If this actually kills off the bacteria causing cavities, it may also get rid of the plaque biofilms that they produce. This could be a very big deal - those biofilm plaques are also a reason for arterial plaques that cause heart disease.
Supposedly there is a "super-locked" mode that you invoke by pressing the power and volume buttons (or double-clicking them or somesuch) which turns off the FaceID until you enter your unlock code manually.
Popo shows up, double-click, done. Presumably with all the face tracking and recognition stuff they added today, they could extend that to a certain expression - stick your tongue out, phone locks down.
Unfortunately, even the people who drafted DACA admit that Trump's in a bind here because the order is unconstitutional.
10 state sttorneys general gave Trump a September 5 deadline for ending DACA or they would sue to get it overturned. This same group had DAPA (the parental version) thrown out due to unconstitutionality and the argument against DACA is essentially identical. They would win in court, barring a reversal by the Supreme Court. The SC split 4-4 on DAPA, so the Appeals Court 2-1 against is the law of the land and no one expects that Gorsuch would find DACA constitutional.
Any dispassionate look at DACA sees that it's plainly unconstitutional. Unlike orders that deferred or gave a low priority to enforcement of immigration laws, DACA actually grants (temporary) legal status with no legal basis. Any attempt to find otherwise is really ends-oriented. Plenty of that sort of thing on both sides - but this would be really bad precedent.
The truly sad thing is that the "Dreamers" have supporters on both sides of the aisle - Republicans are pretty sympathetic to their plight as well. But, like anything, politics gets in the way - Democrats want a "clean" Dreamer bill while Republicans want something in return (either wall funding or mandatory e-Verify). Neither side is budging much at the moment (there are a few bipartisan bills out there, but each of the main conferences are waiting).
I don't tend to expect much from Trump (other than crazy uncle-style Tweeting at all hours) but even he seems to want to do something for the Dreamers. Hopefully, a deal can get done soon.
That's not actually the whole story. Ford had written a cost-benefit analysis of changing fuel systems across all cars, not just Pintos, as part of a presentation to NHTSA about moving to a 30mph fixed-barrier standard. The standards were rapidly shifting during the development of the Pinto - there was no rear-collision standard at all when the design began and the original proposal was a 20 mph moving-barrier standard, which Ford supported and designed the Pinto around.
The NHTSA then solicited opinions on a future change to a 30mph fixed-barrier standard, which was the reason Ford provided that analysis. The Pinto was one of dozens of vehicles which would be affected by such a change. Mother Jones magazine got the report and turned it into a series of stories about the Pinto being a death trap. The NHTSA then tested the Pinto using non-standard methods (different levels of gasoline, the use of a "bullet" car instead of a barrier that was designed to ram under the gas tank, and a 35mph speed that had never been discussed). Based on a set of tests that were designed specifically to cause a gas leak and exceeded any standards even being discussed, the car was recalled.
Pretty much any station wagon or hatchback of the era would have failed that test. I'm glad that we now have even more stringent tests but it's clear that this was a rigged test and a media generated controversy rather than specifically nefarious company wrongdoing. Every applicable standard of the time was met - it just couldn't pass a test specifically designed to make it fail.
Why not just fork and develop Firefox OS? It actually works, is based on Linux, CSS and HTML5 and has actually been deployed by a handful of phone manufacturers, primarily in India. I don't even think it's truly dead, as a couple of small Indian firms appear to still be developing it.
Sure, it was a waste of time for Mozilla but no need to reinvent the wheel.
As far as I can tell, Pale Moon and Firefox handle third-party cookies identically - you can disable them in both via fairly straightforward settings.
In Firefox, Options/Privacy/History/Use Custom Settings (to enable the combo boxes), then set Accept Third Party Cookies to "Never".
It looks like the difference in Pale Moon is that Options is still a dialog box, not a tab (although that might just be an old copy of Pale Moon - I don't use it).
I think you got the wrong impression. I think the only way for countries to get "rich" (by which I mean that median income rises, building a middle class) is by internally directed economic growth and development. The developed countries can help on the margins but it must be driven by the people who actually live there.
Gapminder (by the late Hans Rosling) is a fantastic resource for this sort of thing and its video is a good, in depth documentary about the myths and facts about population growth.
