I so don't know how to feel about beavers. I live in a country where beavers are quite strictly protected, but volves and bears are regularly hunted "to protect the people from them". This causes an imbalance: beavers have zero natural enemies, are not hunted and are capable of changing the countryside. I find myself sympathetic to the people who lose portions of their lands, I am sad for the many trees felled near a lake by my home, I understand why some people are frustrated.
In general, we messed up the ecosystem - the most complex system on this planet and we insist on messing it further by one-sided protection of the "cute" speciess.
Don't get me wrong, I admire beavers: hard workers, creative, imaginative, resilient, with strong families. All in all, a role model for humanity.
I just wish we would look at the big system and strive to fix that as a whole.
The same has happened in the United Kingdom wrt deer and predators including wolves (which are locally extinct) -- a blunt instrument because we can think of no other way of protecting livestock. The result is we "have to" regularly cull thousands of animals instead of letting an ecosystem manage itself.
What would that entail? The whole of the UK has been a human managed ecosystem for centuries. Deforestation was completed about 400 years ago and the larges stand of contiguous trees is under 300 sq. mi. So many of the species that would have made up the old ecosystem are gone.
Here in Germany wolves return to many parts of the country. And there is lots of resistance. There are regular sob-stories how wolves hunted poor cuddly niece lambs and how their owners are now scarred for life and will quit their jobs.
There is financial compensation and also guidance on how to build secure fences, but the big bad wolv is scary...
If the circle of life scars somebody out of farming, that's probably for the better. Farming is hard work and any time you have livestock, you have to make hard decisions about managing them, including how to protect them from predation.
Amusing you disparage a scientifically mandated effort to incrementally pull back from an environmental precipice as "protection of the 'cute' species".
It would be a start, though, if we reintroduced keystone species, allowed less problematic predators free reign, and adopted a policy of generally consigning river floodplains to nature as much as possible rather than making rivers into sewers or canals. Trying to live inches from a flowing river is an anachronism from an earlier era when we cared about very different things.
That solution seems to work best through a colonial, capitalist lens. Rather than TINA (Thatcher's "there is no alternative"), consider TIA (Yoda's "there is... another")?
What's the tradeoff tho? People usually are mad because those animals threaten part of their income, not because they cause harm to the environment. It's not about beavers or wolves or beavers or another ugly animal. Is usually about beaver or corn, or soy or whatever they're planting.
The problem with maproulette is the same thing that makes it fun: the gamification.
Some people value imaginary internet points so highly, they edit OSM willy-nilly to make it conform to maproulette, disregarding ground truth, not checking if the tasks analysis is complete and mapping slightly wrong around the world.
This is mad MUCH worse by the fact that the default setting in maproulette is that when you finish a task, the system takes you to an another one at a random position in the world. I have no idea, for instance, if this Italian restaurant in Minsk has a correct web address (or if it exists at all), but I'm incentivized to jut remove the tag and get those sweet points.
I used to do a lot of OSM editing. In my experience, it really helps to have edited a lot in one area to better understand local context, make better sense of imagery etc etc.
Okay, so I thought I would check this in my "gps" and I see OsmAnd+ from f-droid lets you enter vehicle parameters, including height, and will avoid low overpasses, given the height restriction is tagged in OSM data. You can also enter a type of vehicke and the navigation will avoid roads you shouldn't enter (dangerous load, no entrance for HGV, etc.).
Those drivers should just use a better software.
Rolex and it's secrecy and structure was explored by one of my favourite youtube channels. Goes deeper into history and marketing side of things, less about the non-profit structure and philanthropic endeavors
I would envision it as a money that don't go to the general pile of tax-raised money which becomes the country's government budget, but be kept separate and be used for investments in recycling and environemtn protection. I am not a lawyer and have no idea if this is a thing anywhere, but it seems so logical. You raise money off an ecological problem and use them, directly, to solve the ecological problem (and others).
It just will not work, countries are not interested in keeping the planet clean from plastic and from greenhouse gas. It must be on international level.
Why is it terrible? The OP said to burn what you can for electricity, so that really should just leave metals. Copper is valuable, so hopefully they'd strip all the wiring and recycle it, leaving just steel and maybe aluminum (which itself is valuable for recycling too). How is dumping steel car frames in the ocean "terrible"? These days, entire ships are sunk (after getting all the fluids out of them) to actually help the ocean wildlife as artificial reefs.
However, I do agree there should be a lot more effort to recycle this stuff.
Burning plastic/paper/other packaging gets you a lot of toxic stuff in the atmosphere. I know there are filters and processes and whatnot, but it just feels wrong and smelly.
Aluminium recycling actually works great, recycled aluminium is 95% less energy expensive and some 75% of aluminium comes from recycling. (1)
Steel could also be recycled like that, I guess ships are a lot more difficult to cut apart and melt down than cars, because they are heavier and larger (citation needed). At any rate, we put a lot of resources and energy into the steel for cars, maybe we should use that steel as much as possible instead of putting more energy into more steel.
