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.

What you're saying is that you consider living in a manner consistent with being above the poverty line to be a luxury, and people should be taxed on it. And that attitude justifies, at least in your mind, raising taxes on the middle class — even the lower middle class who often struggle to get by.

And because your tax proposal applies only to things that normal people buy, while mostly ignoring true luxuries, such as yachts bought overseas, and completely ignoring securities, butlers, maids, personal drivers, personal pilots, and other things that the wealthy tend to spend their money on, it shifting most of the tax burden from the wealthy to the middle class, which is what pretty much every economist who has ever looked at this plan has concluded it will do, but you're okay with that, because apparently in your mind, not being dirt poor is a luxury that should only be allowed for those who can afford it.

Start by passing a law that makes it unlawful to make anything non-transferrable, whether it is a concert ticket or a software license. That one law would do more to fix this problem than anything else.

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

One of my friends once pointed out to me that 10 Things I Hate About You is basically Taming of the Shrew in a different setting, and my perspective on movies has never been the same since. So how many of those 7% were still retellings of existing stories, but with enough changes to make them not be flagrantly "based on existing IP"?

If the people using public chargers during the day don't have a charger at home, then by definition, they're not part of that 6 P.M. surge, and are thus effectively reducing its magnitude compared with what it otherwise would be.

Remember that the 10x number that I was arguing against is a hypothetical future state in which everyone has an EV and charges at home, not a power deficit that currently exists and that we need to fix, so if a third of apartment dwellers are never able to move to home charging, it does reduce that number considerably.

And even if the apartment complex owners eventually tear down and rebuild the apartments and thus have to comply with the new building code requirements forcing them to put in charging infrastructure, it still potentially kicks the can down the road for several decades, thus reducing the urgency of dealing with that hypothetical load.

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.

While technically true, that definition of "abuse" has to include things like fast charging, bringing the cell close to 100% state of charge, charging when it's too cold outside, allowing the battery to get too warm, and starting to drain the battery immediately after charging. With the exception of charging to 100%, all of those are things that many car owners can't really avoid. So you can't really just wave your hands and say "That's abuse," because such abuse is common enough for entire lines of products to have been recalled over it.

True, but not everybody has home charging available, either because they don't have a dedicated parking spot (apartments) or because they don't have adequate service amperage to their home (many mobile homes, many homes built before 1970 or so, etc.). In the short term, that's likely to be a pretty large percentage of EV buyers in major cities.

At which point NASA could presumably remotely trigger a reentry burn and plunge the thing down into the middle of the ocean as a giant fireball, cosmonauts included. Besides, the shuttle was designed way back in the 1970s. If you think there was any technology on there that the Russians didn't have two decades later, you're kidding yourself. :-)

The APU is a red herring. They start up the APUs a few minutes before the shuttle begins its reentry burn, not during the landing. Nothing prevents them from manually starting them up a few minutes earlier to allow the astronauts enough time to reach a rescue craft.

Remember that what you're quoting was written at the time of the initial investigation. After the crash, NASA immediately began work on an emergency plan to autoland the orbiter without personnel aboard in the event of just such a disaster, and by the time shuttle launches resumed in 2006, they had that solution, in the form of a long cable that runs across the floor and connects from the avionics computer to the manual flight controls (for landing gear and pitot tube deployment).

So we know that it would have been possible, because NASA already provided that patch hardware on all subsequent shuttle missions. Now it's certainly possible that the Columbia's computer, being part of the oldest of the remaining shuttles, might have required slightly more extensive modifications for some reason, but at least in principle, it should have been possible.

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 average California commute is about 29 minutes. If we assume an average commute speed of... say 45 MPH, that's probably in the neighborhood of 22 miles, or 5.5 kWh. If we assume that everyone installs a L2 charger capable of 30A output (7.2 kW), this means the average car will charge for less than one hour per day. So yes, if you incredibly stupidly charge them all for exactly the same 46 minutes, then 10x could be about right.

However, that's just not realistic. These vehicles are already generally continuously connected to the Internet (cellular), and these cars already are usually capable of timing their charging to coincide with off-peak power, and most of these cars are going to be plugged in for well over 12 hours before you leave home the next day, and if for some reason they mis-guessed when you're going to leave and failed to charge up by that tiny amount one day, it isn't going to matter. So there's really no possibility that they'll end up charging during the same 45-minute period.

Also, a lot of folks will have workplace charging that they can use during the day, or charge at chargers while they're out shopping, or charge at other times. So charging during the same 46 minutes is not even a realistic description of how people charge their cars right now, much less a realistic prediction of how they will charge their cars in the future. Realistically, most people usually work either from 9 to 5, from 10 to 6, or from 11 to 7, so they're going to charge between roughly 5:30 P.M. and 10:30 A.M., and their cars *should* easily be able to randomly pick a time during that window, thus spreading out the usage over potentially a 17-hour period.

Besides, even if I'm wrong and the car companies don't do anything to spread out the load, you could always take care of that at the local level or even the neighborhood level by using grid-scale battery setups to spread that one hour of extra household load over the entire day. That's just not a a realistic concern, much less a serious concern.