goatsneez's comments

When looking at costs, one should keep a reference point in mind. For example, the ESA's total budget is ~7.7 billion euros, which is taxpayer money. However, the US alone spent about 1 billion dollars bombing the Houthis in three months (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/trump-ope...), and the direct military costs in Gaza alone are over 22 billion dollars (https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamhartung/2024/10/15/the-h...). The total cost of reconstruction is estimated to be over 100 billion. The direct costs of the EU's sanctions on Russia alone cost taxpayers more than 200 billion, but these are poor estimates. We could continue in this way and examine Africa, Asia, and other regions to gain perspective.

However, it would be improper to claim that the ESA's budget for this project is a matter of diverting taxpayers' money to something negative.

What was ESA going for with this PR title?

2nd law only states a direction, however, does not determine the rate of change of things. It is also related to the spontaneity of reactions. What is the role of activation energy (or other weak/strong nuclear force potential barriers due to state).

What prevents everything happening all at once (just by obeying 2nd law is there a reason?). And if there is, is there a consistent formulation of 2nd law + other law that get this problem, at least macroscopically correct?

... makes one wonder whether they also check how often the GenAI mimics the western media disinformation on entire plethora of topics (including now well busted narratives from Israel, UK, to UAE based professional "PR" firms (*double-speak)). Is it also possible that all news are these days just disinformation? Statistical data on the military and security budgets permanently growing every year into their media presence/narrative controls, as well as abysmal public perception o US 35% news trust-worthiness should not be ignored in such analysis.

The principal point being, one cannot correct just one side of the distribution, it creates bias (just think of the Google AI diffusion model disaster). So many fundamental questions are presented by these articles, which are utterly left alone, ignored or assumed into our own biases as given truths. I posit that this approach will not makes us any good in the long run, and will come to bite us in the fragile areas (looking at you Germany & France in the most recent elections).

Why do people still believe the Russia narrative? I mean, virtually every single major Russian narrative of influence over US or EU politics, media sphere, or whatever is proven by western investigative journalist wrong (of cause with convenient delay). Eg, the Biden laptop, the hacking of nuclear facilities, and list goes on and on.

We like to over-estimate the capability of Rus in this sphere. After all, the unparalleled, fine-tuned and omni present propaganda machine is in the US, self-declared, psy-ops through gaming industry, music, and movies, etc.

In summary, are there state actors influencing each other's population: Yes. Does Russia somehow hold the super-powers in this domain: No, not by any stretch of imagination. Do they spent more money on foreign interference than US +EU, not by orders of magnitude.

But the function of a boogeyman is just as important, if not more, than an accurate model of the world (I concur).

Neither of these two opinions stem from a consistent set of moral principles of freedom, which Im sure both would claim to defend. It is a logical inconsistency to be pro-freedom and yet to hold such arguments of draft as valid. The conclusion is obvious

I would like to hear under which moral and philosophical framework of freedom these opinions of state-based-slavery stand?

There is simply no logical, moral, ethical or philosophical argument under which population should not revolt and destroy the evil of elites who demand this (as Ayn Rand explains):

Of all the statist violations of individual rights in a mixed economy, the military draft is the worst. It is an abrogation of rights. It negates man’s fundamental right—the right to life—and establishes the fundamental principle of statism: that a man’s life belongs to the state, and the state may claim it by compelling him to sacrifice it in battle. Once that principle is accepted, the rest is only a matter of time.

One of the notions used by all sides to justify the draft, is that “rights impose obligations.” Obligations, to whom?—and imposed, by whom? Ideologically, that notion is worse than the evil it attempts to justify: it implies that rights are a gift from the state, and that a man has to buy them by offering something (his life) in return. Logically, that notion is a contradiction: since the only proper function of a government is to protect man’s rights, it cannot claim title to his life in exchange for that protection.

A volunteer army is the only proper, moral—and practical—way to defend a free country.

It is always nice to have measurements; the CO, CO2 volatiles are expected and predicted by models at these distances (for somewhat large enough bodies so that molecules do not simply fly away into space after sublimation). By the way, the sublimation temperature of CO ice is 25 K!

This has been stated many times and forms a unified strategic concept. So far, Russia has not done that, despite foreign weapons used in deep strikes.

This is precisely the same concept that Israel uses to strike four other sovereign countries (in addition targeting diplomatic and civilian structures) without declaring war, albeit, nobody is really striking Israel the way that UK/US is planning for Russia. Israel's military doctrine in that case is total all out nuclear war (check it).

US has been fighting proxy wars just as much if not more as the other guy. They bombed countries for less than someone striking their territory. Even destroyed several countries which had nothing to do with it.

So, what I do want to know, how is this solving anything, and who is there to benefit from this strategy (of total escalation)?

What, what kind of campaign is this?

https://www.reuters.com/world/russia-fails-rival-un-bid-nucl...

This was a good read, albeit pretty long. The major and final point, which certainly does not follow from the premises cited in this piece and which feels like a rush conclusion, is this: """ It’s time we began conceptualizing, and perhaps prototyping, computation and information in a workers’ world. It’s time to start conceiving of a new left-wing science. """

In other words, sadly, so many valid points along the way gets us only to a restatement of the "class-struggle". The current technocratic (intellectual elites) are bad, but if we replace them with "working-class" elites (in whatever new (uni)form they will be dressed in) the world will be a paradise.

