We are talking about million tons of materials and heavy equipment to get mining (of iron, nickel, copper, manganium, various salts etc.) transportation and processing started. Heavy equipment that has to work in -80C, near vacuum, tolerate Martian duststorms, work on electricity – and be easily repairable with simple tools.
Then there is a problem of refining and smelting. Industrial technologies are developed for oxygen-rich atmosphere, cheap ubiquitous water and easily available fossil fuels. Without these you need exotic processes, available only in lab-scale. Nobody has even tired to upscale these to produce thousands of tons of products in a year.
In any case these processes will require tens of megawatts of energy. As the only available source in Mars is solar, one has to import tens of square kilometers of solar cells. Producing these on Mars means setting up silicon semiconductor processing – add million tons of equipment or so.
You cannot have partially self-sustaining colony in Mars, like it was possible in New World. No resource on Mars is usable without heavy industry so even the simplest things like building a new (green)house or adding a room to settlement need either everything hauled from Earth or the full manufacturing cycle to be set up.

But this research has zero need for human embryos.
To tinker CRISPR–Cas9 to work reliably on eucaryotic genomes (probably not achievable), mouse embryo is exactly as good as human one. And at current stage a cell-line is even better. Embryo editing makes nice headlines in press but adds very little scientific value in comparison with more straightforward approaches.
If gene editing of children proves to be viable, the path to go is probably to make cell-lines from parents, introduce targeted changes, test thoroughly, then convert these cell-lines to gametes and create embryo.

Interestingly we have kind of precedent from recent past. When Soviet Union dissolved, all constituent republics quickly moved back to their “natural” form of society:
Baltics – German-like workaholic countries
Central Asia – khanates and sultanates
Russia, Belarus, Ukraine – moderately corrupt and authoritarian bureaucracies
Caucasus – well, like Caucasus

There is no such thing as The International Law.
What is conventionally meant by it is a set of agreements and treaties, often vague and contradicting. For example Helsinki accords (state sovereignty) vs. Nurenberg code (responsibility to protect). Big players will pick and choose the parts they want for each situation, small ones have to obey whatever the big ones dictate.
By convention UN Charter and UNSC is usually regarded as the supreme law (especially concerning state-to-state aggression). But because UNSC itself is the final arbiter of these statutes there is intentional vagueness. Each party will claim suitable parts of international law and if any of the big 5 uses veto, there will be no “final” ruling. There several other court-like institutions like UN Court of Justice and ICC too, but these are carry even less authority than UNSC.

As for existential risk from aliens, you can’t rule out the possibility of technologically advanced aliens traveling to this universe from outside the universe. It’s possible that advanced aliens actively stamp out emerging civilizations in order to stop them from challenging their power.

Logically possible – yes? But unless someone is speaking about specific model in theoretical physics, the term “outside our universe” is totally fuzzy. And assigning probability and game-theoretic weight to such an event (alien invasion) is absolutely impossible. Thus whether to consider this existential risk or not is purely up to personal beliefs – like the risk of Armageddon or rapture.
The only things we can be sure is, that there have been several megaasteroid hits on Earth in last billion years, but there have not been significant detectable alien presence during the same timespan. At least for me this makes asteroids more acute problem than aliens.

I’d say the probability and timescale of meeting intelligent aliens is even smaller than that of the collision with a massive asteroid. There does not seem to be any traces of advanced aliens in past 500 million years but there are many asteroid impacts.
There is even bigger problem with simulation end. For Kantian reasons it is impossible to even grasp what the concepts like “simulation”, “the end of simulation”, “the world outside simulation” etc. mean. If we are inside simulation then things like time, space, causality, mathematics and logic can as well be forced onto us by the simulation system. The concept of probability has then meaning only inside simulation – and the world has not ended in last 13 billion years one should assign the (inside-simulation) probability it ending in the next billion close to zero.
Malevolent superintelligence is badly defined term. Plus, as the history has taught us, being malevolent and being intelligent is not enough to destroy world. One needs actual tools for that. Before such intelligence could destroy humanity the same humanity should give it the means – that is centralized total control over every aspect of technology and society. Seeing how nobody is very fond of a single world government (perfectly doable without any AI and potentially very beneficial) I do not see it realistic. And if the total centralization will be achieved, the centralized government can end the world even without being artificial and without being very intelligent.

