Central Texas has seasons! They are Spring, Summer, Murder, and Summer Yet Again.

Sad to say, I know people who are working intimately with the water issues of Barton Springs and San Marcos, and what they tell me gives me great concern.

My advice: don't move into a house in or near Austin without rainwater catchment or a cistern. It'll be difficult just a few years down the road, and you'll be a drain on thinning resources. And for the love of god, don't expect to keep a standard issue green grass lawn through the summer. Native grasses and orchards, rainwater harvesting, even xeroscaping if you run out of ideas would all be better. People have got to respect that land more than the developers are presently.

Not necessarily. At least in San Francisco and in significant parts of Silicon Valley, it is possible to have a car-free lifestyle, and a half-mile walk home beats being stuck in traffic anyday. I pulled that off, once, and it was a sweet arrangement.

Austin is *not* ready to be a big city. Its infrastructure wasn't designed for it. Its traffic jams are some of the worst in the country, its aquifers are in serious trouble owing both to desertification and fracking around the Colorado River's headwaters, and much of its distinctive nature is being destroyed by new development. This is why you see signs reading, "Welcome to Austin! Don't move here."

Actually, the karmic comeuppance to internet trolls is pretty fabulous here. Imagine a crowd sounding like a YouTube comment section. We'd... better just leave them to it.

But rapid-composting systems will render sewage into safe, non-smelly fertilizer in a year, provided you're not full of medications or using any fiendish chemicals. It'll get all the rest of the nutrients too. Really, all we need to do is replicate and rev up a natural system, and reclaim *all* the nutrients. There's a reason we aren't all drowning in dinosaur shit.

Seriously, a fancy jig to get just one nutrient back sounds like a money grab rather than a working whole system.

Actually, have you played it? The UI is highly unintuitive for single player. Even if you think you're creating a single player game, it will still set you up with a game that will quit out if the internet connection fails. You have to get right-clicky and dig around for "play offline" options on the map listing.

So, they're ramming their options down player's throats: playing with the net-speaking kiddies over the internet for goofy achievement badges, or play a linear railroaded single-player campaign that feels as if it were written by a thirteen year old. I hope these releases make some change, because this isn't the Starcraft I remember.

Since browsing this conversation, I had to give mpd a try with Cantata client. Almost perfect! I just want to have ratings and tags for mood/tempo/setting and so forth, preferably built into the server.

I'm going for Clementine because it's bothered me the least. It still has some key features lacking. The smart playlists do not allow the inclusion of a song into another playlist as a criterion. If you sort by a column, no other columns will be sorted; sort by artists and album and track will be random. However, from what I've looked at in the source code, some modest changes to the commands it's sending to its SQL backend should be the answer.

Why that's not top priority on their buglist over some damn nyancat visualizer, I'll never know, but it's still one of the best in the mix.

It is teetering close to a run-away process, and most of the world still has its foot all the way down on the gas.

I am in despair of the industrialized world being any different from the many civilizations that destroyed their land base and then imploded - the Nile, Babylon, Greece, Easter Island, the Maya, the list goes on. The destructive acidification of the soils where tobacco was grown was a major factor in the American Civil War - with that and the Dust Bowl and ongoing topsoil loss, the USA is well on its way to doing the same.

We managed to fix the soil with applications of lime and crushed shells, but we're going to have to learn deeply about the ecology of soil, not just its chemistry, if we're ever to make this. Following this broken system all the way down threatens the planet with a mass extinction like it's never seen.

It's possible to feed humanity and keep the ecosystem thriving in a win-win scenario. That's what the Pre-Columbian Amazon jungle was: agriculture totally unlike that which turned the Middle East into a desert. That's our best hope of getting carbon back into the ground where it belongs in a way that naturally increases fertility. http://www.underwoodgardens.com/soil-building/terra-preta-magic-soil-of-the-lost-amazon/

The parent is right. The people who work their way to the top are the rare exceptions, and nobody born into wealth is going to understand what that took. Inter-generational wealth doesn't mean inter-generational lessons, and it rapidly turns into entitlement to use wealth as social clout to secure more wealth.

Most of all - it's used to trample the ability of others to negotiate what they earn from their work. Come on, if you're not a CEO or major shareholder - how likely is it that capitalism is working to create profits? Most people are being reduced to a minimum or less in this system, and Adam Smith didn't write with ultra-wealthy and ultra-poor people in mind. That would just be feudalism by any other name. Students of history know how dark that gets.

I was home schooled in part and knew others, but I can see how it left gaps in some subjects depending on the expertise of the parents. I personally developed a deficit in higher math while being taught out of history and science books full of creationist young-earth theories. I made up for that later, and I got better, but I think home schooling is a wildcard. I honestly think that those who are serious about home schooling - and serious is the only responsible way to be about it - ought to be forming co-ops to minimize the risk of gaps in teaching expertise.

Using renewables effectively takes a bit of rethinking beyond just plugging them into the same old centralized industrial model. You don't need to generate the equivalent amount of power to a coal plant, because you are free to deploy it onsite. You can adjust it for a minimum of conversions between AC/DC or voltages, and you don't have to put it across a sprawling electric grid and lose power to electric resistance. Hell - they make DC air conditioners with directly coupled solar panels now. Think about it - they're going to get power when you need it most. You can't do that with coal.

You can also produce just a little more than enough with broad-based redundancy. A coal plant needs to shut down every once in a while, and it needs a backup plant or two; this means that overproduction of electricity is endemic in the mainstream economy, and needless with renewables.

A more complete vision of renewables is highly dispersed, diverse, efficient, and democratized. It's also deadly to the fossil fuel industry. They're going to do their darnedest to make sure that the public gets incomplete and out of date information about renewables for that very reason.

Do you really want to make the argument that people shouldn't care about a precious ecosystem if they don't have the money to go tour it themselves?

Also, this is baseload electricity. You don't have to generate all your power using it, but it can account for power when the wind isn't blowing or the sun isn't shining. A smart microgrid could deploy this along with wind turbines or kite generators, and perhaps biomass incinerators. That's freedom: you don't have to go to war with a tinpot dictator over it. You don't have solar spills in the ocean. You don't have ruined marshes and rivers with it. You don't have power concentrated in corrupt hands. Most of the cost comparisons fossil fuel shills trot out simply omit all the environmental and political troubles that petroleum causes, needlessly in light of the alternative.

If our entire geopolitical system wasn't a huge subsidy to oil, we'd be adopting this technology for reasons including cost and benefit, and be the better for it.

There are supposed to be predators keeping these creatures in check. Unfortunately, we've overfished the oceans and polluted them so heavily that this problem is only set to grow.