2025-07-19
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How China Became the Biggest Shipbuilder
China’s shipbuilding dominance didn’t happen overnight, but followed years of effort, investment, successes, and setbacks: China’s was left with little to no shipbuilding capabilities following the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949, and it wasn’t until the mid 1970s that China began exporting ships. In 1982 China was ranked just 16th in ship exports. Even after China became one of the world’s major shipbuilders in the 1990s (ranking 3rd behind Japan and Korea), it was still only producing a single-digit percentage of total commercial shipping tonnage. China finally surpassed Japan and Korea in tonnage produced in 2009 and 2010, respectively. Despite a collapse in the worldwide shipbuilding market following the Global Financial Crisis, China has since continued to expand its dominance. While it’s produced all kinds of ships over its history, for the most part its ship exports have consisted mostly of relatively simple ships like tankers and bulk carriers. More specialized, complex ships like liquified natural gas (LNG) carriers and cruise ships historically remained the purview of producers like South Korea, Germany, and Italy. But as China’s shipbuilding capabilities have grown, it has encroached into these areas as well. China now has 34% of the world orderbook for LNG, including an enormous order for 18 LNG carriers from Qatar which was the largest shipbuilding order in history. China’s first domestically-produced cruise ship, the Adora Magic City, first sailed in 2024.
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The Tiny Home Construction Contest Is a Big Deal in This Texas Town
Horseshit
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The remarkable tale of how humans nearly didn't conquer the world
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Scholars just solved a 130-year literary mystery—and it all hinged on one word | ScienceDaily
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Ancient DNA solves mystery of Hungarian, Finnish language family's origins
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China's humanoid robots generate more soccer excitement than human counterparts
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$19,000 a year for a longer life? Inside a luxury Bay Area longevity clinic
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No, That Taste of Wine a Server Offers Is Not to See if You Like It. Here's Why - CNET
the obligatory tasting after the bottle is opened and before it's poured for you and your guests. Despite what you -- and many others -- might think, this is not really to determine if you like the wine, but rather, to ensure the wine is not spoiled or "corked." Because of that, you don't even need to sip the wine, though it's fine if you do. If you want to show you're a wine drinker in the know, simply give it a big swirling sniff, since a bad bottle is usually detectable by smell alone. But that flex is valuable only if you know how to sniff out a bad bottle.
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Microsoft Confirms the Closure of Its Underwater Data Center
celebrity gossip
Obit
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
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As I've Said, There's No Money On The Right
Twenty times as much spent by just the one organisation upon the left as by that whole evil apparatus of the right.
Musk
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
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Data on How America Sold Out Its Computer Science Graduates
This week, we took a look at job prospects for computer science graduates. If you thought prospects for engineering graduates were poor, even more recent American computer science graduates are scrambling for scraps, while a growing number of foreign workers on employment visas are being guaranteed jobs. In 2023, American colleges graduated 134,153 citizens or green card holders with bachelor's or master's degrees in computer science. That same year, our federal government handed out work permits to at least 110,098 foreign workers in computer occupations through just three major guest worker programs. That's equal to 82% of our graduating class who are guaranteed jobs even before any Americans walk across the stage for their diploma.
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Harvard is anti-science - Washington Examiner
Let’s first consider the medical sciences. Harvard University President Alan Garber and Harvard professor of psychology Steven Pinker, the latter in a 4,000-word New York Times op-ed, cited Harvard’s work on a cure for Alzheimer’s disease as one of Harvard’s main achievements. But Science journalist Charles Piller, in his book Doctored, showed that Harvard researchers, leaders of the so-called “Amyloid Mafia” (scientists who believe that amyloid plaques are the leading cause of Alzheimer’s disease), have prevented all other hypotheses from being tested, thereby delaying finding a cure for Alzheimer’s disease.
