This is a common strain of misunderstanding I see all over the place. People think that evolution is somehow magical and that what it produces is mystically better because it's "natural". That's all garbage.

Evolution is a random process. There's no intelligence guiding it, nothing that ensures that the "choices" it makes are the best alternatives or can't have horrific consequences. In fact, the vast majority of evolutionary changes are utter failures that immediately get selected out.

Also, it's silly to claim that climate change is moving "too fast for evolution". Evolution absolutely can and will respond to climate change... it might be that corals go extinct and something else evolves to fill their niche in ocean ecology, or it might be that corals do evolve in something like their current form. Evolution is fine either way and will produce something that settles into a new equilibrium. It might not be an equilibrium humans like, and it might not settle fast enough to make us happy, but we need to realize that what we're concerned about isn't the ecosystem -- that will survive regardless, unless we get into some runaway feedback loop that turns Earth into Venus, or Neptune -- what we're concerned about is maintaining an environment that we're accustomed to.

Given all of that, our potential creation of genetically-modified corals isn't somehow subverting evolution, it's just another evolutionary avenue. Rather than random mutations, we'll create some specific ones and then we'll throw them into the mix and see if they get selected for or against. The same mutations we create deliberately could also have occurred randomly and would that make the outcome any less "natural"?

And if we've already altered the environment so much that our preferred ecosystem is going away anyway, what's the harm in trying to use CRISPR CAS-9 to "guide" evolution in a direction we'd prefer, rather than letting it randomly go in whatever direction it will? Could our genetic modifications make things worse? Sure! Could random mutations also make things worse? Sure! Which is more likely to maintain an ecosystem of the sort we enjoy? No one can say for sure, but in general if you want to get from point A to point B you're better off aiming for B rather than just walking randomly.

Even better would be to stop changing the climate, but at this point all we can do is try to limit the amount we're changing it. And we should do that! But the best that we can do might still not be enough for corals as we know them, so if we like reefs and reef ecosystems (and we really do; I'm an avid SCUBA diver and I love reef ecosystems), then we should probably put some effort into researching modifications that can survive warmer and more acidic oceans.

Both are true, I think. Without discussion and care the numbers would probably be an order of magnitude larger, maybe two... but that's still very small.

And if they find that it's not helpful to them right now, there's no point in learning something about it for the future -- because it's going to change. If it ever achieves its full promise there will be no need to learn how to use it, because it will learn how to work with us.

Well, assuming it doesn't kill us all.

I notice that you didn't provide any counterexamples which is, of course, because there aren't any. No planned economy larger than a few hundred people has ever succeeded. While capitalist economies do go through cycles of expansion and recession (which a well-functioning central bank and adequate regulatory oversight can ameliorate but not eliminate), capitalism consistently makes the entire society wealthier, top to bottom. Yes, it does tend to produce inequality, and that has some negative social effects, but over time even the poorest end up better off than under any other system, assuming modest government regulation to prevent abuses.

There really isn't; definitely not compared to central planning. The results speak for themselves, but it's useful to understand why, I think. When people look at the way capitalist economies tend to produce 10 factories making similar shoes while it seems obvious that one big factory would be more efficient, the mistake they're making is in looking only at what they can see with their eyes: Buildings, machinery, people, all making shoes, redundantly. What they fail to see is the knowledge about how to make shoes efficiently that ebbs and flows through those same enterprises. This is the core flaw in the Labor Theory of Value, actually, which was the basis of Marx's understanding of economics.

The Labor Theory of Value will tell you that the value of a product is determined by the resources that went into producing it, material, energy and labor. But it omits the knowledge required to produce the product and the right knowledge can decrease the resource requirements by orders of magnitude. Capitalism works because it incentivizes the creation of knowledge that enables more efficient production, as well as the creation of better products (where "better" means "optimized to consumer desires in context").

This is why the 10 shoe factories end up being more efficient than one.

But that's not where capitalism provides the biggest efficiency boost to the economy. The biggest boost comes from the knowledge it generates about the most efficient way to allocate capital. Wall Street looks on its face like an incredible waste of money. All of those people generating massive personal incomes by "gambling" on stocks and bonds. In truth, that competitive game is the knowledge engine that no central planning board has come remotely close to matching, and certainly has never exceeded. All of the money to be made in trading incentivizes brainpower to concentrate on solving the problem of making sure that the most productive enterprises have the resources they need.

Any system that fails to replace the knowledge generation capitalism provides will ultimately be far less efficient, and will generate production shortfalls. No one has yet proposed any system that even attempts to cover that critical gap.

So far, the absolute best economic structure we've devised -- as evidenced by actual outcomes, not just theory -- is lightly-fettered capitalism overlaid with a redistributive social safety net.

I do run it for a little bit on gas each week, long enough to come up to temp. My fuel use will be higher in the winter as well. (the electric range with heat on in cold temps is ~ 90 % of my commute vs summer where I still have ~10-20 miles left) Using Ethanol free gas to avoid the separation, and next summer will be filling the tank only partway so it can cycle the fuel ~ every 3 months.

The study said that they're better: 19% better. That's not nothing! It's just not the 75% better that lab testing showed.

