The saying "Laws are for the little people" used to be funny, now, not so much.

Was only ever funny if you still had your eyes closed. OTOH, it *is* getting worse.

Do you really think voting for a third party, or refusing to vote, makes any difference?

If nothing you do makes any difference, is it really your fault? There might have been something that would have made a difference, but voting isn't on that list. That became quite clear when they refused to even count the votes for Pat Paulson. (I suspect he would have won, but there's no way to tell.)

FWIW, in Fukishima one of the main problems was with the cooling of spent reactor rods that were stored on site. Being SCRAMmed wouldn't help there. And they were a problem even on the reactors that had shut down normally.

Now Diablo Canyon wouldn't need to worry about corrosion due to using sea water to cool it in an emergency, but just how *would* they cool it in such an emergency?

Except that it's my understanding that there has been explosive releases from methyl cathlates in the past. LARGE explosive releases (or we couldn't tell from this distance in time).

I think this is a different source of methane.

IIRC, they decided not to mine the methyl cathlates because:
1. It would be too expensive.
2. There was too much chance of setting them off explosively. (State change explosion, not a normal chemical reaction.)

Apparently they're only stable at low temperatures, and the ocean is warm enough that they're iffy, and could be set off by an attempt at mining.

I think there are about as many positive feedback loops as positive feedback loops. The thing is, if a positive feedback loop isn't offset by an aligned negative feedback loop (or set of loops) then that part of the system tends to be unstable, and the system moves away from that point.

Heating the planet strengthens the positive feedback loops involving methane release. The initial heating was caused by an increase in CO2, which is continuing, so it's continuing to strengthen the release of methane. The corresponding negative feedback loop involves the degradation of methane to CO2 which is a less powerful greenhouse gas...but, whoops! it's still a greenhouse gas.

There are LOTS of sources of methane. Rotting pools of what used to be permafrost is going to be a big one. This identifies one under the ocean. It could be a big one, but might not be...because the methane might degrade to the weaker greenhouse gas CO2 before it reaches the atmosphere. Of course, CO2 will still contribut to global warming, just not as much. The real question mark (in my mind) is the methyl cathlates, which may become increasingly unstable if they get warmer. They *could* release explosively, in which case there will be a sudden large increase in the amount of methane in the atmosphere, Or they could release slowly, in which case there will be a slow rise of CO2. Or, if the ocean were cold enough, they could just remain in place. They appear to have released explosively a time or two long in the past, but I don't know how certain that is, or what the results were. Or how quickly they reform during periods when the ocean is colder. (Perhaps they've already done all the explosive releases they're going to do.)

IIRC, the half life of methane in the atmosphere is around a decade (loosely speaking) but it converts to CO2 in most of its degradation modes (like being eaten by bacteria).

But if you make the battery blow up, you can't track the phone anymore.

Why? I'm not considering supporting them, and I'm not considering their opposition, so why should i watch it? I'm sure I could see as bad if I went down to the hospital emergency room and waited for awhile.

I really don't think that snuff fliks add anything of benefit to human society, no matter who does them. What I find most repellant about this thing is that some people want to watch it. All states claim the right to decide when and for what to kill people, and this is just ISIS claiming that they're as good as any other government. (Some governments have decided not to kill people, but they have reserved the right to change their mind.)

The microgrid idea is attractive, and would work. Unfortunately, it appears inherently more expensive and less efficient. This would make it an extremely hard sell. It also decreased central control, so the govt. wouldn't be attracted to it, even if they didn't actually put up roadblocks.

FYI - I've written many daemons. In cases like this, a crash needs to stay down until the admin gets to it.
Why? A restart of the service may very well clear out any logs relevant to the crash.
This is especially true once the service starts relying on things like D-Bus where settings are live and can themselves be the source of the crash, but are not discovered until run-time and there's lots of network/bus talk to get to it.

So no, auto-restart is in 99% of cases NOT a feature.

From every experience I've had with systemd, I'd say that it is NOT progress. I don't want every little thing integrated in the manner systemd does.

And frankly, OpenRC is a lot better.

You did oversimplify. There's really no sense in talking about the "extent to which we are contributing" because of various positive feedback loops. I suppose that if you just say "we are a major contributor to global warming" you would on safe ground, but anything finer than that an things get really complicated. Even this article talked about how a warmer ocean causes increased release of methane....which causes a warmer ocean...which... (Well, the article didn't expressly mention that this was a loop. And only one of many.) Fortunately there are also some negative feedback loops...but they don't appear to be as strong. Or perhaps they're just slower. If deformation of the earth's crust (by melting the glaciers that acted as weights holding it down) sets off a chain of volcanos, then we may end up dealing with a global cooling problem.

FWIW, the drying out of western North America has caused deformation of the earth's crust in that area, as the weight of the water has been removed. It's only about (IIRC) 6cm/year, but volcanos have been active in the US west coast that had long been dormant. Probably a coincidence, but do look up the "Deccan Tapps". And remember that we can't yet predict volcanos or earthquakes.

It's true that most distros are committed to using systemd. That doesn't make it a good choice, and it was often a very narrow vote that approved it, because that are lots of things to hate about systemd. Also, a large number of people don't really trust the lead developer. And .... well, there are a large number of things not to like about it.

I'll probably wait to decide that I won't have anything to do with it for awhile, though. Perhaps it won't turn out to be as much of a blivet as it looks like. But in the meantime I'm going to be checking out alternatives. Just in case. If it's as bad as some have reported, I may be switching to some flavor of BSD.