Garber also cited a Breakthrough Prize awarded to a Harvard scientist for his work on GLP-1-based drugs used to treat obesity and diabetes, such as Ozempic and Wegovy, as evidence of Harvard’s recent medical contributions. Yet, as Gary Taubes has pointed out, Harvard bears some responsibility for the obesity and diabetes epidemic. Taubes showed that Harvard nutritionists pushed food companies to replace fats with sugar, and we’ve gotten, well, fat.
Finally, consider Harvard’s damage to physics, the hardest of the hard sciences. The 1979 Physics Nobel Prize winner, Sheldon Glashow, the greatest physicist ever on the Harvard faculty, left Harvard in 2000 for Boston University because Harvard insisted on hiring string theorists rather than scientists who believe theory should be firmly grounded in experiment. As University of Toronto physicist Lee Smolin has shown in his book The Trouble with Physics, string theory, backed by Harvard’s prestige, has gobbled up all Federal funding for quantum gravity research, preventing other approaches from being investigated.
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the only reason hexanitrogen can be dealt with at all is that even that (rather puny) 14.8 kcal/mol barrier to decomposition is a lot higher than you might have expected. Plenty of other hypothetical polynitrogen species turn out to have basically no barrier at all by comparison, which is why they’re still hypothetical, and you will be too if you try to make them on any kind of scale.
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UC divests hedge funds as CIO criticizes high fees, low returns
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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CBS cancels The Late Show, Stephen Colbert to end program in May 2026
Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., Colbert’s Thursday night guest, reacted on X, “If Paramount and CBS ended the Late Show for political reasons, the public deserves to know. And deserves better.”
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Gee. Why would he suspect there might be political reasons? It's not as if the show has had a history of consistent partisanship to the point that it could hardly be viewed as anything but a propaganda vehicle, now is it?
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CBS Canceling 'Late Show with Stephen Colbert' After Next Season
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Dictionary.com "devastated" paid users by abruptly deleting saved words lists
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After Firing 9000 Employees for AI, Xbox Shares Cringe Job Post with AI Graphics
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YouTuber faces criminal charges, jail time for reviewing handheld consoles
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"Cloud" Is a Cautionary Tale of E-Commerce–and the Summer's Best Action Movie
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Zuckerberg settles lawsuit over Cambridge Analytica scandal, avoids testifying
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Google tapped billions of mobile phones to detect earthquakes worldwide
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RISC-V China Summit: Nvidia: CUDA will soon be ported to the RISC-V architecture
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Is that QR code a scam? Here's what to know about 'quishing' before you scan
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Valve confirms credit card companies pressured it to delist certain adult games
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$2.2 million: DOJ Reveals Sale Price for Seized Wu-Tang Clan Album
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DuckDuckGo now lets you hide AI-generated images in search results
TechSuck / Geek Bait
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CP/M Creator Gary Kildall's Memoirs Released as Free Download
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Gnome devs say sysadmin "smeared the project" with Evolution Mail privacy report
- Isn't it amazing how everyone who breaks with GNOME folks "attacks" them? There's no civil disagreements or "he wandered off"; people who come unstuck are always denounced as Nazis.
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The Remarkable Incompetence At The Heart Of Tech
Pointless software purchases are a comparatively minor symptom of the seething rot and stunning incompetence at the core of most companies’ technical operations. Things are bad to a degree that sounds unbelievable to people that don’t have the background to witness or understand it firsthand. Here is my thesis: Most enterprise SaaS purchases are simply a distraction – total wishful thinking – for leaders that hope waving a credit card is going to absolve them of the need to understand and manage the true crisis in software engineering. Buying software has many desirable characteristics – everyone else is doing it, it can stall having to deliver results for years, and allows leaders to adopt a thin veneer of innovation. In reality, they’re settling for totally conservative failure. The real crisis, the one they’re ignoring, is only resolved by deep systems thinking, emotional awareness, and an actual understanding of the domain they operate in. And that crisis, succinctly stated, is thus: our institutions are filled to burst with incompetents cosplaying as software engineers, forked-tongue vermin-consultants hawking lies to the desperate, and leaders who consider think reading Malcolm Gladwell makes you a profound intellectual (if you don’t understand why this is a problem, please report to my office for immediate disciplinary action).
