It's a good question. One thing I can think of is that drones can accurately use a pre-determined map of which areas need how much of an input, in a way that would be really difficult for a human on the ground to do.
Local, small-scale food production used to be the only way food was produced - people didn't eat better then, and there were many, many fewer people to feed.
There's huge variability in what can be grown where, especially if you want to reduce the amount and number of inputs that are imported from further afield. There are places that can support all the crops and livestock that provide a healthy, balanced, and sustainable human diet, but not everywhere can. What if you want to eat flour in a place where grain crops aren't tenable, or butter where cows, sheep and goats don't do well?
Producing food this way also means that we need to build houses on fertile land that's good for growing things. That happens a _lot_ where I live, and I hate the site of previously productive soil disappearing under concrete house-slabs.
You can have both large scale production and small scale production at the same time. It is actually required for survival on a large scale long term. Technologies enabling small scale farms to be more efficient are as great an enabler as the advent of industrial farming.
If you want to see less fertile land covered up make it easier for people to make money growing on their own land.
Agreed. You could make a very useful 404 page with the list of candidate URLs being used to do the redirect: It's exactly the thing you want to display in a "Did you mean x?" message on that page.
I had the same thought - an off the shelf double-paned window module would be great, otherwise a homebrewed version with two panes and a partial-vacuum pumped out between them.
Again, this is a problem only if you just drain concentrated brine straight into the sea. But there are cheap, easy alternatives. Easiest is a long, leaky pipe leasing way out offshore. Or you could exhaust it into freshwater right before that enters the sea. Or you could dilute the brine with lots of seawater before draining it.
Yes, but out past the kelp beds and sea otters it's all flat sand until it hits the Monterey Bay canyon. The Bay is a marine sanctuary so we'd probably put the desal plant up the Coast on open ocean to serve mostly San Francisco, which now gets it's water from the Sierras. That may not last.
Also interesting to me is that they turned the local fossil fuel electric plant that I grew up with into a giant battery:
Edit: The first link you shared says it's historically been a concern but seems to dismiss the concern by saying it's all in where you put the plant and how you do the discharge, which is obvious:
Environmental impacts associated with concentrated discharge have historically been considered as a major environmental concern to marine life with desalination plants. The environmental impact of desalination plants will vary depending on several factors:
i. The location of desalination plant.
ii. The location of the inlet and outlet.
iii. The method used in the desalination facility and the outlet (water channel and pipeline).
The second link says nothing was harmed but regulation limits were exceeded, so they need to be considerate of that concern:
The bad news in the study is that the salinity level in the discharge zone exceeded the permitted level, and the salinity plume extended much farther offshore than permitted under the California Ocean Plan. Senior author Adina Paytan, a research professor in the Institute of Marine Sciences at UC Santa Cruz, said the study provides valuable information for planners considering where to locate future desalination plants and what discharge technologies to use.
Agree 100%. There's _so_ much additional information that human faces provide outside of the spoken language. It's often hard to interpret, especially over a video call, but turning that channel off completely is definitely a loss of signal.
I'd much rather develop my use and interpretation of facial expressions than ignore them.
Absolutely. This is the "ratchet effect" which is everywhere in software these days. The best you can do is defer clicking the ratchet forward for a while. You can't avoid it forever, and you can't ever turn it backwards.
Presumably they pay rent in those malls, and the bigger the store, the more rent they pay. The problem with that arrangement is that you need to be at a certain minimum scale in order to afford rent at all - you can't just occupy a free/basically free store to play around and make toys in. Taking a commission avoids that issue by making 'rent' scale with the amount of business you do, not how much floor space you need.
I'm not saying that 30% is the right amount - I really don't know. But the mall comparison doesn't seem like a cut-and-dry case to me at all.
