Plants tend to shut down their photosynthesis at night and focus on other things, like taking in CO2 - which they don't do during the day, because it's hottest and their pores are closed tight to keep water in.

Cause we don't have SUV congestion pricing ;)

I mean actually though, I don't know if the USV-only fees are any more than the all-car fees in NYC. SUVs are paying a congestion tax in both

you're thinking of carbon offsets, which are different from a carbon credit marketplace. Offsets are mostly a scam, but a credit marketplace with a real cap on total emissions is a good thing

A government sets a total limit on the carbon emissions that the whole country or a single industry can produce, and gives out allowances for emissions to companies. Those companies can't go over their allowance, but are free to buy and sell those allowances between each other. If one company can produce $1,000 of value from 1 ton of CO2, and another company can produce $500 while emitting 1 ton of CO2, company 1 might buy credits from company 2 for $750. Both make more money than they otherwise would, and the total value gained from that carbon emission is maximized.

Some governments don't just give out credits at the start, but auction them off, the price of which averages to the same market value, and gives revenue to the government (usually used to pay for climate/pollution programs). Either way, the government imposes a cap on the total emissions, and ideally slowly reduces that cap every year. The buying & selling of credits doesn't change the total emissions, it just makes their use more money-efficient.

Not free-floating and killing anaerobic bacteria, I presume

Paris just implemented new congestion pricing, but only for SUVs above a certain size, and with exemptions for work vehicles. I'm sure at least the latter could be done easily enough

"it's not loaded, I promise"

Spoken like a man who's thought about it 😂

Educated guess: people were planing 2x4s down to 1.5x3.5 after purchase for a long time before they started selling them pre-planed, and construction standards are used to the smaller ones

Hard to shoot your own helicopters

Sounds like Gabe knows his job as a gaijin in Japan tbh

That's probably because of exposure to oxygen, if that's true

oh good god 💀

Ironically they're not, they're highly skilled and command really good pay because of it. Almost all guide companies are Nepali-owned now. The problems are the general lower income of everyone in Nepal, which is bigger than Everest, and exploitation of lower-skill workers (hoping to become high-paid guides) by their Nepali bosses, which is a labor issue as old as time

Chrome won

AFAIK it's also a dominance thing. African wild cats live in colonies, and I was always told that dominant cats leave their poop out while the lower ones bury it. That could just be an old wives tale though

"and MJF... with the ring..!"

he should come to the ring with the noose around his neck again

We got another one lads

How do you build tech-friendly infrastructure without industrial capacity? You have to buy it from other countries, and they can charge a lot of money for the value that they add turning raw materials into machinery and manufactured goods. If you produce that domestically, all that added value is wealth that stays in the country. Industrialization was the biggest leap forward in economic activity in world history; Britain became the largest empire in history solely because they did it first.

Skipping that entirely and going straight to a service economy is hard, it's like asking "why doesn't a startup just open 1,000 stores nationwide like Walmart has?" Another added benefit for industrial economies today is that they can sell goods to the richer service economies that are getting rid of their manufacturing jobs. Now that China is getting rich enough, the cheap manufacturing that used to be done there is starting to get offshored to poorer countries, who are taking that chance to climb to the next rung of the economic ladder.

That said, there is a growing service sector in many developing countries, especially since the internet has made it possible to sell human services to the US and Europe from across oceans. A big problem is that it takes educated and english-speaking workers to offer that, while you can run factories with workers with almost any locals. And then you still have to import all your machinery and labor to build roads, power grids, cars, etc. because you can't build them yourself. India, notably, has leaned hard into the service sector, since their British colonial history means they have a lot more english speakers - one reason why we have such a stereotype of Indian IT outsourcing.

they don't produce enough food for their domestic needs, but this was true before 1991 and before the 1959 revolution. And is true in most other Latin American countries. In 2024 specifically they've had a short-term problem, but I'm talking about long-term trends since 1993

The Earth doesn't care how much CO2 is in the air or how much lead is in the water. You are a very fragile collection of chemical reactions that can be disrupted and harmed by the wrong things in the wrong places, like lead in your water, or climate changing faster than ecosystems can adapt.

Same reason we don't use metric for anything else, it's hard to get a whole nation to change a convention that everyone is used to. The US is also pretty uniquely oblivious of the rest of the world (through sheer geography and being the only world superpower).

It's also also very decentralized; there's lots of things that other countries have standardized at federal level that the US never will. When I learned that whole countries have one transit card that works for all trains and busses in the country I was amazed, that'd be met with angry protests about government tyranny here.

To be fair, American scientists use metric, and other professionals might also. But regular people don't need a logical system that's easy to do math with, they just need numbers that they understand the meaning of.

Las Vegas was built on a spring. It has since grown far bigger than the water the spring provided. The Las Vegas Springs were a valuable stopping point for people going west to Southern California, although the value of its location today is being just over the state border where Nevada laws allow things that you can't do in California.

Maybe our prison system doesn't function to reduce crime