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
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(2016) Inside OpenAI, Elon Musk's Wild Plan to Set Artificial Intelligence Free
OpenAI didn't match those offers. But it offered something else: the chance to explore research aimed solely at the future instead of products and quarterly earnings, and to eventually share most---if not all---of this research with anyone who wants it. That's right: Musk, Altman, and company aim to give away what may become the 21st century's most transformative technology---and give it away for free.
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OpenAI launches personal assistant capable of controlling files and web browsers
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Judge certifies class against Anthropic for copyright infringement
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EU-sponsored report says GenAI's 'fair use' defense does not compute
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Wall Street's AI Bubble Is Worse Than the 1999 Dot-Com Bubble
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Perplexity sees India as a shortcut in its race against OpenAI
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AI CapEx Is Eating the Economy
- I'm looking forward tot he bust and the scrapped / second owner uses of the hardware.
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
Crypto con games
Economicon / Business / Finance
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TSMC aims to make 30% of high-end chips in US with Arizona fab build out
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Hedge funds favour short-dated, convertible bonds if Fed's Powell leaves early
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How the Housing Market for Young People Became 'A Total Disaster'
The COVID pandemic shut down much of the service sector. But the home-buyers market was supercharged. Shut inside their homes, wallowing in cabin fever, and having nothing to do all day but stare blankly at their phones and daydream on Zillow, many couples sprang for bigger homes, often just outside major cities. Suburban home prices launched into the exosphere. Meanwhile, the construction market on the supply side was significantly slowed with shutdowns and supply-chain hardships. When the unstoppable force of pandemic housing demand smashed into the immovable object of supply-constrained homebuilding, prices went bonkers, if I may employ a technical term. Between March 2020 and the summer of 2022, the Case-Shiller U.S. National Home Price Index increased by 42 percent—equal to the entire home price index increase between 2003 and the beginning of the pandemic. In other words, the U.S. warp-speeded through two decades’ worth of housing inflation in about two years.
For young homebuyers in many places, it’s the worst of all worlds. Home prices are too high; and mortgages are too expensive; and insurance costs are too high; and existing homeowners don’t want to move; and all of this happened after decades of construction struggles and half a century of onerous rules and legal norms that blocked development in major cities. The 5-year, 20-year, and 50-year histories of the US housing market fit inside each other like a cursed nesting doll.
Donald Trump won a cost-of-living election. He had an opportunity to be the cost-of-living president. Instead, he has responded to America’s housing shortage with his own scarcity agenda. Rather than make it easier to build homes, he has announced tariffs on critical inputs, like Canadian lumber and Mexican drywall. His immigration crackdown tightens the labor pipeline for homebuilding, which relies on foreign-born workers more than almost every other industry.
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
Trump
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Epstein, Trump, and the Smokescreen
For a long time, many of Trump’s most fervent supporters in the MAGA base have been vocal about wanting full transparency regarding Epstein’s network. Hell, many people voted for him simply due to his promises to go public with what was known in the DOJ. They’ve clamored for the release of all files, often believing there’s a larger conspiracy at play involving powerful individuals. Yet, Attorney General Pam Bondi decided not to release the Epstein investigation files in their entirety, and it sent the MAGA faithful into a tailspin. Suddenly, figures who had always stood firmly by Trump, like Tucker Carlson, Roseanne Barr, and Steve Bannon, voiced their disappointment and strong criticism. It’s a significant shift when the most ardent followers begin to question the actions of their dear leader. Their concern stems from a feeling of betrayal; they were promised full disclosure, and now they are being told that much of the material will remain under wraps. The Justice Department’s memo stating there was “no incriminating ‘client list’” and no evidence to investigate “uncharged third parties” only added to the frustration for many. The idea that “there is no there there” is sheer idiocy at this point.
