tablarasa

Hm. I don't think there is anything wrong with having terms defining paraphyletic groups. I don't think we need to treat fish or plants for that matter as a monophyletic group necessarily in order to avoid misinformation. The group that includes algae and plants is monophyletic after all, but I don't know what that has to do with the original point.

"Are algae plants?" "Yes."

Is incorrect. That it once stood as the best available information is interesting but not relevant to the veracity.

Your friends’ botany joke is lame. Tree was never taxonomical, only a growth form or “habit” in older parlance. Plenty of individual species grow as trees or shrubs and many genera have representatives from forb through tree. There is no true tree.

The thing is if all you know is that the screwdriver and hammer go in the toolbox, you lack a functional knowledge of those tools and therefore the skill to use them. I for one am confident that you are capable of understanding that while plants and algae are both living organisms, they are functionally, ecologically, evolutionarily, and taxonomically different. The layperson so married to their colloquialisms need not worry about too much detail, yet may benefit from the knowledge that algae are not for bashing nails and plants are not for driving screws. Alas you may wish to know which of the sea you may eat raw or which might seasonally give you a nut flour. Or you may more easily grasp the functional and ecological role of microalgae, armed with the background understanding of their distinction from trees and grasses, should you encounter those creatures. And I hope you do, since you are relying on them to live.

In any case, in my experience, the greater people’s understanding of natural history and their ability to name the organisms in their environment, the more likely they are to see, appreciate, and value the rich mosaic if life around them. The benefits of that are grand for the individual even if they don’t bother connecting the dots on the science.

Colloquialisms are great. But suggesting we all permanently adopt and maintain a state of ignorance because a certain subset of humans had a term, I dunno.

What’s the fish one?

Well, I am an expert. And ya, the “parent group”, sure, but we all have common ancestors though. So by that line of reasoning, I guess you are a plant?

Anyway ya plants evolved from protists. What other groups of organisms do we lump together based on an 19th century understanding of the world? I am amazed by people’s ability to warp the world to their priors rather be bothered to update them.

It is incorrect. They are not plants. I am curious why you think it is correct to call protists plants? It is not just taxonomy, but ecology, life history, tissue structures, and so much more. Some plants do photosynthesis. Some algae do photosynthesis. Not all things that do photosynthesis are plants. Not all things that do not do photosynthesis are not plants.

That this feels like such a representative statement is disheartening. Remember, in a functioning free-market (behold. bow.) negative externalities, like socializing the burden of reduced air quality resulting from for-profit enterprises, are considered inefficient (boo. hiss.) and deleterious. Even people with jobs have to breath air.

light penetrates in useful intensity for photosynthesis to about 200m so that seems like a decent cutoff for "deep sea" for the purposes of discussion around the unique communities there

I mean the mechanism there is not a mystery. Gravity is known to affect humans.

Nevertheless, IMO the placebo effect is still an effect.

I hear you. But 700 anchovies per farmed salmon is not meaningful without considering the number of sardines per wild salmon. Eating higher in the food web costs one way or the other. It is all about relative impacts of producing food people want to eat.

The article is presented as propaganda and the media format is trash but it raises good points. Still it fails to point out growing use of insect, plant, and byproduct feeds. It also fails to mention that feed conversion ratios in farmed fish are better than any of the land animals commonly farmed, so overall i/o is about as sustainable as it gets for animal husbandry. We also fail to recognize that forage fisheries have short generation times and are easier to measure, so maintaining healthy stocks is easier than trying to do the same with wild caught pelagic fish. Sustainable fisheries are beautiful resources. When managed and informed properly they can afford more production than would otherwise happen under maximum exploitation. They require science based management and compliance of course. But there are a lot of success stories as we have adopted fisheries science and I find it annoying that these articles send people to despondency rather than to grounding their consumption choices in science.

> How does the value of LLM-produced 100% branch coverage compare to no-LLM 100% branch coverage?

This is such a salient question. Sometimes (definitely not always) the test suites produced by LLMs are so trivial it's scary. Coverage can be an illusion for sure.

But the legal immigration system is broken and they did that on purpose. And how is your immigration status relevant to your contribution to taxes?

It is not a false equivalence. Both legal and undocumented immigrants are net positive for our economy, less likely to commit crimes, and part and parcel to the American experiment. This “we only disapprove of the illegal ones” continues to be a disingenuous and ignorant point of view.

There is value beyond IPO- companies continue to sell ("issue") shares on the public market as a way of generating cash. They also buy back shares when with excess cash, usually when the market value is low but sometimes, irrationally IMO, when it is high. They also use this as an incentive-backed compensation pool. The relative value of these is debatable, but I don't think it is correct that post-IPO public shares are just traded between third-parties making short-term bets. Happy to be corrected.

Yes many people don’t vote because of deliberately fettered access to polling and/or a generally correct understanding that the electoral college nullifies or makes redundant their vote in their jurisdiction. Your vote for a third party is a signal but essentially a qualified abstention. Your high horse however is so misguided and absurd- to suggest that you held a moral high ground because the Biden administration supported the Gaza genocide is flatly wrong. If you want to place blame for that administration’s actions, blame Citizen’s United, blame AIPAC, blame the DNC, etc. And write letters, protest, get mad. But facilitating the ascent of what is objectively, obviously, candidly worse to make that statement is insulting to the intelligence of anyone to whom you make the argument. Perhaps your vote was in a jurisdiction where you could assume the electoral votes would go to the Dems anyway, but that just makes it flat out virtue signaling. The left will continue to cut off its nose to spite its face to the peril of US democracy and world peace. You nailed em tho.

As my friend said of doing a PhD, “you learn more and more about less and less until sooner or later you know nothing at all”

IMO, speaking from the perspective of an ecology doctorate, while PhDs have much to contribute outside of academia, the training is laser focused on that route, to the detriment of students and funders (which is, generally speaking, society/taxpayers). The reality is more PhDs are minted than exist professorships, yet many advisors wish you to be their academic offspring, not just continuing in research but in their line of research. This dynamic was far more the cause of mental health issues than the work being “hard”, which checks out since there are innumerable other forms of hard and harder work.