Fried_out_Kombi

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[–] Fried_out_Kombi@lemmy.world 4 points 1 month ago

Some squatter who bought the rights to it for two twigs and a raspberry back when they were first selling off name rights 200,000 years ago

[–] Fried_out_Kombi@lemmy.world 34 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

And things like vertical bifacial solar panels can work especially amazingly on grazing land that isn't suitable for crops.

Counter-intuitive as they may look, they actually have a number of benefits:

  1. The panels face east and west, meaning they generate peak power in the morning and evening, which corresponds to peak demand => less need for energy storage to bridge the gap between the mid-day peak in production from traditional PV and the aforementioned morning and evening demand peaks.
  2. The panels are vertical, which makes them easier and cheaper to maintain, as dust, snow, and rain naturally shed from their surfaces.
  3. The panels get less direct energy during mid-day, keeping their surfaces cooler. Turns out cooler solar panels are more efficient at converting light energy into electrical energy.
  4. The arrangement lends itself very naturally to agrivoltaics, which means you can derive more yields from a given piece of land and use less land overall than if you had segregated uses.
  5. The compatibility with agrivoltaics allows farmers to diversify their incomes streams and/or become energy self-sufficient.
[–] Fried_out_Kombi@lemmy.world 3 points 4 months ago

Is the GOP actually the ones wanting us to replace Biden at the moment? If anything, there's a very good reason to believe the GOP would want Biden to remain: he's a quite unpopular president for whom the overwhelming majority of Americans have concerns about his age and mental fitness. Further, he has a ton of political baggage, and is highly contentious amongst Democrats.

Personally, I genuinely think Gretchen Whitmer (with Pete Buttigieg as running mate) would be much more likely to win in November, at least according to post-debate polling from this leaked internal memo: https://puck.news/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/SUNDAY_Post-Debate_Landscape_2024_06_30__1_-1.pdf

[–] Fried_out_Kombi@lemmy.world 0 points 4 months ago

Leaked internal memo with post-debate polling data showing a strong preference for Biden alternatives (especially Whitmer and Buttigieg) in key swing states: https://puck.news/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/SUNDAY_Post-Debate_Landscape_2024_06_30__1_-1.pdf

[–] Fried_out_Kombi@lemmy.world 9 points 4 months ago

Silvopasture is an ancient practice that integrates trees and pasture into a single system for raising livestock. Pastures with trees sequester five to 10 times as much carbon as those of the same size that are treeless while maintaining or increasing productivity and providing a suite of additional benefits. Livestock continue to emit the greenhouse gases methane and nitrous oxide, but these are more than offset by carbon sequestration, at least until soil carbon saturation is achieved.

Silvopasture also offer financial benefits for farmers and ranchers. Livestock, trees, and other forest products, such as nuts, fruit, and mushrooms, generate income on different time horizons. And help protect farmers from risk. The health and productivity of both animals and the land improve.

https://drawdown.org/solutions/silvopasture

Trees in silvopasture systems provide livestock with protection from sun and wind, which can increase animal comfort and improve production. Trees can provide shade in the summer and windbreaks in the winter, allowing livestock to moderate their own temperature. Heat stress in livestock has been associated with decreased feed intake, increased water intake, and negative effects on production, reproductive health, milk yields, fitness, and longevity.[4][5]

Certain tree types can also serve as fodder for livestock. Trees may produce fruit or nuts that can be eaten by livestock while still on the tree or after they have fallen. The leaves of trees may serve as forage as well, and silvopasture managers can utilize trees as forage by felling the tree so that it can be eaten by livestock, or by using coppicing or pollarding to encourage leaf growth where it is accessible to livestock.[1]

Well-managed silvopasture systems can produce as much forage as open-pasture systems under favorable circumstances. Silvopasture systems have also been observed to produce forage of higher nutritive quality than non-silvopasture forage under certain conditions. Increased forage availability has been observed in silvopasture systems compared to open-pasture systems under drought conditions, where the combination of shade from trees and water uptake from tree roots may reduce drought impacts.[1]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silvopasture

[–] Fried_out_Kombi@lemmy.world 9 points 5 months ago

It also had a second rule set where a land value tax was implemented, and the winning condition was when everyone made a minimum amount of money.

A land value tax (LVT) is a levy on the value of land without regard to buildings, personal property and other improvements upon it.[1] It is also known as a location value tax, a point valuation tax, a site valuation tax, split rate tax, or a site-value rating.

Some economists favor LVT, arguing it does not cause economic inefficiency, and helps reduce economic inequality.[2] A land value tax is a progressive tax, in that the tax burden falls on land owners, because land ownership is correlated with wealth and income.[3][4] The land value tax has been referred to as "the perfect tax" and the economic efficiency of a land value tax has been accepted since the eighteenth century.[1][5][6] Economists since Adam Smith and David Ricardo have advocated this tax because it does not hurt economic activity, and encourages development without subsidies.