And we’re smarter than rats. Rats finding themselves in a destructive environment can’t do anything about it. We have more options. For example we have the option of making changes to urban environments. Rethinking our ideas on what cities should be like. Rats can’t do that because rats are terrible at urban planning.

Be careful with such generalizations.
We are definitely smarter than rats but being smarter only means we are more able to achieve things we want. If something in society or environment is manipulating our wants and desires we are exactly as powerless as rats to overcome it.
It is quite possible that urban high-intensity lifestyle is attractive precisely because it gives us plenty of supernormal stimuli that replace the “normal” ones. People in cities do not reproduce not because they have no reproductive instinct but because it is hijacked. The instinct is still strong, but being directed to supernormal stimuli it directs people to work endlessly to increase the “fake” targets even more.
So even though people are able to do urban planning, they will not use their ability to make more “livable” cities.

High paternal age does not increase population-level accumulation of de-novo mutations significantly. The amount of new mutations in one 60-year generation is approximately the same as in two 30-year ones.
It slightly decreases evolutionary pressure because these new mutations are not selected against in father’s phenotype but this should be more than compensated by increasing pressure because of polygamy.

If this were true, Trump deserved to lose even more. He was elected because of his platform but did not deliver. In war and politics you either deliver or shut up. Nobody want to hear after the fact justifications “if only thing would have been different…”
But I do not agree with your last paragraph. People have successfully confronted the swamp and won before. Certain guys with names starting with (A.H. and J.G. come to mind). Trump had enough support, if he really wanted he could have leveraged this and easily achieved all his campaign promises and more. By organizing deplorables into coherent force. Calling them out en mass to confront the swamp. Etc. etc. – by acting by the playbook of successful populist revolutions.
But he probably detested and was afraid of the deplorables himself. And he did not WANT a revolution.

I’d really like to see Elon’s spreadsheets:
1) How much stuff has to be hauled onto Mars for semi-sustainable small human settlement
2) How much to start small-scale industrial manufacturing. Let’s say few thousand tonnes of iron and plastics, hundred tonnes cuprum and nickel and so on.
In my opinion the latter is in millions of tons at minimum. Such common things like geological prospecting, mining, ore transport, refining, melting and processing simply take some brute power. Plus the existing (large-scale) refining technologies are meant to be operated in oxygen-rich atmosphere with practically infinite amount of water available and easy dissipation of toxic gases. You can do everything cleanly and using electricity but nobody has scaled these technologies. In current state they require even more equipment to get serious output volume.
Plastics is another thing – no oil, natural gas and water to start from. We can create almost everything from biomass if needed but again, there are no industrial-scale technologies for most polymers. In Mars biomass is energy sink because the need of heating the greenhouses.
And if the colony want to become energy-independent they have to start solar cell manufacturing ASAP – hello to silicone processing.
Hauling million or so tons of equipment to Mars is doable, but not by some gang of eccentric paper billionaires. It would need concentrated state-level effort.

Socialism has come to mean different things. Especially at modern times when it is usually associated with welfare state, identity politics and cultural degeneracy. It does not help, that Marx itself wrote about too wide topics and Engels, Lenin and al did not help but confused it even more.
Take the core idea of Marxism and you get the following:
* The ultimate goal is the continuous betterment of human society.
* This is achieved by productive work.
* In just society the power should belong to those who work for the betterment of society.
True Marxists (yes I know, The True Scotsman etc.) detest both rich rentiers and welfare leeches. Neither should have a say in how the society should be built and run. The former, of course, are more dangerous because they can use their wealth to control the state. Thus the accumulation of capital has to be strictly controlled so that it will only be used for benefit of the whole society.
One can (justly) criticize Marxism because it assigns too little importance to the issues of region, race, nation, gender etc. According to the core dogma these belong to the superstructure that is almost completely determined by the base – the organization of productive work. True Marxists also are (or at least should be IMO) very suspicious abut immigration as a) it dilutes the value of labor and b) everyone should work for the betterment of their society first and foremost.
What we see now is the governing alliance of rentier class and leeches against workers. In pure Marxists sense it is as far from the socialism as one can go.
In that sense Trump promised socialism (but did not deliver).

