Wouldn’t that only be true if the third party was running a brand new slate of candidates? If the Republicans and Democrats are in secret talks to form a third party, it’s likely that a whole bunch of incumbents plan to break off from their parties to join the third party. They don’t need to win an election to do that, they could do it right now.

Of course their old parties would try to defeat them in the next election, but if these incumbents have been getting elected for many years then they’d still be hard to unseat even in a different party. Especially so if these members’ electorates are already disgruntled with the existing parties.

The thing I wasn’t prepared for was not the lack of time, it was the lack of desire to play games.

More blood for the blood god!

You are still not addressing the difference between “a portion of individuals will be capable of having a viable pregnancy at this age” with “adulthood”.

My original comment never made that claim:

By human biology, a 14 year old is sexually mature and capable of becoming a parent. The terms “child, teen, adolescent, adult” are all social constructs. We as a society have drawn arbitrary lines and even changed them over time.

The fact that we may define adulthood at 16 or 18 or 21 (depending on the country or the context) but that indigenous cultures defined adulthood (subject to completion of the rite of passage) at 12 or 13 is strong evidence of the social constructedness of these terms. That’s what I wanted to illustrate along with the biology examples showing that maternal mortality is a tradeoff and not an indicator of sexual maturity.

Mortality risk in pregnancy never goes to zero. Many other species (such as salmon, octopi, many insects, arachnids) have a mortality rate close to 100% for either one or both parents after reproduction. Ultimately it is a tradeoff over resources between parents and offspring. Many other mammals have smaller offspring than humans though they lack humans’ large brain volume relative to maternal pelvis size. Scientists have debated about the reasons for women’s small pelvis size relative to the baby’s skull size and the rough consensus seems to be a tradeoff between intelligence and walking/running ability as well as agility.

Your definition of sexual maturity would seem to imply that the optimal time to have children is when a woman’s maternal mortality risk is minimized but that assumes all other risks remain constant over time. They do not, especially not in the past when famine was a much greater risk and all-cause mortality was much higher (including infant and young child mortality). This means the optimal time to have children would be much earlier given that famine or disease or other misfortune could strike the family at any time and that children matured into productivity quite rapidly (children didn’t always go to school for 12 years). It should also be noted that famine and the associated loss of body fat can halt the menstrual cycle in women of any age.

Lastly, I need to point out that many traditional and indigenous communities throughout the world have or previously had initiation rites to welcome children into adulthood and full standing within the tribe at or around the age of puberty. Contemporary society with its emphasis on more and more schooling has been the primary driver of the push to longer and longer periods of adolescence. The mental health and physical development effects of such extended adolescence are only beginning to be understood.

I think they already do, hence the private islands and Bond villain style lairs.

That’s incorrect in several different levels.

Could you elaborate? Throughout history people have successfully become parents at that age or even younger. Your flat denial is an extraordinary claim and you haven’t given any evidence to support it.

By human biology, a 14 year old is sexually mature and capable of becoming a parent. The terms “child, teen, adolescent, adult” are all social constructs. We as a society have drawn arbitrary lines and even changed them over time.

The lie was that only Palestinians have lived there for thousands of years.

Not according to the state of Israel

Correction: the government of Israel, with a ruling party (Likud, led by Bibi) which has 32/120 seats in the Knesset. That’s less than 27% of the seats. This is what you get with proportional representation and coalition government.

Israelis and Palestinians have lived in the area for centuries and centuries. They’re ethnically the same, brothers and sisters. They differ by culture and the old problem (familiarity breeds contempt). I have maintained all along that both have a right to exist and to self-determination.

But there are people here that now deny these rights to Israelis simply because Israel has a lot of military and political power right now. It’s like for them it’s not enough for Palestine to be free, they must also see Israel destroyed. And in the process they overlook the atrocities committed by Hamas (not to mention what the PLO did in Jordan decades ago).

If you’re just going to lie then you’re not even worth talking to.

