...but hardly surprising since it was one of the largest quakes in modern times.

1. The US doesn't need Jack Sparrow running a pirate hospital ship, just get rid of the morbid leaches in the system with a reasonable UHC scheme.

2. Virtually every state capital city on the Aussie mainland now has a massive desal plant, they were all commissioned and built in the final years of our last major drought. Sure they come with higher costs than just collecting rainwater but when your reservoirs of drinking water are hovering at around 10% capacity and there's not a cloud in the sky, it becomes a very affordable option for a first world city. Of course LA would need 4-5 such desal plants due to its unusually large population but these things scale well from an economic POV.

Who are you talking to? What do you gain by having an imaginary conversation with someone that you're pretending has said something that nobody said?

All domestic dogs are the same species. Just like all humans. But let me guess: you aren't willing to refer to Standard Poodles, or Chihuahuas, or English Pointers as breeds, right?

Why ignore that? I chose those specifically because - despite the serious melting-pot stuff of the last 100+ years or so - those PLACES have also been home to readily identifiable large groups of people who share very obvious genetic traits.

But, inconveniently, it's also a perfectly reasonable way to look at a large group and say, "Wow, that group of several million people sure do have a LOT in common, genetically."

Yes, just like most know cases similar to the family with 3 smart kids and 1 much less smart one.

How about: reasonable people of normal intelligence can readily observe the inheritance of broad classes of physically obvious traits - related to skeletal and muscle structure, pigmentation, hair formation, disease susceptibility, and so on - that plainly manifest themselves in large groups of people that have developed together and have tended to breed amongst themselves.

That you try so hard to proclaim that such obvious things are not real makes you sound like, well, a total tool.

Who says it has to be distinct, unique enough perfect compartmentalization enough to put people entirely, precisely in one box of the next?

But are you REALLY pretending that you can't immediately spot some people as being obviously of Mongolian, or Russian, or Ethiopian extraction? I can spot people of Scandinavian heritage a mile away, and can readily see the differences between people carrying DNA from the Andes vs. DNA from the jungles of Central America. Why are you trying so hard to pretend those differences are plainly obvious? What do you gain, other than street cred with the willfully obtuse politically correct set?

Aussie turf grass (mainly cooch) good at stopping sandy soil from eroding and is kind to bare feet (but may contain funnel web spiders). The worst weed to have in an aussie lawn is the bindi, it has a large seed that no matter which way it lands has a thorn pointing upwards. Still, most (not all) people here in Oz fall into the "lazy" camp, we just mow whatever grows and maybe throw a box of seed mix around after a severe drought has turned it to dust. During a drought there are severe restrictions on water use for everyone with harsh penalties for breaking them, watering lawns (if permitted) is 2hr window on two or three days a week, sprinklers are generally banned. We aussies really do take water rationing very seriously during a drought, people or companies who flaunt the heavily advertised water rationing rules are about as popular with the general public as arsonists and pedophiles. All but the most dedicated gardeners see their laws disappear in the first or second February.

Having said that, wild grass is incredibly resilient, my house is near the beach, during the last major drought the yard was bare sand for several years, the lemon tree died in the second of five of our driest summers on record, the handful of native bushes and trees I have took it in their stride, two weeks of good rain in mid autumn then BOOM a carpet of green shoots across the entire yard, not an ounce of fertilizer, not a single seed sown. The easiest way to thicken it up after a drought is as you say cut high and often but also leave the catcher off the mower, this holds in the moisture, allows more species to reseed themselves, and gives pollinators a better chance of surviving the mower.

Flowers are not the only interesting feature of a wild lawn, we have a local grass that puts up a fast growing stem like a dandelion and at roughly the same time as dandelions are turning to seed. A narrow seed pod forms on top of the steam and when ripe explodes shooting hundreds of pinhead sized seeds waist high.

Disclaimer: I am an average (Aussie) post-war suburban grandparent :)
When there's enough rain to have a lawn I pay someone $50 to mow it and trim the edges every 3-5 weeks depending on the season, he does a great job. I am however a little odd (ok very odd) in that I don't mow it in early spring because it is covered in weeds (wild daisies) or late summer ( dandelions and grandpa's exploding grass :). Happily the road people seem to have also noticed the daisies since the drought broke and now appear to time their spring mowing so as to be just the right height when the 6-8 inch tall daisies flower (roughly a 2 week window in early spring). Makes the freeway commute feel like a spring meadow and doesn't cost them a cent.

Are they planning to retire in Montana too?

There's no ice in Queensland, the prevailing ocean currents go south and are replenished by clean water from the coal sea. However fertilizer runoff has been the barrier reef's #1 enemy for decades. We don't get red-tides so much but the runoff triggers the regular crown of thorns plagues whose larvae eat the algae, then as adults eat the coral. The plagues can and do occur naturally, usually after floods from cyclones. The fertilizer both amplifies and increases the frequency of the plagues to the point were the reef does not have enough time between plagues to fully recover.

The reef's in the Caribbean and mediterranean were already heavily damaged when Jack Cousteau was swimming around taking notes in the 60's. Since then Science has discovered that a healthy reef actually has the majority of its biomass stored in large fish such as sharks, a severely degraded reef has the majority of its biomass stored in small fast growing invertebrates and weeds. The only reason the filthy Ganges river has not destroyed the Seychelles and other pristine reefs nearby is that it's mouth is clogged with thousands of acres of mangroves that act as a natural (and extremely efficient) water filter.

Nearly all marine biologists will tell you the answer to the serious problem of collapsing fisheries is to set aside marine parks in specific locations that would cover approximately 5% of the world's coastline and some specific deep sea ridges, virtually everyone else will say there's "plenty of fish in the sea".

You should probably read up a little more on how hypothesis formation works. You can either base it on experiment, or you can base it on, say, what math says should be there.

But it's just hypothetical until it is shown to conform to reality with a certain degree of certainty.

A meta-conspiracy.

Damned organ music, I missed it because I was waiting for something dramatic to happen!

TFA doesn't say what caused the dam break, sometimes it's actually nobody's fault, ie: "shit happens". However the cause should be thoroughly investigated by forensic engineers and if it was negligence, then jail the negligent, which in the eyes of law is normally the principal engineer who signed off on the construction, "following PHB orders" is not a valid excuse in the eyes of the law.

It most certainly does not rule out dyson spheres. Any civilization advanced enough to build a dyson sphere would likely be able to build them in a way that we would have a hard time detecting them. I'm not saying aliens are responsible for dark matter, but it definitely isn't evidence against.

Besides, interaction with normal matter is the ONLY way that we identify dark matter. So says CERN.

We have no idea what gravity.is, only how it behaves, same deal with dark matter. Perhaps there's no matter in dark matter, perhaps we are seeing a naked gravitational field. Technically all we are observing is a gravitational field, the "matter" itself has never been observed we just assume that all gravitational fields require some sort of matter to bend space, nature is under no obligation to comply to our rules, perhaps space is capable of bending by itself via local fluctuations in the expansion rate.