Are we reading the same article ? "The survey found that two-thirds of heat pump owners and 59% of gas boiler owners were satisfied even without extensive energy efficiency upgrades."
It all boils down to what hides behind that word, "existential". Slavs and Jews definitely considered what happened in WW2 an existential threat for instance, but you seem to be arguing that only threats to the entirety of humanity qualify as existential, a view that many others here don't agree with, probably because it gives off the impression that things like the extinction of entire cultures and millions or billions of people are discounted by using a restrictive definition. It seems however that neither view matches the use of the concept of "existential risks" in contemporary discourse, which are understood to be "risks that threaten the destruction of humanity's long-term potential". That's a much lower bar to clear and by that standard, we're clearly collectively cutting the branch we're sitting on, though probably not indeed jumping off the cliff of an absolute total annihilation of the human race.
From the Wikipedia, 'The dispute arose once more when the supermarket tried to stop the trademark "Inspired by Iceland" from being branded on Icelandic groceries in 2015.' That seems cheeky, to put it mildly…
Fortunately, it seems the country essentially won their case in December 2022 and the EU trademark has been cancelled. (“The monopolisation of a country name cannot lead to the inequitable situation in which traders with real and genuine connection to a certain geographic location are forced to constantly ‘look over their shoulder’ when referring to the real geographical origin of goods and service,” the summary documents say.)
It would be nice if Amazon did something about the forest itself on the hand. I am personally saddened that the company is now top of mind for that name for probably most of humanity, despite the Amazon rainforest being the world's largest, is worth many billions and doesn't even support a massive rainforest-oriented conservation program. Same thought about brands benefiting from the aura of other non-persons including Red Bull (from the CITES-vulnerable krating/gaur, which has fewer than 1,000 individuals left in Thailand), Puma, Jaguar…
Some but not all. In the case of meat, it so happens that a homogenous population of non-smokers in the US, the Seventh-Day Adventists, have a very high proportion of vegetarians…
The Okinawa study had even bigger issues, most notably age misrepresentation linked to the loss of koseki registers during WW2, which were unreliable to begin with and were reconstructed from family testimony after the war. I remember reading that on the top of all the rest, elderly people there tended to make mistakes of a full 12 years when giving their age because they would base themselves on their year sign, which they were more familiar with than the new Western calendar.
Genes as well as survivorship bias. On a related note, numerous seasoned athletes or fitness enthusiasts seem to "break" very fast as they age. While they probably boast excellent cardiovascular health, if the package includes worn-out joints and persistent issues like back pain opting for moderate physical activity appears to be a wiser choice compared to pushing the limits with sub-elite levels of exertion.
Big ag and big meat in particular has been playing that game for ages. See [https://time.com/4130043/lobbying-politics-dietary-guideline...] for a recent example. For something older, "The U.S. Department of Agriculture's 1991 withdrawal of its Eating Right Pyramid food guide in response to pressure from meat and dairy producers was only the latest in a long series of industry attempts to influence federal dietary recommendations. " [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8375951/]
A perverse feedback loop has clearly emerged. It seems that in the US at least, "To further enhance color, manufacturers add up to 10 percent vividly colored mandarin orange juice as well as pigment from orange peels." [1] Further, it seems that juice colour is actually designed and kept consistent. [2]
The bees you can breed are not the bees/pollinators that nature is losing. This is like suggesting that to counter the global collapse in birds, you should raise chickens… Worse, domestic bees are often competitors to wild bees, bumblebees, etc. The solution there lies in fighting against the use of broad-spectrum pesticides, planting hedgerows, allowing meadows to thrive, etc.
Paris commute times are much higher than in the rest of the country. France's average commute time is currently at 25 min, which lower than US average. Ergo… Also excellent transit-oriented cities are just that, excellent. Had a 20 min commute in Singapore a while, it was just terrific – excellent flow, perfectly convenient, great selection of hawkers to start the day with a curry puff or whatever suits your fancy before popping into the ultrareliable and silent MRT… Beats driving any day, and especially what you get in a bad car-based city like Jakarta with its average driving speed on weekday mornings of 5 km/h…
Your reasoning here is wrong I don't even know where to start... The fact that Agent A brings into existence Agent B gives them the right to dispose of Agent B in any way they want? When does that ever make sense?
Weird. So you are supposedly beating everyone in terms of yields and yet focus on producing something worth even less than protein per kg. Wouldn't it make more sense to cream off the market on higher value-added products before scaling up while expanding into increasingly low value products?
