The key is that each acre of rainforest contains tons of carbon. When that acre turns into wasteland, most of that carbon ends up in the air.

"something can't come from nothing" - why? Our daily experience suggests a number of laws of nature that do not hold when you leave the scale off human experience. Move very fast and relativity bends our concepts of time and space. Look at the scale of atoms and concepts of waves and particles become tangled up. Look at a quantum field vacuum and you find virtual particles popping up out of nothing without cause. Physics knows a number of laws of preservation, like energy, momentum, charge, etc. These are precisely defined and have so far been found to be true in all experiments. Still, no serious physicist would dare to make a statement about any of these laws of physics when you get close to the big bang. In the first moments of the universe, the conditions were simply so extreme that we do not know which of our laws of physics still hold. We do not even know whether the concept of "time" still makes sense when we reach Planck scale. We simply don't know whether our everyday experience "something can't come from nothing" still holds at the beginning of the universe. Philosophy is fundamentally the science of knowledge. What is knowable and why do we know what we know? There are indeed things we can't know, but not knowing the origin of the universe does not imply that there is something there. The fact that you can't imagine the universe spontaneously popping into existence out of nothing without cause or reason does not mean that it didn't do just that. That's not to say I believe it did. I honestly have no idea what happened. Maybe there was something you could call god. Maybe there simply was plain nothing. Or maybe the term "was" does not even make sense, because time does not reach the value zero at all.

Why should it logically not exist? I don't know of any logical contradiction and the fact that it does exist is the best proof for its possibility. All I can see is that there are and always will be open questions. Some may be answered in the future but behind them, there will always be new unknowns popping up. In an case, labeling this mystery with the name "God" does not solve anything. It certainly does not prove that there is a God, not even that there is a definable entity that you could call God.

You just shifted the unexplained by one level: if the universe needs a beginning, why doesn't god need one? If god could simply exist without explanation, why can't the universe just have started existing out of nothing?

You are free to decide that you personally don't give a shit about what happens to the world, but please don't try to justify that by ridiculous arguments like implying that the current climate change is part of the natural cycle. The current rise in temperature is orders of magnitude faster than anything that happened in the past and even the mildest projections for the future are far beyond the changes that killed the dinosaurs.

Sure, the aptitude that people reach is only very loosely correlated with the time they spend on a subject. Also there are different definitions of the term "professional". The fact that someone earns their living doing something and has an impressive title does not necessarily mean that they have reached professional standards.

People talking about "real" programming are typically mixing up concepts. Just using the term "professional" in contrast to "amateur" should clear up everything. The terms work the same whether you are talking about programming, woodworking or music. There are simple tools geared towards use by amateurs. There are complex tools that are geared towards use by professionals. From a professional, I expect that they use the right tool for the job. Depending on the task that may be a real simple tool, because that may be sufficient and the most efficient to get the job done. An amateur using a complicated tool does not make them professional. Maybe the amateur even does a decent job using the tool, there will still be a huge difference in the result between someone who spent some of their spare time with the tool and someone who properly learned their trade and uses the tool full time every day.

If you were successful in convincing every voter to freely choose the candidate they truly believe is the best, Trump could still count on his base which truly believes he is the savior. What is your plan to convince a larger number than that to agree on the same candidate? If you want to change the system, fight for that cause, but please accept reality for the time being and consider the real effect of your actions, rather than the symbolic gesture that will absolutely pale in comparison to the power of the next elected president.

If they want to go for real change, they should drop all master/slave architecture concepts from their code base! No process should have to listen to any others! Each software component should have the right to decide what it wants to do!

That is simply wrong! The single most important difference between countries that managed to quickly reduce infection numbers and those which are still struggling was how quickly most of the population started wearing some kind of masks. Even just putting some cloth in front of your face makes a huge difference in the statistics. Sure, a cotton mask is not good enough for a medical professional who spends all day in class rooms with fully infected patients, but in regular public contact, just reducing the amount of droplets and aerosol that everybody spreads when breathing and speaking by some fraction will significantly change the infection statistics. Even touching you own mask is not a major problem. The main function of your mask is catching your own droplets, so to you, it is fairly harmless (again contrast to professional PPE that is intended to protect the wearer). Most countries just expect people to wear masks in shops, public transport and other closed spaces, so you typically would not wear them long enough to soak through.

You are free to inject some desinfectant if you prefer that. Your choice.

Funny how the sentence "as little as 9 months or as long as two years" from the article becomes abbreviated to just the first half in the title. Bill Gates' statement is simply "we don't know precisely" he does in no way give either good or bad news in comparison to the typical estimate of 18 months. The original article is, by the way, one of the best and insightful explanations I have read so far.

Sorry about the term "legacy" software in my post. Clearly, Windows has plenty of valuable features to offer. However, whenever your software stack leaves the choise of the operating system, Linux simple has far less overhead for running an Azure service. Running MSSQL on Azure you should not worry about the underlying OS at all. Pick a hosted database which offers scalability, backup and all kinds of other features out of the box and leave it to Azure to deal with hosting in what ever OS works best.

Even Microsoft cloud architects officially use and recommend Linux servers as default and advise against Windows Server unless you have a clear reason like running legacy software.

Best recipe to make up your own mind: I dare everybody to listen to the news on both sides. First hand. Switch to a channel you despise, swallow deep against the urge to throw up and do your very best to find somebody making a good argument. Continue doing so. It will take a while to cut through the garbage and find something of value. It works best if you actually hope to find sane people on the other side.