Terrorists are very good at pushing their messages, this is clear today. ruZia, hamas, Iran, north korea even, apparently they are very effective at this entire psyops thing. Israel needs to eliminate the threat, AFAIC this can entirely mean whiping out the entire Gaza population also I hope they take out Iran's rocket and drone manufacturing capabilities, this would help both, Israel and Ukraine.

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.

The big problem with expecting a city to be "100% walkable" is the fact that it's a goal orthogonal to conveniences like modern-sized grocery stores and big-box stores.

A big grocery store like Publix or Kroger needs about 50,000 weekly customers to be financially viable. Packing 50,000 people into an area small enough for them all to be within walking distance is hard. The one possible loophole to this rule is, if the developer of a large condominium strikes a deal with a grocery chain like Publix to allow the store's customers to park in the garage for free (along with guests of the condo residents), it MIGHT be able to pull off combining a grocery store and large parking garage with skyscraper on top (so it can be marketed to condo residents as a super-convenient ultra-desirable amenity, yet still tap shoppers who live further away).

A store like Target or Best Buy needs a MINIMUM of 250,000-300,000 customers within local-market range before they'll even CONSIDER opening a store in the area. Short of surrounding the store with an ocean of 50+ story skyscrapers, it's damn-near impossible to pack enough people into a small area to make a store like that economically-viable from pedestrian shoppers alone.

Complicating matters further, there's a middle ground where NEITHER big-box stores + dense residential development are mutually-viable. If the store's parking is free while adjacent buildings charge for parking, it will find itself in an endless losing battle to keep people visiting adjacent buildings from parking there. If the store charges to park in its own garage, people who live a half-mile away won't shop there, and will drive 5-10 miles to a store where they can park for free instead.

The only reason stores like Walmart can build a superstore in the middle of (relative) nowhere and survive is because it basically wipes out almost every other store within 10-20 miles, and draws customers from up to 50-100 miles away.

For years, Miami's planning department operated under the delusion that "ground level retail" was some magic panacea. What really ended up happening: building owners demanded rents they considered proper for a big city, and the storefronts remained perpetually vacant (or opened, then went out business within a few months). The fact is, there's actually NOT a lot of market demand for small retail spaces devoid of free parking below condos that are owned mostly as vacation homes and spend most of their time unoccupied.

Townhomes can actually be quite good... as long as you've got a thick concrete wall separating your house from the neighbor's house. I'd argue that my back yard (surrounded by an 8-foot concrete wall, with aluminum-framed screen cage above it like you'd normally find around Florida swimming pools) is MORE private than my parents' yard (separated from their neighbors' with a chainlink fence on one side, and wood-plank fence on the other).

That said, I really like having my own yard and roof, and would hate living in a condo. When shopping for a townhouse, it's important to buy one that's legally a single-family home, and not merely a condominium that regards your yards (and maybe even your roof) as "common areas".

Based on the sources you quoted, I'm guessing that you're Canadian.

TBH, I've read a lot of articles (by Canadians) describing Toronto's transit system as "dire" and "awful", and have no idea WTF they're talking about. I was in Toronto last week, and thought it had the most spectacularly awesome subway and trolley system I've ever seen (as an American).

I mean, Line 1 (yellow?) and Line 2 (green?) had trains coming every 5 minutes or less... on SUNDAY, no less. In Miami, even fsck'ing METROMOVER (downtown) rarely manages to pull off a train more often than every 4-5 minutes, and Metrorail almost never has trains running more often than every 15-30 minutes outside of literal rush hour. Back around 2016, with ridership at its highest level in the system's history (partly, due to all the new condos that were built around the southern half's stations)... Metrorail suffered the biggest service cutbacks in its entire history, and the transit agency's incompetent leaders dared to publicly wonder why its ridership plummeted.

The big problem in America is, we spend billions of dollars building transit systems, then completely waste and squander them into uselessness by running trains 20-30 minutes apart. Or, in the case of the Washington Metro, cut corners on stations like Rosslyn in ways that create chokepoints and diminish the capacity of the entire system.

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.

So what that he encouraged or developed something, he is not the person who had actual access to this information, he never worked for any agency in USA where he would have to promise not to disclose information, to him (or anyone who doesn't work for such agencies) status of any 'secret' information is completely irrelevant, as it should be.

For example, if I egged on some general to disclose top secret information about some project and then he did disclose it, it would be on the general, not on me or anyone who encouraged him. HE IS THE ONE WHO PROMISED NOT TO DISCLOSE IT NO MATTER WHAT, not me, not anyone else.

I am not a 'right wing', I am not a 'left wing', I am a libertarian, anarcho capitalist, it puts me completely outside of what is considered to be normal politics in the USA by the way and I say that Assange has done nothing wrong at all and he is being terrorized because he embarrassed people who have power.

*this* is what "proves" it? Not the kidnappings, the torture, the murders? )

Yeah, you don't understand what will actually happen. What will actually happen is just more terrorism by the government that is already terrorist in nature. Kadyrov is a murderer, torturer, terrorist, his fame to claim was that he murdered his first russian at the age of 16. Today he routinely murders anyone who opposes his rule in any way, real or imaginary. His son kidnaps and beats a kid who posts something online that Kadyrov finds offensive. People routinely disappear, never to be seen again. People get tortured for anything that Kadyrov doesn't like.

At the same time Chechnia's economy only exists because putin provides Chechnia with billions of dollars every year from the russian budget.

You don't understand what is actually happening there. They don't care about law or whatever, if they hear something they don't like, you'll disappear and be raped and tortured and killed and that's about it. This entire thing about the music is really nothing at all, it just means that if someone *hears* music that is not Chechen they will report you and you will be gone.