I was just suggesting that the reason why it's becoming a problem in terms of emissions now could be due to the changing nature of pet diets
The reason it's a problem now is that someone decided to publish a study on its impact. Regular pet food hasn't changed significantly in years.
In the grand scheme of things, pet ownership is barely a blip on the radar. This is just another "sky is falling" study - overhyped nonsense that obscures the real work that needs to be done in terms of decarbonization.
And who is going to enforce that? How? Crippling economic sanctions on countries that are already at desperation levels of poverty? Invasion? Recolonialization?
The surest way to drop the birthrate in poor countries, proven to work time and time again, is to raise the standard of living. Richer people have fewer children - it holds true for every level of "rich" outside of the multimillionaire class. Children are an important resource to subsistence farmers and it's natural to have many of them when there is a high likelihood that many of them will not survive to adulthood (even though, in aggregate, many do).
Children are an enjoyable burden to urban and middle class people - when women work outside the home, there is a huge incentive to have fewer children.
The down side, of course, is that richer people use more resources, but we can work on that from a technology perspective. But if you want fewer people, make them rich(er).
I'm sure you have more knowledge about the Hindi issue than I do. I have both Indian Hindu and Indian Muslim friends and they all pretty much said that due to inter-community tensions that Hindi was less likely to be spoken by the Muslim community (which would speak regional language, followed by either English or Urdu).
But they were all English-speaking emigres to the US, so their experience may not be typical in a country with over a billion people. Thanks!
The summary is wrong. According to the article, the fuel savings is Rs 12 lakh (1.2 million rupees) per train with six retrofitted cars. The cost to retrofit one car is Rs 9 lakh (900,000 rupees).
Rs = symbol for Rupees (the local currency) lakh = x1,00,000 or x100,000 crore = x1,00,00,000 or x10,000,000
India separates numbers differently than most of the West - the first comma is at a power of three, all the rest are at powers of 2. Tens, hundreds, thousands, lakhs and crores are combined in various ways (with some older terms like arab, padma, neel and shankh occasionally used for very large numbers too)
one, ten, one hundred, one thousand, ten thousand, lakh, ten lakh, one crore, ten crore, one arab / one hundred crore, one thousand crore, ten thousand crore, one lakh crore, ten lakh crore, one crore crore, one padma / ten crore crore, etc.
The article was probably written in Indian English, which is one of the most common languages in India. It's often preferred as the inter-regional language (most regions in India have an indigenous language) as Hindi (the main other choice) is often disliked by Muslim communities.
Rs is the symbol for Rupees. Lakh has already been explained.
That's the problem with skimming the book, looking for reasons to doubt it.
The section you linked to was part of the "technical chapters" that was explaining how to convert a "long distance" flight to standard units of energy, and then to contrast that with the amount of electrical energy that would need to be generated. He has several such chapters on various bits (cars, wind generation, etc) and will use them as examples of a potential "stack" of energy use or generation.
But when he talks about actual usage, he uses official numbers. For instance, his 125 kWh/person/day in the U.K. is an official number from UN and U.K. sources (footnoted here). The US figures come from the UNDP source. He has a nice chart (18.4) that compares dozens of countries energy consumption vs GDP. All the chapters are extensively footnoted (at the end of each chapter).
It's an extremely well-reviewed book with glowing reviews from academia, the science press, serious mainstream newspapers, Bill Gates and Cory Doctorow. It's probably the best sympathetic but cold-eyed view at what going carbon free really means.
Actually, it doesn't completely add up, for a couple of reasons.
First, Musk is (semi-purposely?) conflating the area required to generate the same amount of electricity that the US uses each year with the amount of energy that the US uses. Second, he's talking about the square footage of panels, not the square footage of any reasonably designed panel array (multiply that number by 4).
The late physicist David MacKay, an adviser to the UK's Department of Energy and Climate Change and author of the great "Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air" book and website, worked the numbers and came up with the following figures to totally wean the US off of fossil fuels.
First, we need to drop our average per capita energy usage from 250 kWh/day to 125 kWh/day. He's assuming some of this will occur due to electrification of transport but was skeptical we could get completely down there, but assumed for the sake of argument that we could.
We start out needing to build out 2600 GW of wind power. This is 200 times the amount we had at the time and would cover an area about the size of California. That provides about 42 kWh / day / capita.
We then build out offshore wind for most of the shallow waters surrounding the country. This provides about 4.6 kWh / day / capita.
