You need thicker wires for the same power. Which is why Americans live in constant fear of power extension cords, and people in EU just daisy-chain them with abandon.
If you're in a country that uses type-G plugs, almost* all of those extension cords have fuses that break well below the current that will cause a problem.
* Currently using a cable spool which will have problems before blowing the fuse if it's wound up and I draw too much current. It has a thermal cutoff, but I still unspool some extra wire on the floor.
Not everybody knows that Stanisław Lem lived through German occupation of Lwów (now L'viv) during WW2 (as a Polish Jew) and barely escaped an execution.
Many of his most famous books can be interpreted through this lense, but he also speaks about it directly in his book "Provocation". And his thoughts about truth vs perception of nazism are quite unique and very relevant.
Create a system in which politicians have to suck up to rich people to win elections.
Wonder why you get oligarchy as a result.
If anything it's a miracle it's only becoming explicit now. The whole system was held by spit and glue.
In many countries parties are funded from taxes (proportionally to the results of the last elections). People/corporations paying politicians is illegal. Politicians don't have to compete for billioners' money - they just compete for votes.
It's pretty obvious it's a better system. It wastes less money too (there's a cap to the marketing arms race).
What would it even mean in practice for them to think about concrete "walking" instead of the abstract concept? Verbs are inherently abstract.
When I was with my dog in my parents' house and said "spacer" (walk in Polish) - he was happy and jumped around in anticipation, bringing the leash. He did the same in my grandparents house even though we weren't going to the same place - he just wanted to go on a walk doesn't matter the area. What's your explanation that does not involve abstracting the action from the concrete area and time?
Another example - my sister trained our other dog to bring her plush toys on command. She hidden them in house and said "szukaj" (search) and then rewarded the dog with a clicker and/or a treat when the dog brought her the toy. It takes several steps (first you hide the toy very close and then you hide it outside of view). Also you reward the dog with the clicker on intermediate successes like getting the toy without bringing it to the owner.
Anyway - one time my sister lost one glove when we were on a walk with that dog. She noticed only when we were returning from the fields. She gave the dog the other glove to sniff and said "szukaj". Ciri (our dog) went back a few hundred meters searching for the glove and found it and brought it back.
There are smarter and dumber dogs (Ciri was probably the smartest dogs we ever had) - but the ability to generalize and reason is obviously there. Like - I can't imagine an unbiased scientist having a dog for extended period of time and not seeing it.
Dogs also have theory of mind (I've seen Ciri bury a bone in one place, wait for our other dog - Jaskier - to go home, and rebury it elsewhere).
Dogs also know which things are forbidden, and know that the things that are forbidden - aren't forbidden when nobody's there to see them do it :)
We also had a pretty aggressive dog before that - Kuba - which used to pursue neighbors cat when it came to our backyard. The backyard was fenced, and when the cat could see our dog - he wouldn't come. So our dog pretended to be asleep or hidden and waited for the cat to come, then he pursued it up a tree and waited under the tree till we came to free the cat.
This requires reasoning. It shouldn't be surprising - these are social animals that hunt in packs, cooperate, play pack politics, and need to reason about others in their pack and about the prey. How would they survive as a species if they had to invent pack tactics from scratch every time they hunted? Obviously they can generalize.
I find most of these arguments against animals thinking either incredibly naive or biased. Like some people actually argue dogs are "meat automatons" with no capacity to think whatsoever. It's like fishers saying fish can't feel pain :/
> What would it even mean in practice for them to think about concrete "walking" instead of the abstract concept? Verbs are inherently abstract.
Your example of the leash and the concept of "walking" is an excellent point.
To answer your question, all proper nouns are not abstract by definition. Your name refers to you, specifically and concretely, it does not refer to the concept of "person" or "people."
But to take this further, imagine the following thought experiment:
You have a newborn infant, and you isolate them from the rest of the world (remember this is a thought experiment, so we are not bound by ethical considerations for this purpose). You show them 3 identical staplers. You call the first one "Foo", the second one "Bar" and the 3rd one "Baz."
An infant might, on their own as they grow and mature, start to abstract and conceptualize a concept of a logical grouping here. They might observe that Foo, Bar and Baz have similarities and, being humans, they might even come up with some kind of verbal or non-verbal cue to reference this abstract concept.
