Common cleaning sponge found to release trillions of microplastic fibers

San Francisco is 7,194 people per square kilometer. Burning wood is discouraged, especially when the wind patterns are wrong. Wood fires are messy anyhow.

We have a new wood-burning restaurant down the block from us. $140 flat price, no tips, no tax. Wine is extra. We smell the smoke outside around 5PM when they fire up. No reservations, so people stand in line for an hour or so to get in.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Am 23.04.26 um 20:14 schrieb john larkin:

As of last year, they were building 300 coal power generating stations worldwide. They build everything that can be sold for money.

Last month, Trump paid for NOT using a mostly finished wind farm on your east coast.

Did you note their new design center in Munich, or the new fab in Dresden, together with Bosch, NXP and Infineon?

In medieval times, Bavaria was wine land. Must have been a few degrees hotter before they had to switch to beer. They even had to import beer know how from the North Sea coast.

We in Europe will probably watch the news on the TV from the tornado avenues in the US south. You'll have our compassion, but that's Darwin at work.

Gerhard

Well, the business model for wind farms is being paid for not generating electricity.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

But I think it's because of the feeling is that there is not much to be positive about in politics generally.

If the political feeling were postive then postive voting would feel better.

Democracy is like going to a bar and ask people there to design your next electronics by majority vote.

You will get nowhere,

To get anywhere you need a government of specialists. Not some religious fanatics or drunks or addicts with next to zero knowledge of the subject.

A leader that knows stuff about what the people and country really needs, who then creates a team of experts.

But then human nature... One ant heap against the other destruction, world wars, Darwin The best one will win, if anyone left after the nuking, climate change, viruses created, poison gasses created, addictive substances..

Who act mostly in their own interests.

There is no such thing as expertise. It just doesn't exist.

- Scott Adams

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Adams from Adam and Eve?

An easy allegation to make, harder to prove. Specialists tend to have rather narrow interests, and governments have to cover the whole spectrum. Other specialists are likely to complain if the ones with government connections start feathering their own nests.

You don't seem to have much of it, and you do seem to be reluctant to recognise it when you do run into it.

Channeling the pointed-headed boss?

You're very selective in your choice of reading material.

It used to take a world war or two to produce tar balls on the beaches. Today it's 'normal'.

Bottlenose dolphins are reported to be back up to 40% in numbers, with 65% of previous body weight - but not by the Deepwater Horizon NRDA . . .

As of 2024, the Deepwater Horizon NRDA was still just setting up a data collection structure to deal with cetacean health recording and analysis. . .

I'm guessing that progress hasn't sped up much under the new administration.

DH was in, what? 2010?

RL

Not a bit. I read all sorts of stuff.

In many places, it's been normal for millions of years. There just weren't many greenies around to shriek about it.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Dilbert.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

But it does seem to included a lot of climate change denial propaganda.

There was your recent quote from Breitbart the made the film "the Day after Tomorrow" about a new ice age, rather than a re-run of the Younger Dryas.

The ones that showed up Sydney's beaches recently weren't in the least normal. It took a bit of forensic chemisty to find where they were coming from, and the answer was from the sewage system - not from regular use, but when sudden torrential downpours overloaded the sewage collection system, And some unprocessed stuff ended up getting washed out to sea and washed back up onto the beaches.

We've actually been reworking the storm water system to stop that happening in recent years, but global warming has made torrential downfalls more common at a faster rate than the storm water system, was getting cleaned up.

It wasn't the greenies who were doing the shrieking, but tourism businesses.

I don't think I've ever read a book about that. Sounds boring.

Late 1800s were pretty wet.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

It's not the annual rainfall that matters, but how much rain falls in a couple of hours. "Torrential" rain fills up drainage channels and creeks, and floods everything.

Global warming means more water vapour in the atmosphere, and if it all happens to fall out of the atmosphere in a hurry you've got higher peak run-off than you were used to.

The link you posted can give you that information, if you ask for it, but such flooding can be very local.

I know about our local storm water system because our local streets are quite steep and several of them got severely dug up a few years ago when the storm water run-off got separated from the sewage system. The roads weren't closed but there'd be a twenty foot deep trench down one side of the road for couple of weeks.

That sounds like a political problem, poor infrastructure maintenance.

We have hills here that funnel rainfall into low spots, like the end of Cayuga Avenue and a low spot on 17th st. Rainfall is variable everywhere.

The trick is to keep all the local street drains clear and working so the funnel effect doesn't happen.

Naturally the politicians blame climate change.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

That wasn't the problem. It was more poor system design about a century ago, and hadn't mattered until global warming dumped that bit of extra water into the drains and exposed the orginal design flaw.

It gets more variable where local temperatures are higher - warm air holds more water until it decides not to.

Huh? If the water falls into the area, it's going to end up in the lowest lying areas, and flow through them to the sea (eventually - my flat looks out of Sydney Harbour so the sea is pretty local around here).

It is what's made the problem worse in recent years - or a least more frequently noticeable.

If the surrounding areas are properly drained, not much water will collect in the low spots. We get our first seasonal rains around November, and if the local drains are full of leaves and trash the water keeps going downhill.

The cars, on the slick streets, keep going downhill too.

Yes, the politicians keep getting worse.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

They do keep on funding the scientists who keep on collecting the evidence. Donald Trump does seem to be an exception - he does try to de-fund people who observe results he doesn't like. He's not all that enthusiastic about it - like you he doesn't find it difficult to ignore results he doesn't like.

AFAIK this is wrong. About 5% (or possibly more) US citizens have no voting rights. Some lost voting rights due to criminal conviction, some who lost their rights should have them restored, but can not afford financial cost of the procedure.

As a comparison, in my country there are voting stations in prisons: prisoners have voting rights and since they are not allowed to go outside voting stations for them are inside.

BTW: Many elections in USA are decided by tiny margin. 5% citizens with no voting rights is a serious distortion.