Some buses are also smaller than some US cars.

Yes, I think mostly it was farmers who deforested the planet; and are still doing it.

It might be if all the humans not hunting their meat starved to death - orwere never born. I think it really depends on what counterfactual you want to dream up.

You could argue that modern farming techniques created the agricultural surplus and enbled population growth and urbanisation and maybe helped the human population to grow to a level that hunter gatherers woud not be likely to have reached.

I think it is the scale of human population that is challenges sustainability of any tech, either method would be sustainable at some scale. I’m not convinced that modern farming practices are very sustainable for 10+bn people , for all that long. But I guess we’ll see.

Over the long term i think hunter gathering humans were around a lot longer than farmers have been, and a much much longer than modern intnsive monocultural/ pesticide / fertilizer based methods. So you’d have to wait a few thousand years to know how sustainable modern farming is.

Are you arguing that imperfect anti-trust is worse than no anti-trust?

Usually anti-trust is based on proving market concentration and abuse of market power - so to prove a monopoly you have to show impaired consumer choice, and persistent supernormal profits / price fixing.

I don’t know if that’s true for these markets you’re talking about, in my country medicines are mostly generically prescribed with govt price regulation for most common medicines. That mediates the abuse of market power.

As for food I think there are usually alternatives. I suspect there are market power abuses going on but more subtle ones in the wholesale / middle market. Most nestle type stuff that i’m aware of has readily available cheap alternatives.

Monopolies are already allowed under patent of course - so I assume you’re not talking about that. Although I think patent extensions are maybe a problem that is at odds with anti-trust.

I’d be Interested to hear what the individual citizens can do to shut down monopolies though? If it’s as simple as “don’t buy their stuff” then it’s not really a monopoly; or, it’s a luxury in which case - meh, choose another passtime.

I hate remakes, I normally don’t watch them. Even sequels, especially 3rd or more.

But I believe people - generally - do want to watch remakes, (or formualic films based on cartoons), since that’s all I ever seem to hear about. People seem a lot more likely to talk about “captain bat-spider 5 the egg-sack years” or "starwars the phantom plot connexion " than anything that seems intertesting to me.

I used to live by a cinema that did cheap mondays a few years ago, I think maybe ‘Looper’ and ‘Sightseers’ I remember seeing there most recently. I’ve doubt I’ve seen a new film since then.I think they’re ‘original ish’?

I don’t even know where my nearest cinema is in this town, I think theres a small artsy one in town, but for proper cinemas i think you need a car drive out into the sticks fuck that.

All that aside, I liked lethal weapon 5 more than any other lethal weapon film. Does that count?

You want to open a .R script that you wrote for R using R-studio . . .

Cool. Let’s force it on everyone else then. Go competition!

Humans are so naturally stupid that they almost make AI seem intelligent.

I am a 5-star man

99% of authors or commentators or journos writing about climate change need a 1-tonne solid carbon periodic table smashed over their head.

Everyone in UK would be taught pythagoras, periodic table, evolution at secondary school. Some learning disabled or who DGAF might skip over it or won’t actually learn it; but it’d be at taught in basic terms on the general syllabus for most people before age 16. Certainly anyone specialising in science / maths at 16-18 would be expected to know this stuff at a reasonable level from secondary school.

Having had to choose only 3 subjects at age 16, it’s very limiting for young people who don’t really know what they are doing. You drop one thing and it rules out a whole swathe of things you might never have known would be useful. I sort of wish i’d been forced to do chemistry longer, I dropped it because it was boring and I was allowed to choose stupid shit that proved FAR more useless (Economics).

I’d have probably ended up doing something more interesting and maybe even useful with my life - though maybe the grass is always greener.

-1 not unopular.

But it’s not the worst form of noise pollution; unneccesary motor vehicles, and phones on public transport are worse.

Measure the noise level outside the edge of their property, if it is lower than a car driving by, it’s hard to complain too much. If it’s directed off their property directly onto a public street then yes.

+1 for unpopular. I think planet earth is worse platform.

I went to a university that thinks of itself as prestigious - though not a US one. The teaching and the course were a bucketful of shite. All it really had was decent libraries. There was the odd smart person, but they all did mostly research and were hardly involved in teaching.

Admittedly, I chose a stupid subject that I now know to be useless, but the university shuld have known that and not offered the course in the first place. It was a massive waste of my time. Fortunately for me our Government covered most of the fees - but that just makes it a waste of other peoples money.

The whole thing seemed largely to be a badging excercise for a bunch of posh cunts.