doesn’t it seem silly to remove the leaves from a lawn, then buy and put down commercial fertilizer

I think you are imagining leaves from small and widely spaced trees. We do not put down fertilizer, but we remove leaves from the part of our yard we want to include grass. The parts of the yard we let the leaves stay kills all the grass (hardier plants grow there, but they are not compatible with mowing to a walk-over height). Leaf mould easily takes two years to create, and grass needs sunlight in a half year from fall. Chopping it up helps, but at the volume created by our over-hundred-year-old oak and several other large trees, even chopped there is just too much mass per lawn area to be able to leave it and not kill the grass.

Because our society has widely available public transit and pedestrian/biking options, of course there is no overwhelming pressure to drive to be able to hold down a job and purchase food. /s

Bizarre to have a headline claiming five “types” were identified, but then only describe the behavior of a single type. What are the other four?

The people who care about executions being humane are generally opposed to the death penalty. People who support the death penalty generally want suffering to be inherent to the process. Only limit is whatever the Supreme Court deems “unusual”. Cruelty is allowed by the Constitution as long as it is “usual” cruelty.

In states that have death penalty (and federal when we have a president who supports death penalty), it’s the pro-death penalty groups - the ones that want it to cause suffering - that get to pick the process.

There is deeply emotional resistance to the idea of topics being too complex for the average person to understand. The “experts” promote something that superficially contradicts our lived experience? They must be corrupt liars! Down with the experts!

The economy had, on balance, positive trends in 2024? We felt poorer, so economists should be lynched! /s

Feels scarily like America is moving towards something like China’s Great Leap Forward https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward

The Great Leap Forward stemmed from multiple factors, including "the purge of intellectuals, the surge of less-educated radicals… Mao was dismissive of technical experts and basic economic principles…

Higher officials did not dare to report the economic disaster which was being caused by these policies… Mao did not retreat from his policies; instead, he blamed problems on bad implementation and “rightists” who opposed him…

…dozens of dams constructed in Zhumadian, Henan, during the Great Leap Forward collapsed in 1975 (under the influence of Typhoon Nina)… with estimates of its death toll ranging from tens of thousands to 240,000.

The failure of agricultural policies… suppressed the food supply… The shortage of supply clashed with an explosion in demand, leading to millions of deaths from severe famine.

I think they lack a diaphragm. It was weird reading in my cockatiel care books that some handling on the neck was fine, but even small pressure to their chest could prevent them from breathing.

Apparently she started out saying AI, then switched to A1 mid-statement. Might have been corrected privately before, but it only partially took.

Elsewhere in the thread, someone said non-primate mammals (like mice) are dichromic (can’t see orange), but birds are quadchromic (see even more colors than trichromics like primates). Is your cat only a good mouse-hunter, and comparatively a bad bird-hunter?

Apparently pink works as well, if a hunter wants a second color vest

I guess people eating a basket of shrimp are balanced out by people sharing one cow with several hundred others.

Well, changing it dramatically. It’s going to stay within historical ranges where ocean life flourished, but without any exoskeleton-heavy animals like corals in the mix.

Maybe more with less is possible, but we are currently doing less variety of skill with way, way more energy. From https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/en/follow-hbp/news/2023/09/04/learning-brain-make-ai-more-energy-efficient/

It is estimated that a human brain uses roughly 20 Watts to work – that is equivalent to the energy consumption of your computer monitor alone, in sleep mode. On this shoe-string budget, 80–100 billion neurons are capable of performing trillions of operations that would require the power of a small hydroelectric plant if they were done artificially.

A lot of US benefits have “benefit cliffs” where making $1 more substantially reduces or even completely disqualifies a person from programs like SNAP (food stamps) or childcare subsidies or Medicaid. https://www.ncsl.org/human-services/introduction-to-benefits-cliffs-and-public-assistance-programs

It’s not surprising people whose families are directly affected by, or who know people affected by, benefit cliffs think the lawmakers set up taxes the same way.

they’ve been shrinking as we evolved changed our diet

No genetic changes (evolution) happened. If as children we ate only very tough meat and lots of chewy vegetables - no bread or rice or potato softness - our same genetics would result in much larger adult jaws.

The politics aspect is much more driven by identity and social group than by sunk cost or refusal to have buyer’s remorse. A singular respected leader can turn the ship - churches and pastors were critical in the US civil rights movement, for example - but groups can be more nebulous without a particular leadership structure, like how difficult it is for people to leave Twitter: even though most users agree the experience has significantly degraded, there is no critical mass agreed on a replacement.

The more nebulous groups can break up - Twitter’s engagement is declining - it’s just slow. Maybe years or decades slow to get to the point it’s no longer one of the dominant social media. So I guess keeping the social connections open (giving someone who wants to make a major change an option to still have a friend or family member who will talk to them after), and patience.

A quick internet search suggests 36 weeks (eight months), which is well into the third trimester, is the most common start of restrictions, and many airlines will accept a doctor’s note the woman is low risk even past that. It was a 2008 election blip when the media got ahold of Sarah Palin flying while in labor because she wanted her special-needs baby delivered by the medical team that had prepared for him, which suggests even the written restrictions in airline policy are not consistently enforced.

There is a surprising amount of empty space between atoms, and even inside atoms between the electron orbitals and the nucleus. Small black holes are so dense they mostly fall through this empty between-atom space and don’t actually hit anything. Even in a matter-rich environment like inside the Earth, you’d need a black hole with more than half the mass of the moon to be large enough to eat matter faster than it loses matter to Hawking radiation.

It’s wild that there is so much space between atoms (and inside them, between the elctron orbitals and the nucleus), and black holes are so incredibly dense, that a small black hole can fall all the way through the Earth and not hit enough matter to gain appreciable mass.

The 3:2 resonance Klear references is considered a type of tidal locking.

There was a time people thought Mercury would have some “twilight” acreage that was always at habitable temperatures. Then we learned that, while yes it is tidally locked with the Sun, it is locked in a 3:2 resonance so it does rotate with respect to the sun, and everywhere gets both scorched and frozen to uninhabitability.