That's a terrible take. The only reason Conservatives in the U.K. and U.S. suck so much is because the two party system allows their shitty platforms to exist. When a problem is systemic, blame the system. There might be shitty people taking advantage of the system, and they may appear to be your adversary, but they're not. Get rid of them and they'll just be replaced by more shitty people. Because that's what the system produces. The system is the true antagonist.

In the U.S., the Democrats know the causes they ostensibly fight for cannot be resolved without reforming the political system first. But they don't want to reform the political system because they're one of two in a duopoly.

Well, no *one* of us in a position to save the coral reefs. Not even world leaders can do it. But we *all* are in a position to do a little bit, and collectively all those little bits add up to matter.

Sure if you're the only person trying to reduce is carbon footprint you will make no difference. But if enough people do it, then that captures the attention of industry and politicians and shifts the Overton window. Clearly we can't save everything, but there's still a lot on the table and marginal improvements matter. All-or-nothing thinking is a big part of denialist thinking; if you can't fix everything then there's no point in fixing anything and therefore people say there's a problem are alarmists predicting a catastrophe we couldn't do anything about even if it weren't happening.

As to the loss of coral reefs not being the worst outcome of climate change, that's probably true, but we really can't anticiapte the impact. About a quarter of all marine life depends on coral reefs for some part of their life cycle. Losing all of it would likely be catastrophic in ways we can't imagine yet, but the flip side is that saving *some* of it is likely to be quite a worthwhile goal.

Well, you bringing *evolution* into the argument shows that your views are so far off base theyr'e not even wrong.

Sure, the planet does not care, but we're not asking what the *planet* should do, are we?

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.

I guess it just depends how you're measuring things. For example, I would say that Clover POS systems are everywhere these days. You could counter by saying, "Well, Walmart doesn't use Clover and I wouldn't be surprised if they ring up more transactions daily than all those small businesses with Clover devices." Both can be true.

I bet the average person visits at least one PHP-driven site per day, even if they tend to stay within the confines of social media and YouTube. You might check the menu of a restaurant, visit a local government page, click a link to a news story or blog, visit an ecommerce site. Facebook might not use a lot of PHP anymore, but when you click on an ad on Facebook, it'll probably take you to a webpage driven by PHP.

Those 3 CRMs equate to a pretty large chunk of it.

And despite the story here, it might be PHP.

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.

You can still be smug:

"Linux? What, you just run a kernel? I run GNU/Linux."

"Your distro has systemd. You might as well be a Windows user."

"I use Arch. You've probably never heard of it."

"Linux has be corporatized. That's why I use *BSD."

"Slackware is the only true distro for nerds."

"Gentoo is the only true distro for nerds."

The definitions of communism/socialism get very murky, but I think Star Trek comes about as close to the ideal as one could get. Central control by the state that provides an abundance of goods. The problem with real communist countries is that they had to contest with the very real problem of scarcity. Star Trek doesn't really have to worry about that, but if my memory serves me correct a whole load of services like transportation were monopolized by the state. People appeared to have jobs because they wanted to do things, not because of an economic requirement. Seems pretty damned communist.

I want an open phone but it really isn't practical for my needs right now. Also, while my iPhone may be less "open" than an Android, I at least get some semblance of privacy protections. I don't think that makes me a horrible person.

For years I used nothing but Macs. I dabbled in Linux and would dual-boot, but that was just for playing around and learning about servers. Eventually Linux got to the point where I could use it everyday and when my Macs reached EOL, I just went from dual boot to only *nix.

I'll probably follow the same trajectory with cell phones. Once PostmarketOS becomes compatible with an old phone I have lying around I'll install it and toy around with it. Eventually I'll have an iPhone and an "open" phone. Once there's enough feature parity, I'll make the switch full time (for me, the ideal situation would be tight integration with NextCloud—if that becomes a thing I could convince my boss to switch the whole company over).

I think it's pretty unreasonable to expect everyone to use an "open" phone:

– State of PostmarketOS

(I know there are some Android forks out there, but that's like using a Chrome-based browser when I could be using Firefox)