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.

And modern music is no exception. Some songwriters have more of a way with words. "Around The World" is one extreme to great effect - it's a neat song. Then there's song verses like:

Dive bar on the East Side, where you at?
Phone lights up my nightstand in the black
Come here, you can meet me in the back
Dark jeans and your Nikes, look at you
Oh damn, never seen that color blue
Just think of the fun things we could do...

You Know Who at her (IMHO) best. The notion that the only good music was performed in the 1970s by men with guitars is, at best, circular reasoning. De-valuing Taytay's music because her music and persona appeal primarily to women is nothing more than misogyny.

...laura

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.

I live in rural America, and an EV charging infrastructure is largely non-existent. In concept, EVs have their merits, but in execution, they are not usable everywhere. And frankly, I can't afford to replace 2 ICE vehicles and a farm vehicle with EVs and the supporting charging infrastructure. And besides, when the power goes out, all of my vehicles can still run.

Such bans are commonplace. Digital porn is heavily regulated, copyright violation is regulated, and supercomputer construction and export are quite heavily controlled. So is cryptography export.

Such transactions are reserved to governments, as Oliver North and President Reagan and Vice President Bush so eagerly showed, to evade political checks and balances on their bribery.

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.

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.

I got a pair of real eclipse glasses with my copy of Sky & Telescope's eclipse guide. They don't work very well with my glasses so I'll do the pinhole camera thing for the partial phases.

Loved Dr. Becky's collander.

...laura

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.

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

In this case the reasoning is somewhat circular. *If* there are many simulated worlds just like ours and there is only one real world, then it's more probable that our world is simulated than it is real. That's necessarily true, because it's a tautology. The truth of the statement as a whole tells you nothing about the world we actually live in.

As usual, tech bro hype has taken some impressive (to laymen) demos and spun them into a scenario that is far beyond was is demonstrably possible. Sure we can have the comptuer draw pretty pictures, but we actually can't model the world we live in very well. No computer model can tell you the price of Apple stock at the close of business tommorow or the temperature at 2PM in the afternoon a year from now. You can't model a fusion reactor sell enough to get to the point of building a working power station, you have to build many physical experiments to validate your model results. As the statistician George Box famously noted: all models are false; some models are useful.

As for faith, it has its place in science. You do an experiment because you feel confident it's going to tell you something; you usually have a pretty good idea of what you want to happen. That feeling of confidence is important in directing your efforts, but it carries no weight in arguments about results. Faith is only a "sin" (Greek *hamartia* -- to miss the mark) when you demand others share it.