We then build out our hot-rock geothermal potential over 50 years to get another 8 kWh / day / capita.
Hydro currently supplies about 3.6 kWh / day / capita. There isn't a whole lot of capacity left but he generously allows us to double it to 7.2 kWh / day / capita.
That only gets us to 62 kWh / day / capita. You're going to need about 13,225 square miles (a 115mi x 115mi square) of concentrating solar power to supply the rest.
But that doesn't sound good - all of California covered in wind farms, all of the near-coast also covered in wind farms, thousands of hot rock geothermal wells plus 13,225 sq mi of CSP in deserts. And that only gets you to half of what we're currently using and we haven't even talked about batteries...
OK, scrap that plan. Let's just go to CSP in deserts - it's about the best renewable resource and you can build in molten salt reservoirs to provide nighttime energy - no need to build out all those batteries. And let's be realistic - the US isn't going to significantly drop its energy use as its population continues to grow, so let's peg that at the current levels.
You now only need a 139,000 square miles of CSP to provide our 250 kWh / day / capita energy use. Hurray! That's only all of Arizona (114,000 sq mi) and a big chunk of New Mexico...
Except, of course, that Liberty University has a long history of having leading figures on the left come and speak to its student body. Ted Kennedy was a frequent speaker, and last year, students were required to go to a Bernie Sanders speech.
The students were respectful and listened, even though they disagreed with Sanders on most points.
I wouldn't go to or send my child to Liberty U, but the differences between a Liberty University and a Berkeley or Evergreen or Yale or Middlebury are pretty stark. Liberty U expects a respectful audience and gets one, the others have let the inmates run the asylum.
They do the separation work on the larvae, which have a noticeable size difference between males and females. It's basically just mechanical sorting - you either can pass thru the filter or not.
When Oxitec (a company in the same line of work, but using genetic engineering to create males that have non-viable offspring) did this, they actually took a batch of 100,000 now-adult mosquitoes and dissected them individually. 69 females got through the filter - not a bad job.
I’ve read a lot about mosquitoes and their place in the ecosystem over the past 10 years. Bats, purple martins and other insectivores get a vanishingly small amount of their calories from mosquitoes - less than 2% of the stomach contents of bats. Mosquitoes are quite small and therefore not very calorically rich. Unlike midges and gnats, they don’t really swarm in a way that would allow insectivores to get a whole bunch in one swoop, so generally mosquitoes are providing fewer calories than the expense required to fly at them. Bats, martins and the like mostly end up eating moths and midges. Some species of dragonfly are mosquitovores but, again, not as a large percentage of their caloric intake.
There are species that target mosquito larvae, which bunch up enough to be worth it. The aptly named mosquitofish is one such creature.
But the saving grace even among mosquitofish is that they don’t care what species of mosquito larva they eat - getting rid of the handful that target humans will leave space for the hundreds of other species that exist in the US (let alone the thousands worldwide). There are 3,500 species of mosquito and only 40 of them target humans - getting rid of those would not affect total mosquito mass available for fish. Especially considering that most of the deadliest mosquito vectors in the Americas are invasive species (Aedes aegypti, Asian Tiger Mosquitoes) - wiping them out from this hemisphere should be a good thing. (No one cries over attempts to control/wipe out lionfish in the Caribbean - but attempt to kill an invasive disease vector and everyone gets the vapors.)
Contrast wiping out a handful of mosquito species via bacteria or genetic engineering with the enormous chemical inputs we put into our lakes, streams and rivers in order to just control mosquitoes - we are surely inadvertently killing off other species of insects just trying to control mosquitoes. And when we drain a wetland because of mosquitoes, we impact far, far more species than even the worst case scenario of mosquito extinction. Even ecologists who are nervous about tampering with ecosystem largely agree.
That fails basic economics. If the embedded energy cost of a solar panel was greater than any possible eROI, they couldn't be sold at a profit. You might be able to get some suckers early on and government subsidies could help somewhat, but you're talking about a many multi-billion dollar industry with dozens of multinational suppliers and enormous factories. At some point, there has to be a positive eROI or the whole system would grind to a halt, as we can see from Solyndra which, despite large subsidies, failed.
But plenty of other companies are making good profits from solar (and wind, and batteries, etc.).
