This is such a fascinating look at the history of flowers! It’s amazing to think that floral diversity was even greater 100 million years ago. Nature constantly evolves, but I wonder what factors led to the decline in variety. Climate change, competition, or other environmental shifts? I’d love to learn more about how ancient flowers compare to today’s species. Thanks for sharing this intriguing insight! Fuerteventura All-inclusive-Urlaub

I understand that, but a lot of what those tech-ceo's predict ends up in the vertical archive. And even if there will be a metaverse of some sorts, I really do not feel like joining that hype. Not because I wouldn't like it, it'll be entertaining in a way or at least some nice new things to learn about technology, but because I value real life. Be it interaction with other humans or making art, non-digital reality is where the real fun is. And yes, maybe I will miss the boat with some sort of business or moneymaking, but I do not care. Same with NFT's: I didn't join that movement and it saved me a lot of time and trouble, since that market crashed pretty significantly, just because of the amount of bullshit that people are "creating" and trying to sell. Compare it to a pond with a few fish in it: if you're the first with a fishing rod, chances are high you catch something. When a kazillion others join the fishing party, chances are zero catching something.

Except dogs are not vegans. You want a pet that does not eat meat,get a rabbit. Ok,two bonded,neutered rabbits from a shelter is your best bet,but I digress. Anyway,it bothers me a lot that people feed animals what they did not evolve to eat. Dogs and cats have short intestines (like us) and do not have plant digesting micro flora either (nor do most humans,(except Japanese.).

Compare a rabbit,cow,vs a dog's cat's or human's GI system and you will see what I mean. Most birds (including chickens) are also omnivorous,but end up being fed mainly grains,leading to obesity,fatty liver.

I volunteered in wildlife rehab for six years. Only feed animals what they evolved to eat was pounded into our heads with a sledge hammer. All this forcing the whole world to be vegan will lead to a number of detrimental consequences,as I have discussed before. One size does not fit all.

Isn't it silly that brains call themselves very intricate, most complex and more superlatives of selfflattering? The irony of this all is that those same genious brains can't even comprehend it all and need a lot of them to "not even scratch the surface of that all"? Also, the brains tend to compare themselves to the most innovative invention of the respective era, i.e. machine, electrical machine, computer et cetera. I assume there was a time it compared itself to a wheel or a doorknob, who knows? :-)

FSM has accused what it labels as Australia's "lesser" universities that offer alternative medicine courses of "putting the public at risk".

However, this is a difficult notion to fathom when you compare the tiny number of injuries inflicted on natural medicine patients compared to the hundreds of thousands of deaths recorded each year due to medical errors.

It goes a little too damn far to compare a fckng robot or AI to life. That's pretty steep and arrogant, don't you think?

They should compare the mosquito-genes against the genes of a tax-collector. Similarity galore! :-)

My own country, Australia, is rich in renewable resources and has the money to invest, yet only around 15 percent of electricity is sourced from renewables.

They claim they have enough money, but do they really, Governments run on huge deficits, for the most part, they could go into more debt for it and are probably good for it, but is it cost-effective?

Wind power can be sent straight to the electric grid, or stored in a battery. The trouble with the latter is that, at the moment, batteries big enough to store lots of energy are expensive.

Batteries are expensive, but let's not forget that a country like the USA is large, not postage stamp sized like the often quoted Iceland, which coincidentally didn't go Green suddenly but started in 1904. The truth is that it would cost billions for each state to implement, on top of that you would have to get large batteries to store it, my understanding is battery production is in no way Green, batteries also don't last forever and need to be replaced, would there be an offset to the green revolution when they have to continue producing very unclean batteries?

If we could build enough of these pumped hydro stations as backup for the variability of solar and wind power, Stocks said, Australia could easily get all of its electricity from renewables.

We are again talking billions to install. The article talks about a cost of 3.3 Trillion if we don't do anything about global warming by 2050, we are probably talking the same figures or more to replace the old system.

"If there's uncertainty around politics, then things grind to a halt," Stocks said.

As does money it would cost to update and install.

"But the struggle is on the political, institutional, cultural areas, trying to get movement from governments and industries that are tied to the past."

In the US, a country that Stanford University says has more than enough resources to run entirely on renewables, the goal is 30 percent by 2025.

These last two quotes go together for me. We are tied to the past, it's already installed, we don't need to spend trillions to replace it and update to new stuff. The goal at this time is to phase out the old and in the new, but this article makes it sound like they should do it immediately, the Stanford study even claimed: "Geothermal energy was available at a reasonable cost for only 13 states." But they don't say what they think is reasonable, or how those states could pay for it, most states operate on a budget deficit as well and can't keep up with crumbling infrastructure, where are they going to find the ability to do this?

