It's not just a question of whether it's justifiable. It's just simply nonsense to think that they can enforce this. Anyone can run Stable Diffusion on their computer. There's a virtually limitless number of models finetuned to make all kinds of porn. It's IMHO extremely annoying all the porn flooding the model sites; I think like 3/4ths of the people using these tools are guys making wank material. Even models that aren't tuned specifically for porn, rarely does anyone (except the foundation model developers, like StabilityAI) specifically try to *prevent* it.

The TL/DR is: if you think stopping pirated music was hard, well, *good luck* stopping people from generating porn on their computers. You might as well pass a law declaring it illegal to draw porn.

Light exposure, depth, degree of exposure, isolated from others or clustered... many factors can affect survivability.

You'd need to bundle that law with a law that would make the tickets refundable until a certain point too close to the event.

It's legitimate, in my mind, to resell tickets for some event you wanted to go to but now cannot because life circumstances got in the way. It's less legitimate to scrape a website, buy a zillion tickets, and resell them at a huge markup.

Economic populism is more in vogue on both the left and right today than it was in the 90s.

Ban TicketMaster/Live Nation from the lucrative resale market and watch how quickly they conjure up an effective solution to solve the problem of bots snatching up all the tickets.

We purchased tickets for Alanis Morissette's tour this summer, within 60 seconds of sales opening, and magically all the first sale tickets were gone and we had to go to the resale market. From nosebleed to "if you have to ask, you can't afford it", literally, every single seat in a ~20k person arena sold within a minute? Who knew she was still that popular....

TM gets to collect their bullshit fees on every single sale, so what incentive do they have to do a damn thing about bots?

To be fair, there have been times where Earth's temperature changed relatively rapidly.

On the other hand... those times tended not to work out very well for life :

Our current experiment with mass greenhouse gas emissions affecting the climate, Earth itself has kinda done it before, at the Paleocene-Eocene boundary. The associated Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) left the world such an altered place that we refer to it as a different era (the Eocene). The oceans took the brunt of the hit. Except the differences we have vs. the PETM are *not* to our favour:

  * The arctic was ice-free going into the PETM; ours is not. The presence of ice creates an amplifying feedback process, where the more ice that melts, the more sunlight gets absorbed, creating more heat to melt more ice.

  * We're releasing our carbon an order of magnitude faster (though our methane emissions are similar)

The PETM caused a 5-8C rise over 6000 years, but we're speed-running it, so it's really our best case. The worst case is the K-Pg extinction event

Only the worst excursions in history tend to result in large parts of the earth becoming relative sterile. But they all lead to mass disruptions in ecosystems and waves of global or at least local extinction (but new speciation of the survivors who take their place). Indeed, we probably owe our existence to the PETM - primates diversified and radiated after it. But that's little solace to species that didn't make it. Like, for example, dinoflagellates flourished during the PETM. But do you really want to replace reefs with red tide?

Also, it's actually 1-3 years. The Great Barrier reef underwent mass bleaching events in 2016, 2017, 2020, 2022, and now in 2024.

(To be clear on terminology: colony != reef. A coral colony is a cluster of polyps that bud or divide off from each other, all genetically identical and interconnected by the coenosarc to share resources, with each polyp living for a few years. For a plant analogy, the colony would be a a tree, and the polyps, individual leaves of that tree)

Going through mass bleaching events every 2-3 years is not the "whew, let's relax" event you seem to think it is when corals don't hit reproductive age for ~3-10 years, depending on species, with initial reproduction rates being slow and taking time to accelerate (the longest-lived animals on Earth are coral colonies, with certain individuals documented having lived for thousands of years; most live for decades, or in some species hundreds of years). Let alone the knock-on for all the species that depend on healthy coral for their their habitat, which lead to balance in the ecosystem, which is critical to e.g. preventing explosions of coral predators.

It's like taking an old growth forest in an ecosystem not adapted to regular fires, and burning it down every couple years. There will still be "something" living there, but it's just not going to be the same ecosystem it was.

Or they were just healthier to begin with, or more favourably situated. It doesn't mean that they have an inherent genetic advantage.

Corals are not fast growing. They grow about a centimeter per year, give or take half an order of magnitude. The fastest-reproducing corals still take several years to hit reproductive age, while others take as much as a decade. These aren't like bacteria that can quickly get new genes into the mix, test them, and quickly spread them through the population.

Corals need to get off Tiktok and stop with these unhealthy style trends. You're beautiful the way you are, corals!

It's an interesting situation in Ukraine.

Ukraine has essentially run out of artillery shells and anti-missiles. That's not an absolute measure, but effectively Russia is missile striking all the infrastructure in Ukraine, notably power generation facilities, with impunity.

The Russians are also slowly taking territory. You might have heard about the recent fall of Avdiivka, which is officially a win for Russia except that Ukraine made it a very expensive piece of real estate. I've heard one estimate that Russian casualties are 10:1 against Ukrainian, so it's really a win for Ukraine. Except that Russia has so many people it can throw into the war effort it might not make a difference.

On the flip side, Ukraine has damaged several oil processing facilities inside Russia 200 miles East of Moscow. Two soldiers carrying small drones in a backpack can hike across the border, deliver a small munition (probably more than a hand grenade but not much more) right to the vertical distillation column using video feedback for targeting, and the distillation column is an integral part of the process and the most difficult piece to repair.

Ukraine has taken some 14% of Russian oil processing offline using this method, which is a huge bite out of Russia's federal budget. Also, Russia now has to allocate resources to protecting vital infrastructure all over Russia.

Ukraine has also had good luck with water-based drones: put a bunch of munitions on a motorboat with a GPS and video feedback for targeting, paint it black and send it at night, several hundred miles with pinpoint precision to sink a warship. Russia discovered experimentally that all of their anti-whatever guns are intended for incoming missiles and other ships, and so they can't point down low enough to hit a small motorboat within striking range. You have to get the crew to shoot at the drone from the deck with rifles and hope you hit something important.

Ukraine has basically kicked the black sea fleet out of the western half of the black sea using this method.

Of note, these drones are being built in Ukraine by Ukrainians. They're not donations from other governments.

Ukraine now has lots and lots of military observers from various countries across the world looking in on the military aspects of drone warfare, which is a completely new tactic for war. If it takes an anti-missile costing $100,000 to take out a drone costing $1,000, that's an obvious advantage to the side using drones.

And no one has tried drone swarms yet either, and I think that would be the next logical step. Exhaust your opponent's anti-missile shield over the city with one wave of cheap drones, then send in the second wave with incendiary munitions to set everything on fire all at once.

And all for the price of 1 anti-missile missile.

The very first episode of Star Trek I ever saw was Duet. Have you seen it? It was Season One and by the end of the episode we're pretty far removed from "Terrorist Kira." It did not take seven years for her to view the Cardassians as people or to think that a political solution was possible.

Your legal theory where a person can break into someone's house, take book that the person doesn't have the right to share, photocopy it, and share it, and that this is the VICTIM's liability because their locks aren't good enough to stop the attacker, is duly noted.

Or is this just a good old fashioned human-dupe?