What a silly title. The answer is “because Italy’s government may have useful experience in setting up asylum claim offices in other countries which may reduce disastrous boat crossings. And taking the time to have a pragmatic look at another government’s plans does not mean endorsing their xenophobia or poisonous rhetoric.” Which any adult with normal reading comprehension would understand.

Is anyone over there a credible source?

Yawn

o no

7 with a sprinkling of ‘this is fine’

Once, yes

The sentence was a custodial jail sentence. There were just two mitigating factors that downgraded it to a suspended one by a whisker: 1. early guilty plea (in the UK this reduces sentence by a third) and 2. first offense. Typically a first offense under two years would be suspended for anyone.

It’s pretty standard to have a first offense under 2 years suspended

BBC is reporting it

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c8dp10d4vq2t

Neat!

Has Starbug vibes

You would be amazed

C is probably closest to reality with light weight ceramics and so on. Though still very very far away from actual reality.

Find something you think is more important than you and give your time to it

I wonder if they gave a little because he’d caused so many fact checks they didn’t want the uninformed to mistake it all for being one sided

oh my days

I don’t get what the problem is about this? The last tickets are worth more than the first ones, no?

They could just auction all the tickets, but the result would be the same

I’m afraid you are not going to find anything in the brain except “dead molecules”. There isn’t anything in there except the laws of physics and chemistry acting out like clockwork.

But in terms of the scale of how “decisions” work. Then, yes, far simpler decisions (perhaps better to say “reactions”) happen with relatively few neurons. The complete brains of small insects have been mapped by researchers, maybe several million neurons. They can detect movement reactions happening in response to stimuli.

This though is a very different thing to what people mean when referring to their conscious decision to do something.

That’s how neurons work, yes. But you can’t reduce a “decision” down to a single neuron. It depends what you mean by decision really. Do you mean “the smallest thing that can affect something else”, in which case, yes, neurons are the smallest unit (it seems) of brain function. But not consciously so.

Or do you mean the collective input that goes into the brain generating an output? In which case, the brain appears to function more with swarms of neurons firing together. You won’t find any examples of a single neuron affecting, say, the choice of going to the cinema. We don’t know the brain in enough detail for that, nor does it seem possible for it to work that way (neurons die and are replaced but our behaviour and decisions seems far more stable).

Or do you mean the conscious experience of making a decision (free choice)? Which is a different thing again. The mechanics of the brain operating input and output and the conscious experience of it are not the same thing. They may be generated by distinct but overlapping parts of the brain. Often in step but not always. Conscious choice can’t have elements of it reduced to single neurons, brain experiments seem to frustrated any attempt to turn up evidence for that.

Whatever it is we colloquially mean by making a conscious decision about something doesn’t exist on the neuron level. It exists on the millions of neurons acting simultaneously level.

A “decision” is highly complex emergent behaviour. Looking for it in a single neuron is like asking if there’s a single air molecule where a gale started. We almost certainly will never identify single neurons corresponding to single mental ideas. A “go to the cinema” neuron versus “go to the park” likely don’t exist. What is more likely is that large ‘flows’ of neutral activity correspond to these things or to what we call ‘decisions’. However when we think of more and more specific mechanical things (like lifting a finger) then it’s more likely this corresponds to very small areas of neurons that controlled their activation and it makes a bit more sense to talk about that being a switch to ‘decide’ to move a finger. But the decision itself is actually the vast cloud of neutral activity leading into it not a single thing.

There are GUI wrappers that issue the equivalent commands for you, but a lot of Linux users would just write something like this on the command line:

sudo apt install vlc

That’s how you would install VLC (media player) on Debian linux without any prior file download or browsing. It connects to the Debian repository for you, downloads and installs.