But for a while at least, these are individual concretes. If all they ever see is one single concrete "stapler", they may learn to associate the word with the concrete and never even think about abstracting it. But if they do start to abstract it upon observation of similar "things" ... to what degree are non-humans capable of doing that?
You provide a lot of good evidence that dogs can to some degree. But to what extent? What are the limitations?
These are unanswered questions in both science and philosophy.
I hope I answered your question, as it was a valid one. I'm not giving answers to these hypotheses and philosophical conjectures. I'm saying that this is something that is still not quite figured out yet.
BTW I think the concrete proper nouns we use (like "Eve") are actually abstractions too and prove some reasoning capability.
At first infants don't realize objects exist. They just see shapes and react to them. When something disappears from their view - it's the same as if it stopped existing. That's why you can play peekaboo with them and not bore them.
To abstract from "a shape that sometimes appears, moves and disappears" to "an object that exists over time even when it's not visible" is a pretty impressive generalization. If AI was able to do it on its own I would be impressed at least. I'd even say it's more impressive than the next step (generalizing from "mom' and "papa" to "person").
Of course we have hardware in our brains dedicated for this stuff and it's probably not conscious reasoning that gets us the object permanence. And we don't remember it in any case. So we take it for granted.
But when you think about it the generalization from "sensations in my eyes" to "objects in the world" is a pretty big one.
There is a psychological concept called "anchoring" which associates two different things perceptually. For example, it's what happens when you listen to a song during a particular time in your life, and then many years later you hear the song and feel all the things you felt in that moment with all of the memories triggered etc.
You make a good point about language itself being some form of abstraction in reference to the objective world. But this conversation reminds me of a famous artwork called "The Treachery of Images." It is a painting of a tobacco pipe with the caption "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" ("This is not a pipe" in English).
Through the painting, we can appreciate that a picture of a pipe is an abstraction that represents a pipe, and is not the same thing as a pipe itself. It is a painting that appeals directly to reason.
The philosophical and scientific question is: when a dog hears the word "walk", or sees a leash, is it conceptual abstraction at play; the understanding of a logical category... or is it emotional anchoring that came about through Pavlovian conditioning and having that word associated with a memory of a concrete?
I'd say it's 33/33/33 whether it was Russia, Ukraine or NATO countries that blew up Nord Stream.
Russia shut down transfers through Nord Stream months before it blew up, used lots of excuses not to re-open it (they said they need a turbine that they can't get cause sanctions - sanctions were lifted, Russia still said it won't reopen it cause "it got broken even worse").
Blowing up Nord Stream could be simply a way for Gazprom to blackmail Germany energetically without having to pay fines for missed deliveries.
Germany has issued an arrest warrant for a Ukrainian man they're alleging did it. Meanwhile Swedish and Danish investigations were closed without any public accusations, which would be strange if they thought it was Russia but not strange if they thought it was Ukraine (or a NATO country.)
Both Sweden and Denmark were protecting the area from Russian ships before the explosion. So they both knew about what was going to happen. If they planted the bombs, or Ukrainians? Not sure but I don't think it was the Russians. Nord Stream was very controversial in Sweden when it was built.
To case maximum disruption in EU with rising gas prices. To avoid paying fines. To disrupt relations between Ukraine and Germany. There's many possible motivations.
> Lol, what could any country do if they don't pay the fines?
There's 300 billion dollars of russian money frozen on western accounts. International courts can allow Germany to take their money from there if Russia refuses to pay. Gasprom was clearly breeching the contract, and part of the contract is - which court can judge any disputes about it.
I'm as pro-Ukraine as it gets, but it doesn't make any sense for Russia to blow it up. The biggest incentive is Ukraine by far, then some western intelligence agencies / covert groups in some distance.
Gas has been always part of the carrot and stick strategy for Russia. It makes sense for Ukraine to blow it up to stop any discussions about returning back to cheap Russian gas.
If your goal is to sour relations between Ukraine and its allies in Central Europe, then blowing up the pipeline makes perfect sense.
The pivot away from Russian gas was well underway by then and the pipeline had lost its value. May as well blow it up and hope that Germans will blame Ukraine (and not own shortsighted energy policy) for their high energy prices and cut military aid to 'reckless' Ukrainians.
From Ukraine's point of view, messing with allies' infrastructure would've been incredibly foolish: a lot to lose and nothing to gain.
