In a liberal democracy with many opposing viewpoints, having to elect a single "head of government" that will be necessarily beholden to only one part of the electorate is detrimental, especially in combination with something like FPTP.
A directorate where executive power is distributed over multiple people and executive policy is decided on in a concordat it a much better solution.
> I imagine those countries have sane energy prices compared to Western Europe.
No. There is no argument being made regarding "legacy hardware’s power inefficiency isn’t as big of a deal when electricity prices are lower".
That's just complaining that Western Europe has high energy prices compared to China without taking into consideration how different these economies are.
I think that's be best argument one can make for environmental protections. Forget the warm-and-fuzzy-koombaya altruistic argument and appeals on mother nature or whatever.
In the end this is about protecting and preserving our own ecosystem without which we will perish.
For all we know the universe could be teeming with life, in whatever shape or form. And since we see the first signs of life about 500 million years after the plant was formed, there's a good argument to be made that life doesn't need much more than a stable energy gradient and some basic building blocks to get started.
Agreed. There are just too many unknowns. Certainly about how life started here(if indeed it did start here). But even more so about what's out there. There's so much we don't know even about the planets and moons in our own solar system, let alone other star systems. It's only recently we've become able to detect exoplanets in significant quantities at all, and we've still only scratched the surface really. And what we know about those planets is very limited. For most of them we don't know much except their distance to the star and estimated size. For a handful we have some information about their atmospheres, usually only enough to narrow it down to a couple of equally plausible models. It's hard for me to imagine us being able to conclusively detect life on an exoplanet. I think the best we'll be able to do in the next several decades is say we're pretty sure a planet's atmosphere contains chemical compounds for which there's no known abiotic origin. But there will be so much uncertainty there in terms of possible unknown abiotic origins that it would never feel conclusive.
Not understanding the consequences and impacts of doomscrolling and instant gratification videos on reasoning, memory and abstract thinking is not limited to persons aged 15-16. I'd argue this applies to about 90% of the population using smartphones.
A directorate where executive power is distributed over multiple people and executive policy is decided on in a concordat it a much better solution.
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