How do these companies perform compared to the USPS? Just knowing that they're privatized without any mention of customer satisfaction, cost, or other comparative metrics doesn't say much about whether it's a good idea. (I don't believe anyone's main contention is that it's "novel")
I think it's certainly worth comparing which model produces more superior outcomes. We ought to compare the per capita expenditure, and the median delivery time.
But also regardless of which is better, why is it all-or-nothing? Why can't UPS/Amazon/FedEx/DHL ALSO co-exist with the USPS? Today, they are prohibited from delivering any first class mail to a mailbox, by law.
I think that would be fine if they also gave a mandate to deliver letters at a fixed price regardless of destination. Otherwise, USPS gets left being forced to serve costly and inaccessible rural destinations while private companies don't bother serving those customers or charge far higher rates there.
Sure, but with the amount of wealth and power that they have, it goes beyond lobbying. If there were any sense of the other side getting equal bargaining power, maybe people would be less upset.
I agree, and I will add that once someone's net worth and exaggerated power are quite apparent, there should be some serious oversight if they are utilizing their money to vote like a block of x billion people. I think there should be more oversight at the government level as well...but the government isn't just one person's opinion.
What about this video did you find relevant? The case where one individual attacked a plywood barricade with a hammer and was stopped? (Surely not the Andy Ngo digression.) That's not the topic under discussion. People are concerned with federal officers arresting people off the street with no probable cause.
It's funny the author wasted energy composing this after admitting he barely knows the origin of the sentence. Chomsky invokes it in "Syntactic Structures" to illustrate that the grammaticality of a given sentence doesn't fully explain the odds of it appearing in a large corpus. "Furiously sleep ideas green colorless" is another low probability sentence, yet a native speaker couldn't perform these sorts of mental gymnastics to twist some meaning out of it.
I think the more interesting result (and more relevant to Chomsky's point) would be to work in the other direction. If you instead produce a list of sentences with similar log probabilities you will see that it contains a mix of grammatical and ungrammatical utterances. This implies something more is needed to distinguish them.
> If you instead produce a list of sentences with similar log probabilities you will see that it contains a mix of grammatical and ungrammatical utterances.
Yes, Chomsky mentions this in a footnote. But as far as I know, it hasn't been tried with modern language models.
There's been some interesting work that tries to reproduce grammaticality judgments in terms of language model probability after controlling for length and lexical content. It turns out it works pretty well. For instance https://arxiv.org/pdf/1910.14659.pdf
I wish there were a freely available copy online, I could link, but the passage is at the end of chapter 2 of Syntactic Structures. It's not a footnote, but rather the crux of his argument, I believe:
> "... a structural analysis cannot be understood as a schematic summary developed by sharpening the blurred edges in the full statistical picture. If we rank the sequences of a given length in order of statistical approximation to English, we will find both grammatical and ungrammatical sequences scattered throughout the list; there appears to be no particular relation between order of approximation and grammaticalness. Despite the undeniable interest and importance of semantic and statistical studies of language, they appear to have no direct relevance to the problem of determining or characterizing the set of grammatical utterances. I think that we are forced to conclude that grammar is autonomous and independent of meaning, and that probabilistic models give no particular insight into some of the basic problems of syntactic structure."
I do think it's an important point for people to recognize. Scientific theories don't arise on their own out of large-scale statistical analyses. There is a lot of faith being put in deep learning methods these days, which are great for prediction, but not inference.
Thanks for pasting the whole thing. It's an interesting argument. The core empirical claim is
> If we rank the sequences of a given length in order of statistical approximation to English, we will find both grammatical and ungrammatical sequences scattered throughout the list; there appears to be no particular relation between order of approximation and grammaticalness.
It's totally not clear that this would be true with modern language models, after you control for (1) the length of the sentence and (2) the words in the sentence (as mentioned in the thing I linked above).
I will have to take a look at that paper. I didn't catch your edit before replying. It would certainly be worthwhile to verify that claim (or not) using the paper's model if I find some time. In any case, I think the underlying point is that these language models serve a purpose, but will not uncover an underlying structure for you or derive something like the phrase structure grammar proposed in Syntactic Structures. I may be extrapolating a bit based on other times I've seen Chomsky discuss this, though.
I couldn't even get through all of the original article.
