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Norway is sitting out there with 97.2% of its energy from renewable resources vs 46.2% for Germany.

"But that doesn't count!" you say, "it's all hydro!"

OK, Denmark is sitting out there at 60.5% from renewables, and only 0.1% from hydro.

"But Germany is the leader in solar!" you say.

No, that's Malta - 14.6% vs 9.0%.

Germany is third in Europe for Wind % (behind Denmark and Lithuania).

But, hey! Germany is the leader in one category across Europe - coal!

"But Germany is the leader in number of GWh of renewables!"

Only true of Europe - China, US, India, Canada, Brazil all beat it.

But hey! Germany can claim to be the leader in one energy category in Europe - coal! It uses almost as much coal as the rest of the EU combined. Way to go, Germany!

Not even close - Australian per capita coal production in 2021 was 133mWh while the Kuwaiti per capita oil production (not including natural gas) was 358mWh. Even granting that hydrocarbons release about 33% less CO2 per unit compared to coal, Kuwait takes the crown with the other Gulf petrostates not far behind. And this is not including the copious amounts of natural gas those same states produce.

Heck, Norwegian oil produces more CO2 per capita than Australian coal.

I'm actually slightly amazed that the market share is so low. Scooters are pretty much the perfect use case for batteries - light-weight, don't need enormous KWh packs, the cost differential isn't huge, etc.

I'm honestly kind of surprised Taiwan hasn't mandated or heavily, heavily subsidized their adoption, if simply for pollution control (scooter engines are kind of dirty).

Part of it is an epidemic of obesity that is obvious when you look around (I'm guilty here too).

But another part is that high blood pressure used to kill you pretty quickly and now it mostly doesn't. The drugs are quite effective, they are quite cheap, have low levels of side-effects and so more people are being put on them almost as soon as they fall outside the normal range. Before, there was a lot of resistance due to cost and lack of data on effectiveness, but now that that ship has sailed, you see huge uptakes. Which is fantastic for marginalized communities that had ridiculously high death rates due to untreated blood pressure that have now plummeted.

The flip-side of that is you have many more people on BP meds - but given the costs (some are less than $10 / month), the tradeoff in quality and length of life are totally worth it.

I started Wegovy 10 days ago. It is actually kind of amazing - definitely curbs appetite but does not prevent you from enjoying what you eat. The biggest side-effect for me is that it can sometimes kick in a little late - while it suppresses your appetite, it won't magically change how you eat. If one of your issues is eating a little fast, you can get a little ahead of the "hey, I'm full" signal and eat a little more than the drug wants you to. And then you get a full on "damn, I massively overate" signal that brings on some nausea (just happened with lunch - I had a small lunch but ate faster at my desk than I should and now I'm feeling the side effects).

But even that side-effect is good, from my opinion. I am much more deliberate in the rate at which I eat and stop as soon as I start feeling even a hint of fullness or mild nausea. And I've lost 15 pounds - some of that is undoubtedly water weight but my shirts and pants already fit different.

I have had a bit of dizzyness (it also regulates insulin fairly aggressively) which is the only side-effect that is truly annoying. But I get the feeling that if I continue (and I'm on the initial month of super-low doses), I'm gonna lose a lot of weight. And continuing is pretty damn simple - one shot a week. You really don't need a lot of willpower once it's in your bloodstream.

Oxitec has the best of the “traditional” non-gene drive GM mosquito control and selection is precisely the “problem” with them. While the GM males will definitely cause nearly all their daughters to die as larvae, only 50% of their sons will have the killer gene and it will soon be selected out.

You could, in theory, still cause local extinctions by releasing huge numbers of GM males over the course of a dozen or so breeding cycles until the population crash is non recoverable (if the population drops below predation, it’s game over - locally).

The problem is that mosquitoes can be reintroduced in any number of ways and the population rebuilds. A strong gene drive, however, could theoretically wipe out the entire species, provided it was introduced in enough places that localized extinctions didn’t stop the spread,

Now, I’m on Team Extinction but only for the 40 or so species of mosquito (out of 3500) that feed on humans. Most mosquitoes don’t use blood in their lifecycles and even among those that do, most don’t feed on humans.Wipe those particular species out - they hold no unique ecological niche, are not a significant food source for any animal (the bat thing is a myth), they do not uniquely pollinate any plants. But they cause tremendous suffering, mainly in the Global South - and that suffering leads directly to other issues like high population growth, slow economic development and poor governance. The tropics lag for many reasons but a major one is the toll that disease takes on them - not just the deaths but caring for the millions who are severely sickened each year and who often have lifetime complications. I have no problem valuing the lives of African children over those of a handful of mosquito species.

