You still need to turn incredible amounts of biomass into charcoal or other stable forms of carbon to make a dent in atmospheric co2. It would take decades of hard work on gigantic scales to unburn and bury the fossil fuels we used.

That's the pay-off of our 150-year rush to monetize as much of the Earth's natural resources as possible -- while making stringent efforts to keep quiet knowledge - or suppress any efforts - to utilize the benefits of free solar energy.

Having polluted and despoiled much of the biosphere, of course we'll be donating our supposed wisdom and that hard work to the future generations that will enjoy the fruits of our labors and entreasurement.

The problem with any scheme to capture and store carbon from the atmosphere is the incredible amount of carbon we've blown into the air in the last 150 years. Just look at the size of the machines we use to harvest coal. Essentially you'd need to have machines of similar size working for many decades to re-bury the carbon we extracted and burned. Who's gonna pay for that?

There’s no getting around it. If we reduce CO2 emissions to zero it’s either plants or carbon capture, and one way or another the planet will have to do something with all that carbon.

Last time it took plants millions of years, and that was before things started eating wood. I’m pretty sure that we’ll have to have a hand in the process if we want to reduce CO2 levels in timespans shorter than geological.

I agree that we’ll actively have to do something if we want to reduce carbon levels. I’m not convinced that we’ll want to reduce carbon levels badly enough to spent all that money. It’s very hard to convince voters that they’ll have to spent lots of taxes for a project that sees payoff in two or three generations at the earliest.

You can heat definitely heat NaHCO3 to get CO2 and NaOH back. It just takes a lot of energy.

The mutation testing engine.

Being on time over thousands of kilometers is a lot easier than being on time over dozens of kilometers. Especially if you share the same tracks with cargo trains, regional trains, and high speed trains and stop at every other village because that was the condition the nimbys required for allowing you to build the track in the first place.

Local trains in Moscow and Saint Petersburg ("elektrichka" with all local stops) may get delayed by a few minutes sometimes, true. But e.g. several trains being delayed by ten minutes because of an ice rain is newsworthy. At least that was the case on several directions I knew about.

I would expect a litigious country like the US makes common sense very expensive if somebody happens to get hurt. Train tracks are quite dangerous.

You would think so (and so would I), but my experience with Amtrak is that the conductors and engineers exercise a lot of individual discretion.

(I think it "helps" that Amtrak covers a very large area, most of which only sees a train once or twice a day at the most. So the practical reality is that there are a lot of stops where you pretty much exit the train right off onto the rails.)

Amtrak also exists in a strange portion of law where it can be actually quite hard to sue them.

Sometimes „eventually“ is „At the end of the process“. For many resources this is not acceptable.

I have twins (a boy and a girl) and you could tell they have a completely different temperament about two weeks after birth.

I’m a twin - admittedly boy/girl, so already with some fundamental differences - and we are very, very different people. Always have been. Different interests, different ways of seeing the world, different attitudes to competition, sports, social relationships etc.

Now I’ve got 2 boys, and even at fairly young ages they were very different. I’d say by 6 months old the basics of their personalities were visible, and they haven’t changed vastly as they’ve grown.

The twins I have known are the same. I would assume it has something to do with a desire to differentiate themselves from one another, but they always seemed far more dissimilar in personality and affect than my siblings.

OTOH could be siblings tend to be more similar as the smaller ones try to copy the older ones (my son would dress up as a ballerina to play with his sister when he was little, my smaller brother would acquiesce to play chess with me just to spend time together etc).

I have given up trying to explain child development, there's just too many variables.

You don’t have to be religious to know and support the moral teachings of a religion

Before you managed to build a popular tool it is unlikely that you need to serve many users. Directly going for something that can serve the world is probably premature

For most software, yes. But the value of a package manager is in its adoption. A package manager that doesn’t run up against these problems is probably a failure anyway.

The point is not "design to serve the world". The point is "use the right technology for your problem space".