“Was founded” is weird thing to say. But the reality is that Russia conquered many territories with different religions and I think it is the best to let the locals worship as they please. That makes Orthodoxy, some forms of Islam and Buddhism, and many varieties of shamanism the native religions.
But this absolutely does not mean that imported religions like various Protestant sects and Judaism should be tolerated. OK, I do not know the history well enough – maybe if there are some Jews left from Khazaria they could also be included.

I do not think there will ever be large-scale gene editing available to masses. I just cannot imagine a method that will be precise enough at molecular level, especially inside living zygote/oocyte for more than handful edits. The probability of getting all wanted target mutations goes down with the number of edits, and the probability of non-targets goes up, both in geometric progression. From certain number of edits (and you probably need at least hundreds for detectable change in IQ) the probability of introducing at least one new unknown harmful effect is close to one.
The technology with much more perspective is IMHO de-novo chromosome synthesis. It has been successfully done for bacteria – and single human chromosome is only 10-50x larger.
De-novo synthesis offers infinitely more possiblities – in single run we can disable or repair all deleterious mutations, kill transposons and set the desired alleles for 10 000-s of polymorphisms – instead of designing CRISPR probes one-by-one and praying that they do not cause non-target mutations.
It will be harder to swallow for prospective parents, of course. Instead of “repairing” your own chromosomes child will get newly synthesized ones. But this will probably be overcome, especially as the benefits could be really huge.
Of course neither of these methods is actually NEEDED for a population – as long as it is willing to use tried and tested old-school selection methods.

I think this sub-thread illustrates the cause of problems Europeans have dig themselves into (and it started already in Roman Empire).
We simply are not content with doing our own business but for some reason want to spread universalist values at the side. I understand why one may see colonizing America as a good thing, because it spread our kind to other continent and brought huge fortunes back home. But justifying it because it ended human sacrifice by Aztecs? Why should it concern us? Why should we care how other people and civilizations are behaving? In the rare occasions when it really is our concern (like slave raids in med) the problem can usually solved by military means without attaching any soft “values” to it.
This universalism has now IMHO came home to roost. Europe has largely exhausted barbarian hordes to convert to “civilization” and thus has targeted the energy toward its own native population. The basic formula is the same – in earlier times it was paganism, human sacrifice, slavery – now it is xenophobia, racism, xenophobia etc.

First, just because we do not know the exact number of Chinese nukes does not mean that Pentagon does not know. And there can be many reasons why they do not make it public. Intelligence world has its own rules.
Second, nuclear war does not start out of the blue. As mad as the US foreign policy sometimes seems to be, attacking china with decapitating strike just does not seem very probable at moment. There will be long step-by-step escalation before ICBM-s start to fly and Chinese may prefer to reveal their trump cards at the suitable time.
Maybe the recent public discussion in China is meant to slowly prepare the world for their big announcement (that they have 1500+ warheads)? Seems logical to me – they may have estimated that the probability of nuclear strike has increased recently and thus they have to cool some heads across Pacific. But they prefer to make it slowly and in small steps..

Modern science is shamelessly exploiting the enormous prestige acquired by physics when quantum mechanics were established during the first decades of 20th century. In a brief period of time, cutting edge theoretical research finally mapped out how the world around us works and opened a way to all following technological advancement. It helped that nuclear bombs and nuclear energy withe the massive psychological impact came out directly from this research…
There have been few similar big leaps earlier in history – calculus, atomic theory, electromagnetism and maybe statistical mechanics. But other than these, most science is incremental technological advance that does not justify the big hype and can indeed be done by industry. There has also been constant hope of similar “big leaps” in molecular biology and genetics, information theory and so on but these are not realized. And probably will never realize.
But keeping academic science is still useful for countries because of synergies it creates with high-end technological manufacturing.

Functional receptors for binding onto your cell, intact membrane and RNA/protein complex inside. The attack happens by many complex chemical systems working in cohesion so if any of them is damaged nothing happens (other that the virion will eventually be eaten by macrophage). Biochemists call even single proteins (like enzymes) as active if they are able to perform intended chemical or mechanical role.
Membrane viruses are very fragile – breaking membrane (what soap does) simply scatters proteins and RNA into solution. Although the RNA is technically still able to infect cell it cannot enter by itself. Capside viruses (like smallpox) are completely different beast – they can remain virulent for years but fortunately our corona-chan is of the former type.

