I think on average beaver ponds promote more biodiversity than human farms, allowing for a larger number of specialized species to find homes. This article gives a breif view of how beavers help to boost biodiversity, including hosting beaver pond specialists. Some methods of farming promote biodiversity, but monoculture largely prevails - 80% of arable land plots are used for monoculture globally.
So we need to do better and strive to do as good of a job as the beavers do.
One point is that the Parker and Cross type of refills completely replaces the writing head and so by one view it is not really “BIFL” since so much of the unit has to be refreshed (and so not as environmentally friendly) compared to a fountain pen. That being said, for some people the risk of ink all over your hands is not worth or even entirely precludes using a fountain pen, or there may be other circumstances.
For example, at my workplace there is only one approved type of pen that can be used 😢
IIRC the government has actually always had a large number of nodes because the government helped to create the Tor network. I don’t think they operate “most” of the entry and exit nodes though. With appropriate precautions it is still a hugely effective tool to preserve privacy.
For example, the person who ran the “Silk Road” (formerly the most famous website marketplace on the darknet) was only caught because of revealing personal information theough forum posts and on the clearnet, not because the government can see the traffic of anyone using Tor (which they cannot if you are using https). There are way too many curious high schoolers out there for it to make sense for them to monitor like that anyway. The more people who use it, the more effective of a tool for privacy it becomes.
Am I being overly paranoid?
Yes, simply connecting to the Tor network is not a sketchy thing and browsing the clearnet using Tor is a smart way to preserve your privacy if you aren’t in a hurry for your pages to load.
I used to browse the clearnet with Tor regularly but eventually I decided it was overkill and stopped (Tor really is slow a lot of the time so it isn’t always a walk in the park).
I shudder to think of the impact this could have on plants and animals. We have already seen horrifying mass environmental death in the oceans (see: coral bleaching) and other crazy biological imbalances like red tides. Soon we are going to be experiencing similar insanity everywhere. Not just the ocean, not just that other part of the world that you yourself don’t live in - everywhere.
GTX 760 🫡
It’s “super clocked” so you know it’s good!!
Great article. The rise of sports betting and other gambling has been hard to watch as someone on the outside who doesn’t have an interest in gambling.
I think one side of the story that this article didn’t touch on that separates modern gambling such as Polymarket from the life insurance gambling of old is the participation of youth gamblers in today’s market. I think for me and many others it is especially alarming to imagine that children are the ones gambling on whether people will die. And I think that the normalization of children in betting sits in its own context of rising “loot crate” schemes in video games (not that it is completely normalized for children to gamble yet, but it is gradually becoming so).
I think it’s a “confirmation bias” type of thing, which likely originally evolved to “reduce cognitive load,” so it is something that all human brains are designed to do unfortunately…
Or maybe it is fortunate? Who knows how torturesome it would be to experience no cognitive bias at ALL. How would you settle on a decision? Thinking of Chidi from The Good Place.
What problem do you mean?
The blastophaga psenes wasps in Turkey die during pollination just like the blastophaga psenes wasps in California do.
Here is more information about how figs (and fig wasps) came to be cultivated in the US.
Pretty soon you’ll be hearing folks say things like “why are you worried if you don’t have anything to hide” as if personal privacy has no value whatsoever. It’s a slippery slope!!!
I’m not sure I would call the particular missile the article is referring to “retaliatory” since afaik Turkey has not attacked Iran.
The article makes no mention of homelessness and thus I find the title disingenuous/misleading.
It’s a good article though. I think the community would be better served with a title about how this study shows that we would be better off removing parking requirements from building codes.
I had to go and listen to this song because of how outrageous I thought this interpretation was… But it’s real!!!
From Rock and Roll All Nite by Kiss: I want to rock and roll all niiiite, and part of ev-er-y day!
My childhood best friend absolutely loved this song and sang it out loud ALL the time with these incorrect lyrics, I was totally convinced and would sing along with him. My mom thought it was HILARIOUS and so she never told us lol 😆
(The correct lyrics are and party ev-er-y day)
Ironic that Pakistan provided so much funding to the Taliban over the years only to one day see themselves fighting the Taliban. A familiar story…
Sounds like there will be more to come in this conflict. I really don’t see what Pakistani leadership hopes to solve long term by repeating mistakes of other countries (carrying out imprecise strikes with complete disregard for collateral damage) which led to intractable conflict rather than solutions in Afghanistan in the past.
Ah, the ultimate insult in 2026: accusing someone of behaving like an LLM. In hindsight my original comment probably had less value than the average LLM comment would smh 🤦
It is also the most serious contributor to acid rain.
https://www.gem.wiki/Sulfur_dioxide_and_coal
The EPA estimates that more than 65%, or over 13 million tons per year, of SO2 production in the U.S. comes from electric utilities, 93 percent of which is produced by coal power plants.
“Miners with black lung disease, meanwhile, have had to the Trump administration’s move to roll back safety protections for the coal industry…”
From OSMRE website:
Each year, OSMRE transfers more than $1 billion to the United Mine Workers of America Health and Retirement Funds to support health care and pension benefits for eligible coal miners and their beneficiaries.
The US spends billions every year subsidizing coal and paying for the toll it takes on coal workers’ health. And yet, the MAGA folks I know seem to be more supportive of coal than they were 5 years ago. Like a lot more.
I don’t get how this plays in MAGA favor when the coal miners themselves are getting shafted and when coal energy represents a complete and total grift - exactly the same type of stuff that had these same folks so excited about Trump and Musk cutting government programs. Any argument for coal falls apart immediately because natural gas is better in almost every way.
Why are these “coalfare kings” getting away with it?
I understand the downvotes on my comment, I guess it was in poor taste, not every joke is a good joke. I am however genuinely confused by the intent behind your reply.
I can definitely see how a race of superintelligent industrialized beavers could be a bad thing for the world, so as far as the comic goes you are right lol.
As for real life beavers - whether beavers are conscious of it or not, the way they relate to the ecosystems they inhabit in some ways sets an example for humans to follow. We don’t need to limit ourselves to only living in North America and Scandinavia/Eastern Europe, but maybe we should try to farm in ways that intentionally promote species diversity. There could be other lessons to take as well, such as spending more effort farming appropriate locations (beavers spend considerable effort finding the right place to set up shop) - many farms around the world are located without much thought toward how they will relate to neighboring ecosystems.