LVT is associated with Henry George, whose ideology became known as Georgism. George argued that taxing the land value is the most logical source of public revenue because the supply of land is fixed and because public infrastructure improvements would be reflected in (and thus paid for by) increased land values.[7]

It's just a stupidly good tax policy, and we should be implementing it in more places.

!justtaxland@lemmy.world

[–] Fried_out_Kombi@lemmy.world 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Somehow internet populists have become convinced that liberalism = the government never does anything. Ask literally any economist and they will tell you government intervention and regulation are needed in many things.

For example, read this study on the policy views of practicing economists: https://econfaculty.gmu.edu/klein/PdfPapers/KS_PublCh06.pdf

You will find that most economists strongly support things like environmental, food and drug safety, and occupational safety regulations.

Convincing people liberalism is an evil capitalist ploy to deregulate at all costs is a conservative psyop, and judging from comments like the one to which you're responding, it's working.

[–] Fried_out_Kombi@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago

But society already values flexibility as well. As a basic example, I was hired in my current job in large part because I have a relatively broad range of skills within my field, rather than being hyper-specialized in one particular thing. Sure, in an abstract world where replacing employees is frictionless and firms are all megacorps with tens of thousands of employees (or more), tremendous specialization would probably be more commonplace. But in our real world, companies value flexible employees who can respond to changing projects, requirements, conditions, etc., because just firing and hiring a new specialist costs times and money, and many companies (startups especially) can't afford having thousands of specialists in every niche they touch upon.

Further, even specialists have to communicate and collaborate with other specialists, and they need to be able to understand each other well enough to do so. If you wanted to build robotics to pick tomatoes automatically, for instance, it would be ridiculous to hire one tomato farmer and one roboticist who know nothing about each other's respective specializations. If neither has any flexibility or breadth of knowledge, it will be very difficult for them to communicate and collaborate to get the project working.

[–] Fried_out_Kombi@lemmy.world 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Sounds similar to some of the research my sister has done in her PhD so far. As I understand, she had a bunch of snapshots of proteins from a cryo electron microscope, but these snapshots are 2D. She used ML to construct 3D shapes of different types of proteins. And finding the shape of a protein is important because the shape defines the function. It's crazy stuff that would be ludicrously difficult and time-consuming to try to do manually.

[–] Fried_out_Kombi@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago

http://gameofrent.com/content/can-land-be-accurately-assessed

The key downsides of income taxes, though, are it requires tracking everyone's income, and it's very easy to hide income by doing under-the-table work and getting paid in cash. In contrast, it's impossible to hide land.

[–] Fried_out_Kombi@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Wow, even Terre Haute. Almost went there for college (Rose-Hulman), but decided against it in part because the city itself was so small and sprawling. It must've been 1000x livelier back in the streetcar days when things were probably more densely built and less obscenely car-centric.

Also, Trump got elected, so I was like, "Nah, I'm moving to Canada", which is how I ended up in Montreal instead.

[–] Fried_out_Kombi@lemmy.world 6 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Similar with Montreal. A whole grid of streetcar lines just got torn up and replaced with buses. We now have a nice metro now at least, but it certainly wasn't made from pre-existing tramways.

 
 
 

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/7654367

https://vhelio.org/

I personally think it could be a great alternative to cars and bikes for those who need to take a whole family somewhere or a decent amount of stuff.

Only modifications I would make would be ride-by-wire and an extra set of pedals (so you can have two people pedalling without the annoyance of normal tandem bikes having to pedal at the same rate), and a more powerful motor (only 250W is legal in France, where this was designed, whereas 500W is legal here in Canada)

 
 
 

Videos that compare climate activists to Nazis, portray solar and wind energy as environmentally ruinous and claim that current global heating is part of natural long-term cycles will be made available to young schoolchildren in Florida, after the state approved their use in its public school curriculum.

Slickly-made animations by the Prager University Foundation, a conservative group that produces materials on science, history, gender and other topics widely criticized as distorting the truth, will be allowed to be shown to children in kindergarten to fifth grade after being adopted by Florida’s department of education.

 

I was watching this video, and the first thing that came to mind is how interesting it would be to the solarpunk community. It's the story of a professor and his efforts to make a "cybertecture" island by getting coral reefs to grow on-demand.

 

The temperature rises we've seen already are only a fraction of what our carbon emissions should be causing, and that is because we've been polluting many other materials into the atmosphere, which have been reflecting energy into space, masking the true impacts of our carbon emissions. But as we (rightfully) scale back on many of these other harmful emission types, such as from high-sulfur ship fuels, we're exposing our selves to the full weight of the carbon we've already emitted. Essentially, we've already been inadvertently geoengineering, and that has been masking the effects of climate change, which should and likely will be much more severe.

 
 
 
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