Did you think they were called that because they were hedging the hog? No, they’re hogging the hedge.

And they would’ve gotten away with it if it wasn’t for you meddling kid!

I disagree with your disagreeing.

Both

Most, but not enough.

I’m French and we mostly mearn British English in school. But then again, we’re very close to GB and Japan is very Americanized (occupation and all that). I think a country that’s halfway between them and has no privileged relationship with either should step into this conversation. Like Russia, Mongolia or Kazakhstan. However, as you might have noticed from the previous sentence, I refuse to use the Oxford comma because we don’t use it on French and it doesn’t make sense.

I feel pretty good!

Yeah, I’ve heard the nuclear interpretation from there. The number still could have a meaning tho…

The largest ring of Jupiter is just about 129 000 km of radius. The nearest Galilean moon to jupiter has a semi-major axis of 421 800 km, so the rings aren’t in any of their orbital neighborhoods.

Beside, the largest of them, Ganymede, is more massive than Mercury.

But you’re right that not all the moons would be either planets or dwarf planets, many would be asteroids.

One must imagine Pluto happy.

Four of them, the galilean moons would be. The others would be dwarf planets [EDIT not all moons, many would be asteroids].

I don’t find that this adage applies that well in politics. Yeah, I’ll assume whoever almost hit me with his car the other day was stupid/irresponsible/distracted rather than that they were attempting to murder me. Or that someone who gave me wrong directions to somewhere was mistaken rather than deceitful. That is because stupidity can explain these things, but stupidity on its own doesn’t explain becoming president.

Beside, if you assume he was being used by dickcheneys, you’re still assuming malice, just not from the same person.

As for which case his behavior would make most sense in, I won’t try to contradict you since I’m not good at analysing people and don’t enjoy trying.

I just tend to think of Trump+close collaborators as a system and assume the purpose of a system is what it does, and I don’t make too many assumptions of Trump’s exact place in this.

With people in power it’s always hard to say whether a bad thing they do is due to stupidity or ill-intent, tho I tend to favor the second hypothesis.

All of their actions did benefit a group. For Trump, most obviously, himself; but he also advanced the power of the American far-right and probably some companies thanks to lose regulations. For Bush, he clearly aimed to give more power to companies over things formerly done by the state, like hurricane relief or even the military. His vice president Dick Cheney famously profited from the Iraq war through the company Halliburton.

Many of Bush’s policies had a disastrous human cost, but they were very efficient at filling the pockets of a few shareholders. So was he an incompetent buffoon playing into the hands of the capitalists, or was he himself an evil schemer who willingly enriched those he deemed worthy allies at the expense of the rest of the world?

Same question applies to Trump. A narrative people like is that of the out of control puppet. An idiot that the Republican Party tried to use because he was attractive to their target demographic, but who ended up turning against his puppeteers and giving full reign to his folly.

But it’s also possible that he is a smart and evil man who’s particularly talented at playing the role of a madman and who saw it was working.

So basically, I have no definite knowledge of the intelligence of either man.

There’s that, and also their short lifespan (1 to 5 years). And the fact that the mother only cares for their offspring while they’re in eggs.

Forms of transmission of behaviors by imitation or communication mostly emerge in species that care for their young, like birds or mammals, because the young learns from their parents, which complements instinct. It gets stronger when they’re a social species, because they also learn from every other individual. That’s when culture begins to emerge (like how some “accents” or “dialects” can be identified in the songs of birds or whales of a same species). But a specie that isn’t social and doesn’t care for it’s young, whatever an individual learnt in its lifetime dies with it, behaviors can only be transmitted genetically edit: ^{inexact, see below} , so they’re slower to evolve.

[EDIT : I looked up some things online to make sure I wasn’t spreading disinformation (should’ve been the other way around, sorry…) and it seems some nuance needs to be added to two things;

1. Despite being usually asocial and sometimes confrontational, octopuses can occasionally display social behaviors such as signal, so they’re not devoid of inter-individual communication source

2. They seem to be able to learn from each-other to a certain extent. Source

I still think my point mostly stands, but it’s a bit shakier than I thought.]

Yeah, some infos that had to be stored really long times, like the location of buried radioactive waste, are written on paper. Because with current tech, we can make really good paper that doesn’t tear easily or rot for hundreds of years and really good ink that doesn’t fade, but we can’t make digital drives that can last nearly as long. Even regular paper and ink, if in the right conditions, may last longer than an SSD or HDD…

source 1 (Safety of Nuclear Waste Disposal)

source 2 (Nordik Nuclear Safety Research Project)

C

I paused this video to go delete my Reddit account. It is done.

Would depend how it’s achieved. The most realistic way would be through mass automation, but the question is now “who owns the machines that produce everything?” A minority controlling these means of production would mean the rest of the world is at their mercy. If they manage to maintain their ownership (though a fully automated defense force, I guess), they can have the rest of the world doing whatever they want… But what do they need these people for then? All they are is a threat, as they are prone to revolt. Genocide seems like a handy option if the elites are sufficiently ruthless, but it would be hard to put in place; there are many people in the world and they can be inventive when fighting for their lives. Beside, there would probably be several such elite groups, still divided in different country; one who starts building large armies and stacking weapons might attract hostility from their neighbors. Providing the people with their needs to pacify them? Sure, but what if they want more? Or what if they make their own automated armies with the free time they have not worrying about starvation? Keeping them occupied seems safer. Why not invent some bogus job that doesn’t actually need to be done and have them believe they still need to earn their living? That could solve the problem from the elite’s point of view. So basically, no change for the people.

With collective ownership of the means of production and an egalitarian spread of wealth, it could be cool tho. People would just do whatever they want, many would still probably undertake collective project, either to further better life of for the fun of it. There could still be forms of conflicts about how some things are managed and by whom, tho…

Early rat poison saves the early worm

The forces within an atom are very strong and complex. We can create fission chain reactions in some very radioactive elements, and we can fuse some small elements, but the amounts of such reactions we can produce is pretty restricted. Beside, a particule that exits an atom will leave at a high speed, and it’s impossible to reliably know where it goes because of the rules of quantum physics, so it’s not like you can just take a proton and leave it in a box to reuse later. What we can use is the energy produced by the fission, and that’s what nuclear plants do.