Having said that; and having formally studied linguistics at an undergrad level, "Furiously sleep ideas green colorless" is different than "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" in that the former is not grammatical.
It is also the case that non-grammatical sentences can have meaning. For example, I believe that most English speaker would agree that the sentence "me happy" is not grammatical, and indicates that the speaker is happy.
Right. The sentences are both very unlikely to be uttered even though one is grammatical and the other is not, so there must be another factor in play.
What examples do you have in mind when you say this? The main case studies that I see get brought up are Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War and the Paris Commune, but the wartime pressures that led to their collapse strike me as much different from the present situation. I think the CHAZ will be an interesting experiment given the context.
Specifically the music festivals I've been to. It's fun and a wonderful feeling for a while, but eventually the idiots/assholes will become a problem that needs to be dealt with. Or nature throws a disaster at you and there is chaos.
It's a little hard to come up with historical examples because the utopia portion is often quite short and overshadowed by the negatives that follow. Generally, I would point to almost any historical 'revolution' as a warning that tearing down a system and rebuilding it from scratch does not mean improvement, even if it appears to be at the beginning. You could probably point to the August 1789 period of the French Revolution as an example of the 'utopic' phase, but I'm not certain. The fall of Saddam's government in Iraq would be another example. Kurdish Syria is probably another decent example.
They're trying out the many proposed and proven methods of community management other than armed, poorly-trained cops. Music festivals aren't trying to prove the viability of alternative societal structures. They're different things.
And I hope it works. But history says it's going to go poorly and they're going to need to end up with something resembling a police force, even if they don't call it that.
I don't know how your interactions with police have gone, but I've never had them show up when I called, and most accounts I hear are that they don't do anything at best when they do. At worst, they kill someone. Most of what they do is not stuff they should be doing.
There's some niche a well-trained police force can fill, but it's a lot smaller than what the poorly-trained forces do now. Almost no one is actually calling for a complete and permanent abolition of police. Just a redefinition of their role.
> The Seattle Police Department and attached court system are beyond reform. We do not request reform, we demand abolition. We demand that the Seattle Council and the Mayor defund and abolish the Seattle Police Department and the attached Criminal Justice Apparatus. This means 100% of funding, including existing pensions for Seattle Police
Also, I would look at the Baltimore police/crime post-Freddie Grey to see how diminished police action leads to much increased crime. What the BPD did was horrifying but so was the rise in crime once they became less active.
I have a gun and my right to defend myself is a practical, factual statement. American police have no duty to protect you and are free from legal punishment if they choose to idly wait while you are assaulted and raped.[0]
You missed the point. You can assert your rights all the livelong day, but without a criminal justice apparatus all you have are a gun and some fine words. Given the relatively high mortality among armed gang members in America's underpoliced inner cities, your gun isn't the reason you and yours enjoy relatively low mortality--the difference is either one of policing or fine words, and I'm pretty sure it's not the latter.
No, you are missing the point. Without a gun there is nothing keeping you safe aside from a cop's whims. If someone wanted to walk into your house/office and kill you, a cop would (1) stop them, (2) choose not to stop them and not get punished for it, or (3) not get to you in time to be of any help. Defending yourself is the fourth option you exercise with your right to self-defense. If you really think that cops are bad, arrange your life so that your life doesn't depend on their whims. I live in a state where at least two thirds of people own guns (usually multiple guns) and the crime rate is very low.
I really don't think I'm missing the point. I might be missing your point, since you seem to have misinterpreted the thread and gone off onto your own digression. I'm all for 2A and I don't think cops are bad, but guns aren't keeping the peace, the police are keeping the peace, even if they aren't a perfect institution. There are lots of places with lots of guns and few police, and they are not known for being nice places to live. This conversation has reached the absurd--those of us without guns aren't dying multiple times per day as your "without a gun..." comment suggests. I'm not interested in debating absurdities, so I'll leave you with the last word.
a police force doesn't prevent you from being attacked, they only dispense justice after the fact and only sometimes.
welfare, courts and legal systems have a far larger impact than police as a means to prevent violence by having a peaceful way to resolve issues between individuals and ensuring basic needs are met. they also happen to be cheaper.
most violence happens at the edge of society where people cannot avail themselves of the court system. (drugs/prostitution)
Yes, I was using police as a shorthand for the criminal justice system. The fear of being caught and sentenced has a deterring effect on crime. The criminal justice system, however, depends on police, and police officers visible in the community also deters crime.