Autopilot has existed for decades now and works really well, but it doesn't replace a crew, be it only for everything unrelated to navigation, crossing the path of other vessels, etc.
Europe has no trees? Are you joking? This is ChatGPT-level hallucination stated with ChatGPT-level confidence. On a side note, a few European firms manufacture single-use plates and cutlery from agricultural waste (wheat bran). Really good products, and even edible and, frankly, quite tasty (not that you'd want to take more than a nibble as they're 100% fibre).
No law of economics… are you that sure? France is the poster boy of nuclear energy and has been pushing very hard for electric domestic heating over the years and yet it simply has almost never made any sense for homeowners to opt for electric heating rather than natural gas. Indeed, though French electricity prices have always been probably the lowest in Western Europe, it still always comes up some 50% more expensive than natural gas. The only major reason property owners switch to electric is that it's cheaper to install, so using in it in rentals shifts higher energy prices onto tenants while property owners benefit from lower investment costs. Clearly, not building more power plants isn't really what went wrong here.
Is there perhaps something related to smell or movement? The only time I got stung by a yellowjacket is when I pulled a Miyamato Musashi and caught one with some chopsticks. I got two deserved stings out of the experience, but yellowjackets have treated me well since. I've observed that though yellowjackets might want to land on people and investigate a while, they're soon gone as long as there's no beer involved. I just semi-freeze for a few seconds and let them do their thing. Obviously a bit uncomfortable when they land on the face or neck, but the only people I know who seem to have been stung as adults are those that are clearly panicky around wasps. I'd go so far as to qualify them as placid. Horseflies are aggressive and another beast altogether...
In Turkey right now, where there are stray dogs everywhere, not only cats. Dogs are typically extremely well fed (I'm seeing a magnitude more fat stray dogs than skinny ones, which comes as a first for me) and they are treated really well by locals. Saw the same in the muslim city of Harar, Ethiopia. In Turkey, dogs are very congenial and will easily follow you/people around for a while if you choose to interact with them, yet they know their place and don't seem to try to enter buildings. Not a bad deal for them. Religious culture isn't determinism and you shouldn't generalize from either minor details from the Quran or contemporary Arab countries, which aren't representative of Muslim cultures through time and space.
Everything that matters to people is as easily mapped out to metric units. I know how to span my fingers to get either 10 cm, 20 cm or 25 cm, and how to pace my steps to get 1 m. Arm span is easy too, I simply get my height and can work based on that, as I do when measuring heights. Step pacing is quite visible and I see it regularly in the open in various contexts. Metric people know how to do these kinds of things. Real estate agents or construction workers might refine their paces to achieve greater precision, but even people who have never had the curiosity or need to do so can get a rough estimate of a meter that's probably good enough and not much more imprecise than the length of the step of another person (like feet… Charlemagne's giant foot became the standard unit for peasants with half the foot size for centuries…). I've never felt any personal interest in measuring weights based on fist-sized rocks either (sandstone or granite by the way? you've got all sorts of density ranges out there…), but I'm sure you could find something as intuitive if you needed it and I sure can get of sense of weights expressed in grams in a kitchen and have also developed a pretty good intuitive feel of heavier stuff based on a few experiences moving 25 kg and 50 kg bags around that proves useful from time to time.
The French property tax is not bizarre as much as absurd, obtuse and obsolete. The index hasn't even been updated since 1970, which means that it's completely disconnected with real-life rental values. Every single addition or improvement costs you something (an equivalent of 4 sqm is added to your official surface area simply for having running water, 3 sqm per heated room, etc), though it must be noted that you can't even properly simulate the impact of any improvement. I just received mine and my flat's rental value is computed based on input data I don't have access to as being roughly one fourth of current market prices. On the flip side, I'm paying the equivalent of 43.118% of its theoretical rental value this year (on top of income tax, obviously). The system is honestly completely messed up. A reform is apparently coming in 2026, and though it seems that it will be quite fair, it's mostly an excuse to increase taxes by an another 15% on average :(
it's apparently proving very difficult to reform as there would be as many losers as winners, and the losers hold more political clout (people with property in hot markets).
Referring back to the article, from what I'm seeing pools aren't even taxed that much. In most places, you're seemingly paying some €80 per year in additional real estate taxes for a standard 4 × 10 m pool. Probably much more interesting for the tax office is that if you're cheating on something as visible yet fundamentally cheap as a pool, you're probably not being very honest about your other taxes either…