Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re: 20% survival is pretty good (Score 1) 57

If I understand your argument properly, you're suggesting that things will be OK with the reefs because "survival of the fittest" will produce a population of corals better adapted to warmer conditions.

Let me first point out is that this isn't really an argument, it's a hypothesis. In fact this is the very question that actual *reef scientists* are raising -- the ability of reefs to survive as an ecosystem under survival pressure. There's no reason to believe reefs will surivive just because fitter organisms will *tend* to reproduce more, populations perish all the time. When it's a keystone species in an ecosystem, that ecosystem collapses. There is no invisible hand here steering things to any preordained conclusion.

So arguing over terminology here is really just an attempt to distract (name calling even more so) from your weak position on whether reefs will survive or not.

However, returning to that irrelevant terminology argument, you are undoubtedly making an evolutionary argument. You may be thinking that natural selection won't produce a new taxonomic *species* for thousands of generations, and you'd be right. However it will produce a new *clade*. When a better-adapted clade emerges due to survival pressures, that is evolution by natural selection. Whether we call that new clade a "species" is purely a human convention adopted and managed to facilitate scientific communication.

You don't have to take my word for any of this. Put it to any working biologist you know.

Comment Re:Think Different (Score 0) 107

The lack of interest leads to more lack of interest. And a lot of the lack of interest comes from the lack of women in tech. Even when women do show an interest, they are often run off by the rampant sexism in the field. Look at something like gaming, which is a lead in for many people to tech. Sexism is rampant in gaming to the point many women refuse to use comms in a game because they know what will happen. Because there are no women, it leads to open sexism, which leads to less women. It is an ouroboros of terrible behavior and bad outcomes.

Comment Re:Makes sense (Score 2) 86

I don't know how you are doing it, but it certainly works for me. I just tested with "how do you make a bookshelf" (minus quotes in the search). Quora was about the 5th result. I added -quora to the end (still no quotes) and that result disappeared completely.

Comment Does this make it through SCOTUS? (Score 1) 63

I mean, this is basically passing a law saying that company A cannot own something. Yes, it is China nd Bytedance, but if this stands, is there anything saying they couldn't do the exact same thing to another company. Could the dems pass a bill saying Trump must sell off all his ownership of Trump Media? I mean, this seems like a REALLY bad idea.

Comment Re: 20% survival is pretty good (Score 1) 57

I won't return in coin by calling you an idiot, because I don't think you are one. What I think you are is too *ignorant* to realize you're talking about evolution. "Survival of the fittest" is a phrase coined by Herbert Spencer in 1864 to refer to natural selection, a concept that's in the actual *title* of Darwin's book.

Comment Re:really - the whole world's ? (Score 1) 57

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.

Comment Re:20% survival is pretty good (Score 1) 57

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.

Comment Re:really - the whole world's ? (Score 2) 57

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.

Comment Re:import (Score 1) 90

How do you suggest they do this? All the systems are web based now. Do you think Intuit is going to allow the government access to it's DB to export last years tax data? Not a chance (and really, it would be terribly dangerous to allow a third party access to that info anyway). But not all free alternatives lack this. CashApp Taxes keeps your data from year to year and imports it and is free.

Comment Re:So? (Score 2) 93

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.

Slashdot Top Deals

Real Programs don't use shared text. Otherwise, how can they use functions for scratch space after they are finished calling them?

Working...