If anything I would think them even more practical, but require one to be more active in their enforcement.
But that is the thing I don't see being recognize. While the current institute that is the police could pass away, society will still have rules and will still want enforcers of those rules (though not all rules are equally enforced). And you see this in any supposedly anarchic community, they still have social standards they enforce, they just do not rely the nearby government for enforcement of smaller issues (though there is still a reliance for larger issues, such as stopping annexation by an entity with a larger force). In turn this makes me think all such communities are actually minarchist instead of anarchist, which is a drastic difference in base assumptions.
American police departments have no duty to protect you. They are law enforcement officers who choose at their own discretion to arrive at your home seven minutes after you dial 911.
I guess I'm just on the side of: if the only thing we think police should be doing is something they already legally don't have to do, achieving the goal of getting that covered is better handled by tearing the entire system down and building a new system with a new name and new members than trying to force reform on orgs that have fought it tooth and nail. The actors that have gotten rulings like Warren v. District of Columbia obviously don't want reform in this area, and I don't see much success in forcing it on them. They have the time, resources, and inclination to fight it at every step, and piecemeal subvert the spirit of the reforms as they occur.
I guess the point I'm dancing around is that words have power, and rebuilding a force called police is still a half measure. Don't just rebuild, but instead create a new force with a new name as part of gaining new semantics. People bring baggage with them when you use the same words.
I don't think that is true, plenty of police forces around the world call themselves police without feeling the innate urge to shoot at innocent protesters with lethal force.
It's really strange how people in this thread refuse to believe that the "reform the police" option even exists. As though we must either have a subpar police system or no police system at all. It's also strange how many people think that getting rid of the police will just work itself out.
"Reform" is a well known word in the US that translates to "do the very minimum necessary to shut most people up for a while". The fact that proponents of radical changes to policing have not come up with terms you like more should not be an indictment of their perspectives.
Many other countries have a police system that works much better than the US but obviously the only possible solutions in the search space are "Americanism" or "Nothing".
Animal Farm is not intended to be a fable. It is an allegorical retelling of Stalin's co-option of the Russian revolution - and that co-option is presented as only being possible because the populace is illiterate and ill-informed, which allows for revisionism from the Stalin-figure.
Orwell almost certainly did support anarchist revolution and utopia, given his role in the Spanish Civil War - and his concern about the suppression of anarchism through a totalitarian control of information is exactly what 1984 is about. He never would have felt that "Anarchic utopias do not stay utopic for all that long."
I mean would Seattle residents really consider CHAZ turning into Christiania a win? For a community of less than 1000 people, it seems to have a ridiculous amount of violence and crime.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. While many of the police actions are inexcusable, trying to have a society without an active group of people enforcing law and order doesn't work well. Just look at Baltimore for the downsides of police inaction.
When people start policing the police force, don't they become....the police (by definition, not legality)? And therefore susceptible to becoming just like the "idiots/assholes" they were empowered to deal with.
Both of these represent the same phenomenon as the modern police force, which is class oppression (in the first case anti-intellectual misogyny, in the second the same base racism underlying the current struggle). Communities can and will self-regulate, when let out from under the thumb of state-sanctioned violence.
no, because they don't have authority to police civilians. there is no recursion here.
police force -> used to arrest dangerous criminals only
police wardens -> used to review, charge, change police policy, and arrest police officers who violate the law.
social officer -> used for all non-violent community enforcement. fines, ticketing, homelessness, mental health issues, etc. have no power to arrest anyone.
Revolutionary Catalonia and the Paris Commune are interesting examples of libertarian socialism. You could also look at the Korean People's Association [1], Rojava more recently [2], or the Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities in Chiapas (EZLN), which seem to be exceptional in having lasted 30 years or so.[3]
Look into what happened with the various hippie communes that sprung up across the US in the late 60s/early 70s, and how they fared.
Most came together with utopian ideals but fell apart as tension arose between those that just wanted to drop out and take acid and those who actually worked hard and tried to build something. Only one remains AFAICT and that one is atypical, enforcing sharing of everything, down to having a communal wardrobe, and having work schedules etc.
