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Messages - AATW

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1
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump
« on: February 04, 2025, 06:00:05 PM »
I don't see any proof that representative experts are better.
I would have thought that it's pretty self evident that laws which affect the citizens of an entire country should be made by a group rather than an individual.
Pretty much every country has moved away from dictators or kings towards some form of representative democracy.
Societies are much more complex than they were when a king ran things, no one person can understand enough about it all to make informed decisions. That's why you have different departments in charge of different areas.
As for "one side of the other", that's a bit of a US problem where your population and government are so polarised between the two sides.
Things aren't much better here although I don't think the division is quite so extreme.

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The fact that the four years of incompetence has ended shows that the system works.
You're now talking about a different system - one where there are regular elections which can change the government if the population decides they want to change it.
We have that too, you know. That's not some unique feature of US democracy, most democracies have that. We changed our government last year.
Some would say we just changed from one lot of incompetents to a different one, but that's a different issue.

We have our problems, certainly, but we're the 6th biggest economy in the world which given by population we're just outside the top 20 in the world we're doing OK.

2
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump
« on: February 04, 2025, 12:01:00 PM »
Learn more history.
Another irony-meter explodes...

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The Ancient Greeks experimented with direct democracy and failed. They were asking people to vote on and decide directly on questions such as "Should we go to war with Sparta?"
I guess you're talking about a referendum. I have no issue with the idea that those should be used sparingly, and they mostly are. The Brexit thing was a dumpster fire - whatever side of that debate people are on, it was not a decision arrived at by a well educated and informed population who knew and understood all the issues involved. Which is why you have a government. But you have a government, not a king or emperor. Were you happy with the last 4 years of Biden as an "elected king"? That worked well, did it? You need some checks and balances and that's why you have a government.

3
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump
« on: February 03, 2025, 10:05:18 PM »
If it was left to Congress they would just argue about it and have a hard time getting the required votes and essentially do nothing.
That depends on the make up of Congress. Right now in the UK Labour have a strong majority. Which means they can basically do what they want unless a significant number of their MPs rebel. But they still have to go through the process and allow parliament to debate things before anything becomes law. I can see that your system is more efficient but the trade-off is the President can do things unilaterally which doesn't feel right in a democracy. Yes yes, people voted for him to be President but they also voted for a government which should provide some checks and balances.

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Allowing the US President great freedom to act, react, and dictate policy is partly why the US is the richest and most powerful country on earth.
No it isn't.

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This is also why the English Crown has lost an incredible amount of world power after the Monarchy decided to stop governing directly and leave most things to democracy.
No it isn't.

4
Flat Earth Investigations / Re: Solar Eclipse of Aug 12, 2026
« on: February 03, 2025, 10:00:34 PM »
It still has the same problem. If the Moon's shadow is traveling at that steep of an angle then there should be steep Southward or Northward vertical shadow movement in all eclipse shadow paths. Yet we see many with relatively horizontal Eastwards paths for the same duration.
Firstly, I can't find any horizontal ones.

https://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEatlas/SEatlas3/SE2001-25T-2.GIF

But also one factor is the latitude. This is not a very good diagram and don't take the numbers that literally, this is just to illustrate the point:



The two red lines represent the start and end point of where it hits the earth in the "y" axis - up/down. With the same difference in "y" it causes an eclipse near the equator to have a difference of about 8.6 degrees. At a more northerly latitude it's nearly 12.3 degrees. And if it was more northerly or southerly still you can see it would be even more.
Because (all together now) we live on a globe.

This is complicated and you keep on conflating you not understanding that complication with it not being possible.

5
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump
« on: February 02, 2025, 09:01:46 PM »
Basically, the president has control over the executive branch.  The part that does the actual work of implementing laws.  So as president he can dictate how those departments do their job.

Pardoning is part of the constitution and has no real limits.

But Trump is also doing things he's not allowed to do and is being stopped by the courts.
Right. Interesting.
I did hear something (possibly on The Rest is Politics podcast) about how Trump is signing executive orders with no regard to whether those things are actually legal. I guess those are the things being stopped.

6
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump
« on: February 02, 2025, 07:58:26 PM »
I don’t really understand all this executive order stuff. Why can a US President unilaterally decide policy, impose tariffs, pardon people, decide about DEI policies, halt refugee programmes etc.
You do have a government, shouldn’t these things go through that, be discussed and voted on?

The Uk system of democracy is lamentably poor in terms of how we arrive at a government. But our Prime Minister can’t strutt around like an emperor or dictator unilaterally deciding policy.

