There's something kind of comically tragic about the idea that these tools that were meant to lighten our loads seem to be doing the opposite for some.
That turns what has been an automatic tax into a new layer of admin and compliance, another bill to track, another system to understand, and potentially another source of anxiety and a cost of living crisis.
By banning the export of chips to China, the cost to China of a Taiwan invasion decreases. And so if China can't access TSMC chips anyway, it's a lot less risky to go to war.
Singapore enacted policies to clean up their waterways, and they were really, really successful. So all of a sudden, instead of having waterways that were filled with filth, we had waterways that were filled with fish. And from the otters' points of view, they were feeding troughs.
So we know that there were otters in Singapore sometime before the mid 20th century. But then Singapore started to change. It modernized. It started to industrialize. And all of a sudden, the waterways got filthy.
Singapore enacted policies to clean up their waterways, and they were really, really successful. So all of a sudden, instead of having waterways that were filled with filth, we had waterways that were filled with fish. And from the otters' points of view, they were feeding troughs. So they came back.
78 percent of the air around us is nitrogen gas. That's a form that plants can't use, and so they've partnered with microbes on a process called nitrogen fixation. The microbes can breathe in that nitrogen gas and turn it into a form that plants can metabolize. It's a symbiosis, a partnership that's worked for millions of years, right up until the point that humans started breeding crops to be more productive.
Ironically, it's a huge success of the civil rights movement. Civil rights activists protested against blackface and tried really hard to strip it from the school curriculums and everyday performances where it was really common currency. And by doing so, they turned blackface into something that was culturally taboo. And so it became so taboo, in fact, that the history of it is no longer taught.
1mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