The technology causes female mosquito larvae to die before metamorphosis - so each generation of GM mosquitoes is 100% male. They can only breed with the wild females, who will then give birth to no daughters. Do this a few times and the population crashes.

They’ve done this with non-gene drive mosquitoes (Oxitec being the main player in the space). The “problem” there is that you have to keep releasing new batches of male mosquitoes as the gene eventually gets selected out of the population. With gene drives, you bypass selection - every mosquito will have the gene - and therefore you only have to release a much smaller number of initial GM mosquitoes.

This is pretty much the premise (with some twists) of the GE Podcast Theater production LifeAfter.

Essentially, a company uses an audio-based social media platform to resurrect the dead by going through all the data uploaded and constructing avatars that act exactly like the dead. But are they dead? There are twists and turns, of course.

The people who canâ(TM)t afford those high taxes and rents, of course. The global hyper cities are turning into highly stratified regions with a large caste of highly educated, well compensated elites who jet from big city to big city, a larger group of second-tier types who live in far-flung exurbs, and the poor. Anyone in the second-tier who canâ(TM)t afford to live in the city and doesnâ(TM)t want to live in an exurb leaves. Continue that trend and you end up as a weird version of the typical developing world city - the connected upse-rich and vast pools of the poor.

That's because college educated adults from other parts of the country move to New York City, not because New York does a fantastic job fixing the problems of their public schools in college. Being home to one of the global hypercities has its advantages.

Sounds like some African leaders need to read Seeing Like a State by James Scott.

A quick summary: "For a state to exercise its power across a large population, it must simplify, codify, and and regularize local practices. This process of flattening, or of making local practice “legible,” is not without costs. In the past, states have quite literally missed the forest — with many different valuable products, including food, shelter, medicines, and clothing — for the trees, or timber, that they contain. And that is not the least of states’ errors in this regard; even in the twentieth century, high modern building practices and management techniques have neglected local variation and local knowledge, often to the detriment of state and non-state actors alike. These faults are regular, predictable, and worthy of further study. Provocatively, Scott closes his essay with a warning: Large actors in a market will often find themselves seeing like a state, too."

The bone doesn't provide any flavor to the meat itself - it's merely acting as a thermal barrier, which could be provided with a tie-on, reusable piece of ceramic.

Gnawing on a bone covered in fat and a bit of gristle is, of course, intensely flavorful, but if you are just eating the meat, it has no effect.

Engineered meat that only has muscle and fat cells shouldn't be the end goal - some amount of connective tissue should be part of the mix. Connective tissue breaks down into collagen, which gives meat its unctuousness. An engineered steak could, however, have a perfect matrix of connective tissue that is ultra thin (no gristly bits) and well distributed, making every bit of meat even better.

McDonald's uses frozen fries that are par-cooked in oil that contains natural beef flavor before being frozen. The restaurants themselves use 100% vegetable oil in the frying, so the Beyond Meat patty won't be coming into contact with any beef flavor other than that which leaches off the fries themselves.

"Natural beef flavor" is derived from milk and wheat proteins, so no cows are slaughtered in the process of creating the flavoring. Still, the flavoring isn't used in India even though many beef and pork abstainers eat milk and cheese products.

Chicago had the reverse experience. The main shopping street (State Street) was turned into a pedestrian mall and it essentially destroyed the city center. State Street wasn't an important traffic route (Michigan Avenue is a far larger and more important north/south street and only a few blocks away) but something about the lack of traffic made the area feel like a bad suburban mall rather than a vital part of the city. The major retail outlets eventually failed (part of this was due to larger trends in retailing, but accelerated along this street) and the whole area became filled with cheap tchotchke shops, empty storefronts and the homeless.

In the early 2000s, the second Mayor Daley decided to revert it back into a standard street. The street almost immediately revived. Again, there were some other trends helping with this (a push to have more people living in the Loop, redevelopment of an empty lot) but much of it was simply due to returning the "dynamism" of a street that had car traffic. State Street is once again a major shopping and dining destination and it has also revitalized several of the streets around it.