Adding another layer to this already complex picture is the recent news that Maurene Comey, a top prosecutor in the 2019 Epstein case, was fired by the Justice Department. While the official reasons for her dismissal might not be immediately clear, the timing is certainly noteworthy. Here is a prosecutor who played a significant role in bringing Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s close associate, to justice, and her removal comes at a time when the Epstein files are creating such a stir. For those who believe there’s a cover-up, this development only strengthens their suspicions.
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Trump directs AG Pam Bondi to release ‘pertinent Grand Jury testimony’ in Epstein case.
The Wall Street Journal late last night published a counterfeit letter it falsely accused Trump of sending to Jeff Epstein in 2003—long before law enforcement or the future president discovered Epstein pimped minors. How do I know the letter is false? Rupert Murdoch’s WSJ told me so. You see, it ran a 13,000-word expose on Epstein on December 17, 2023. The piece did not mention Trump. Not once. If the publication had the goods on Trump, it would have exposed him ahead of the 2024 presidential primary season. If the deep state had the goods on Trump, the end of him would have come years ago.
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You'll Never Guess Who 1 of the WSJ Reporters Behind the Trump/Epstein 'Scoop' Is Connected to
- "In the Clinton Orbit" at least
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Trump's fab plan to let Nividia chip into China again hides a 'rare' agenda
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With One Call, Trump Alters the Fate of a Contested Power Project
Democrats
Left Angst
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NYPD Bypassed Facial Recognition Ban to ID Pro-Palestinian Student Protester
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Hot Dogs for Insomnia? A Kennedy Aide's Startup Can Get You a Tax Break
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The Far Right Contagion – It's not a Trump thing. It's not a politics thing
One of the mistakes a lot of political people make is that voters have rational and reasoned choices about which party they support; if you vote for a Far Right party you must love Far Right policies. That’s not true. Most decisions are vibe-based. We have enough data to show that the lowest of low information voters who are behind Reform have zero idea of the party’s policies. In fact, many of Reform’s aims are in direct opposition to what those voters want. While they can be considered Far Right on some fronts — massively racist, “hanging’s too good for ‘em” — in other areas they have what would be classed as socialist beliefs. Tax the wealthy till the pips squeak. Invest in public services. They’re better characterised as Smash the System voters. It’s not working for us how it used to - I’ll vote for anyone who looks like they’re going to upend the status quo.
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Trump to sign stablecoin bill that may make it easier to bribe the president
- If only "convict presidents for taking bribes" was something we could do...
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The USDA Wouldn't Let Her Give Up Her House When She Couldn't Pay Her Mortgage
Since March, the USDA has filed 56 foreclosures in the federal court system against properties purchased with a rural development mortgage. All but one were in Maine. The Maine borrowers have been in default for an average of nearly nine years, racking up more debt because of the interest and fees that piled up in intervening years. About 20% of USDA Section 502 direct loans across the nation were delinquent as of March, according to internal agency data.
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The Number Go Up Rule: Why America Can't Fix Anything
Just take a look at another headlines of the Wall Street Journal yesterday, and you’ll notice in this headline the flip side of the Epstein story. Health care in America is insanely expensive, unpredictable, and often low quality. And yet it’s going to get far pricier next year, largely because a network of monopolistic middlemen are pushing up costs. There’s a gossipy angle here - Diddy apparently had pharmaceutical executives at his creepy events. But it’s the impact on ordinary people that matters. Despite decades of popular anger, we just can’t seem to do anything about health care costs and the people who foist them on us. Two other headlines from the WSJ yesterday are also worth mentioning. First, rail giant Union Pacific is considering buying Norfolk Southern, a historically important merger would harm farmers and shippers, and push up prices of food, energy, and a whole set of goods on which we rely. And second, Chevron is closing its deal for Hess, completing the consolidation of the oil sector, and they are going to move engineering work to India. Things in America, in other words, are getting worse, very quickly, for most of us, while a small group does quite well. The Epstein saga is just a gossipy way to convey that narrative. The question I want to ask in this piece is why that is.