A small number did. Vastly more were part of the diaspora.

That’s not true. Only 26% (and shrinking) of Israeli Jews have European ancestry. A plurality, 44% (and the fastest growing) have native Israeli ancestry. The remainder come from North Africa and Asian ancestry but all groups besides Israeli background are shrinking.

Nazis during the Holocaust might have wanted Jews deported to Israel but today’s Nazis want Israel wiped off the map and all Jews destroyed.

You can’t draw a clean ethnic or cultural boundary around Israel that’s separate from their arabic brothers and sisters

Not an ethnic boundary but definitely a cultural one. Judaism is very different from Islam. Palestinian culture is very different from Israeli culture.

That’s what makes the conflation of anti-zionism and antisemitism so nefarious.

The conflation happens on both sides of the argument. The two extremes need each other to justify themselves.

I believe both Israel and Palestine have a right to exist. The issue is that both claim the same land and neither tolerates the other at this point. It doesn’t help that none of Israel’s neighbours want Palestinian refugees so the crisis is exacerbated to such an extreme.

Nobody contends that the “shared identity” of Israel has no right to exist

That’s where things get tricky. There clearly are people who claim Israel (and Jews in general) as a shared identity and cultural group have no right to exist. These people are traditionally called Nazis.

You’ll also run into trouble talking about historic Palestine, previously part of the Ottoman Empire, and long prior to that the Kingdom of Israel (around 1047-930 BCE). The Israelis aren’t simply a group of Ashkenazi Jews who moved to the Middle East during the Holocaust. They’re a people who have lived in the area for thousands of years and maintained a distinct culture throughout occupation by other empires.

It seems you’re conflating the words nation and state. A nation is a group of people with a shared, named identity, such as Hawaiian or Palestinian. A state is an officially recognized group with sovereignty over an area of land. Many nations exist which do not have their own states.

All nations have the right to exist by the human right to freedom of association. Sovereign states have no right to exist: their existence is asserted and defended by force and by mutual recognition with other sovereign states.

Everyone says the transmission lines cause devastating wildfires but that’s the proximate cause. It’s like if we went to a gas station and there was an enormous leak with a giant pool of gasoline filling the parking lot and then we blamed a lady wearing a wool sweater for giving off the spark that starts the whole thing ablaze.

The problem with wildfires in California is twofold: 1) not enough controlled burning (due to underfunding and lack of staff) and 2) too many homes built in the highest risk areas.

I think part of this issue is the California government’s boneheaded fight with insurance companies which seeks to prevent them from appropriately pricing the risk for home insurance. One of the most valuable things insurance companies (as hated as they are) do for society is develop highly sophisticated risk models for wildfire and flood damage. When allowed to, they incorporate these models into the premiums they charge for home insurance in different areas. This would ordinarily make it extremely expensive to insure a home in the highest risk areas, creating a market disincentive to build there, but Californians insist on fighting this (shooting the messenger) through the political system.

I’d go for the fertilizing the queen’s eggs third, if it were up to me!

No I didn’t. Most computers on the planet (phones, tablets, laptops) have only 1 user. The whole multi-user system isn’t obviously useful for these computers.

Everyone knows that multiple user accounts need permissions to prevent users from accessing each other’s files. I didn’t bring it up because it was too obvious.

Think about this: let’s say you run a program. Do you want that program to be able to take over the computer and read all your files from now on and send the data to a remote third party?

Probably not.

Permissions were created to stop programs from doing that. By running most software without admin permissions you limit the scope of the damage the software can cause. Software you trust even less should be run with even fewer permissions than a normal user account.

The system is imperfect though. A capability-based system is better. It allows the user to control which specific features of the operating system a running program is allowed to access. For example, a program may request access to location services in order to access your GPS coordinates. You can deny this to prevent the program from tracking you without otherwise preventing the software from running.

The guy seems like a shill. A hired goon who successfully destroyed Ross’s movement, just like they planned!