The Stanford study also says...

So the overall cost spread over time would be roughly equal to the price of the fossil fuel infrastructure, maintenance and production.

"When you account for the health and climate costs – as well as the rising price of fossil fuels – wind, water and solar are half the cost of conventional systems," Jacobson said. "A conversion of this scale would also create jobs, stabilize fuel prices, reduce pollution-related health problems and eliminate emissions

They never talk the actual costs in either the fossil fuel or supposed lower costs of green, you can't compare because they don't give you numbers you are just supposed to take their studies word for it... The second part of that quote is that green will cost half of the fossil fuels, sure in theory, but who is going to pay for the rollout of the new techno...

How does this compare to bird populations? Animal birth rates run in cycles. If there's been a peak in bird pops, this could partly explain the downturn in bug pops.

I'd be interested in seeing a mirror of this list with the 'Good' products - because there are some. Not saying they'd balance things out, but interesting to compare and contrast.

The question is, do the North Koreans have something like that to compare it to?

Not that it matters, since saying anything will get you executed by anti aircraft gun (if you're lucky).

My ears aren't all that anymore, so I continued to lift away the magazines, because I couldn't hear myself really good. Anyway, when it sort of worked I found the voice more pleasing than the one I had recorded to compare. Probably the inneracoustics are the "soothing" factor. Not really sure. On the other hand: I prefer others to listen to all the rambling. Interesting article, kept me busy for a bit. :-)

Yeah, this is a non-sequitur. Compare the number of times you've lost your umbrella to the number of times you've lost your bike.

I'm going to enroll!!! I think this is very important for us humans, and it could be a great opportunity for me to help science a bit. Also, I'll receive a comprehensive report showing how my brain health and sleep patterns compare to thousands of other people. Exciting! (^̮^)

With Wikipedia, at least, one can rely on the discretion of the most authoritative of the collaborative editors, and a sound process in place for contending with what’s contentious. I mean, we’re not comparing Wikipedia to Encyclopedia Brittanica any longer, obviously, but let’s compare that to the premium brands in the commodification of truth, outfits like Politifact. If Politifact checks out mentally whilst trying to assign a truth-rating, there’s nothing you can do. At the very least, Wikipedia is participatory in a way that a journalistic side-project website run by the Tampa Bay Times never will be.

Ah, the thing is, I'm comparing him to people like the Koch Brothers, or Zuckerberg, or pretty much anyone else on this list. I guess their level of evil is as hard to grasp for me as their level of wealth. Makes it hard to compare them.

We are looking at "a post-antibiotic era," a threat on par with terrorism.

The two things don't even compare. Terrorism is a tiny problem compared with this. If suddenly antibiotics don't work and we can't find an alternative, we're talking tens to hundreds of millions of people dying as a result.

What kind of ethical issues were you thinking about? I'm not an expert on organising clinical trials but here's how I think it could go: unless they need other smaller trials to check other things, the main task of the next trial would be confirming the efficacy of the vaccine while still keeping a close eye on the safety.

So they would have more participants and possibly a longer trial period. One group would receive the vaccine, the control group would receive an injection of saline (and wouldn't know that it's saline). Then, perhaps, the participants would just go about their lives and come back for check ups every now and then. The clinicians would then compare how many people get malaria in the control versus vaccinated group. For this they would use complicated statistical analysis to compare how many people get infected in each group.

Nobody would be infected on purpose, they would just try to see if any of the "real life infections" are prevented. And the control group would be no worse off than they would be without taking part in the trial.

The only downside of this approach? It would require a lot of participants and thus such trial would cost a lot. Also, it wouldn't give sensational headlines such as 100% efficacy ;)

Compare to that, any quiet island cheap destination outside the USA sounds so much better.

AdelleChattre : Very interesting link, I enjoyed all the data that was given in a clear way. Out of curiosity, I had also created a male profile with the same details, Just to compare.

The West's actions in Syria are no better. And arguably worse. We've funded rebels that turned around and committed ISIS-level atrocities.

I know few will want to, but look at RT's coverage of Syria and compare it to every Western outlet. Why, besides the obvious knee-jerk answers, are the reports so different?

There are no good guys in Syria. Russia is supporting the established government. We're supporting infighting rebels on the off-chance that it will lead to a Syria compatible with Western business interests.