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2024 Election Fraud Evidence: They Didn't Just Steal Votes, They Rewired the Entire System
The 2024 election fraud evidence compiled in this investigation reveals a technological conspiracy that transcends traditional vote manipulation. This comprehensive investigation demonstrates how corporate networks, AI systems, and satellite technology created unprecedented vulnerabilities in American democratic processes.
In March 2021, a seventy-nine-year-old electronics magnate named Barre Seid executed the largest known political donation in American history. But this wasn’t a check written to a campaign or a Super PAC—it was a $1.6 billion gift of company stock to a shadowy nonprofit controlled by Leonard Leo, the architect of America’s conservative judicial revolution. The company? Tripp Lite, a Chicago-based manufacturer of power equipment that sits at the heart of America’s election infrastructure. Three months later, Eaton Corporation completed its acquisition of Tripp Lite. By May 2024, Eaton had deepened its partnership with Palantir Technologies, giving the surveillance giant access to every connected device in Eaton’s global network. And in the final weeks before the 2024 election, Elon Musk’s SpaceX deployed a constellation of Direct-to-Cell satellites that could communicate with any Internet-capable device—including the supposedly air-gapped UPS systems that power America’s voting machines.
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Trump admin squanders nearly 800k vaccines meant for Africa
Nearly 800,000 doses of mpox vaccine pledged to African countries working to stamp out devastating outbreaks are headed for the waste bin because they weren't shipped in time, according to reporting by Politico.The nearly 800,000 doses were part of a donation promised under the Biden administration, which was meant to deliver more than 1 million doses. Overall, the US, the European Union, and Japan pledged to collectively provide 5 million doses to nearly a dozen African countries. The US has only sent 91,000 doses so far, and only 220,000 currently still have enough shelf life to make it. The rest are expiring within six months, making them ineligible for shipping.
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
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Greek police arrest 5 in killing of UC Berkeley professor, including ex-wife
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The Role of Blood Plasma Donation Centers in Crime Reduction
Our findings indicate that the opening of a plasma center in a city leads to a 12% drop in the crime rate, an effect driven primarily by property and drug-related offenses. A within-city design confirms these findings, highlighting large crime drops in neighborhoods close to a newly opened plasma center. The crime-reducing effects of plasma donation income are particularly pronounced in less affluent areas, underscoring the financial channel as the primary mechanism behind these results. This study further posits that the perceived severity of plasma center sanctions against substance use, combined with the financial channel, significantly contributes to the observed decline in drug possession incidents.
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
World
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UAE plans first underwater bullet train connecting Dubai to Mumbai
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India hits 50% non-fossil power milestone five years ahead of 2030 target
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Authoritarian citizens? Spanish youth are losing faith in democracy
- The kind of euro "democracy" where the elections don't count when the wrong folks win?
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Britain is lowering the voting age to 16. It's getting a mixed reaction
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Extortion: Mexico's new battle against a deeply rooted crime
Russia Bad / Ukraine War
Health / Medicine
Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda
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Louisiana cancels $3B coastal repair funded by oil spill settlement
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How can we negotiate with autocracies on the climate crisis?
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French villages have no more drinking water. The reason? PFAS pollution
- The "Show harm was caused" step of the panic cycle is too time consuming, we just got from allegation straight to panic now. Even dirty water is better than no water.
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An average human breathes out roughly 1kg of carbon dioxide a day
Gas masses are kind of abstract, and most of the mass is oxygen than you breathe in, but that is still 273 grams of carbon that your metabolism draws out of your body every day, even if you are fasting. Much more for a large person laboring heavily.
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Antarctica's oldest ice arrives in UK for analysis on climate shifts
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What a bumble bee chooses to eat may not match its ideal diet