The famous article 5 of NATO treaty does not say what most people seem to think.
Basically – NATO allies have to refer aggression against a member state to UN security council. Until UNSC takes action to stop it, they should take some action, possibly military one, themselves to repel the aggression. But the military action is not an obligation, NATO charter does not require anything stronger than “deep concern”.
After WWI the world got allergic to “automatic defense” clauses in treaties.

Iran’s social capital should be on par with Serbia’s, with some halfway decent management.
While Serbia’s average IQ may be 89, and Iran’s–84

Iran is interesting case. While the average is on par with other Muslim countries, there seem to be a disproportionate number of top-level Iranian scientists in “hard” fields. So maybe there is some traditional segregation in play in their society, just like India’s varna system?
Given the number of Iranian mathematicians in West one can be sure that there should be some left to their country too.

Such campaigns need time – Serbia was bombed for more than a month with very little damage to its military. And Serbia was surrounded by NATO countries militarily stronger than her that were used as safe logistic bases. No such safe country exist in ME aside Pakistan and Turkey and both probably do not allow their territory to be used against Iran.
This leaves only bases in Gulf countries, Jordan, Israel and carrier groups in Indian ocean to support the campaign. The former will be devastated by Iranian missile strikes and probably cease to be of much use. Also both Bahrain and SA are ripe for civil war.
So the bombing has to be carried out from carriers and airbases far away which severely limits its effectiveness and allows Iran meanwhile to destroy most infrastructure in Arab peninsula. Conquering any part of Iranian territory to effectively suppress Iranian strikes is pretty much impossible without D-day scale assault because there are no safe harbors and airfields where to land sufficient number of armored troops.
Of course eventually US can destroy large part of Iranian infrastructure but it takes many moths – possibly over a year – and during that time the world has to function without any Saudi, UAE, Kuwait and Iraq oil.
Then there are, of course, Shia militias in Iraq. They are quite capable of attacking Kuwait and probably conquering it if needed. While formerly they would maybe kept some distance it is not the case at moment.
There is a reason why there have not been US punitive strikes inside Iran and it is not US benevolence.

On the other hand, Saddam simply sat on his fat *ss and watched how US built up fighting force of 150 000 men, planes and whatnot.
If Iran has any strategic sense it simply does not allow this to happen. Sometimes pre-emptive strikes are the correct strategy. And then US is left only with carriers far from iranian shores and airbases in Jordan or even further away. Of course, it can still destroy most of Iran’s infrastructure eventually – while simultaneously watching how his client states in Gulf will be levelled to ground. But bringing land forces to Iran without relying on friendly ports and airbases will be D-day scale operation – much, much larger than Desert Storm of Iraq Freedom.

Not directly comparable
12 used to be the “age of marriage with parental consent”. Modern consent laws gives parents zero say about whether the affair is legal or not.
As in other areas, the erosion of morality is directly associated with tearing down traditional family and community control over people (The Patriarchy TM) and replacing it with state control.

Breeder groups are inherently unstable because their behavior is culturally motivated. There is little reason to believe that most Amish, Mormon or Haredi women have genetic disposition to have more children than their peer populations on average. Change their society/environment radically and they will stop breeding – just like most of the traditional societies did with urbanization. Mormons are probably the most resilient group, but I cannot imagine how either Amish or Haredis can keep the functioning, once they become the absolute majority in their countries and have to support the (ultra-complex) modern state structures themselves.
What ultimately changes the demographic trend upwards is natural selection among “normal” people, picking out the genotypes that increase the desire to have many children in modern urban environment.

On the main subject of gossip I would say that the pictire of Andrew and Giufre/Roberts would be enough for a jury to disbelieve any allegation of forced sex.

I am pretty sure that nobody thinks that Prince Andrew violently raped underage girls.

But soliciting prostitutes is illegal in many places, soliciting underage prostitutes is illegal everywhere, trafficking prostitutes over state borders is illegal, manipulating minors to have sex is illegal in most places, knowingly using prostitutes that have been trafficked/manipulated/forced to do what they do is illegal etc. etc. And not reporting it is also crime. As is knowingly using the results of crime of someone else to your personal gain.

Andrew should convince the jury that he did not know how and why Virginia Roberts happened to be in Epstein company and why she was so eager to have sex with him. And court system being as corrupt as it is, he probably will succeed.

