And then there's this:

I can make some limited sense of necessary and sufficient causes, but direct and indirect? What do they mean, what is the distinction being made?

Two pythons on one page! I think we have broken the nonvenomous snake record. It must be global warming leading to an excess of hot air. :nerd: :sweat:

Innocence:— that from which one has fallen. It only has importance or even meaning from the point of view of the fallen, as the name and symbol of the paradise that has been lost.

As a parent, one knows that human innocence must inevitably be lost as the price of participation in society. One hopes and endeavours that one's child (and every child) loses their own innocence, rather than have it wrenched by another from them untimely.

You are talking rubbish.

No one has suggested that nighttime temperatures in Kuwait at night exceed those during the day, though it is conceivable that it could happen there rarely.
Your desperation to find an excuse for your obvious failure to make any kind of a case here is pathetic. I'm quite sure you are not even convincing yourself, never mind anyone else. Time to concede, or at least end the futile continuation of a lost cause.

Yet another report: a valediction for the natural world.

https://livingplanet.panda.org/en-GB/

Where is your evidence to support these statements? — Agree-to-Disagree

You just gave it to me.

From Abstract:
During the day, the temperature difference (urban/suburban minus versus governorates) was −1.1 °C (95% CI; −1.2, −1.00, p < 0.001) indicating a daytime urban cool island. — Agree-to-Disagree

A daytime urban cool island is produced by basic physics. Dry sand has air pockets that are a net insulator as compared to solid rock or concrete and the urban environment is therefore going to absorb more heat during the day and emit more heat during the night. Perhaps you ought to try and understand what you are reading, before trying to use it in an argument.

During the day, the temperature difference (urban/suburban minus versus governorates) was −1.1 °C (95% CI; −1.2, −1.00, p < 0.001) indicating a daytime urban cool island. At night, the temperature difference (urban/suburban versus rural governorates) became 3.6 °C (95% CI; 3.5, 3.7, p < 0.001) indicating a nighttime urban heat island.

Conclusion
If there is a UHI effect at night of up to 3.6 °C or 3.8°C then that could explain the meteorologist's claim that the number of days per year that see temperatures rise above 50C have more than tripled since the turn of the century. It is not necessarily caused directly by global warming. — Agree-to-Disagree

Well no it couldn't. On the contrary, the fact that daytime temperatures are reduced by extra absorption of heat by concrete could explain why day time temperatures have decreased on average. Except that they haven't, they have increased in spite of that extra absorption. It does explain why nighttime temperatures have increased though, but not quite to 50°C.

So you want to be surrounded by "yes men". Perhaps you should change your name to Donald Trump. — Agree-to-Disagree

Neither yes men nor no men such as yourself are of any value to a discussion.

My advice is to just let them be. Banging your head against a brick wall is useless— eventually you just have to stop. Ignore feature is helpful there. — Mikie

Forgive me, I will not take your advice. If no one shovels out the shit, then the whole thread becomes shit. If I was a mod, I would have banned, but since I am no longer a mod, I feel the need to respond to even pathetic attempts to undermine what I post, even though it is a never ending and thankless task.

so you’re irrelevant. — Mikie

I'm irrelevant too because I don't get to vote. But I notice that Dump has become of late a magnet for flies - so he seems to report and comment on in his campaign speeches of late. I immediately thought of "The Lord of the Flies', or ...

Beelzebub is the Greek version of the name Baal-zebub, a pagan deity worshipped in the ancient Philistine city of Ekron during Old Testament times. The name means “the lord of flies” (2 Kings 1:2), which is significant as golden fly images have been discovered during excavations at ancient Philistine sites. After the Philistines, the Jews changed the name to “Beelzeboul,” as used in the Greek New Testament, which means “lord of dung” and refers to the fly god that was worshipped for protection from fly bites. According to certain biblical scholars, Beelzebub was also known as the “god of filth,” which later became a term of contempt in the mouth of the Pharisees. As a result, Beelzebub was a particularly despised deity, and the Jews used his name as another name for Satan.

Tell all your fundamentalist Christian friends not to vote for this antichrist. Signs and wonders, people!

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has officially evaluated temperature record extremes of 54.0 °C at two locations, one in Mitribah, Kuwait, on 21 July 2016 and a second in Turbat, Pakistan, on 28 May 2017.

In its most intensive evaluation ever undertaken, the WMO Archive of Weather and Climate Extremes, has verified the Mitribah observation as 53.9 °C (± 0.1 °C margin of uncertainty) and the Turbat one as 53.7 °C (± 0.4 °C).

The Mitribah, Kuwait temperature is now accepted by the WMO as the highest temperature ever recorded for the continental region of Asia and the two observations are the third (tied within uncertainty limits) and fourth highest WMO-recognized temperature extremes. Significantly, they are the highest, officially-recognized temperatures to have been recorded in the last 76 years.

Full details of the assessment are given in the on-line issue of the International Journal of Climatology published on 17 June 2019.

https://web.archive.org/web/20231218172054/https://public-old.wmo.int/en/media/press-release/wmo-verifies-3rd-and-4th-hottest-temperature-recorded-earth

But Mr troll is suddenly the world expert on weather station rules on the basis of a photo.

