The Deforestation Process Deforestation is too often reduced to what’s most conspicuous. But deforestation is complex and a lot more than raising beef cattle or growing soybeans. To begin with, despite all the biodiversity especially of plant life, rain forest soil isn’t very fertile. Nope, it’s actually very oxalic. Oxalic soils are acidic. Acidic soils are full of iron, bauxite and other minerals. So not only are trees in the forest chopped down for their precious hardwood, the soils these trees grow in are mined for minerals including aluminum, zinc, copper, manganese, gold and iron. Do you know where the aluminum in your water bottle came from? What’s one of most electricity intensive things to do? Convert bauxite into aluminum. It’s an electrostatic process to remove oxygen from the alumina (Al2O3). This electricity is also one of the largest costs of producing aluminum. So that’s why hydroelectricity is often used to reduce the costs of refining bauxite to alumina to ...
Thanks to Maxwell for this contribution... The Grey Death: COVID-19 Exposes the Perils of an Ageing World Tom Tyler Despite numerous advantages in quality and accessibility of healthcare, developed nations have been hit particularly hard by the depradations of SARS-CoV-2. For all the benefits their citizens enjoy, it has become apparent that these nations’ ageing populations are uniquely susceptible to public health crises. With this trend set to continue, is it time to sound the alarm on the industrialised world’s looming demographic collapse? When the scale of the COVID-19 pandemic first became apparent, governments and public health bodies scrambled to engage measures that protected hospitals from becoming overrun and entire healthcare systems from being overwhelmed. In this endeavour, most have been remarkably successful. With a few exceptions thus far, the initially catastrophic projections of mass graves, overflowing hospital wards lined with the sick, and whol...
The Deep Politics of Jared Leto’s Cult Posted on September 15, 2019 …Pop singer—he’s not so much a person as a puppet, whose strings are pulled for a scheme of total nightmare! …A terrifying and withering exposé of the misuse of power in an age of illusion! — Privilege theatrical trailer, 1967 For the past year, I’ve been working hard on a book project, which is going to offer insight into a lot of the bigger contemporary political trends. One of the main threads is this: many of the political conflicts we see are the result of internecine struggles between ruling class-power blocs, and many of these are the result of Silicon Valley taking its place among the monopoly industries. In order to illustrate the concept of deep politics, one chapter discusses conclusions we can draw from two of the best on the subject: Crypto Cuttlefish and Dave McGowan . One of the first things to say about the value of their respective research i...
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