7
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump
« on: February 02, 2025, 02:50:56 PM »
Chuckle


8
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump
« on: February 02, 2025, 08:54:26 AM »
I agree but we (I'm also in the UK) can't get on our high horses too much given that we voted for Brexit and elected Trump!
I'm sure you're as sick as I am of Brexit, whatever side of that debate you were on. But it was not a decision arrived at by a well educated or informed population. It was "the sky will fall in if we leave" vs "everything will be much better if we leave". Neither side was telling the truth and people just don't care.
With Johnson - he's similar to Trump in that he has has a somewhat tenuous grasp on the truth. There are differences though. Trump just says whatever pops into his head and bases his opinions on stuff he sees on social media or Fox news - sources all carefully filtered to constantly reinforce his worldview. Johnson is better read and educated but he just says whatever he thinks sounds good and will make him popular, he genuinely doesn't care what's true and he believes he has some divine right to rule.

I used to joke that there should be a test before you can vote, as I get older I become more serious in that view. It's probably a terrible idea but it's lamentable how little people understand about the issues they're voting on.

9
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump
« on: February 02, 2025, 07:20:11 AM »
Trump was the one who made this political by immediately insisting without evidence (and incorrectly, as it turned out) that this was caused by DEI policies.
The issue for me isn’t whether he was correct or not. One of my issues with him, other than him being a narcissistic self-serving bigot, is he seems to base his opinions on gut feel and hunch. Or what he sees on social media or TV - which is all heavily filtered because of the channels he chooses to watch which all pander to his worldview.
I’d want a leader to base decisions on data and evidence, not gut feel and wishful thinking. A good example of the latter being when he said Covid was all under control and would disappear. It wasn’t and it didn’t. And he had no basis for saying it would other than that’s what he hoped would happen. Sigh.

10
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump
« on: February 02, 2025, 07:14:00 AM »
when do gas and groceries get cheaper
When all those other countries have to start paying tariffs which then have to be passed on to people in the US…er…hang on a minute!

11
Flat Earth Theory / Re: Is Mars rotating faster?
« on: January 31, 2025, 06:30:20 PM »
But one thing to note is that because the earth is rotating you're not looking at Mars from a fixed point, I guess that must have some effect in what we observe.
I think the effect would be immeasurably small (or maybe just on the edge of measurably small). Imagine drawing a line from the observers point on the surface of earth to the center of Mars at 8am, and then draw that line again from the observers point at 8pm. Those two lines will be different, certainly, but the angle distance between them will be miniscule. Less than a percent of a degree I reckon. I don't think our point of view of Mars would change drastically over the course of the day (until of course it's hidden entirely - that's a pretty big change)
Yes, thinking about it you are correct.
As we discussed in the eclipse thread, this is all a bit complicated. The rotation is a bit quicker than I'd expect but maybe there's something we're not taking in to account.

12
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump
« on: January 31, 2025, 04:34:49 PM »
50 persons qualified (based on merit) for any position, will outperform 10000 persons hired using any other metric.
Well, there's no way of arguing with made up numbers like that.

13
Flat Earth Theory / Re: Is Mars rotating faster?
« on: January 31, 2025, 04:28:24 PM »
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The Martian rotation is increasing by 4 milliarcseconds per year squared. That means the Martian day is shortening by a fraction of a millisecond per year.

60 degrees in 3 hours = 480 degrees in 24 hours, a gain of 33% in the rotational speed.

Of course, in FET it is the layers of clouds which are rotating, not the planet itself.
I'm interested what would make the layers of clouds rotate in FET if the planet itself is not.
There's a dark band in the northern hemisphere, it goes about a 3rd of the way across the surface in the 3 hours. Which is about 60 degrees.
But one thing to note is that because the earth is rotating you're not looking at Mars from a fixed point, I guess that must have some effect in what we observe.

14
Flat Earth Investigations / Re: Solar Eclipse of Aug 12, 2026
« on: January 28, 2025, 05:32:02 PM »
Weird considering the images he's been posting of flat earth eclipse paths on this thread, which are all Gleason based.
Indeed. Tom has never been troubled by the thought that one should be logically consistent

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What happens to the sun in the bipolar model? How does it go from west to east?
Literally no idea. Does it spend 6 months circling the north pole and then 6 months circling the south each year? I don't think there's any pacman stuff going on. But for me while the bi-polar FE model does solve some problems in the southern "hemisphere" it creates a load of new ones which are bigger problems for a coherent FE model. It would be interesting to see eclipse paths mapped on to the bi-polar map.

15
Flat Earth Investigations / Re: Solar Eclipse of Aug 12, 2026
« on: January 28, 2025, 11:43:32 AM »
And it's notable that he hasn't shown how eclipses work on a Flat Earth or how the details of the path of totality are calculated.

To Tom's credit, he's one of the few flat earthers who actually commits to a map. Of course, the map he commits to is explicitly falsified - it's the Gleason map, which is falsified by observing the southern celestial pole overnight from 2 countries - south african and brazil (you could of course use argentina or chile or any other number of southern-hemisphere countries, those are just the first that come to mind).
I think Tom now favours the bi-polar model. The issue is there is on FE map which works with movements of the sun, known distances between places, flight times and so on. Obviously the reason for that is any flat earth map has to be a projection of the reality of a globe, that necessarily distorts things. But as I said maybe historic eclipse paths can be used to construct a FE map which does work.