There were quite a few utopian socialist (not necessarily anarchist) projects started in the United States in the 19th century, especially following the proto-socialist Charles Fourier. Wikipedia has a list based on a wide variety of different philosophies:
And did those arrest and charges come before or after multiple days of protests? At this point the protests have snowballed into a larger frustration over police conduct (and I'm sure other issues), which only gets reinforced with each instance of force being used on those who are assembled peacefully.
Seriously? They let him slowly kill a dude right next to him! This isn't a situation where he just whipped out a gun and instantly shot someone, that kind of thing would be hard to stop in time, they had literal minutes where they could've stepped in, and chose not to.
I've participated in law enforcement hand to hand and incapacitation training sessions (as a Marine). At least in those trainings, it was very clearly taught what techniques were safe and effective, how to use them, and we practiced them on each other literally hundreds of times. If you've ever had a blood choke or constrictive choke applied to you, you immediately understand what it's like, and what dangers it presents. The officer charged knew what he was doing, without a doubt. The officers around him had a moral and legal requirement to stop him to avoid being complicit in this murder; they chose to help in the murder instead.
In the military, I would have been convicted of a war crime had I done this to an unarmed and incapacitated enemy combatant; even in ignorance, even if it had been a mistake, even if I was tired and had a bad day. I'd hope our police force would be held to a higher standard dealing with our own citizens than a soldier or Marine dealing with an enemy of the state.
The question isn’t whether failing to stop a crime makes you an accessory, it’s a question of whether or not performing perimeter security for a crime makes you an accessory.
Because the parent poster's comment is dead, I'm responding to yours. Yes, obeying unlawful orders from your commanding officer is a violation of the UCMJ, and you will be criminally charged for doing so unless it can be demonstrated through strong evidence that you could not have known the order was unlawful. You are simply responsible for your own actions, as is everyone else (including the police).
If this is true and every office on the scene was that misinformed, it's still a systemic problem that requires a complete overhaul of the way police are trained and hired. This won't be fixed by punishing a few bad apples and then pretending the problem is solved.
What's the chances that of a sample of officers who responded, those 4 are the only ones who would have let this happen?
The idea that kneeling on a restrained human’s neck for 9 minutes isn’t something they knew could lead to the severe injury or death of that person would be laughable if it wasn’t so chilling to hear you defend.
If I owned a martial arts studio and I let a student do that, I’d face criminal & civil liability. Why shouldn’t trained officers of the law be held to at least that standard?
If you did 1/2 of what the other cops did, you’d already be in jail pending trial. If you’d done 1/10th of that to a cop, you’d be lucky to survive your arrest.
Part of the outrage is how blatantly unequal the treatment of cops and and civilians accused of crimes are. It’s especially galling because not only are they given the power of the state, they are also given extra rigorous training in the safe application of force. If anyone should have reasonably known that kneeling on someone’s neck would be lethal, it would be the cops.
Oh, and all the bystanders who clearly recognized what was going on. Apparently they’re more wise to the dangers of kneeling on a restrained human’s neck than the police are.
They’re authorized to use necessary violence; kneeling on a handcuffed man’s neck was not a justifiable application of force. I genuinely cant believe I have to explain that.
You tried to change the standard to “all the officers didn’t kneel on his neck”, I just called you out on it.
I do believe they should be arrested for accessory and face a trial by jury. It’s your right to think to the contrary, but your rationalizations about why they were willing to stand by and watch something that has deeply shocked the conscious of the whole nation is both disturbing and unconvincing.
You say that as if that is what should have happened and its all ok. He was sacked, whoop de do. He should have been arrested, that he was arrested 3 days later means they could have arrested him immediately but if this hadnt kicked off he would likely still be patrolling now looking for his next victim.
So your point is that this justifies the expansion of the surveillance state? Do you consider all of the protestors responsible for looting? And should we just discount the evidence pointing to the presence of agents provocateurs?
A breakdown of law and order is an emergency situation, justifying the use of any tools in the state's pocket regardless of our normal concerns about using them. I don't want a permanent gendarmerie in the US either, but that doesn't mean I'm opposed to deploying the National Guard.
Most of the protesters do seem to be peaceful, but that just doesn't matter in Minneapolis at this point.
Seriously, "any tools"? You are commenting on an article about the use of new surveillance tools like facial recognition software that scrapes Facebook, not a discussion on whether the National Guard should be deployed.
