France and dystopian copyright laws, name a more typical duo.
sndrtj
joined 1 year ago
Google needs to be broken up. It needs to separate in at least 5 different companies:
- Admob/Adsense
- Ads/Adwords
- Search
- Android
- Chrome
This absolutely isn't uncommon in Europe.
Yeah but these are usually taken to France or Germany where uphill definitely exists.
Not entirely true in my location. Radio also mentions (large) train outages.
I find cost comparisons between cars and public transport that factor depreciation and tax always a bit disingenuous, if the goal is to get people to take public transport more often.
Once you have a car, you will have this costs regardless of whether you take public transport or not.
Only if you don't have a car yet at all, only then does such a comparison become useful.
What I do always miss here is the cost of parking. Probably Dubai is an oddball again, but at least in European cities parking is a significant expense.
Let's do a comparison from my Dutch perspective. If I go to the city center of my place of residence by public transport (tram) it takes me 24 minutes by public transport, of which 8 are by foot, getting to the tram stop. By car it's 15 minutes, but that is on a Saturday morning with barely any traffic. The tram would cost me €2.08, single trip. By car it's 6.4km. My car runs about 1l/20km, and at current fuel prices of €2.01/l, that's (6.4/20)*2.01 = € 0.64. Including return trip that makes €4.16 for the tram vs €1.28 by car. So far, car wins by a long shot. But now comes parking. This is a whopping €6 per hour. So if I stay just 2 hours, the total variable cost for the car trip amounts to €13.28. Suddenly the car is 3 times as expensive.
In real life I'd probably go by bike anyway, costing me a grand total of €0.
Indeed, I live in The Hague, just a short hop from the Westland (where all the tomatoes, cucumbers and bell peppers are from). At least I can say I can get very local produce if I go the supermarket 😅.
Even the "water bombs" (as we call them here) situation is improving. There are some really interesting new producers that actually focus on flavor instead of yield. The price naturally is high, but I'm enjoying Dutch tomatoes for the first time ever.
I live in one of the most light-polluted areas in the world. Even Orion is hard to pick out, and even lunar eclipses visibly more muted than elsewhere.
The main source of the worst pollution is not street lights. Instead, it's industrial pollution coming from one of the largest collections of greenhouses worldwide a couple km. Many of them have growlights on all night long. On an overcast night, the sky is orange and purple - orange is the older technology with modern leds being purple.
That said, i am hopeful for the future here. Between 2012 and 2018 the brightest areas have already become a little less bright. Let's hope that trend continues.
You're not getting many answers yet regarding nitrogen.
As a preface: When it comes to climate and environmental concerns with respect to agriculture, the word "nitrogen" does usually not refer to the completely harmless atmospheric nitrogen (N2). Instead, it refers to various compounds that contain nitrogen.
Nitrogenous pollution from cattle comes in two shapes:
The first is methane (NH3). A single cow burps and farts out about 100kg of methane each year. Methane is a greenhouse gas that's 28 times as potent as CO2. This means a single cow is responsible for as much as 2800kg equivalent in CO2 each year due to burps and farts alone. For reference, the CO2 per capita emissions globally are about 4 tons (4000kg) per year, for all sources combined. Cows, relatively speaking, therefore produce a huge amount of CO2 equivalent.
The second is all the nitrogenous compounds in their excrements. This acts as a fertilizer on soil and in the water. While that sounds good, it leads to various unwanted effects. One is that agricultural runoff causes algal blooms in water that then ends up killing a significant amount of marine life. Another is that nutrient-rich soils tend to seriously decrease plant species diversity. Many native and wild plants actually need nutrient-poor soils to thrive. Those plants will get outcompeted by a small group of fast-growing plants that do well in all the cow-poop-infested soil. These compounds also tend to travel far, via agricultural runoff or even via the air, so ecosystems far away from farms are also impacted.