The point I try to make, the UN have absolutely no jurisdiction on anything. The UN or EU should not be able to overrule national laws.

The UN certainly gets a lot of criticism, sometimes justly sometimes unjustly.
The problem is threefold:
1) The international law is not a fixed corpus but instead a loose collection of treaties and declarations, often contradicting each other. Thus anyone can pick and choose the parts they want to apply in certain situation. But UN charter is certainly one of the most universally recognized treaties.
2) The “XYZ cannot overrule national law” principle would make all international treaties meaningless. Thus all countries have special methods to incorporate such treaties into domestic law. Usually this is done by the ratification by parliament, in the same way as all domestic laws are adopted. Thus, unless the establishing treaty is annulled by parliament, both UN and EU (for member states) rules ARE the national law. And thus UN has jurisdiction over many things because national parliaments have given it many rights.
3) The core of the UN was to be ultimate arbiter of war and peace. Hence the Security Council has the most authority among its organs. Unfortunately, like all bureaucracies, it has grown beyond all proportions and sticks its nose into areas it was not meant to (like women’s rights, religious freedoms, climate etc.). This greatly dilutes the authority it originally had.
The UN is often impotent but it is not the fault but feature of its setup. No international organization can do anything against the will of major powers. But the same stands for national governments. A country can act as righteously as possible, but if one of the major powers does not like its behavior, and none of the others will support it, it has to bend. Either voluntarily or by force.
But sometimes the UN format works. Mostly if none of the major powers has strong interest in the outcome of certain conflict between minor states. Or it can give a formal forum for major powers to make compromises between themselves (like happened during the Cold War). And because of this, the major powers still like to keep it, even if they are complaining.
TLDR: I think UN is still useful thing but it should be pruned of all “soft” hoogabooga and let to be the arbiter of war and peace.

the only reason that the Baltic states are of any value to Russia is because of their ethnic Russian population

Whether or not they have value for Russia depends on how the hypothetical future war of the Baltic Sea will be fought.
As long as Russia believes it can can block most sea traffic from Kaliningrad/St. Petersburg, there is little need for Baltics. If not, aquiring the whole Eastern coast is of enormous value. In that sense being in NATO can be detrimental to their own security – if neutral, Russia could simply ignore them during conflict (as long as the supply lines to Kaliningrad are secured) but as long as they are in hostile alliance, they will be the first to be crushed.
The reason anyone has had interest in Baltic territories has always being strategic – starting from Eastern Crusades, Great Northern War, WWI, WWII.

With a finite Universe Darwinian evolution becomes mathematically impossible

I think it simply has probability 0 – but this is totally different thing from impossibility.
Getting any real value randomly from continuous distribution has probability 0. But objects still have locations, speeds etc (ignoring certain QM aspects).
But event probability 0 is questionable. Starting at least from Prigogine we know that local enthropy minimization is a thing and evolution extends naturally from that.

It is hardly irrational to recognize the 1200 year war Islam had on Europe

Except that it was not a war of Islam against Europe but an ordinary conquest any “normal” empire makes during its ascending phase. If the Caliphate and/or Ottomans had been Zoroatrist, Buddhist or Christian the history would probably have been pretty similar.
The theological differences, of course, created a lot of burdens to normal communication and trade between the blocks but conquering weaker countries does not need any extra justification. Europe did the same as soon as it recovered, initially in Americas, later in Asia and ME too.

The main reason was AFAIK that Lithuania was not able to claim the full restitution of their preWWII state because it was Stalin who took Vilnius from Poland and added to Lithuanian SSR.
Thy calculated that having few hundred thousand Russian-language citizens is small price to pay compared to potential Polish (and German) territorial claims.

History shows us that eugenic selection for higher IQ is not universal in Mathusian environment. Otherwise we should have seen almost all population in the World converging to European/East Asian levels.
Certain societal organization seems to be needed for the potential to be realized and it is hard to tell what will the situation be in future.

Germanic philosophy is bullshit

Wouldn’t say so.
Kant still casts a huge shadow over many XX century schools of thought.
Frege single-handedly created analytic philosphy (now exclusively British and American brand).
Wittgenstein probably created something large we even cannot fully understand yet.
Plush there are Marx, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger – their philosophy may have been shit but they have huge influence over contemporary thought – larger than any French or British philosopher of the same period I can think of (OK, Adam Smith probably qualifies).