Yes, what a heroic display we're commenting on here. What exactly is your point and how is it relevant to this unsettling video? Just the platitude that not every interaction is necessarily racist?
Can anyone recommend a good introduction to differential geometry and forms? Does something analogous to "Visual Complex Analysis" exist for the topic? I have been curious to learn for a long time but, for whatever reason, always lose my way at some point with articles like this. I come away with some feeling that I understand what's going on and yet I can't say I have any concrete intuition for what a form or a manifold is despite knowing the formal definitions. I feel like applied examples would help, but at this level of math that seems to entail going on a side quest to learn a lot of difficult physics first. (Or alternatively, doing a lot of proofs, but that feels futile without having a tutor/mentor to check them.)
I just took Keenan Crane’s course on Discrete Differential Geometry at CMU, and the slides and lecture notes are available online for free. Due to COVID, the second half of the semester’s lectures are available on YouTube, and they are really a goldmine (Keenan is a wonderful lecturer!). The coding exercises are in JS as well with a lot of base code to work with, so they are quite accessible and you get to focus on the geometry.
The figures on the slides are really great. Hope this helps:
Wow, this is beyond what I could've hoped for. Especially the coding exercises, which make up for the other massive difficulty in self-studying--a lack of solutions to verify the work on written problems.
I got this recently from Springer directly, and just as a psudeo-warning, this is a "print on demand" book, at least the one I got was (it said so when I ordered it, so I was properly warned). Now, the print is actually pretty high quality and so is the binding, and it's a large and beautiful book. My only complaint is the paper of the pages is a bit thin, like regular printer paper stock, as opposed to the thicker glossy paper I was hoping for and that would be usual for a book this size. When you're leafing through it and a page is lifted, you can often see the content on the opposite side showing through. That can be distracting and may bother some people.
BTW: If you buy from Springer, you get a free pdf of the book immediately while you wait for your physical copy, because of the delay for print on demand. They say you don't actually "own" the digital edition (can't remember the exact wording), but I can vouch that it's not time-limited. It's a very good deal.
Having gone through two chapters now, I also feel the need to caution others that the amount of typos in this book is simply jaw-dropping. The conceptual explanations in the text are generally excellent, but it is simply impossible to get through a page without hitting a substantial number of mistakes. I'm left wondering if there are errors I'm not catching on my own that are going to affect my understanding. I really hope a cleaned up second edition is on the horizon (hopefully with answers to some of the in-line exercises).
Thank you! This looks great and surprisingly affordable for an academic textbook. It seems like a lot of the good material for teaching these topics at the undergraduate level has come out rather recently.
Edwards' first three chapters give a wonderfullly intuitive exposition of forms and their application to integration.
Tu's book is a rigourous study of smooth manifolds and differential forms. His exercises are approachable, and his book is the most expedient to the full theory of differential forms.
As a quirky intuition pump, I recommend Geometrical Vectors by Gabriel Weinreich. The Fortney book mentioned in another comment is a nice, visual book, and there are other references in the replies to the comment I linked.
Which means large corporations get to influence policies, even without any lobbying. "Dear senator, what do you mean those environmental protection regulations apply to us? The regulations of the neighbour country $x, that also invited us to build our 10 000 jobs worth plant on their soil, are nowhere near as onerous. We might need to take them up on their offer. Perhaps at least you can cut us a tax break?"
"Well, dear corporation, if you want to sell your products to our citizens, you have to play by our rules. We'll let you know that your direct competitor already agreed to these rules yesterday."
"I'm sorry Senator, you must be confused. Our products meet the health&safety standards prescribed by yours as well as international regulations in this region. You cannot, legally, stop stores from reselling our products, nor you can prevent customers from ordering them on-line. Meanwhile, if you're satisfied with the smaller plant of 2000 jobs of our competitor, we'll happily set up shop at your neighbour's.
It was nice dealing with you. I hope you don't mind if I mention your name at the press conference we'll call soon to announce signing of the deal for our new plant with your neighbour."
"We have and will use our authority to prevent the sale or re-sale of products that do not conform to the rule of law. Please be so kind to mention my name at your press conference, so that my citizens know their government stands up for their rights."
I know that the above response might seem like a pipe-dream to some, but let me assure you that there are governments and government officials that do stand up for the rule of law, and that are not easily bought by the highest bidder.