So what next, Troll?

The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth — Agree-to-Disagree

A troll, a complete troll, and nothing but a troll. There is literally no end to your bullshit, is there?

Even if the Conservative Party has dominated the politics of post-war UK, there has been the Attlee administration, Wilson and Callaghan administrations and the fifteen years of Blair and Brown. So the Labor party has had it's share in power here. — ssu

What has changed though is trade union power. The Wilson era was the last one in which the unions held huge power and influence on policy of either party. Unions were a strong force for raising the living standards of the poor, but also a strong drag on innovation and modernisation. Socialism grows in the big factories the coal mines, steelworks, the docks, shipbuilding where collective solidarity can develop. In agriculture, tourism, catering, everyone is too spread out and isolated for it to happen.

I think you are also right that the waste of oil revenues massively contributed to the decline of manufacturing, but the unions helped too by opposing all change. Until the Winter of Discontent, followed by Thatcherism, and the great sell off.

We've been in a slow decline since WW2 and the end of Empire. Your analysis is pretty good; Thatcherism and Blairism were both about selling off all the government assets to cover up this decline, and once the assets are gone (to the extent that the health service no longer owns the hospitals it runs) nor the education service its schools), the sums stop adding up and there is "austerity". I see no prospect or serious plan for recovery, because xenophobia, which has been promoted and exploited by the right wing makes the obvious need for immigration impossibly unpopular.

The plan is, it will be an autonomously operating AI that could take over the world if it had bad intentions. — Carlo Roosen

Or good intentions, presumably. Isn't that what humans do as best they can anyway - take control of the world to adapt it to their requirements? And in building said device, I assume you in particular want to take over the world with good intentions?

So do you think that intention can arise from language processing, or do you have another system in mind that will fire up autonomous action and the language aspect will again be the tool of this autonomous intentional system?

Incidentally, just don't put links to your work, don't talk about fund-raising, and talk sensibly about what you are interested in, and there will be no problems. This is an ad free site paid for by the owner and members' donations, and people are sensitive about it. If you are not exploiting us or disrupting us, there will be no bother. Move on from the rules and warnings, and have the interesting discussion, and things will be fine, apart from being called an idiot now and then ... that happens to everyone.

You have not really illuminated me as to what you mean by intelligence, but I infer from what you say, that you mean language manipulation. In which case, the answer to my second question is that your SAI will still be a tool that is functionless apart from the non-super human operator. Disappointing, but not unexpected.

https://www.pbs.org/video/are-we-at-the-tipping-point-udlvvz/

First of a series of easy-watching videos that might illuminate a little.

We have already built various superhuman devices - superhuman diggers, lifters, throwers, calculators and so on; so my first question is what you intend to mean by superhuman intelligence? It is fairly clear that current AIs are not superhuman in anything much as independent intelligences but can only function as tools under close human supervision.

So I conclude from this that intelligence as implemented in current AI is nothing more than a tool that can be used or misused by humans but does nothing of itself. So it can be great for looking for patterns in data, astronomical or medical or whatever, but is devoid of what might be called 'common-sense'.

Are you building a better tool, or a real super-human?

I think his point was that humans can and do adapt to desert conditions with extreme heat. — frank

Then why would he so triumphantly post about air conditioning sales going down? I like a charitable reading if one can be found, old man, but yours is a completely nonsensical reading, and thus fails also of charity.

volatility is the main problem, not heat. — frank

This is true of temperate zones, but near the equator heat itself is a big problem. As a minute's research would have told you.

https://publications.iom.int/system/files/pdf/mecc_infosheet_heat_and_migration.pdf
https://theconversation.com/increasing-heat-is-already-a-factor-in-human-migration-new-study-206358
https://www.climate-refugees.org/spotlight/2023/10/4/global-temperatures

etc.

You really are an idiotic argumentative twerp.

The world's hottest city whose coast can burn sea creatures to death and whose streets feature air conditioning has been branded "unliveable".

In happier times, Kuwait City was known as the "Marseilles of the Gulf", boasted a thriving fishing industry and was an attractive prospect for tourists.

But like so many of Britain's seaside towns, the hub has fallen on harder times in recent years - albeit for reasons that would be alien to anybody who has taken a shivering stroll on one of the UK's beauty spots.

On July 21, 2016, the Mitribah weather station in northern Kuwait registered a temperature of 54C (129F) – the third-highest reading in the world. The blistering Cerberus Heatwave Europe has just endured would hardly have raised an eyebrow in the Middle Eastern country.
On July 21, 2016, the Mitribah weather station in northern Kuwait registered a temperature of 54C (129F) – the third-highest reading in the world. The blistering Cerberus Heatwave Europe has just endured would hardly have raised an eyebrow in the Middle Eastern country.

https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1798490/world-s-hottest-city-where-streets-are-air-conditioned-spt

So demand for new air con units has fallen because it is so unliveable that tourists are avoiding it and the economy has declined along with new builds. But you couldn't work out that your evidence was evidence for exactly what I said, so you had to go posting it like you were in the right.

Idiot!

