraits for your characters.

See for instance my new character:

I've now found a combination that looks pretty good. Which is dndbeyond.com with a Chrome extension "AboveVTT". That last one is in alpha but works well. Saves me a ton of work compared to roll20.

Yeah, I get what you're saying. I'm going to try dndbeyond with a discord bot that supports five rolling and stuff (avrae I think) and see how that works and then just use teams or something.

The precise term would be a Confederacy, but that term (thanks to US history) has a bad rhyme to it. — ssu

It's not a confederacy either. It's entirely it's own beast, so let's just call it the union.

Yeah Frank. Why don't you go on and explain to me what the EU is. :rofl:

Well we accept Orban too but we're not silent about it.

Is there some reason you can't engage others like a normal person? — frank

You're a grown man. If you throw out comments like a five year old and subsequently whine about how I react to them I even have less of a reason to engage you normally. As is quite apparent, even in this thread, I take plenty of time to discuss things with people in a normal manner if they make at least a bit of an effort.

what was the sentence right after that in Manuel's post?

Brexit. You missed Brexit.

And in my opinion, the UK shouldn't be in that list with messed up representation in both the House of Commons and unelected House of Lords and no basically no ability to submit legislation.

Nothing useful to add as usual. Stick with your shtick to the Trump thread please.

A sweeping statement completely devoid of argumentation. Useless.

Yes, it has all these separate governing bodies and all these fancy sounding internal organizations. How much influence does the average European have over any of this?

Virtually nothing. — Manuel

I just explained how it is more representative than some EU states so virtually nothing is still more than most "democracies". So if your point is that modern democracies are not democratic enough then ok, but otherwise, this is simply not true relative to existing democratic countries.

Did the EU function well in the 2009 crisis? What about the pandemic, did the member states help each other out? — Manuel

Compared to what? I can criticise Dutch society up and down all day and point out all its flaws but at the end of the day it's a hell of a lot better than 98% of the rest of the world in most areas that matter to me. And did member states help each other out? They do so on an ongoing basis through the exchange of information, technology, capital, goods, people etc. and specifically Italy enjoys low interest rates on its bonds thanks to the ESF giving it headroom to react to the pandemic. Italy could borrow money from the ESD and received money through the Recovery and Resilience Facility during the pandemic. Did the EU and other member states initially not react to calls for help from Italy? Certainly. Everybody was unprepared for the pandemic, Italy, the EU and every other member state. But that's not a consequence of the function of the EU but a result of the gross underestimation of the risks of a viral pandemic, which underestimation we've seen in almost every country that hadn't dealt with MERS and SARS.

And Varoufakis has an axe to grind due to his role (or lack thereof really) in the Greek restructuring. Why take him so seriously? Greece and the other member states were collectively fucked by the banking industry, which claimed if Greece failed on its bonds it would cascade through Europe. Everybody feared that spectre and the resultant disintegration of the EU. Of course, Greece also got itself in that mess in the first place by window dressing its accounts through the use of off market swaps (courtesy of Goldman Sachs). Point is, it's not so black and white.

Mody, I assume you mean Ashoka Mody, is in the long list of the "euro can't work" authors at a time when support for the euro among industries, people and politicians is at an all time high. So really, who cares what he thinks? He probably makes some fair criticisms, I have some of my own especially around the introduction of the EUR but let's not pretend

At the end of the day, the EU functioned way better than the UK and the USA and worse than a few other countries.

In short, the EU has a long way to go to become democratic. — Manuel

Yeah, not really, you overestimate the democratic credentials of EU member states.

Flawed democracies in the EU:
Belgium
Bulgaria
Croatia
Cyprus
Czech Republic
Estonia
France
Greece
Italy
Latvia
Lithuania
Malta
Portugal
Slovakia
Slovenia

Or that's a sign that you're incapable of expressing yourself clearly. I'm not sure what you think I fail to understand in your post. How do you think it even relates to the discussion about the perceived democratic deficit of the EU?

Plurality of parties usually means there's either no pressing issues to deal with or there's apathy about dealing with the issues at hand. — frank

Funny how all those Nordic European countries end up being so damn progressive, totally gripped by apathy...

The EU is not the USA and it certainly isn't the USA at the time of the civil war.

Not that NATO is much better. I mean yes, the US is somewhat democratic, more than the EU now, I'd argue, but it doesn't matter, I mean they can just bombard you with propaganda and people go wild and want to go to war. — Manuel

This is a gross misconception. People just keep repeating each other that the EU is not democratic. It is, in fact, more democratic than some European states and it certainly is more democratic than the USA if only for the fact that there's a plurality of parties, meaning the representation of various different types of EU citizens is better guaranteed.

Unlike the USA, the EU is less susceptible to lobbying influence as a result of the plurality as well and requires the approval of individual Member States depending on the subject. This requires successful lobbying efforts to connect with the EC, the EU Parliament and the relevant heads of state or ministers at the same time.

Of course, part of what is often considered the democratic deficit results from the particular constitutional setup of the EU, which has two sources for democratic legitimacy. On the one hand the EU Parliament and on the other the European Council (not to be confused with the Council of Europe). The first directly represents EU citizens the second the people of individual member states. The second is an international treaty principle of equality among states and it's difficult to reconcile the two because obviously smaller countries are "overrepresented" in the European Council which can be a loggerheads with the overall will of all EU citizens. On the other hand, it is another check and balance on the exercise of power, more regularly requiring compromises.

And while the Parliament only has a weak right to propose new legislation, which the EC can ignore provided it gives reason to do so, the fact is that in almost all democracies, the majority of legislative proposals are initiated by governments and often passed with little or no resistance (either due to governing coalitions enforcing party line voting or governing majorities in national parliaments). Additionally, for each new legislative proposal by the EC a new and separate coalition/compromise must be build to pass it. The EU Parliament exercises a lot of influence on legislative proposals.

Meanwhile, voting in the European Council requires a qualified majority or sometimes unanimity.

So when people complain about the democratic deficit of the EU, it usually reflects little knowledge of how the EU works and why. Which of course is also a problem because the EU should explain what it does much better than it does now.

Wrong. https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2017/science-genetics-reshaping-race-debate-21st-century/

Edit:

Ultimately, there is so much ambiguity between the races, and so much variation within them, that two people of European descent may be more genetically similar to an Asian person than they are to each other. — Harvard

Yeah, not interested. You can find plenty on the internet.