I see now. I misunderstood: I thought you were saying that dumping the remaining steel shells in the ocean was terrible for the ocean. Yeah, burning all that stuff is terrible.
Consider the economics. There are HUGE companies with a history of influencing legislature, lobbying an lying to everyone, whose existence depends on us to continue not caring about climate change. People like us can hardly imagine the amount of money they are throwing at us in the form of marketing, lobbying, astroturfing, etc. They are literally making money off us not taking action.
Otoh, I cannot think of a single billion dollar company that got where it is by being climate friendly.
Media companies get views by being sensationalistic and spreading paranoia. Governments love that too, since it means another excuse they can use to enact more authoritarian policies. The Internet has taken that to the next level.
I'm not a fan of Greenpeace and I haven't checked their number here .. but it passes the "it'd be at least that much" test for order of magnitude:
Koch Family Foundations have spent $145,555,197 directly financing 90 groups that have attacked climate change science and policy solutions, from 1997-2018.
My main quibble is that as I've been around geophysical energy and mineral exploration since the 1980s I'd argue that Koch and Co. started funding anti-climate change think tanks and policy groups a lot earlier than 1997.
They've been prepackaging all manner of FUD talking points and passing them out to media groups for almost 50 years.
They torpedoed any chance of decent widespread public transport in the US, simply to keep the demand for individual freedom loving liberty driven gas guzzling high and profits flowing.
It's remarkable how easily led by the nose central north americans have been.
I've thought about this a lot. Is it worth wasting water, derergent and energy to clean a yogurt cup, for instance? Does the plastic-waste-recycled outweigh the water-wasted? I never found an answer, maybe this is a really tough comparison? Too apple vs. orange?
(Edited for spelling)
Your yogurt cup is almost always PP (Polyproylene) Type 5 to maintain stiffness at large size. In that case the answer is throw it in the garbage, they're going to burn it or send it to China/Africa anyway.
The one that blows my mind is washing aluminum cans (or steel).
How do you think they're going to get the plastic coating off the cans and remelt it?
I mean don't recycle a full can, but they have washers for recycled materials too.
> The one that blows my mind is washing aluminum cans (or steel). How do you think they're going to get the plastic coating off the cans and remelt it?
> I mean don't recycle a full can, but they have washers for recycled materials too.
I'm sure they have washers, too, but how well will they work for sticky, dried on stuff?
Also washing helps prevent the bin from getting smelly.
No, basically all Lifetime Cost Analysis of plastic recycling suggest it saves carbon/GHG to recycle. (And further that incinerating it with energy recovery is more GHG friendly than landfill)
The people who believe otherwise seem to get their information from fossil fuel funded "libertarian" sources, that seem to magically always conclude that selling more fossil fuels is the best possible answer to every question.
Especially if my clean plastics will get mixed in with a bunch of dirty plastics and then rewashed in with that batch. I don’t know the answer either but would love to find out so I can be a better citizen about it.
We're way off topic now, but well.
OSM is insistently not focused on a map, but on the data. On this data a lot of other mapping projects can (and are being) built.
In central Europe, we have freemap.sk, which combines OSM data, hi-quality aerial imagery - for Slovakia only, these were shot by the government and are licensed in a way that they can be combined with OSM data - resulting in possibilities such as displaying bike paths over super detailed aerial maps.
Also check out mapy.cz, they are based on OSM (outside of Czechia) and in some parts of the world can be switched to satellite/aerial imagery with roads overlayed over it.
So they will invest probably hundreds of thousands of dollars into a tech that will make them use a lot less electricity for heating and cooling, only to stop using that technology 5 years later and pay for expensive energies? Or will they completely uninstall the heat pumps?
The thing with this kind of investment is, it's cash heavy at the beginning and then lets you save a lot of money. It makes no sense to ditch the installed technology once it's working for you and saves you money.
I believe a government grant paid for the system. The article neglected to mention that. It’s conceivable that there may be other things that went unmentioned in the article.
I live down the street. Here’s what the developer’s website has to say:
> Lendlease acquired $4 million in support from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) to build a geoexchange system at 1 Java Street.
I am #3 in a similarly sized country, I was #1 for a few weeks about a year ago. It should be noted that this is "only" streetcomplete. Many mappers don't use it at all - instead mapping in JOSM or iD and greatly outperforming StreetComplete folk.
According to HDYC [1], the author of TFA is currently ranked at 37 in New Zealand. I don't know if HDYC can show historic data.
All that said, this is not a competition. It's just fun to enhance the maps and see the enhancements in real life - better driving directions, more naturally shaped roads, sidewalks being replaced with stairs where needed, traffic lights and pedestrian crossings showing up where they should.
The gamification is only a cherry on top. Now I have to go out, score a few hundred edits and maybe grab #2.
In general, we messed up the ecosystem - the most complex system on this planet and we insist on messing it further by one-sided protection of the "cute" speciess.
Don't get me wrong, I admire beavers: hard workers, creative, imaginative, resilient, with strong families. All in all, a role model for humanity.
I just wish we would look at the big system and strive to fix that as a whole.
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