Of course this isn't science, it's just wishful thinking and hand waving about things you don't actually know much about. It's probably worth noting that actual reef scientists aren't so cheerful about the prospects for coral reefs as you are.

It's not even that what you *think* you know is necessarily wrong. You're talking about about something reef scientists aren't particulary worried about: the extinction of coral *species*. In other words it's a straw man. What scientists are worried about is something quite different: a massive reduction in the 348,000 square kilometers of coral reef habitat that currently exist.

That's something that will take millions of years to recover from, and which will cause countless extinctions It will result in multiple species extinctions; sure that's survival of the fittest, but "fittest" doesn't mean "better"; it means more fitted to specific set of new circumstances, in this case circumstances we *chose to create*. And sure, in a few million years it won't matter. But that's not the test we use to decide whether anything other issue needs addressing. If someone broke into your house and took a dump on your kitchen table, it wouldn't matter in a million years, but you'd sure report it to the cops and expect something to get done about it.

No, it's not evolution *at work*. It's human intervention in the environment at work. Sure, evolution will *respond* to this intervention; if you want to see *that* at work, go into suspended animation for a hundred thousand years.

You could argue that *humans* are part of nature and therefore anything we do is natural. That's just quibbling. By that argument it would be just as natural for us to choose not to shit in our own beds.

Turbotax offers free service to low-to-moderate income people as part of an agreement it has made with the IRS. In return for this, the IRS doesn't provide free electronic tax preparation services like most other advanced countries do. For most consumers, the IRS could in fact automatically fill out their returns and the consumer could simply check it by answering a few simple questions rather than puzzling over instructions written for professional accountants.

If you've always wondered why filing your taxes couldn't be simpler, a bit part of this is marketing from companies like Intuit that make a lot of money out of simplifying the process for taxpayers.

The free tier service is something Intuit is contractually obligated to provide. Upselling low-income people to a paid service that wouldn't benefit them in any way is morally dubious at best.

Is there some other strategy that is better? It's hard to see what the "wise" strategy would be for dealing with an aggressive nuclear-armed dictatorship that may or may not be collapsing politically.

Certainly "let Russia do what it wants because they might nuke us otherwise" feels a lot like paying the Dane-geld; as soon as they realized that was our strategy, they'd control us with it.

The purpose would be to bankrupt your opponent; once they no longer have the resources to manufacture more battle-robots, your robots can march to the capital and take it over.

You want a pre-WW2 suburb.

I was visiting Oxford UK on business and I stayed at a colleague's house which dated from the1800s. I was shocked that the front door of her house was right at the sidewalk, you could look right into her front room. But it turned out that by giving up privacy in that front room, she got an enormous and very private back yard. The arrangement was something like this. That's just a street in the area I randomly picked off of Google Maps satellite view, but I checked it for walkability: it's less than one minute's walk from the local boozer, and on the way back you can get a takeaway curry.

I'll quote from the Wikipedia Article: "In urban planning, walkability is the accessibility of amenities by foot." It is important to contrast this with the practices it was intended to counter (again from the same article): "... urban spaces should be more than just transport corridors designed for maximum vehicle throughput."

Transit is an integral part of walkable planning simply because it gets people *into* neighborhoods so they can do things on foot. But cars are a way to get people into an area too, so cars can and should be part of *walkability* planning. For example there's a main street area near me with maybe 50-70 stores. When I visit I contribute to congestion by driving around looking for a parking spot. A carefully placed parking lot could reduce car congestion on the street while increasing foot traffic and boosting both business and town tax revenues.

Is John Cage's famous minimalist piece acceptable?

If not, how will they prevent people from playing it?

Because a law passed by Congress actually *requires* what you are calling "the administrative state" to draft those regulations. The executive branch can't regulate something just because it thinks doing that would be a good idea. There has to be a law directing the executive branch to draft such a regulation.

Now if you actually look in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), you will see that each and every regulation in the CFR cites a *statutory authority* -- that is to say a law passed by Congress which compels the executive branch to draft a regulation about such an such a thing. For example 40 CFR Part 50, a regulation written by the "administrative state", cites 42 USC 7401 a statute passed by Congress.

Note that I say the statutes "require" and "compel", not "empower" and "enable". That's bcause the executive branch has no choice in the matter. It *must* issue a regulation if so directed by statute, even if it disagrees with that statute. This is why regulations don't just disappear when an anti-regulation president gets elected. An administration can tweak regulations to be more favorable to business, but if they go too far in undermining the intent of the statute they'll get sued for non-enforcement of the law (e.g., this).

So if you think an adminsitration has overstepped its statutory authority with a regulation, and you have standing, you can sue to have the regulation amended. But if you fail in your suit, you won't be able to fix it by electing a President who agrees with you. You need a Congress which will repeal the statory authority for the regulation.

If your information on this stuff from political news channels, you can be forgiven for thinking government bureaucrats just make up regulations on their own initiative, but it just doesn't work that way.

The idea that poor folks are the backbone of Trump's base is a myth. In 2016 Clinton won the under $50k income vote by 12% and tied with Trump in the over $100k income group. Trump notched a modest 3% margin of victory in the $50k-$100k group.

The actual backbone of Trump's base is white people without a college degree who are nonetheless doing fairly well for themselves. This is particularly influential demographic in rural states, which have outsize representation in the Electoral College.

If you've ever bought gas, you helped pay for it.

Even if you never bought any gas, your tax dollars paid for some of it, in the form of subsidies.

Really the only reliable way to prevent an AI from giving out a particular type of info is to avoid training it on that info. Eg if you donâ(TM)t want your AI giving out bomb-making instructions, donâ(TM)t train it on bomb-making instructions.

Of course, removing harmful info from the training sets at scale is its own tough problem; maybe they could train an AI to do that.

I've been out of IT for many years now, but one question I always have about these ransom scenarios is this: wouldn't advanced journaliing filesystems make recovery from an attack much easier, particularly filesystems where you can mount a shapshot? You could just start serving a past snapshot then make any updated files available as you clear them.

Back in the day I had customers who had incompetent DBAs bork their databases with bad SQL DML and DDL. Where the customer was using Oracle it was pretty easy to walk that stuff back because under the covers Oracle has been making heavy use of COW in their database storage. This allowed me to selectively walk back certain sets of problematic transactions. I could roll back just the transactions made by a certain user on a certain day that involved particular operations or database objects. You didn't have to figure out how to undo the individual effects of the bad transactions, you just waved your magic wand and it was as if those transactions never happened.

There must be some reason people aren't using file systems with COW and efficient snapshotting for general file service, because of on the face of it this seems like an obvious solution to the problem.

Yeah, doesnâ(TM)t everyone? The problem is itâ(TM)s very easy to be a bad C++ developer, and thereâ(TM)s a long twisty road to travel before you can be a good one.

Rust is similar, except the bad Rust programmers will spend more of their time battling the compiler and less of their usersâ(TM) time discovering runtime bugs caused by avoidable programming errors.

It's both easing of the accellerator and using the brakes to scrub off speed, with precise performance altered by the drive mode.