It worries me that, even in the best case where the Epstein scandal causes Trump’s supporters to turn against him and he’s forced from office by his cabinet or Congress, Vance and most of the rest of the administration will emerge unscathed—and public opinion on his actual policies will be unaffected.

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.

I think part of intelligence is the ability to recognize patterns that can be abstracted and generalized, and memorizing data is just one means of making the data available to your brain for pattern recognition. Like, if you come up with a possible theory, the quickest way to test it is to see if anything you already know would invalidate it; so the more you know, the more quickly you can sift through possible theories.

So, yeah—education reminds you that you might be wrong, while memorizing things gives you a tool to prove yourself wrong.

Wikipedia has further details:

Tigers depress wolf (Canis lupus) numbers, either to the point of localized extinction or to such low numbers as to make them a functionally insignificant component of the ecosystem. Wolves appear capable of escaping competitive exclusion from tigers only when human pressure decreases tiger numbers. In areas where wolves and tigers share ranges, the two species typically display a great deal of dietary overlap, resulting in intense competition. Wolf and tiger interactions are well documented in Sikhote-Alin, where until the beginning of the 20th century, very few wolves were sighted. Wolf numbers may have increased in the region after tigers were largely eliminated during the Russian colonisation in the late 19th century and early 20th century. This is corroborated by native inhabitants of the region claiming that they had no memory of wolves inhabiting Sikhote-Alin until the 1930s, when tiger numbers decreased. Today, wolves are considered scarce in tiger habitat, being found in scattered pockets, and usually seen travelling as loners or in small groups. First hand accounts on interactions between the two species indicate that tigers occasionally chase wolves from their kills, while wolves will scavenge from tiger kills. Tigers are not known to prey on wolves, though there are four records of tigers killing wolves without consuming them. Tigers recently released are also said to hunt wolves.

Evidently: in regions where humans have eliminated tigers, wolf populations have started to appear.

In practice, none: wolves are locally extinct in the range of the Siberian tiger.

If you click the triangles next to the categories, there are some subcategories grouped by place—like:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Television_series_set_in_5th-century_Anglo-Saxon_England

Here’s a good resource:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Television_series_by_century_of_setting

Yeah—“job creation” only makes sense in the timeframe of making incremental changes to industry to adjust to changes in the labor pool. On the timeframe of decisions that alter future demographics, “job creation” is a distorted and detrimental lens.

Only if you ignore the opportunity cost—i.e., the number of terrestrial jobs that could have been created with the same investment.

But would the energy recovered from using it as fuel be more than the energy required to ship it to China?

Seems like an opportunity for a bunch of street artists to show up at court and pull an “I’m Spartacus”.

If any element of the Marvel universe respected the laws of physics, it would break the rest of the franchise.

Not to excuse him or anything—but I have to remind myself that high-profile targets of anti-semitism (or racism in general) are exposed to orders of magnitude more of it than private individuals, and are correspondingly more likely to interpret it as a cause of things that anyone else can see have other motivations.

if the death is actually only a means to an end and not the end itself

I would restrict the intended end to institutional change—it’s not an assassination if you kill someone for their parking space, but it is if you kill them for their school board vote.

Edit: I guess I’d also have to add killing someone purely for their notoriety.

Depends on whether you see the primary function of houses as housing people, or as providing their owners with a competitive return on investment.

We can’t do both at once.

They gave my younger sister a traditionally masculine name, so apparently they were already out of ideas on that score.

It’s a good name for a baby born with horns protruding from its head.

I don’t know if it’s what you had in mind, but MediaWiki (the software WP runs on) has “interwiki” features that let MW instances easily reference each other’s articles; and other MW plugins (like Wikibase and Sematic MediaWiki) have features that let MW instances share their underlying data.

That’s never stopped him before.