Solar panels (and batteries) will never have an eROI of, say, a drill head or gas turbine, but that's comparing apples to oranges. The total systems ROI of solar and wind farms are currently near, at or exceed various carbon and nuclear power systems.
If you want to make an argument that renewables will have a hard time replacing all baseload energy systems (because the power is more more diffuse, requiring a lot of land and more complicated grid management), that's a better argument to make. But any argument that starts with renewable energy simply not being able to compete in any context is wrong.
Actually, for inland freight transport, the EU has a greater intensity of road transport to rail transport (51.1 / 11.9 = 4.2x) than does the US (56.8 / 32.6 = 1.7x).
Europe ships more by sea than the US (a combination of being surrounded on three sides by ocean and from importing/exporting a greater percentage of its goods overseas) but once it gets on dry land, you use trucks to a much greater degree than does the US.
Emissions mean you're burning fuel. Fuel costs money. American corporations don't like to spend money and are constantly looking for more efficient ways of doing business and squeezing out costs.
So, yeah - the US is very worried about emissions, just not for the reasons everyone else is.
(For reference, the EU freight rail share is 11.9% while the US freight rail share is 32.6%. The EU is much better about electrification of rail - it's basically non-existent in the US except for some passenger rail.)
Kroger is both a brand and a holding company. It's the third largest retailer in the world and third largest employer in the US. It's the largest grocer and second largest retailer after Walmart in the US.
When they takeover a chain (which they do a lot), they don't tend to change the name. If you've shopped at Ralph's, Fry's, QFC, FredMeyer, Food4Less, Foods Co. or Harris Teeter (all these are in coastal states), you've shopped Kroger. They have a dozen other chains they run too (Baker's, City Market, Dillons, Gerbes, Jay C, King Soopers, Owen's, Pay Less, Roundy's, Mariano's, Pick n Save, Scott's, Ruler, Qwik Shop, Tom Thumb) plus Kroger itself (which is in 20 states).
They might have started in flyover country, but they've been gobbling up the coasties for years. As has Albertsons, which started in Boise, ID and now owns pretty much all the other grocery chains (they are #2).
Slashdot Mirror
If this actually kills off the bacteria causing cavities, it may also get rid of the plaque biofilms that they produce. This could be a very big deal - those biofilm plaques are also a reason for arterial plaques that cause heart disease.
Supposedly there is a "super-locked" mode that you invoke by pressing the power and volume buttons (or double-clicking them or somesuch) which turns off the FaceID until you enter your unlock code manually.
Popo shows up, double-click, done. Presumably with all the face tracking and recognition stuff they added today, they could extend that to a certain expression - stick your tongue out, phone locks down.
Unfortunately, even the people who drafted DACA admit that Trump's in a bind here because the order is unconstitutional.
10 state sttorneys general gave Trump a September 5 deadline for ending DACA or they would sue to get it overturned. This same group had DAPA (the parental version) thrown out due to unconstitutionality and the argument against DACA is essentially identical. They would win in court, barring a reversal by the Supreme Court. The SC split 4-4 on DAPA, so the Appeals Court 2-1 against is the law of the land and no one expects that Gorsuch would find DACA constitutional.
Any dispassionate look at DACA sees that it's plainly unconstitutional. Unlike orders that deferred or gave a low priority to enforcement of immigration laws, DACA actually grants (temporary) legal status with no legal basis. Any attempt to find otherwise is really ends-oriented. Plenty of that sort of thing on both sides - but this would be really bad precedent.
The truly sad thing is that the "Dreamers" have supporters on both sides of the aisle - Republicans are pretty sympathetic to their plight as well. But, like anything, politics gets in the way - Democrats want a "clean" Dreamer bill while Republicans want something in return (either wall funding or mandatory e-Verify). Neither side is budging much at the moment (there are a few bipartisan bills out there, but each of the main conferences are waiting).
I don't tend to expect much from Trump (other than crazy uncle-style Tweeting at all hours) but even he seems to want to do something for the Dreamers. Hopefully, a deal can get done soon.
That's not actually the whole story. Ford had written a cost-benefit analysis of changing fuel systems across all cars, not just Pintos, as part of a presentation to NHTSA about moving to a 30mph fixed-barrier standard. The standards were rapidly shifting during the development of the Pinto - there was no rear-collision standard at all when the design began and the original proposal was a 20 mph moving-barrier standard, which Ford supported and designed the Pinto around.
