I think that is a bit of a misleading way of putting it because the feeling being a "self" that is in charge of the body is an experience that is contained within consciousness rather than the essential nature of it; in principle, one could imagine having consciousness without any feeling of being a "self" at all.

If I had to define the nature of consciousness, I would say that it is essentially an internal simulation that the brain creates in order to aggregate information from various sources in order to facilitate processing and decision making. Just to be clear, this is not my own original idea, and more importantly I do not think that it is a particularly clever or deep way of thinking about consciousness, but rather the inevitable conclusion one reaches when one plays around with one's own attention and awareness and sees what happens; the trick is just to do it like a scientist and be constantly challenging one's own conclusions, rather than to invent one's own version of chakras. I find it especially enlightening to watch what the mind does when one tries not to steer it into doing anything; with some practice, it is possible to watch the "self" pretend to be in charge while simultaneously realizing it is not, and this experience can be helpful (though frustratingly I have not found it to be as immediately life-changing as I might have hoped).

Agreed, but at least the two chairs you brought provided a nice table for that plant.

That's fair, but my understanding is that Los Angeles is an extreme case rather than a representative example of a typical American city, in part because of its unfortunate location in a valley and in part because of its sprawl. The fact that pollution is particularly hard to control there is why California is legally uniquely able to apply for its own set of automobile pollution regulations that are stricter than the rest of the country.

I am having a really hard time figuring out what it is about this language that is supposed to make me excited about it.

An actor single handedly keeping a good 40% of the LGBTQ community off the ledge right now.

Oh, wow, how is he doing that?

I am not familiar with it; what do you mean?

I find it even easier just not to do things in the first place.

Looks cool, but I am disappointed that the logo of SSS is not a SSSsnake. 😀

What a hare-brained idea!

Huh?

Absolutely disgusting:

Being surrounded and yelled at about “misrepresenting reality” is not how serious United Nations-hosted negotiations are meant to proceed. But that is what happened to Prof Bethanie Carney Almroth during talks about a global treaty to slash plastic pollution in Ottawa, Canada. The employees of a large US chemicals company “formed a ring” around her, she says.

At another event in Ottawa, Carney Almroth was “harassed and intimidated” by a plastic packaging representative, who barged into the room and shouted that she was fearmongering and pushing misinformation. That meeting was an official event organised by the UN. “So I filed the harassment reports with the UN,” said Carney Almroth. “The guy had to apologise, and then he left the meeting. He was at the next meeting.”

I cannot speak on behalf of the article author, but as someone who personally is an imbecile, the answer is: definitely!