Oh, I guess I can't delete posts. My bad.

disregard; will delete

I'm afraid that would not work very well, as a substantial proportion of cases require hospitalization, regardless of age. The peak load on the health care system would be too high, and it would cause many deaths through simple lack of equipment and personnel. Other diseases would also become suddenly lethal for the same reason. Good luck getting your heart attack taken seriously when the ICU is full of COVID-19 patients, y'know?

They are certainly a factor, but they aren't the single dominant factor. The loss of wetlands and migratory habitat due to encroaching cities (along with their attendant urban wildlife) is probably more important.

I bake bread every other weekend, and I use AP (12% protein) flour, not bread (15% protein) flour. Bread flour isn't necessary, but it does give you a denser crumb, all things equal.

Historically, cats have preferred the fat and lazy seabirds to the hard-to-catch and wily rats with big teeth.

I like "eating the seed corn" as a metaphor. You can get a great short-term boost by eating the resources that you'll need later, and by the time the bill arrives, he's going to be out of office, and most likely dead.

Nothing Trump does is going to buy him another minute on this Earth.

Another step toward Vinge's locators.

I'm not sure if you're kidding or not, but the concentration of CO2 isn't nearly as important as the rate of change. A small change every year over a couple of hundred thousands of years leaves ample time for species to adapt as the oceans rise and climate zones shift. A change as rapid as we see today is going to change them quite a bit faster, possibly faster than most species can migrate or evolve adaptations to.

So while it is true that CO2 levels have been higher in the past, the suddenness of the change is potentially very damaging.

We of the four-digit UID club have delegated language policing to the five-digiters.

(however, it will almost certainly happen in about a billion years)

We're looking at more a Venus scenario than a Mars scenario, if runaway warming ever does happen. However, it's unlikely to happen, because there are strong feedback mechanisms. Humans may not live to see it, but Earth will correct over a few tens of thousands of years.

in fairness though, people have been complaining about how much Slashdot has gone downhill since, like, day 2.

Surely they could be used as storage tanks, instead of living spaces. I doubt they'd be rated, after the stresses of launch, for long-term habitation, but there's going to be ample need for the bulk storage of mass. One of the sad things that is done, is the jettison and burning of trash; perfectly good organics and mass that might be someday useful in orbit, when the technology is developed to make use of them. Then the containers themselves could be used as raw material for some hypothetical future process.

Whether it's worth the investment is another question entirely, though the existence of a tank full of vacuum-dried sewage co-orbiting the ISS might inspire some thinking about what to put it to use for.

The investment, unfortunately, would also have to include the cost of periodic reboostings, keeping it all fastened together, keeping it balanced along a thrust vector, and several other considerations. It could get very expensive to maintain that orbital junkyard as a future investment, which may or may not even pay off.

Quite a few people do care, even if you don't.