Exactly. People seem to have forgotten about the Xanadu project.

How about a situation in which the police are monitoring an informant or undercover police officer who is with the criminals. They're waiting for something to happen before they enter to make arrests or search, or they're ready to go in and protect their CI or undercover officer if things go wrong. What if one officer wants to tell another that he thinks that the bad guys suspect the informant and they should prepare to move in? He may not name the CI, but if the criminals hear this, bad things will happen. Similarly, how about a hostage situation where a sniper needs to communicate that something has changed and he no longer has a shot? Situations like these call for immediate communication.

There have been criminal investigators in China for over 1,000 years. Each "county" (hsien) was governed by a magistrate, who was charged, among other things, with investigating crimes. He had staff to assist him, including officers who functioned as police officers and a local physician who served as medical examiner.

How do they communicate it? Some of these things need to be communicated rapidly - they can't rely on face-to-face communication.

A possible solution is for the encrypted signals to be automatically stored by a third party, a kind of escrow service. The public would automatically gain access to the stored material after a certain amount of time. The police would be able to flag certain communications as requiring longer term secrecy (say those containing the identities of confidential informants). Those desiring access to communications flagged as not to be released could appeal to something like a Freedom of Information panel, which would decide whether secrecy should be maintained.

Some information should not be made public, e.g. the identity of confidential informants, the existence of (legal) wiretaps, details of ongoing operations. The bill acknowledges this. How is this information going to be kept secret while most information is not? Are police to have to remember to press the "scramble" button when they want to say something secret? Are they going to have to use their phones for secrets and their official radios for public information? I'm all for careful oversight of the police, but it is far from obvious how this is to be implemented.

That's not how evolution works.

Yes, life can adapt to higher temperatures, but as the article shows it's not instantaneous as the populations are crashing.

But the problem is the whole point of climate change is the climate won't stop changing. Even if they adapt to the current increase it will take time to do that, and for the populations to recover. But before that happens we'll be looking at another degree and the populations will crash again.

The longer the temperatures keep increasing the more the populations will decline and closer we get to the point of whole ecosystems collapsing.

I always figured a big part of that was expanded use of agricultural pesticides. The thing that gets me with this story is it's inside the nature preserves, so the answer isn't local pesticide use, it's something much larger.

Which does feel weirdly foreboding. I don't think most bugs have a particularly large range. Give them enough local plant life and they should thrive.

And the nature preserves should be pretty free of pesticides, meaning something else, like climate change, is causing the issues.

I own a tiny indie studio in Chicagoland and my peers own the some of the huge studios in Chicagoland.

Cinespace is dead right now. It has ONE show active. The other studios are so dead that they're secretly hosting bar mitzvahs and pickleball tournaments for $1500 a day just to pay property taxes.

My studio is surprisingly busy but I'm cheap and cater to non-union folks with otherwise full time jobs.

Well, like I said, appearance isn't the most important thing; in the movies, Herbie doesn't even always have his standard paint job. Sometimes he's (visually) just a plain VW bug. It's what he does, that's important.

Where are you getting this from?

The support for reunification is 12%, not 40%. And there's no more "independent provinces" in China, you think the Taiwanese haven't noticed what happened to Hong Kong?

And China would not see it as "randomly invading a country", it would be retaking a rebel Chinese province. And China has been prepping to retake Taiwan for years, they even built a replica of the neighbourhood around Taiwan's Presidential palace to train their troops.

That's kind of my point. If China knew for sure that the US wouldn't intervene they'd invade Taiwan tomorrow. And if China launched a surprise invasion and conquered Taiwan in hours the US wants the option of backing down without a major loss of face.

So strategic ambiguity (plus the US doesn't want to formally ally with what China considers a rebel province) is the policy.

But if China invades Trump might still react, and that might escalate. So his non-backing of Ukraine makes the situation with China very dangerous.

Ukraine was a friendly nation moving closer to the west (and the US in particular). Not a formal ally, but it had formal interactions with NATO.

I don't think Taiwan is much different. They cooperate, but there's no formal obligation for the US to defend them and the official policy is ambiguity.

And this is one of those cases where I think the "simpleminded" analysis is the right one. Even dictators need to justify their actions to their populace, meaning international politics can be very low bandwidth. The rule "no wars of conquest" was a very simple and effective one. In Russia's eyes this got sullied by the NATO intervention in Yugoslavia. And more likely by the US invasion of Iraq.

If Bush doesn't go into Iraq, and if he played the NATO expansion into Eastern Europe better, I'm not sure Georgia or Ukraine get invaded.

As to Taiwan, again, simplemindedness wins. How far the US goes to defend Taiwan depends heavily on political expectations. And if Ukraine demonstrates that the US has low resolve for defending a friendly nation then China will be encouraged to act, and that expectation of low resolve makes it harder for the US to sustain a defence of Taiwan.

That's why Biden ignored "strategic ambiguity" and said the US would defend Taiwan in 2022. To discourage the Chinese from deciding to invade during the distraction of Ukraine.

I'm sure it has nothing to do with the fact that most houses these days don't have peeling lead paint, like basically all of them did in the seventies.

In literary terms, Herbie is absolutely a character, but I'm not sure why anybody would set about to make real-world replica versions of him. All of his distinctive characteristics (that make him different from an ordinary, non-sapient Volkswagon Beetle, a model of car that was chosen for the films specifically because it was extremely common), are either so cartoonish as to be impractical to replicate in a real car (like the ability to be sawed completely in half and continue to operate as normal) or concern the car's behavior, rather than its physical characteristics. (And it's not enough to make the car drive itself. You have to make it have consistently smarter ideas about where to drive, than the person behind the wheel; and it has to go markedly faster than any other car in its immediate vicinity.) Several of the movies do feature a version of Herbie with some distinctive markings painted on (particularly, the number 53 in a circle), but these markings (and his paint job in general) are not consistent across all the movies and so really cannot be regarded as a core aspect of Herbie's identity. When he's an old secondhand car with a standard-but-weathered paint job, he's still very much Herbie.