No, bacteria (and some other things like fungi) have evolved to eat some kinds of plastic, and we don’t yet know how scalable that is or if it has significant environmental side effects. Regardless, the bigger matter here is that we burn a huge majority of extracted crude oil. If we stop doing that, we can drill far less

A huge majority of crude oil production goes towards fuels and we still have an enormous problem with the amount of plastic we use, we can definitely stand to drill less

Wales implemented a pretty widespread version of this, changing roughly a third of all of their roads from 30 mph to 20 mph (pretty close to 50 and 30 kph respectively). Test areas before the full implementation seemed to go well, and the first year of the reduced limit saw casualties on affected roads drop by a quarter compared to the prior year. That’s only one year of data, and casualties were already trending down anyway, but it does seem promising

It has been very controversial, though. A lot of people do not like it and are fighting to repeal it

Thirteen is just the German contingent, but the other countries are sending similarly small numbers for now. However, this small group is a recon mission, not intended as a fighting force. They’re going there to make a plan for their armies, not to be the army

Oh wow, it really is just 11 lines. The article is significantly longer than the bill

It actually has the lowest crime rate for violence against the person amongst English and Welsh police regions. It has higher-than-average homicide and total crime rates, but it’s not the highest and it’s comparable to other cities

Why would he need to? Reform is well on the way to supplant the Tories anyway, and under FPTP if they do that once they’re basically entrenched

Only if you assume that its performance will continue improving for a good while and (at least) linearly. The companies are really struggling to give their models more compute or more training data now and frankly it doesn’t seem like there have been any big strides for a while

The UK definitely seems like the easier challenge here, given that it’s not a superpower and is currently actually trying to cooperate

Unfortunately Reform have enough candidates no matter how dysfunctional they might be if they actually get elected. I dread to think of the mess they’d make

No, it’s about agricultural standards and food safety. The sentence structure does make it a bit more confusing than it has to be though. It’s:

Starmer has made a veterinary agreement, or a sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) agreement, a crucial element…

“Sanitary and phytosanitary” seems to be pre-established language for this stuff in international law, as there is an Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures WTO treaty

It’s talking about legitimacy of who/whatever ends up running Venezuela after this, not Trump’s legitimacy. The point is that removing Maduro is not going to create a pro-USA Venezuela

I’m never going to actually watch any of the live action Popeye horror films, but it is funny that we immediately got three of them

He has the perfect voice for this

Fighting Baseball did this the best

To be fair, the Finnish yards are also just really good at building icebreakers. Something like half of all of the entire world’s icebreakers come out of Helsinki

We just need better branding for them! Middle East and North Africa doesn’t roll off the tongue nearly as well as just Africa

Well yes, it is entirely arbitrary. One of the most agreed-upon factors is that “at least as big as Australia” is a requirement, but there’s no hard reason for that requirement

Personally I think we should consider particarly big mountain ranges and deserts as continental boundaries more often, like we do with the Urals in nodels that separate Asia and Europe. “Asia” is such a huge concept as to be almost useless, and it’s not like China and Arabia had much influence on each other historically

As I understand it, Russia actually tends to reject the notion of a separate Europe and Asia. They prefer a six-continent model with Eurasia as one thing

Man those games are great. I recently-ish tried out one of the decompiled versions of the original after the source code leaked. It’s still a lot of fun

What you describe is a huge part of vehicle racing in general. Getting into a flow state is fast. If you can stress an opponent out enough by threatening to overtake or even just keeping up, you can very often push them to start taking bigger risks and to drop out of that flow state