A biochemical correction: fat is not convertible to glycose in human body (except glycerol that is small part of total energy in fat). It still enters citric acid cycle though.
Fatty acids are broken down in 2-carbon (2C) units. These can only be used either for energy or to synthesize new fatty acids. To synthesize sugars or amino acids organism needs at least 3C units.
This, of course, is of minor importance because in all normal foods there is enough sugars and amino acids to cover the 3C needs.

Two more ideas (for symbolic value and giggles):
1. Make Crimea Special Economic Zone, free from certain import restrictions. I.e. one can import Belgian apples to Russia but only through Crimean companies and using Crimean ports.
2. Law that automatically makes null and void all patents for companies and technologies that do not have unrestricted sales in Russia. I.e. if Siemens does not allow placing their gas turbines to Crimea Russian companies will not be prosecuted for copying Siemens patented technologies.

There’s also not much need to suppress pro-Russian opinions when such opinions are more fringe than alien abductions

This is objectively wrong. You seem to forget that about 30% of Estonian population are Russian-speaking and the majority of them have quite positive view of Russia. But Estonian media chooses to mostly ignore their opinion.
Even among Estonians the Russian-friendly segment seems to be sizeable around 10-20%. Definitely not fringe minority.
What is happening is that this Russian-friendly position is unexpressable in political scene. There are no Russian national party and for mainstream ones the risk of being labeled “pro-Russian” and loosing Estonian nationalist voters far outweights the risk of alienating minor Russian population. This overflows from politics to other pubic life where public figures have to suppress their possible Russian friendly viewpoints because of the fear of being ostracized by majority.

I think there is simpler explanation. European, and especially US/UK universities draw the brightest students/professors from much larger pool. Japan is quite isolated and much larger part of the research is done by locals.

No-one is taking even the most basic steps to halt a rapid dysgenic spiral.

Agree 100%. The IQ-enchancing technologies and knowledge have been around thousands of years. There is nothing magical about CRISPR than cannot be (at the population level) achieved by applying basic selection to human breeding. But if anything, we have recently seen the opposition to eugenics growing stronger – and specifically in high-IQ West.

I have always found the whole idea of serious “discrimination” against Jews in Middle Ages to be somewhat weird.
European civilization was explicitly Christian. Everyone was expected to convert, those who did not were forced to do so by threat of death. The only exception were Jews who were allowed to keep their non-Christian religion. In that sense, not only that they were not discriminated against, they were specially protected and tolerated, compared to, for example, pagan religions. But, of course, due to their different religion, they were excluded from lots of public life, rising to suspicion and overt conflicts. Later, when religious tolerance was established after the 30-year war, this was interpreted as intolerance. But in the core it was originally an act of tolerance that allowed them to keep their separate religion in otherwise monoreligious Europe.

In my opinion, the talk about SNPs is a bit misleading in this context.
20 000 SNPs is in the same order of magnitude that the number of haploblocks in European population. So they more or less capture the total genetic variability of the population into the model and use it to predict phenotype. It is interesting and certainly useful approach, for example to predict disease risks. But moving from such model to biological explanations – i.e. finding genes that should be manipulated to cure certain symptoms, is a long way.

The upper limit of GWAS methodology seems to be somewhere near 10% of genetic variance at maximum.
On the one hand the larger and larger cohort sizes increase the number of relevant associations. But one the other hand individual effect sizes become even smaller and smaller.
Interactions could give us the remaining part, but they increase the search space by the power of interacting markers. The number of individual markers is currently in millions, even two part interactions increase it to trillions. We will quickly hit the upper limit of cohort size (7 billion) for any reasoable power.
Actually we, even now, know a lot about what makes people more or less intelligent (or at least we have pretty informed guess about it). These are genes regulating brain organogenesis in fetal development. Hundreds to thousands individual genes, cross regulated by a web of transcription factors, which are themselves regulated by each other. This protein-protein, protein-DNA, RNA-DNA, RNA-protein etc. interaction network holds all the clues. Well-developed (high g) brain is a result of certain fine balance between all component of this network. Individual mutations alter its components – but without the picture of a network it is near impossible to find out, which combinations of mutations result in the optimal performance.