Atticus Finch, beloved American, figment of Harper Lee’s imagination and impossibly idealized father figure, tells us:

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view . . . until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.

Of course Drumpf is part of the whole decaying mass of the establishment. It’s as obvious as his mob ties, his manifest personality disorders, and his loathing for his fellow human beings. However, this line of thinking is harshing our buzz. So let’s try on our Appaloosa suits. Sure, he’s part of the establishment, but that’s not the same as being part of The Establishment. In the same way the West Coast is part of the country, but it’s not quite exactly the same country as the East Coast. You’ll have no problem recognizing that’s he’s a shock to the system, so it’s not too far a stretch to begin to perceive the ways he’s a wrench that’s been thrown into The Machine.

If Romney’d been elected, there can be little doubt his administration would’ve had American troops in Iran within a year. Maybe two. Once he’d been beaten by Team Obama, that whole hypothetical future fell away. You and I don’t need to compare notes on the Obama years to know he was more like Romney than not, but on at least that one thing there was a difference. Similarly, the election of this ridiculous homunculus means in this alternate timeline, the U.S. will probably not find itself in combat with Russian and Chinese troops before the next. He may be establishment, but not that Establishment. That’s, unless I’m much mistaken, the kind of distinction that Appaloosa’s on about.

It’s still a dystopian nightmare, it’s just more of a choose-your-own-adventure than it seemed a few weeks ago.

That’s how I imagine it happened, too. You probably saw the post and, having read the headline, and the intro all the way to the end, and then made it straight through the article itself in its entirety from beginning to end, knew you had to search your soul for how you really felt about it. Perhaps you sat with it, in your favorite chair, making a two-cigar problem of it. Joseph, your hired man, may’ve had to stoke the fire three times into the night. Could be that you settled on one particular way you may’ve felt about the questions raised, then were haunted by nitpicking doubts now and again, even deep in the middle of other reflections over the course of several days.

Uncertain results not being satisfactory to you, I could imagine you set out with a faithful bloodhound for the kind of long walk that settles a furtive mind. In one’s mind’s eye, I can see you and Scout setting for a spell on a promontory over Lookout Mountain, asking Old Man Sunset his thoughts about the trouble and which way you ought to cast your vote on the snap. At long last, and on a dewy next morning, I can see you rounding the corner coming home, its familiar scene bracing you for the vote you knew, now once and for all, had to be down.

What other choice could it’ve been, really? Having familiarized yourself with every aspect of the problem, you will’ve come from the mountaintop not so much having been convinced, as having a conviction. That’s the thing about historical lessons as general as this checklist. They are either true, or not. Yes, or no. And only once in the wide, wending stream of history. This piece was from 2007. Clearly such a template, meant for comparing to other times and other places and other cultures, only meant something if indeed it meant anything at the exact moment in 2007 that it was written. Here, almost ten years later, it’s stale. Useless. Old. Can tell us nothing, nor inform our views, nor compare with our times, our place, or our society.

Why, if you’d’ve downvoted it before you’d even read the headline all the way through, you’d’ve saved yourself all that torment, and introspection and self-examination.

I have a suggestion. How about you go back and read the polemic you're pushing. Compare its breathless accusations of Stalinism to what we know now that administration is coming to an end. Contrast its batshit craziness to the record of the most conservative administration since at least Coolidge.

Especially, I'd say, the 'global warming is a one-worlder, New World Order hoax' vitriol.

Tell me you've read that bile-soaked tract and you think it was prophetic and not pathetic. C'mon, read it.

As for Bill Moyers, who's been on the side of ordinary Americans this whole time, who Johnson called his indispensible man on poverty, who will one day win the Medal of Freedom and by so doing bring honor and prestige to the medal, nobody but you is going to confuse him with your little ür-Goebbels.

I'd believe Wikileaks was operating with the intention to serve the public except for a few niggling matters:

1. They had this information months before but carefully timed the releases in such a way to do maximum damage not to a specific candidate (whom they could have damaged before the nomination was settled) but to a specific party.

2. They did not visibly work toward exposing corruption in both major parties. They just shrugged and said because no one had tried hacking the RNC it wasn't their problem.

3. What they did release was overhyped but ultimately very weak tea. The most common comparison was with sausage: you don't want to watch it being made, but that doesn't make it bad.

4. Assange admitted to having information on Trump but claimed he didn't release it because nothing was worse than what Trump was saying to the media. He didn't even give us the opportunity to decide that for ourselves.

All of that strongly suggests to me they weren't operating on high-minded ideals, they were looking to influence the general election.