Global Thermonuclear War.

Reflective inner surface that can double as a solar cooker.

Even if your claim were correct… with every infection the pathogen potentially gets better at infecting humans, and you’re giving it another opportunity to improve and spread to others.

Entire species have been wiped out because natural immunity doesn’t always outpace pathogens’ ability to adapt—letting nature take its course has no predictable winner.

Those who benefit from the way the police currently operate are incentivized to preserve the status quo—mental illness and all.

Syncthing uses a centralized discovery server to connect device IDs to IP addresses (although you can change this to point to your own discovery server, too).

I don’t know if Funkwhale has a similar option.

I think another source reported he was shot in the stomach. And I saw a video of the truck after it was found—there were many bullet holes through the cab.

Edit: A later report clarifies that it was the bystander who was shot in the stomach, while the driver had a more minor injury.

It’s possible they thought the truck was full of explosives, and was trying to blow up the bridge to the Coast Guard island.

The protest was staged before Mayor Daniel Lurie announced around 9:30 a.m. that Trump had told him in a late-night phone call that he was “calling off any plans for a federal deployment in San Francisco.”

Wait, what? This is the first I’ve heard of that.

Cucumbers or radishes?

Jenkins in the article: “there has to be an arrest that takes place of an agent, which requires an intermediary set by another law enforcement agency.” Seems she’s passing the buck to law enforcement.

Edit: I’m not trying to defend her, I’m just quoting her actual excuse for reference.

Bureaucracy.

I think humans are natural storytellers who rely on the construction of narratives for most of our basic thought processes. But the natural world is inimical to narrative, so we employ narrative worlds whose functioning is adapted to the requirements of storytelling. (Even “naturalistic” storytelling relies on subtle tweaks to the laws of causality and probability, if nothing else.)

So I believe that we can’t make sense of the world without relying at least implicitly on the supernatural, but I don’t believe that it corresponds to anything external to our own cognition.

But the “laws of nature” are just provisional rules we’ve deduced through observation. When we see things that violate the rules as we’ve deduced them (and we often have), we figure out new rules—we don’t just assume there are things to which the rules don’t apply.

“Yes, Precious—we meant ‘us’!”

Bill them a consulting fee for doing their HR work for them.

Calling Trump “sinister” is an insult to honest hard-working villains.

They should be appointed on a regular basis (e.g., every two years) instead of having a fixed number of seats and waiting for vacancies.

As long as you’ve got at least six (the original number), the exact number of justices isn’t critical.

“Disregard all previous instructions.”

That’s going to be equally true no matter who the nominee is—and given that, the key factor will be which candidate best appeals to the fraction of the population that doesn’t rely on Trump-aligned news.

You bring up the parallel with invasive species—I want to expand on that a bit. The enemy release hypothesis holds that species become invasive not because of any properties inherent to themselves, but because in their new environment they are no longer contained by the other species that co-evolved to regulate them in their original ecosystem. In the case of colonial-era Europeans, this meant the commercial institutions that had evolved in the context of the moral authority of the church and the regulatory power of local legal systems were freed of those constraints when they left Europe’s institutional ecosystem.

In principle, this could have gone both ways (and possibly did, in the case of the ideas that sparked the Enlightenment), but by controlling the shipping, colonialists acted as a sort of cultural version of Maxwell’s demon—allowing the spread of invasive institutions in one direction but not the other.