Yes, a rail tunnel seems more logical and Seikan would seem to prove that earthquakes are not a deal-breaker.

With another (much shorter) tunnel at Banyuwangi, Indonesia's rail network could run from Palembang to Bali. Very logical in a such a densely populated place. The Japanese would have done it already! Maybe this would have been a better use of all that money being spent on building a new capital city in the jungle.

The digital euro, as a digital central-bank currency, is the last thing we want from the perspective of privacy.

About time. When I was there last year, I did what I usually do in such places: stay near the train station and walk everywhere. Greece is getting better but it can't go fast enough. Mediterranean cities often have amazing potential for livability because they tend to be super dense. But alas only a few of them are actually livable, because of the car scourge.

Thessaloniki was also suffering from the second-city problem. Emerging countries will splash out on a prestige metro for their capital, which is invariably a huge success and thus makes their other cities seem car-choked and horrible. Istanbul and Taipei spring to mind. In Athens the metro still needs a few more lines but it has already made such a difference.

The Inca would probably use a similar qualifier to describe your heresy.

Yes yes, all good points.

Yes the washer wastewater should be easy in theory. But to filter the really small particles you'd need an expensive HEPA-equivalent filter that has to be regularly changed. Needless to say, none of this is happening in practice.

Filtering tyre dust is always going to be a haphazard proposition. This interesting contraption notwithstanding.

ive heard people say

So, literal hearsay.

its not perfect against if the signal servers where malicious (btw said servers are not open source).

The server is centralized so it's irrelevant whether it's open source or not, we have no means of checking.

$1 from the cia funding it is $1 too much.

Seems you're referring to initial funding from the Open Technology Fund. That's a US government body that promotes technologies that undermine authoritarian regimes. Signal fits the bill perfectly. In any case that was a decade ago. Since then there has been far more money from various do-gooding individuals and foundations. In particular the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which (I just checked) is vouched for by various whistleblowers including Edward Snowden. So, hardly a stooge of US imperialism.

Yes but the difference with every other messenger is that they can't even see who your message is going to. Due to E2E encryption of contact data.

What remains is the phone number issue. Verifying a phone number is by far the simplest and most effective way to prevent abuse, which is obviously a major issue with any messenger. There's no reason to disbelieve them when they this is the reason for it.

So: yes, they know who their users are individually. But they cannot know who is talking to who, let alone what is being said.

This is consipiracism-adjacent.

It's E2E encryption and the source code is public. Uniquely, the E2EE includes the social graph.

They've got money from a bunch of people and organizations, That's also all public. As for any organization, to have a wide variety of stakeholders with different interests is the best possible guarantee of independent.

But I agree that the ideal destination is to fully federate the protocol.

Interesting. That certainly looks like a better world than the current one.

This model seems to be optimizing for a specific conception of human nutrition and wellbeing. Fair enough, that will definitely be an easier sell than veganism (if still extremely hard due to entrenched interests).

Personally (like many others here) I would prefer to go further still and optimize the model for biodiversity and animal wellbeing. 40% of current US meat consumption is still pretty high, seems it would be possible to cut that much more without conceding any ground on human nutrition. All of our nearest ape cousins are heavily (if not absolutely) vegan. That to me offers a pretty big clue about what's possible and even advisable.

In this alternative model, I suspect the bottom line for the animal biomass necessary for manure would be above the bottom line for optimal human nutrition, and lower than the figure necessary to produce a kilo of meat per person per week. Especially if it involves lots of egg-laying manure-producing chickens instead of large grazing ruminants. Such a model would require less land still. And if there's one thing even better for the environment than a best-practices agroecological farm with well-paid cooperative workers, it's no farm at all and a forest in its place.

Yes I've seen this factoid too, but I struggle to see how it could be true. We're comparing theoretically non-disposable kit from individual boats with the output of a large number of massive rivers in countries with populations of hundreds of millions (in particular Indonesia and Philippines) and a terrible habit of dumping trash in waterways. The amount reaching the ocean must by definition be huge.

Of course, the main problem with discarded fishing nets is not that they are plastic but that they destroy the ecosystem by design. Maybe the two harms have been conflated.

One of the problems that’s literally never mentioned is that growing produce for humans can either depend on artificial fertilizers from fossil fuels or natural fertilizer from animals. Less animal production for meat, while a very good idea on so many levels, presents a generalized fertility problem.

This is the "manure argument", and it is mentioned, typically by the Big Meat lobby.

While the argument has merit in principle, it neglects the issue of scale. The amount of manure produced by a meat industry of a scale needed to feed billions of omnivorous humans is massively excessive to any possible needs in terms of crop fertilizer. The vast majority of that sh*t ends up in the environment, completely untreated. So, not only does it function as a pathogen that leads to overuse of antibiotics and thus pandemics, it also "fertilizes" rivers and groundwater with nitrate pollution that kills off everything that was there already.

The issue is not just about distribution, it is about type.