The NHTSA then solicited opinions on a future change to a 30mph fixed-barrier standard, which was the reason Ford provided that analysis. The Pinto was one of dozens of vehicles which would be affected by such a change. Mother Jones magazine got the report and turned it into a series of stories about the Pinto being a death trap. The NHTSA then tested the Pinto using non-standard methods (different levels of gasoline, the use of a "bullet" car instead of a barrier that was designed to ram under the gas tank, and a 35mph speed that had never been discussed). Based on a set of tests that were designed specifically to cause a gas leak and exceeded any standards even being discussed, the car was recalled.
Pretty much any station wagon or hatchback of the era would have failed that test. I'm glad that we now have even more stringent tests but it's clear that this was a rigged test and a media generated controversy rather than specifically nefarious company wrongdoing. Every applicable standard of the time was met - it just couldn't pass a test specifically designed to make it fail.
Why not just fork and develop Firefox OS? It actually works, is based on Linux, CSS and HTML5 and has actually been deployed by a handful of phone manufacturers, primarily in India. I don't even think it's truly dead, as a couple of small Indian firms appear to still be developing it.
Sure, it was a waste of time for Mozilla but no need to reinvent the wheel.
As far as I can tell, Pale Moon and Firefox handle third-party cookies identically - you can disable them in both via fairly straightforward settings.
In Firefox, Options/Privacy/History/Use Custom Settings (to enable the combo boxes), then set Accept Third Party Cookies to "Never".
It looks like the difference in Pale Moon is that Options is still a dialog box, not a tab (although that might just be an old copy of Pale Moon - I don't use it).
So... you switched to a leaner, lighter browser that... has more built-in functionality? That's what everyone else is calling bloat, my friend.
I think you got the wrong impression. I think the only way for countries to get "rich" (by which I mean that median income rises, building a middle class) is by internally directed economic growth and development. The developed countries can help on the margins but it must be driven by the people who actually live there.
Gapminder (by the late Hans Rosling) is a fantastic resource for this sort of thing and its video is a good, in depth documentary about the myths and facts about population growth.
The reason it's a problem now is that someone decided to publish a study on its impact. Regular pet food hasn't changed significantly in years.
In the grand scheme of things, pet ownership is barely a blip on the radar. This is just another "sky is falling" study - overhyped nonsense that obscures the real work that needs to be done in terms of decarbonization.
And who is going to enforce that? How? Crippling economic sanctions on countries that are already at desperation levels of poverty? Invasion? Recolonialization?
The surest way to drop the birthrate in poor countries, proven to work time and time again, is to raise the standard of living. Richer people have fewer children - it holds true for every level of "rich" outside of the multimillionaire class. Children are an important resource to subsistence farmers and it's natural to have many of them when there is a high likelihood that many of them will not survive to adulthood (even though, in aggregate, many do).
Children are an enjoyable burden to urban and middle class people - when women work outside the home, there is a huge incentive to have fewer children.
The down side, of course, is that richer people use more resources, but we can work on that from a technology perspective. But if you want fewer people, make them rich(er).
That's really interesting. Thanks for the local insight!
I'm sure you have more knowledge about the Hindi issue than I do. I have both Indian Hindu and Indian Muslim friends and they all pretty much said that due to inter-community tensions that Hindi was less likely to be spoken by the Muslim community (which would speak regional language, followed by either English or Urdu).
But they were all English-speaking emigres to the US, so their experience may not be typical in a country with over a billion people. Thanks!
The summary is wrong. According to the article, the fuel savings is Rs 12 lakh (1.2 million rupees) per train with six retrofitted cars. The cost to retrofit one car is Rs 9 lakh (900,000 rupees).
So, it should take about 4.5 years to break even.
Rs = symbol for Rupees (the local currency)
lakh = x1,00,000 or x100,000
crore = x1,00,00,000 or x10,000,000
India separates numbers differently than most of the West - the first comma is at a power of three, all the rest are at powers of 2. Tens, hundreds, thousands, lakhs and crores are combined in various ways (with some older terms like arab, padma, neel and shankh occasionally used for very large numbers too)
one, ten, one hundred, one thousand, ten thousand, lakh, ten lakh, one crore, ten crore, one arab / one hundred crore, one thousand crore, ten thousand crore, one lakh crore, ten lakh crore, one crore crore, one padma / ten crore crore, etc.