I must reject the conclusion in the strongest terms while giving 100% truth to the statements for the core issues highlighted in this piece.

However, why/how is the US and EU so good at disinformation? More specifically, domestic/internal perception management in scale and effectivity, but also foreign target disinformation by the US (and EU, although EU is just simply an amplifier, not a source).

I also wonder, whether there are data/research whether this US direct disinformation against foreign actors actually does have the effect it assumes (as in this article). For instance, the Iraq 2002-2003 full scale disinformation definitely fooled and was in its entirety adopted by the Western populations at masse (apart from true journalists who were marginalized as part of this campaign), however, it was not, I submit, accepted by the Iraqi population as true. Iraqi newspapers and population understood that this is just a pretext for war (albeit there is nothing to be done about that, since disinformation is a vector entity with strong power and cultural components). This angle is much more interesting, but probably more tabu to investigate.

It is lost on me how can anyone produce such a piece of self-serving, fundamental reality disconnect. This is such a profound incompetent piece on the subject that one is left wondering whether it is just due to terminal case of ignorance, or pure propaganda/narrative intellectual verbiage. The very start would be to acknowledge depth and scale of tabu that this topic is enshrined in, its strength of a grip over EU institutions; that would be enough to even open this question to an honest analysis.

Whatever M. Draghi, or whoever else will propose will certainly not be anything that has a chance to relief the complete politic-economic paralysis that the EU is under (as the article self-servingly addresses)

It seems you are with rationalizing politics to decide the science, especially if you disagree with it; at least based on your points. Regarding 3) I did not attempt to make any larger point on climate science as such (only on climategate itself); These blatant statements simply unethical and unscientific attitudes of the leading manufactures of climate consent. These have well known context, and no need to re-interpret them.

If we stick to the climategate issue rather than commenting on our beliefs in validity of climate science as represented by the conclusions in the IPCC reports; again, these statements are standing on their own as a witness on the attitude of those authors which you cannot get from the sanitized wiki article.

.... but there are number of pearls which are not ambiguous or context dependent at all. They are blatant. Whether we like it or not, even science is a human endeavor, corrupted by human motivations (not excluding prestige, group-think, belonging, etc). This blatant admission of using political position to influence what is or is not science (rather than the facts alone) is not available in the normalized and disinfected summary on wiki.

"Who can forget Phil Jones writing to Michael Mann on 8 July 2004 ‘can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"

(https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/jul/07/hacked-c...)

This is first time I see this from the main-stream news. It is pre-posterous to think that anything will be done about this, but perhaps it will finally finds its (dominant) place in the discourse on the topic. Any serious debate about environmental pollution and damage must start and end with stern and non-apologetic numbers how these two processes/institutions dominate the said environmental effects.

This little piece is using Mencken's famous quote in application to the Israeli-Palestine conflict reaction-solution rhetoric.

I submit that this particular problem is not in any sense complex. It is made complex (indeed, on purpose, by several actors) because of the self-proclaimed double standard in applying logic, morals and ultimately international law (the negating the very values it tries to justify). In that sense we are collectively stupid in this pretend game. Nevertheless, there is nothing unclear, unknown, or complex about it.

It is like with obesity (non-medical cases), everyone knows what shall be done, but doing it is basically impossible (still, in the IP-conflict the corruption of values is unspeakable in a way that this analogy cannot begin to cover).

The truth of the matter; there is no reasoning under which such a call can be considered as a "moral" or civilized. The motivation behind is not humanitarian, on the contrary it is pure terrorism in all-encomassig meaning of the word. If you doubt that, put your-self in the situation, right now as you sit wherever, receiving this call.

Another poster asked a question: Would you prefer that they dont call? I reject this frame of reference all-together as a valid one. So far, 10k people as per UN data ~70% of them children (and there are innocent men as well, which puts as per UN estimate >90% of casualties as pure non-combatants) and women have been massacred in openly admitted and self-proclaimed extermination process, and they received no such call. Nay, they actually are actively being starved and do not even have electricity for weeks now to even being able to take the call.

Therefore, if such call is made or are made, they are exception. Most people did not receive it before being murdered. Hence, its nature is not humanitarian but the contrary, calculated terror. Any sane human not consumed by ethnic or racial hatred (for which I have not need to comment) cannot accept this argument as moral. That BBC runs this an a tone and implied morals is despicable.

Oh, the non-existing values behind which the collective west pretends to hide. It is really difficult to be westerner with conscience over the past few years especially. It is not even double standards anymore; it is at this moment arguably, purified bigotry into which the collective psychology under the dictum of relentless, all-encompassing, ever-present propaganda morphed us into.

Bigotry in a sense that the rights (to defend, self-determine, etc) we so vehemently ascribe to/for ourselves as given are in the same sentence with dumb righteousness denied to the other party/country/ethnic. What is going on?

How is it that we defend this blatant anti-pole of what we claim are our values as a collective?

What is the null hypothesis, and what is the experiment that rejects it? That seems not to be the approach. This is a philosophical stance, and as such, unless it connects to something practical it has no value.

And as it violates anything practical, any/all function and reality of modern society, it is simply a dead meat at arrival (at least for this observer).