I suppose, but that's nothing like the world we live in. In our world, food is abundant at never-before-seen levels. Agricultural productivity has not only matched but significantly exceeded population growth. Unless climate change or some catastrophic event has large negative impacts on food production, directly or indirectly, it seems unlikely that the human race will ever again experience significant food scarcity.

"Nuclear Power will solve the climate crisis, and it doesn't need a breakthrough or a TED talk, all it needs is a building permit" - Sabine Hossenfelder.

I think it's more likely that approximation is necessary to complex, higher-level thinking, and that produces a certain form of error which is therefore inherent in all intelligences capable of it. This can be improved by adding subsystems that compute more precisely, just as humans do, using processes and equipment to augment their intellectual abilities, ranging from complex computation engines to pencil and paper (Einstein said "My pencil and me are smarter than me").

This ought to be really easy to rectify:

If they're still using VMWare's licensed software, are they a former customer? I think the answer depends on the details of the license and purchase agreements.

I think they'd argue that the audit is a condition of the license to use the software, which the customer already agreed to and which was not tied to an ongoing support contract. Depending on the details of the license agreement, this could pass legal muster.

It still seems like a stupid move on the part of Broadcom, alienating their customer base in the hope of extracting a few more fees. I wonder if they've decided that their virtualization business is soon going to be eaten up by OSS anyway, so they have to get what they can while they can.

Other nations regularly poach in the Georges Bank? That's pretty crazy.

You're really triggering Poe's Law here for me.

It doesn't need to change the total catch. You can lower the minimum size if you impose a maximum size. Same fraction of the total fish allowed to be caught. Large fish tend to be much better reproducers than small ones, so you may actually be able to allow an even larger fraction of the fish to be caught each year.

You better put the word "findings" in quotation marks. This "study" is a preprint, has not been peer reviewed, and it's being widely mocked for its bad methodology. But the media is just loving to run with it. Even the lead author is complaining about the media's "LLMs cause brain damage!" hot takes.

(BTW, that's the reason why "Saran Wrap" is no longer made of Saran. Saran is a far better barrier polymer than the polyethylene that Saran Wrap is made of today, but Saran is polyvinylidene chloride, aka chlorinated - and almost invariably ends up in the trash, where it will get burned. The decision to switch to inferior polyethylene wrap was so that it would burn cleaner)

People usually assume that all the plastic they see around food is "waste", when in reality it's usually carefully engineered to maximize shelf life, and thus minimize food waste. And the energy / resources needed to make that miniscule amount of plastic and the issues with its disposal are well worth offsetting wasted energy producing, processing, and transporting a larger fraction of food that just goes to waste.

Plastic around fresh fruit? That's maintaining it at an optimal humidity and/or reducing the risk of scratches that lead to spoilage. Metalized plastic wrap around your cookies in a box? The alumium is applied to that plastic to decrease water and oxygen transport by orders of magnitude, veritably eliminating the main ways in which food goes bad. On and on. And you know what the alternative is to maximize the shelf life of foods? Preservatives. You want more preservatives in your food? No? Then be happy with better-protective packaging.

And we all would love all of the plastic to be "biodegradable", but the problem is that waste doesn't come with a switch that says "Okay, now I'm done with you, fall apart". There's a steady process of biodegradable polymers becoming weaker and weaker, and letting orders of magnitude more oxygen and moisture through them. Basically, by the time they're at your supermarket, if it's at all easy to biodegrade, it's already doing a crappy job. Some products reduce (but not eliminate) these problems, but usually via requiring special conditions for quick decomposition, such as particularly high temperatures - but most landfills don't reach those conditions. And again, we're talking about generally grams of plastic, or even milligrams. This just isn't the big issue people make it out to be. Just burn it. Have good pollution controls on the incinerator, and just burn it. Just avoid chlorinated and fluorinated polymers that tend to produce more problematic combustion products.

Sorting plastic is useful even if most of it is going to be burned.

  * Some types of plastic are much easier to recycle than others
  * Some types of plastic can't be easily recycled, but are good for downcycling (such as use as filler materials)
  * Most types of plastic are fine to burn, but you don't want to burn chlorinated or fluorinated plastic (at least not with very strong pollution controls)

So sorting your waste is good. In our system, we have four types: "hard plastic" (which is probably manually or automated sorted for things that are readily recycleable and to remove PVC, etc); "plastic packaging" (probably burned); "plastic foam" (probably densified and not burned); and "large plastic film" (such as from greenhouses, row covers, construction plastic, etc; I'm not sure what they do with it).

Also:

The low price of wind and solar allow them to be overbuilt while still being affordable - and if you do that, with a mix of wind, solar, and battery storage, you can affordably build a grid that provides e.g. 90%, 95%, 98%, even over 99% of your electricity - but you never get to 100%. You still need some sort of peaking, which needs some sort of bulk storable energy medium. Well, one possibility for that is waste - it's storable and can be burned. Waste / biomass commonly provides a couple percentage of nations' total power needs - which, in a high-renewables grid, may be most or all of your peaking needs.

Only it'll be worse, because the value of the "assets" that have secured all those mortgages they sold the risk on as derivatives will almost certainly go into freefall along with everything else when the bubble pops.

"So, Mr. Jones, you secured your mortgage you're struggling to repay with £1m of... ah, crypto. And what are those holdings worth now? $500k you say? Well, if you'll just vacate the premises and hand over your house keys, I'm sure we can sort all that out to minimise our losses as far as possible. I hear there are some nice bridges and stuff to live under not too far from your neighbourhood. Next!"

The suggested regulations I've seen to counter these evolutionary pressures are IMHO pretty clever: you impose both minimum *and maximum* sizes on your catch. You can only keep fish that are between the minimum and maximum sizes. So growing fish have a certain size where they're in the "danger zone", but if they get bigger than it, they can keep spawning to their heart's content with no danger from humans.