[Source] On the incompetence of totalitarianism

Trump halts data collection on drug use, maternal mortality, climate change, more

https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-doge-data-collection-hhs-epa-cdc-maternal-mortality

TIL planned obsolescence is illegal in France; it is a crime to intentionally shorten the lifespan of a product with the aim of making customers replace it. In early 2018, French authorities used this law to investigate reports that Apple deliberately slowed down older iPhones via software updates. [source, comments]

coulda had laser tag or low-income housing

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So when I was a kid and we drove to Denver International Airport and it was just plains and plains and plains out there, and I was floored when we drove that way for the first time in a long time and it had turned to the worst kind of suburban hell, and indeed, where there at least could be a grocery store, there is a car wash and a Sonic

Then another fifteen minutes of suburban hell

The current biodiversity crisis is often depicted as a struggle to preserve untouched habitats. Here, we combine global maps of human populations and land use over the past 12,000 y with current biodiversity data to show that nearly three quarters of terrestrial nature has long been shaped by diverse histories of human habitation and use by Indigenous and traditional peoples. With rare exceptions, current biodiversity losses are caused not by human conversion or degradation of untouched ecosystems, but rather by the appropriation, colonization, and intensification of use in lands inhabited and used by prior societies. Global land use history confirms that empowering the environmental stewardship of Indigenous peoples and local communities will be critical to conserving biodiversity across the planet.

Archaeological and paleoecological evidence shows that by 10,000 BCE, all human societies employed varying degrees of ecologically transformative land use practices, including burning, hunting, species propagation, domestication, cultivation, and others that have left long-term legacies across the terrestrial biosphere. Yet, a lingering paradigm among natural scientists, conservationists, and policymakers is that human transformation of terrestrial nature is mostly recent and inherently destructive. Here, we use the most up-to-date, spatially explicit global reconstruction of historical human populations and land use to show that this paradigm is likely wrong. Even 12,000 y ago, nearly three quarters of Earth’s land was inhabited and therefore shaped by human societies, including more than 95% of temperate and 90% of tropical woodlands. Lands now characterized as “natural,” “intact,” and “wild” generally exhibit long histories of use, as do protected areas and Indigenous lands, and current global patterns of vertebrate species richness and key biodiversity areas are more strongly associated with past patterns of land use than with present ones in regional landscapes now characterized as natural. The current biodiversity crisis can seldom be explained by the loss of uninhabited wildlands, resulting instead from the appropriation, colonization, and intensifying use of the biodiverse cultural landscapes long shaped and sustained by prior societies. Recognizing this deep cultural connection with biodiversity will therefore be essential to resolve the crisis.

Ellis et. al., People have shaped most of terrestrial nature for at least 12,000 years

Ellis et. al., People have shaped most of terrestrial nature for at least 12,000 years

And we're not even calling it anthracite

(DS9 reference, everyone should watch the labor episode of DS9)

(Everyone should just watch DS9 period)