Yeah, but what I meant by my response is that, in this hypothetical scenario, the products themselves are fine. Nice, clean, safe, recyclable, whatnot. It's the manufacturing process that's polluting. You can't ban a product from being sold in your country on the grounds that manufacturing it in another country is an ecological disaster. Meanwhile, all those jobs are highly desirable (not just for your personal benefit as a politician, but also for the benefit of your constituents and your nation's economy). So there's an incentive to relax the environmental protection rules a little bit. A corporation can use this to play countries off each other - if you stand fast by your existing rules, and your neighbour does not, all the plants and all the jobs and all the economic boost will go to your neighbour, making your country weaker on the international scene.
There's no bribing involved in this scenario. Just plain market competition at nation-state level.
Well, it depends on the size of the country, does it? And on the mindset of the population.
If the EU tells you you can't produce anywhere in the EU because of how dirty your factory is, you can still produce it in the US or Russia and then ship it to the EU. However, your supply lines have just gotten more complicated, expensive, and error prone (because of distance) - so that's one part of the equation that a company has to take into consideration as well.
On top of that, I'm fairly sure there are quite a few Europeans who will applaud politicians who stand up against polluting or otherwise unethical companies, and who look down on (and not vote for) politicians who do shady deals with polluting companies.
So, as always - it's not so simple, and there's more than one dynamic at play.
> You can't ban a product from being sold in your country on the grounds that manufacturing it in another country is an ecological disaster.
Why not? Constituents like it because it brings back the jobs that left because moving them out allowed companies to avoid environmental regulations, which they can now not avoid either way if they want to sell in your country and so might as well bring the jobs back.
> Constituents like it because it brings back the jobs that left
If it succeeds.
I guess you could do that; a sovereign state can try whatever they like. But has that ever actually happened? I can't think of any case where a country banned import of a product on the grounds that its manufacturing isn't up to environmental standards, even though the manufacturing happens in a different sovereign nation, and is compliant with that other nation's standards. I imagine trying to do that would quickly escalate the issue from business to international politics.
There are already rules about things like labor standards of where the product was made. Like if a company uses slaves to manufacture a product, the purchasing company doesn't just through up their hands and say "What can we do? It is not our labor standards they have to comply with." No reason we couldn't add environmental standards to the list.
Edit: I am getting a lot of down votes so let me clarify: if external costs are not internalised, humans will ignore it.
Internalising the cost does not even need to mean tax. Many clothing brands in my country, even the budget brands (think Walmart), have been pressured by consumers into using more ethical factories. The same could be done by forcing companies to disclose what factories they use and the factory carbon footprint.
It could have been non-polluting, but instead of redesigning, it's easier now to get nations to compete against each other for the location of that plant - and as part of that competition, relax the environmental protections. The "freedom of movement" for corporations (freedom of movement of capital?) has plenty of benefits, but this is one of the negative side effects.
My solution is for all governments to take responsibility, tax pollution and for consumers to understand the environmental costs of products, possibly by forcing disclosure.
I don't understand what your solution is. Ban importing goods? Tax imported goods based on factory pollution and standards?
Knowing the solution is the easy part. The hard part is how to get there, and how to keep the solution working.
"All governments taking responsibility simultaneously" is not something that ever happens. And even if it did, in a moment of selfless reflection of all global leaders, weaker economies will still have a powerful incentive to relax the standards to compete better with stronger economies. I don't have a solution, I'm just saying how things are. Restricting the ability of multinationals to play countries against each other would help in this matter, but it would probably gum up the economy too hard to be worth the attempt (not to mention, it would have to be another thing most governments would have to agree on simultaneously, otherwise the ones to attempt it immediately lose).
The overall point is: it is a tragedy of the commons, just not a local one - an international one. The solution to tragedy of the commons is to have a higher authority unilaterally force participants to limit their use of the commons. But we don't have any higher authority above nation states, so we're ill-equipped to solve tragedies of the commons at international level.
Yes, What is difference between ie. CO2 and other thrash we already producing (as society). So far we didn't accepted that we need 'pay' or handle CO2 as rubbish (while PPM constantly growing). But take your dog poo in park or pay fine (Plastic anyone?). Again, What is difference ?
Even assuming they are capable of that (I am doubtful), reaching consensus on the idea seems quite a bit of a long shot. Something likely needs to be done though, somehow.