The article was probably written in Indian English, which is one of the most common languages in India. It's often preferred as the inter-regional language (most regions in India have an indigenous language) as Hindi (the main other choice) is often disliked by Muslim communities.
Rs is the symbol for Rupees. Lakh has already been explained.
Good, maybe now CCleaner can go back on Ninite, as it was Piriform that pulled it.
Avast has been available on Ninite forever, so I expect CCleaner to show up again.
That's the problem with skimming the book, looking for reasons to doubt it.
The section you linked to was part of the "technical chapters" that was explaining how to convert a "long distance" flight to standard units of energy, and then to contrast that with the amount of electrical energy that would need to be generated. He has several such chapters on various bits (cars, wind generation, etc) and will use them as examples of a potential "stack" of energy use or generation.
But when he talks about actual usage, he uses official numbers. For instance, his 125 kWh/person/day in the U.K. is an official number from UN and U.K. sources (footnoted here). The US figures come from the UNDP source. He has a nice chart (18.4) that compares dozens of countries energy consumption vs GDP. All the chapters are extensively footnoted (at the end of each chapter).
It's an extremely well-reviewed book with glowing reviews from academia, the science press, serious mainstream newspapers, Bill Gates and Cory Doctorow. It's probably the best sympathetic but cold-eyed view at what going carbon free really means.
Actually, it doesn't completely add up, for a couple of reasons.
First, Musk is (semi-purposely?) conflating the area required to generate the same amount of electricity that the US uses each year with the amount of energy that the US uses. Second, he's talking about the square footage of panels, not the square footage of any reasonably designed panel array (multiply that number by 4).
The late physicist David MacKay, an adviser to the UK's Department of Energy and Climate Change and author of the great "Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air" book and website, worked the numbers and came up with the following figures to totally wean the US off of fossil fuels.
First, we need to drop our average per capita energy usage from 250 kWh/day to 125 kWh/day. He's assuming some of this will occur due to electrification of transport but was skeptical we could get completely down there, but assumed for the sake of argument that we could.
We start out needing to build out 2600 GW of wind power. This is 200 times the amount we had at the time and would cover an area about the size of California. That provides about 42 kWh / day / capita.
We then build out offshore wind for most of the shallow waters surrounding the country. This provides about 4.6 kWh / day / capita.
We then build out our hot-rock geothermal potential over 50 years to get another 8 kWh / day / capita.
Hydro currently supplies about 3.6 kWh / day / capita. There isn't a whole lot of capacity left but he generously allows us to double it to 7.2 kWh / day / capita.
That only gets us to 62 kWh / day / capita. You're going to need about 13,225 square miles (a 115mi x 115mi square) of concentrating solar power to supply the rest.
But that doesn't sound good - all of California covered in wind farms, all of the near-coast also covered in wind farms, thousands of hot rock geothermal wells plus 13,225 sq mi of CSP in deserts. And that only gets you to half of what we're currently using and we haven't even talked about batteries...
OK, scrap that plan. Let's just go to CSP in deserts - it's about the best renewable resource and you can build in molten salt reservoirs to provide nighttime energy - no need to build out all those batteries. And let's be realistic - the US isn't going to significantly drop its energy use as its population continues to grow, so let's peg that at the current levels.
You now only need a 139,000 square miles of CSP to provide our 250 kWh / day / capita energy use. Hurray! That's only all of Arizona (114,000 sq mi) and a big chunk of New Mexico...
Except, of course, that Liberty University has a long history of having leading figures on the left come and speak to its student body. Ted Kennedy was a frequent speaker, and last year, students were required to go to a Bernie Sanders speech.
The students were respectful and listened, even though they disagreed with Sanders on most points.
I wouldn't go to or send my child to Liberty U, but the differences between a Liberty University and a Berkeley or Evergreen or Yale or Middlebury are pretty stark. Liberty U expects a respectful audience and gets one, the others have let the inmates run the asylum.
They do the separation work on the larvae, which have a noticeable size difference between males and females. It's basically just mechanical sorting - you either can pass thru the filter or not.
When Oxitec (a company in the same line of work, but using genetic engineering to create males that have non-viable offspring) did this, they actually took a batch of 100,000 now-adult mosquitoes and dissected them individually. 69 females got through the filter - not a bad job.