The link you provided is the experience of one driver, one who is conscientious and focused on minimizing fuel consumption (within reason; hypermilers would do better). The study looked at the real-world results across 800,000 drivers, most of whom apparently didn't take so much care to minimize fuel usage.

Also, it's not true in general that "hybrids use generators rather than ICE". That's true of PHEVs that are strictly serial hybrids, but most are series-parallel or "power split" hybrids, meaning they can drive the wheels with the electric motor, or the combustion engine, or both. Often both the electric motor and the ICE are too small to provide the target maximum performance so must be used in parallel when you step hard on the accelerator.

One fascinating strategy for power splitting is "through the road", which has no mechanical connection at all between the ICE and the traction motor, and uses the wheel-driven traction motor as the generator. The way it works is the ICE drives one axle and the traction motor drives the other. Battery charging is done "through the road", using the road itself to transmit power from the ICE-driven axle to the electrically-driven axle. The ICE spins one pair of wheels, driving the vehicle forward, which forces the other pair of wheels to spin which turns the electric motor which charges the battery. This only makes sense in AWD drive cars but it's peak design elegance.

Mine has been about 95% electric. I bought it 6 months ago, and will probably do my first fill up tomorrow.

If 100% of jobs meet some standard, we'll pick a higher standard. For example, consider the standard that employees not be chained to their benches, fed nothing but moldy bread and be brutally whipped if the overseer feels like it. 100% of legitimate jobs in the US exceed that standard. OSHA exists to ensure that jobs meet minimum workplace safety standards and minimum wage laws ensure that jobs pay at least a certain amount, so we don't discuss whether jobs meet those standards, we take them as a given and set the quality bar higher.

If a study finds that 40% of jobs meet some standard, it means that the researchers did a reasonably good job of writing a description of the median job, then tweaked it upward just a bit. It's not like there is some universal, eternal standard for what constitutes a "quality job". It would be interesting to take the current standard and apply to historical working conditions, 50, 100, 200, 500 years ago. I'll bet the 1975 percentage would be half of the 2026 percentage and the older percentages would quickly tail off to ~0.

Of course if you get rid of capitalism then you get a different systemic problem, massive shortfalls in production, making everyone worse off. Much like democracy, capitalism is the worst system except for all of the others.

as long as the topic is not controversial and political.

The problem is that the Wiki mods are VERY VERY biased. Not just a little. I have run into this personally just trying to make very simple edits. They would not accept simple facts that I had backup sources for.

This was just for movie credits for an actress that at some point had turned conservative...

So for anything political, Wikipide will be factually wrong, sometimes (or often) egregiously so.

But that's ok if it's only for political content right???

But there's the trouble you see. It affects what is political TO THEM in ways you cannot comprehend, so ANY page might be touched by the corruption of the Wikipedia moderator biases. I wouldn't think a simply actress filmography would be affected yet it was. No visitor other than that page would ever know it was inaccurate or incomplete.

So you can trust absolutely nothing from Wikipedia without extensive checking of what facts they refuse to list. Which makes the entire body of work garbage - I have not used it for years now.

So AI ingests the text books to learn about the subject so it can...create text books?

Some is from London at least, because I ended up behind one of the training cars a while ago.

I'm sceptical, but I'm not on the "never" path. It was going through one of the most annoying parts of my drive - for those that know the area, just outside of St Pancras heading up to Pentonville Road. At that point you have a lane split, comically bad driving, buses overlapping the lane, psychotic cyclists ignoring lanes and red lights and pedestrians on a tiny sliver in the middle of the three lanes continually trying to kill themselves in ever more novel and entirely unexpected ways.

If they tested it there and they still want to launch - huh. I'll be very interested to see it.

Actually, this is also why I stopped using Waze. Coming back from Heathrow once, I could have just taken the M4 and South Circular, but Waze claimed it would save me more than seven minutes on 25-35 minute journey, so I thought I'd give it a go. It took me through Hounslow and the back streets of Isleworth before crossing the A316 bridge in to Richmond. It ended up taking at least 15 minutes longer than the easy route and a vast amount more effort, in the dark. Much of that extra time was either reversing in to a gap between parked cars to let somebody by, or waiting for an oncoming car to do the same for me.

This has been one of my biggest frustrations with Waze for years - it has no understanding of how difficult a road is to drive. It'll happily send you off an easy, fast, well-lit motorway onto a difficult, narrow, unlit B road if it thinks it can save two minutes on a two-hour trip.

The stupid thing is that in the UK, road types already hint at how easy or hard they are to drive. Motorways (M roads) are the easiest, then A roads, then B roads. You could even go further by looking at the number of digits - single-digit routes tend to be simpler than three-digit ones. Sure, there would be exceptions (like the M25 compared to the M6), but overall it would make routing far more sensible than what Waze does now.

Play the Schoolhouse Rock numbers episodes continuously during school for the entire school year. After that, not only will they not do this silly 6/7 thing, but they will replace that behavior with counting by 3s or 5s, and might actually learn multiplication tables.

Real 'Muricans don't leave the ol' US of A. Anyone who regularly travels beyond driving range of their home town is suspicious, frankly.

(Meanwhile, I got the extra-thick passport booklet and have made a good try at filling it with stamps.)