TheChurn

joined 2 years ago
[–] TheChurn@kbin.social 0 points 2 years ago (4 children)

Gold is rare, compared to just about every other element, in accessible areas of earth. All the gold ever discovered on Earth would fit inside a 23 meter (75 foot) cube. This is about 244 thousand tons, in all of human history.

Compare this to iron, where just the United States produces 46 Million tons in 2022 alone.

There is plenty of gold deep within the Earth - it is very dense, so it sank towards the core when Earth was recently formed - but on the surface and the proximal crust, it is not found in abundance.

[–] TheChurn@kbin.social 11 points 2 years ago

Check it out to throw in the trash. Jared Diamond's book is thoroughly condemned in anthropological and archaeological circles.

[–] TheChurn@kbin.social 6 points 2 years ago

Immigration is a football wedge issue that cannot and will not be addressed.

The solution is already known, stricter enforcement of penalties for employers of undocumented workers. But that would actually fuck a sizable portion of the economy, as these workers are vital to a lot of low-wage labor (harvesting and food processing in particular).

Instead the plants and the feds play a game where the authorities give advance notice of ICE raids, and take a couple people and the employers face insignificant penalties.

As with any other mass behavior, adjusting it requires altering the economic incentives. People come here for higher wages, they come here illegally because the legal method is expensive, arbitrary, and time-consuming, and the opportunities open to illegal migrants are still enticing enough. Stopping illegal migrants requires removing those opportunities.

That might make some shareholders a penny less wealthy though, so we can't have it. We'll just keep arguing about this for the next 500 years and accomplish nothing, just be sure to vote for US because the other side wants to do the BAD THING on immigration.

[–] TheChurn@kbin.social 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)

it's not spontaneous

Spontaneity in thermodynamics refers to a process which occurs without external application of energy. In your description, a pile of ash becoming an apple is spontaneous.

So in a contained universe, it doesn’t matter if it’s an apple releasing energy and becoming a pile of ash, or a pile of ash absorbing energy and becoming a perfectly normal apple.

The net energy is still conserved. Just going from energy to mass unlike mass to energy.

There is no mass-energy conversion in an apple burning to become ash, just the release of chemical energy from newly-formed bonds.

Regardless, conservation of energy is only one part of how the universe operates. The second operating principle is (or at least from hundreds of years of scientific inquiry appears to be) the maximization of entropy. That is the 'spreading out' of available energy. This is the reason iron rusts, rather than remaining oxygen and iron - conservation of energy alone cannot explain natural phenomena.

Spontaneous reconstruction of an ashed apple violates the second law of thermodynamics, and the Second law is no less valid than the First.

Lastly, I was not writing specifically about Penrose's views on consciousness. His entire theory that gravity is driving the collapse of a wave function, and that said collapse occurs retroactively, is untested and based on an appeal to elegance. This does not make it wrong, but it most certainly should not be taken as true.

[–] TheChurn@kbin.social 7 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Beyond consciousness, the second law of thermodynamics also implies the presence and direction of time. In fact, it is sometimes called the Arrow of Time as it appears to direct physical processes to happen preferentially in the direction that increases entropy.

A self contained universe with fixed energy and infite time will eventually see a pile of ash turned into an apple. And it wouldn’t violate a damn thing with our system of physics.

This occuring spontaneously would indeed violate the 2nd law. This is a core disagreement between classical thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, which seems to re-derive classical thermo from probabilistic arguments over system states.

I feel it also warrants stating that Penrose's theory is not widely accepted, has yet to be tested, and is based mostly on an argument to elegance - it "seems weird" for their to be uncountably infinite parallel timelines spawning at every instant. It is far too soon for it to be taken as fact.

[–] TheChurn@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago

I agree with you, but it doesn't change the implications of a police officer having a complaint and a sufficient description to follow up on it without a warrant.

It is at their discretion, same as if you called in that your grandma didn't answer the phone, they could ignore it or bust down the door. Both would be fully legal.

Court is a different matter. A judge could say there wasn't cause to search after the fact, but that won't change what the police do in the moment.

[–] TheChurn@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago (2 children)

With a complaint and a full description of the offense, the officer had cause to force entry.

Same as if someone called in a suspicious package, they wouldn't need a warrant to gain entry.

Society gives police an incredible amount of leeway.

[–] TheChurn@kbin.social 6 points 2 years ago

Floats have a wider range, at the cost of not having full coverage over that range. Even the integers in that range cannot be exactly represented

[–] TheChurn@kbin.social 11 points 2 years ago (4 children)

The problem with the principal refusing to escort the officer is then they are obstructing a police investigation, and that is a crime. It isn't fair to put this burden on them, the blame lies squarely with the police chain of command.

In fact the root problem of all things police is that once police decide to do something, even if that thing is illegal, interfering is a crime.

This is how we end up with people being charged with resisting arrest, and no other crimes that would warrant an arrest. This is also how we end up with a bunch of people live streaming George Floyd's execution, because stopping a cop from killing someone is a crime.

[–] TheChurn@kbin.social 9 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Last time they had 60 seats they waited until someone died so they didn't have 60 seats anymore.

[–] TheChurn@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago

but I don’t think the newest movie really gets across any of that beyond a surface level of setting up who the villain is.

The first movie was the first part of the book, and the first part of the book was basically just world building and introducing characters (and a lot of characters thinking about things alone).

I think there was a lot to like about the movie, it was beautiful and hopefully brings back the 'weird' sci-fi aesthetics of the pre Star Wars era, but if you aren't familiar with the book, then just first movie it isn't going to be satisfying as a story.

[–] TheChurn@kbin.social 10 points 2 years ago

The origin of Liberal is as the alternative to Absolutist - basically a monarchist.

The concept of Liberalism is compatible with either right (laissez-faire) or left economic theories. The term generally isn't used this way today, but in reality just about all Western political parties are liberal.

view more: ‹ prev next ›