Why is the population of Kuwait going up so fast when Kuwait is supposedly "already more or less human uninhabitable in summer" ? — Agree-to-Disagree

I already told you. Air conditioning.

This is not a good song. But it is all this thread deserves.

The normal human body temperature range is typically stated as 36.5–37.5 °C (97.7–99.5 °F). Because movement, digestion circulation and all life processes generate heat, at ambient temperatures above 30°C the human body needs to cool itself by sweating even at rest, to avoid heat stroke. The effectiveness of sweating as a cooling response is reduced by humidity. The recommended sleeping ambient temperature is 18 - 20°C

Kuwait, in the summer (June, July, August) the nighttime temperature rarely falls below 29°C.
The average high these same months is 45°C. Without air-conditioning, Kuwait is already more or less human uninhabitable in summer. With air-conditioning, wot me worry about climate change?

https://weatherspark.com/y/150245/Average-Weather-in-Kuwait-Year-Round#Figures-ColorTemperature

I can hold my pride tight, or I can give and receive love. I can't do both. They're mutually exclusive.
— Patterner

Hours later your words mixed with another thought I am holding and together those thoughts could potentially be life changing. I take pride in being pretty egoless, but I became aware of what my ego has to do with some conflict resolution failures. Interesting. I look to seeing if a changed behavior pattern gets better results. I thought that you might like to know your words were so effective. — Athena

That is about the most profound little exchange I have seen on this site. Thank you both for your insight and honesty. I, too have to think for myself about this in my own life.

↪Outlander This comes from Tolstoy's observation about it in War & Peace? — Benkei

If it does, it somewhat betrays Tolstoy's meaning, which is that there is no drama in a happy family; this relays the same observation that is made about "the News" - that good news is always boring, as also illustrated in every fairytale ending - "... and they all lived happily ever after." Contentment is the background normal life that drama interrupts, but not because it is one dimensional or 'the same', it simply requires no response, and sets no challenge. And that is what makes it appear one dimensional from the outside.

Does one not also get compassion fatigue when disaster becomes the normal condition? Another bombed hospital, glad I'm not there.

Let's pretend ...

All I want is all the life in me to be free. — Deus

Freedom is the prerequisite for morality and immorality. All a bit Hegelian, but potentially explanatory.

Answer philosophers' questions.

If I was God, I wouldn't do what I would do if I was God.

You use the words how you want, but we are discussing Sartre's usage as translated. The way he talks - "Existence precedes essence" - So my existence as physical human flesh precedes my essence as irritating old fart. And likewise the existence of the steel precedes the essence of knifliness into which it is then formed.

The essence of knifliness is sharpness and cutting not steel, because a knife can be bronze or ceramic or flint.

I think that the essence of a knife would be the steel used to make it and that the purpose and utility is given it by man. — Sir2u

I think you have that the wrong way round. the existence of the steel is what precedes the essence (being) of the knife as a sharp edged form thereof.

the existentialism of B&N is not as soft or warm and inviting -- i.e. humanistic -- as the existentialism of EiH. — Moliere

Being and Nothingness comes out of the occupation of France by the Nazis. There is nothing soft or warm in the kind of freedom that survives under a totalitarian regime.

Resistance is the secret of joy — Alice Walker

Alas, not even that excuse!

My humble apologies to the heroic pea! My finest linguistic achievement was to be mistaken for a Belgian in Southern France one time. Like being mistaken for a drunken Irishman in Scotland.

The French do a mean chanson.

Here, if you don't know it is one of the best:

I'm not sure that he ever wrote about it. But my surmise is that the freedom that he was concerned with is peculiarly human in that it involves the complexities of language and the concept of self. That is to say that the essence of a human is something that develops out of language interaction such that one declares to oneself what one is and shall be. And that declaration gives rise to the possibility of living in good or bad faith with that declaration.

But I could be wrong.

Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. — Art48

Stop imagining that there are these two kinds of people; the patient thinkers like you, and the others, infected by religion. That is itself the root of fanaticism. The godless are also capable of horrors and especially in the name of rationality. It is the certainty of righteousness that always justifies human horrors, and everyone is capable of them.

God is well known in matters of power to favour the big battalions, and particularly those with big guns. So whenever you see a pro-life stance allied to a pro gun stance, you might want to draw some psychological inferences about what is important to such.

I'm trying to prompt "pro-lifers" to think about all this, so it seems best to talk of parents meaning, the individuals who have primary responsibility for the situation. — Ludwig V

That can only work if folks are honest with themselves about their motivation. Are pro-lifers actually full of love for infants and children, and in particular other people's infants and children? Do they surround themselves with them, support measures to improve child-care, education, etc? If they do, then arguments about the merits of this or that rule can be persuasive.

But my experience has been that most pro-lifers are not great lovers of other people's children, but misogynists and seekers of power over others. If the aim is to support patriarchal power relations, and the right to life and sanctity of life arguments are mere cover, then they will not be convinced by any counter-argument, that points out - for example the horror of a pregnant woman bleeding out and losing her baby in the hospital car park because doctors are too afraid of prosecution to treat her.

Ear-twisting chord sequences. Yum.