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coriny

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The EU, like almost every democracy ever, is a "representative democracy":

Representative democracy is a system where citizens vote for officials (representatives) to make laws and political decisions on their behalf, rather than voting on every issue directly, making governance of large populations more efficient while holding elected leaders accountable through regular elections. It's also called an indirect democracy and is the most common form of democracy, seen in the UK (MPs) or India (Members of Parliament).

Direct democracy has historically been completely impracticable. And even with modern comms, I still don't see a way of doing it in practice, personally. The direct democracy of ancient Greece was notoriously corrupt.

This cast doubt on the long-established view that life was made possible when organisms started producing oxygen via photosynthesis, which requires sunlight, about 2.7 billion years ago.

So ... life began because it started producing oxygen via photosynthesis? I think they oopsed the word "multicellular" or "complex". A low-grade article and a long shot of a theory, but maybe not impossible.

Shutting down and starting up again can draw more power than sleeping/other low power mode. e.g. airplane mode on a phone is probably better than turning the device off for the night. Old dumb phones used to sip power when switched off so the alarm would work.

No idea with desktops, but I wouldn't be surprised if suspend used less power than stop/start for overnight in some cases.

There is a biannual structural prediction contest called CASP [1], in which a set of newly determined structures is used to benchmark the prediction methods. Some of these structures will be "novel", and so can be used to estimate the performance of current methods on predicting "structure that we have no baseline to start with".

CASP-style assessments are something that should done for more research fields, but it's really hard to persuade funders and researchers to put up the money and embargo the data as required.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CASP

Not quite sure what you mean by "mind manifestation"? MDMA has significant impacts on your emotional and mental state, and also causes strong audiovisual hallucinations, disorientation and loss of self. What extra experiential effects would you ascribe to a classic psychedelic that aren't found in non-psychedelics?

Generally there's either the experiential (e.g. do you hallucinate?) definition, which regards MDMA, THC etc as psychedelics or the receptor-based definition, which excludes them.

You might have missed this statement in the article:

German authorities were of course also customers of the company

Though I don't think that's what the title was implying, I think it means German "nationality" rather than German "state-owned".

They seem pretty good. This summer was a bit of a mystery, but otherwise things have tracked pretty well.

<jk> Obviously you can't determine anything without taking into account the estimated/guessed factors (extent of people movement, other restrictions) included in the models versus what really happened (new restrictions, lower than expected movement). And why only select this subset of forecasts, given they are produced daily/weekly (depending on urgency)? There was an early prediction that Covid would only cause ~30,000 deaths in the UK, why wasn't that included?

Do you have a link to anything that isn't Fox-news level cherry-picking? The Spectator is notoriously not a reliable source.

I don't know if it was clinically RSI, but I had severe cramps in my forearms, shooting pains and tingling sensations from shoulders to hands for about 6 years. Switching from using MacOS laptops back to Gnome 3 (first an XPS 13, currently a Lenovo L14) fixed it in three weeks. I realised in retrospect I had been using Apple laptops for about 6 years. Never going back without a fundamental redesign.

Um, this is how banking works in the UK. Nobody cancels their bank account if they lose their card, they just cancel their card. And given someone else's card I could send them 1p within a minute (even if it's cancelled). Now I've seen this approach, it's what I'll do next time. And it doesn't involve the poster's company in any way, transferring thousands of pounds instantly within the EU is trivial.

As far as I'm aware, cars are modified for the UK market and they're not allowed to do this - I think normally a start/stop button is added and an alarm goes off if you get out of the car with it running.

I probably should have added more comment, but the point is the "Calorie is a calorie" argument as applied to diet was pretty thoroughly debunked over decade ago. Calorie counting is a poor predictor of weight, while source of calories is a much stronger predictor. However, plenty of other people have commenting with more detailed explanations as to why, so I won't go on.