drosophila

Nah, the cost of labor + materials + distribution is the minimum price of an item. The actual price in practice will be that price + whatever the manufacturer can get away with charging.

What determines the premium they can get away with is whether or not alternative goods exist and whether or not the consumers are informed of them, motivated to seek them out, and capable of making the switch.

There’s little to be gained in trying to make current-day nations pay reparations for things that their ancestors did.

"We will not blame [King George] for the crimes of his ancestors if he relinquishes the royal rights of his ancestors; but as long as he claims their rights, by virtue of descent, then, by virtue of descent, he must shoulder the responsibility for their crimes.".
-James Connolly

How about we look forwards, instead?

How about we look at the present? Because colonialism isn't over. People are still suffering from it right now. The global south is still actively being colonized and exploited right now.

You can't drive a knife into someone's ribs then say "what's in the past is in the past, we need to look forward instead" when your hand is still holding the blade. How can you hope to start the process of healing if you haven't even taken the knife out all the way?

Now, I don't have all the answers for how that healing process is going to work for the world, but I'm pretty sure a billionaire dancing around in a golden hat and velvet robes with a title that says "God made my bloodline special so I can stab whoever I want" isn't a part of it.

Humans need to move around to be healthy regardless, so any energy consumed to pedal a bike is immaterial.

Though I guess if the person in question just died that would be even more pollution free.

90% of the things they named weren't cars but in practice if you actually compare cities with tons of cars vs ones with few you'll find that removing cars removes 90% of the noise.

Though It may be that not being bombarded with car noise makes people quieter as well (like how being in a loud crowd makes you want to speak up as well).

Using solar panels to power artificial lighting so you can vertically stack farms directly inside cities doesn't make any sense from a sustainability perspective.

But greenhouses in the suburbs that are tied into the city's thermal grid and seasonal thermal energy store is the future of agriculture IMO.

By enclosing fields in greenhouses you decrease the land, water, pesticide, and fertilizer requirements, while also eliminating fertilizer runoff and the possibility of soil depletion from tilling. By tying a greenhouse into a thermal grid the greenhouse can act as a solar thermal collector in the summer while maybe even condensing the water that evaporates through the plants for reuse. Then you can use that same heat to heat homes during the winter or extend the growing season in the greenhouse even further.

https://www.renewableenergymagazine.com/storage/world-s-largest-thermal-energy-storage-to-20240409

https://www.dlsc.ca/

https://ag.umass.edu/greenhouse-floriculture/fact-sheets/heat-storage-for-greenhouses

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/152874/a-greenhouse-boom-in-china

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/150070/almerias-sea-of-greenhouses

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2022/netherlands-agriculture-technology/ (Yes I know they use artificial lighting in a lot of these, and yes I know a lot of the value of their agricultural exports comes from flowers, but the point is it's another example of large scale greenhouse use. Also they do still produce quite a bit of food in a small area, in addition to the flowers.)

Back then adding a word to a search query also made it more specific. You could easily narrow a search down to just a few results, or no result at all if that specific combination of words had never been written. Now adding another search term just makes the search less specific.

You can try to approximate the old behavior by wrapping every single word in quote marks but it's not the same.

Huh?

It's the combination of FPTP voting and the presidential government structure.

In a parliamentary system third parties are more viable because they can act as "king maker" to one of the two larger parties.

Of course a proportional voting system like STV is even better for party diversity.

They've done that periodically for years.

I don't dual boot anymore but when I did I kept each installation on a separate hard drive for that reason.

My condolences.