16
Flat Earth Investigations / Re: Solar Eclipse of Aug 12, 2026
« on: January 27, 2025, 03:48:55 PM »
So these are two variables you have not been considering that will affect the shape of the path of the shadow.
This stuff is complex. You have the earth orbiting the sun, the moon orbiting the earth.
The earth is also rotating and its axis of rotation is tilted with respect to the sun.
The moon's orbit is elliptical which means it's not at a constant distance from the earth - which is why we get annular eclipses - and the plane of its orbit is also tilted with respect to the sun/earth line - which is why we don't get an eclipse every month.
Then you have the fact that the earth is a globe but slightly oblate

All of this has to be taken into account when calculating the path of totality.
Tom routinely conflates him not understanding something with the something not being possible. And it's notable that he hasn't shown how eclipses work on a Flat Earth or how the details of the path of totality are calculated. The link he provided explained how projecting the shadow on to a flat plane is done to make the maths simpler, but it also explained (in a part he didn't quote, strangely) how it then has to be projected back onto a globe and the oblateness taken into account in order to get useful results and calculate the eclipse path to the accuracy which is now possible. Only when you do that do you get results which match observations - it's a vindication of the globe model.
There is no FE way of doing this and no agreed FE map. A thought for future FE research is to use historic eclipse paths to try and make a working FE map.

17
Technology & Information / Re: Autonomous weapons systems
« on: January 25, 2025, 09:39:59 PM »
I did not bring up autonomous weapons systems within the context of "Terminators."

I'll just leave this here:

Someone still needs to put the batteries in, charge it up, switch it on or whatever. 

Or not.
Once you have an autonomous machine capable of building a machine, then what?

You didn't use the word "Terminators", but the way you used the term was clear hand wringing about "the machines" taking over. This was your original question:

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what happens when one of the autonomous weapons chooses to start eliminating the workforce and/or the other stakeholders of the company?

That's not going to happen. Certainly not in your lifetime or mine.
My gut feeling is it's going to be a very very long time, if ever. The sort of technology you're talking about doesn't exist and is absolutely nowhere near existing. Now you're flailing around talking about a very limited use case of some self-replicating cells. Which is nothing like what you first started talking about. And you're getting cross with me because you don't know what you're talking about.

18
Flat Earth Investigations / Re: Solar Eclipse of Aug 12, 2026
« on: January 24, 2025, 11:00:23 AM »
Incorrect. The polynomials in the Besselian Elements are most directly derived from a flat earth, not directly from a round earth:
Oh dear! You accidently left this bit out from the link you provided:

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We also know (via some very common spherical trigonometry formulas – or at least, as common as spherical trig ever gets!) how to “project” that lunar shadow circle on the fundamental plane up to the surface of the real Earth, thereby converting the coordinates of that shadow’s position on the plane into real latitude and longitude coordinates we can use with a round Earth. This assumes we know what part of the Earth is lying directly above that shadow’s spot on the fundamental plane; but since we know the exact time represented by our calculation (we choose it to be whatever we want), we know how far the Earth has moved in its daily rotation. A big tweak due to the equation of time (based on what day of the year it is), and a little tweak due to an ever-changing value of Delta-T, and we have our answer!

some detail snipped

And, sorry to say for flat-Earthers, if we do this based on our knowledge of the exact value of the flattening of the Earth that we've determined through the science of geodesy, we come up with values that are found in practice to be literally perfect on eclipse day. Yup, we’ve assumed a round Earth, and we’ve obtained values that match our observations to the second. That’s pretty good evidence that we’ve got the Earth’s curvature correct!

Thanks for yet more globe earth evidence, Tom. You're really good at finding this stuff!

19
Technology & Information / Re: Autonomous weapons systems
« on: January 23, 2025, 04:45:44 PM »
Go ahead and report me if you feel so offended or that I am treating you unfairly.
There's nothing to report.
Being ignorant isn't against any forum rules.
It's just a bit weird how you revel in that ignorance and get cross with people who clearly know a lot more than you on certain topics - like the multiple people in this thread who are telling you what utter nonsense you're spouting.

I've been quite clear that when I'm talking about self-replicating machines I'm talking about the sci-fi Terminator kind of thing which is how most people understand that term - that's the context in which you brought this up. They don't exist. They're nowhere near existing.

20
Technology & Information / Re: Autonomous weapons systems
« on: January 23, 2025, 12:18:03 PM »
You really need to get so cross with people because you don't know what you're talking about.
Multiple people have told you that you don't know what you're talking about.
And you just keep coming back with your terminal Dunning-Kruger doubling down on your ignorance and getting angry with people who point it out.

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