Readit News1. https://www.euronews.com/green/2022/04/11/how-much-plastic-d...
2. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/mar/24/micropla...
3. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/apr/15/winds-ca...
Because humanity and capitalism's incentives are just wrong. Bottling companies like Coca Cola and Snapple have long switched to plastic bottles, and externalized the cost to the environment.
My recommendation would be to tax negative externalities and redistribute all of it as a UBI to the people of the country. Simple and effective, but apparently the governments have been moving way too slowly.
What's worse is that the governments perpetuate a lie to the public, making them think they can individually make a difference. In the case of plastic the lie was "recycling", when in fact the plastics were simply shipped to China, who dumped them in landfills and rivers.
But the government tells the individual that they can't have a plastic straw or bag. It's all there to distract the individuals from banding together and demanding the costs be imposed on the corporations which put out metric tons every day. I write more about this phenomenon here: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=362
And it's not just the bottling companies. It's all the packaging. It's the clothes using synthetic fabrics like polyester, which generate microplastics flushed in every wash. And so on. Convenience is when you'd rather have a one-time-use spoon shipped from China, than wash and re-use a spoon. Your ancestors re-filled containers.
If we made it more costly for these companies, they'd long ago have researched biodegradable alternatives.
We could reduce human consumption of the particles if we only consumed lab-grown meat & hydroponically grown vegetables where the water is ultra-filtered before use.
1) Let's look at the ship I am most familiar with, the NL Navy Zeven Provicien class (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Zeven_Provinci%C3%ABn-class...). It generally would have 2 types of anti air defense missiles, the SM-2 and the ESSM (both US-built, see wikipedia for their publicly available specs). Apart from that, there are electronic and flare/chaff passive countermeasures and finally a Goalkeeper CIWS for last-mile defense. I have little doubt that we would have been able to take on an attack of 2 Harpoon missiles. OTOH, the Neptune missiles are a lot more modern than the Harpoon and modern missiles have been known to do tricky things like having a pseudo-random noise generator generate corkscrew like maneuvers to evade the defensive fires. I'll also note that the Moskva was built in the early 80s (though refitted after the fall of the Soviet Union) and it was apparently quite stormy (so additional radar noise from wave reflections may have been a thing). All in all, IMHO it seems quite likely that they were indeed hit. Warships don't just suddenly catch fire, and especially in warzones when the opponent has sophisticated anti ship missiles it seems more likely that the fire was caused by a missile impact.
2) For older warships it could be possible. Usually they would have a rotating air warning radar and a dedicated targeting radar for missile guidance. An example would be the STIR (https://www.thalesgroup.com/en/stir-tracking-and-illuminatio...) on NATO vessels, basically a powerful narrowbeam radar on a servo pedestal. There would rarely be more than two or three on a vessel, so it might be possible to distract all of them with several drones. Modern naval radars use active phased array technology where the amount of tracked targets is no longer the bottleneck (in practice, you'd need dozens of missiles), but as mentioned before the Moskva is from the early 80s so they would probably not have this yet. So it could happen, especially in a stormy sea where the waves provide a lot of additional radar noise, but it is really only speculating without a lot more information than we have right now.
Of course space heaters are far easier to move around the house compared to a mini-split system and would use less power if you only plan to heat a small room.
I’m not that sure. A lot of experts agree that there’s not much quality data to reach that conclusion.
Most “definitive proof” comes from mechanical studies (they measure how far your saliva is reaching with and with out mask), but that’s not the only important factor.
Masks are not designed for full day use, and by wearing them everyone is constantly touching their face, mouth and nose. This sounds to me like a way worse infection vector. Viruses like covid can survive for a long time on surfaces.
It’s hard to separate the effects of masks from that of hand sanitizer, vaccinations, or other measures taken.
I see there are no cloth masks tested. I'd love to know how useful they are (or can be) as I much prefer being able to reuse my masks.
Edit: just realised that both Type and Style can be cloth and the cloth ones are presumably all under Style. All of them failed :(