> The pivot away from Russian gas was well underway by then and the pipeline had lost its value.
This is the autumn 2022, the pivot is only starting. Gas prices are sky-high and there's a lot of uncertainty in the anticipation of winter. The storage is low since Russia started this strategy already in 2021 by restricting the supply. The government is against buying Russian gas, but you don't know how bad the winter will be and how strong the opposition will become if factories stop working and people can't afford their heating bills.
On one hand you argue that the pipeline has no value, on the other hand Germany would get extremely mad at Ukraine destroying an extraterritorial infrastructure of no value (as you say) which is mostly owned by Russia.
Again, because for some reason people keep forgetting - Russia stopped deliveries of gas to Germany BEFORE THE PIPE RUPTURED. When they tried to use the sanctions and broken turbine as excuse - sanctions were circumvented by Germany. Russia still refused to take the turbine back and gas still wasn't flowing.
The timeline is somehow always misrepresented.
> On 16 June 2022, European benchmark natural gas prices increased by around 30% after Gazprom reduced Nord Stream 1's gas supply to Germany to 40% of the pipeline's capacity. Russia warned that usage of the pipeline could be completely suspended because of problems with the repairment.[54]
> On 11 July 2022, Nord Stream 1 was turned off for scheduled annual maintenance, but remained off after the usual repair period.[55] The Siemens pipeline turbine was repaired in Canada. Due to sanctions, Canada could not deliver the turbine back to Russia after repair works and instead sent it to Germany, despite the call of Volodymyr Zelenskiy to maintain the sanctions.[56]
Ok, so you misremembered the events and thus the whole discussion was pointless. You probably also did not remember that NS2 was shut down (non-violently) two weeks after Biden made this statement, 6 months before NS1 (and half of NS2) got blown up.
At least we clarified we can't implicate Biden based on your false memory.
My reading of article 19 of UNCLOS says Denmark and/or Sweden can't place a new universal insurance requirement for innocent passage, because it is not on the list of activities which are "prejudicial to the peace, good order or security of the coastal State."
Article 235 says there can be 'procedures for payment of adequate compensation, such as compulsory insurance or compensation funds' for 'the protection and preservation of the marine environment' but that's the only mention of insurance I see.
I don't think an insurance company would pay out for deliberate acts of sabotage.
It's all to easy to set up an insurance company which would go bankrupt in that case, requiring oversight.
Clearly of Denmark were to set up the only insurance company which could meet all the criteria, then we are back to having Sound Dues.
If Trump goes through with his Greenland annexation Denmark might want to block US vessels.
It is a pity that the EU would have to fight a two front war against Russia and the US after the US has started the eastern front part (as acknowledged by Trump himself).
The Copenhagen Convention of 1857 does not include warships.
The Danish Royal Ordinance of 27 Feb 1976, amended in 1999 by the Ordinance Governing the Admission of Foreign Warships and Military Aircraft to Danish
Territory in Time of Peace, only allows passage during times of peace, and is specific that "Other vessels which are owned or used by a foreign State and which are not employed exclusively for commercial purposes shall be equated with foreign warships in the application of the provisions of this Ordinance."
Trump is definitely not "just shooting off his mouth" and is dead serious. Whether he’ll do it is another question, but a lot of damage is already done. In the long term, the US have a lot of potential to be very damaging as well. Europe is between a rock and a hard place and its prosperity will depend on the risk assessments that were made in the recent past and that are being made now.
There are some wriggle room here. The rights provided by the UN do have conditions, like protection of undersea cables. If a country do not enforce such protection, they could in theory loose the right associated with international waters. Insurance requirements could in this theory be used to codify compliance with the requirements of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.
Maritime law is definitely not my forte, but I think the convention was related to the tolls imposed to pass through these waters (Sweden's Gota Kanal was built to bypass this). It's also related to "innocent passage", which may not be so innocent in this case. Either way, there are probably provisions here for Denmark to close this off, as ultimately they are Danish waters.
Denmark can put some constraints for ships passing the straits. They are danish water. So the Baltic is special in that you can’t reach it on international water. Similar to the Black Sea. But these restrictions are codified in existing agreements so I don’t think Denmark could easily and unilaterally change them to include more conditions. But they could start enforcing ships following the existing requirements for environmental safety and insurance. It would make life pretty difficult for those shipping oil past the sanctions in rusty single hull tankers.
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