I’ve read a lot about mosquitoes and their place in the ecosystem over the past 10 years. Bats, purple martins and other insectivores get a vanishingly small amount of their calories from mosquitoes - less than 2% of the stomach contents of bats. Mosquitoes are quite small and therefore not very calorically rich. Unlike midges and gnats, they don’t really swarm in a way that would allow insectivores to get a whole bunch in one swoop, so generally mosquitoes are providing fewer calories than the expense required to fly at them. Bats, martins and the like mostly end up eating moths and midges. Some species of dragonfly are mosquitovores but, again, not as a large percentage of their caloric intake.
There are species that target mosquito larvae, which bunch up enough to be worth it. The aptly named mosquitofish is one such creature.
But the saving grace even among mosquitofish is that they don’t care what species of mosquito larva they eat - getting rid of the handful that target humans will leave space for the hundreds of other species that exist in the US (let alone the thousands worldwide). There are 3,500 species of mosquito and only 40 of them target humans - getting rid of those would not affect total mosquito mass available for fish. Especially considering that most of the deadliest mosquito vectors in the Americas are invasive species (Aedes aegypti, Asian Tiger Mosquitoes) - wiping them out from this hemisphere should be a good thing. (No one cries over attempts to control/wipe out lionfish in the Caribbean - but attempt to kill an invasive disease vector and everyone gets the vapors.)
Contrast wiping out a handful of mosquito species via bacteria or genetic engineering with the enormous chemical inputs we put into our lakes, streams and rivers in order to just control mosquitoes - we are surely inadvertently killing off other species of insects just trying to control mosquitoes. And when we drain a wetland because of mosquitoes, we impact far, far more species than even the worst case scenario of mosquito extinction. Even ecologists who are nervous about tampering with ecosystem largely agree.
That fails basic economics. If the embedded energy cost of a solar panel was greater than any possible eROI, they couldn't be sold at a profit. You might be able to get some suckers early on and government subsidies could help somewhat, but you're talking about a many multi-billion dollar industry with dozens of multinational suppliers and enormous factories. At some point, there has to be a positive eROI or the whole system would grind to a halt, as we can see from Solyndra which, despite large subsidies, failed.
But plenty of other companies are making good profits from solar (and wind, and batteries, etc.).
Solar panels (and batteries) will never have an eROI of, say, a drill head or gas turbine, but that's comparing apples to oranges. The total systems ROI of solar and wind farms are currently near, at or exceed various carbon and nuclear power systems.
If you want to make an argument that renewables will have a hard time replacing all baseload energy systems (because the power is more more diffuse, requiring a lot of land and more complicated grid management), that's a better argument to make. But any argument that starts with renewable energy simply not being able to compete in any context is wrong.
Actually, for inland freight transport, the EU has a greater intensity of road transport to rail transport (51.1 / 11.9 = 4.2x) than does the US (56.8 / 32.6 = 1.7x).
Europe ships more by sea than the US (a combination of being surrounded on three sides by ocean and from importing/exporting a greater percentage of its goods overseas) but once it gets on dry land, you use trucks to a much greater degree than does the US.
Emissions mean you're burning fuel. Fuel costs money. American corporations don't like to spend money and are constantly looking for more efficient ways of doing business and squeezing out costs.
So, yeah - the US is very worried about emissions, just not for the reasons everyone else is.
(For reference, the EU freight rail share is 11.9% while the US freight rail share is 32.6%. The EU is much better about electrification of rail - it's basically non-existent in the US except for some passenger rail.)
Kroger is both a brand and a holding company. It's the third largest retailer in the world and third largest employer in the US. It's the largest grocer and second largest retailer after Walmart in the US.
When they takeover a chain (which they do a lot), they don't tend to change the name. If you've shopped at Ralph's, Fry's, QFC, FredMeyer, Food4Less, Foods Co. or Harris Teeter (all these are in coastal states), you've shopped Kroger. They have a dozen other chains they run too (Baker's, City Market, Dillons, Gerbes, Jay C, King Soopers, Owen's, Pay Less, Roundy's, Mariano's, Pick n Save, Scott's, Ruler, Qwik Shop, Tom Thumb) plus Kroger itself (which is in 20 states).
They might have started in flyover country, but they've been gobbling up the coasties for years. As has Albertsons, which started in Boise, ID and now owns pretty much all the other grocery chains (they are #2).