My favorite ship of Theseus example is the Roman Empire. They started out as a Latin speaking polytheistic + republican empire with Rome as capital; and hundreds of years later they had become a greek speaking monotheistic + monarchistic empire with Constantinople as capital. When did they stop being Romans? According to themselves, never.

There is no direct adjacency needed to spread seeds from one plot of land to another, that’s one of your made up hurdles. Small seeds naturally get blown far in the wind. Larger seeds still get carried large distances by animals, which was why I specifically copy pasted the bit about birds carrying acorns …

To claim that it would be difficult and expensive to let a wild forest grow in those meadows is absurd, that’s what this was about for me. It’s a convenient excuse to do nothing, but it’s not a very good excuse.

To give another example:
…
Instead, the trees at Knepp Castle Estate in southern England were allowed to spread naturally. Birds such as jays can disperse as many as 7,500 acorns in four weeks. “Not a single tree was planted, no saplings were bought from commercial nurseries, no tanalised wooden stakes, no polypropylene tubes and plastic ties, no direct financial or carbon costs – no effort,” says Isabella Tree, co-owner of Knepp Castle Estate.
…
Chazdon, who has studied natural regeneration for more than 30 years, questions the commonly held assumption that trees need to be actively planted to tackle climate change and biodiversity loss. “There’s a perspective that humans did this damage and it’s our job to fix it, and that we should govern the process, and just let nature help when it can,” she says. “Another view is that forest restoration is fundamentally natural, and that humans can assist it, but ultimately it should be governed by natural processes.”.
…
Proponents are arguing for natural regeneration to be taken more seriously in national and international efforts to mitigate the climate and biodiversity crises. Recent research has shown that natural regeneration can potentially absorb 40 times more carbon than plantations, and provide a home for more species. It is also significantly cheaper than tree planting, with different studies in Brazil showing costs reduced by 38%, or even up to 76%.
…

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210524-the-reason-wild-forests-beat-plantations

The reference to a woman was me misremembering the op, I don’t use alts, not everyone acts like tankies.

About why the authoritarian label applies to you: You oppose liberalism, which makes you illiberal, which makes you authoritarian.

Hey, I looked it up in a few large dictionaries and Wikipedia to confirm the meaning, I can’t help being able to read. If that women says that she is liberal, then she probably means what is understood by that word by mainstream society, not whatever nonsense your authoritarian cult has come up with for it.

I’ve seen forest sprout up in abandoned dead areas without any human assistance. It takes about 2 decades of being left alone to get enough young growth to start being called a forest, but not really more than that. And it would take generations more to be called an old “real” forest, but it has to start somewhere. To rehabilitate long dead soil it might take what you describe, but turning an old meadow into a wild area that will eventually turn into a forest, does not need human intervention. It just requires to be left alone. In my climate that is. Claiming that forests can’t grow without human assistance is absolute nonsense, forests grew just fine before humans came along.

And as further proof that I don’t live in fantasialand with my belief that forests can grow without human intervention, here’s 2 links with examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_rewilding https://www.rewildingmag.com/passive-rewilding-natural-reforestation/

Making wild forests in a temperate climate is not complicated at all. Stamp a bunch of seeds into the ground, fence it off to keep grazers away, wait a few years, and boom there’s a new forest. Once it gets started, nature knows just fine how to grow forests, they’ve been around far longer than our meddling after all. The problem is humans, who need capital and incentives to let nature do it’s thing. Making the forest is cheap, buying the land is expensive. And a wild forest has little earning potential, so for private landholders it makes no financial sense.

But if there were incentives, then these solar panels could have been put above existing hardened surfaces (roads, parkings), and the unhardened land could have been returned to nature. We’d have both the solar panel fields and the forest. It requires a much larger up front investment, which is why it’s not going to happen without government incentives, and to get those, political will is needed, which is why it’s not going to happen anytime soon.

And we should absolutely be making more forests from scratch, Europe has a massive deforestation problem. Reforestation is already an official policy goal in the EU and in most (I assume) EU countries, and this could be one of the ways of achieving those goals.

They also use lots of irrigation from aquifers in the Great Plains, so they’ll need less irrigation and the shading will help a tiny bit with replenishing the aquifer.

In northern Europe these solar fields make no sense at all to me though. When I see something like the fields below in my temperate marine climate, then I can’t help but think of the forest that could have been there.

What i stated is what the word means. If someone says “I’m a liberal and I hold liberal values”, then the values that they profess to be holding are wanting rights for the individual, consent of the governed, liberty, equality before law, …

There were indeed self-labeled liberal parties in the 19th century that opposed giving equal rights to common people/women/minorities. Those self-professed liberals had recently acquired their rights, but were then opposing equal rights for others, which wasn’t very liberal of them at all. Claiming to be liberal while acting illiberal means that they were hypocrits, but it did not change the meaning of the word liberal itself. If a totalitarian dictatorship like North-Korea calls itself a democracy, then that doesn’t automatically mean that they are democratic. The meaning of what it is to be a democracy hasn’t changed just because some authoritarian states misappropriated the label. People professing to hold certain beliefs, but then acting opposite of those, are common. So common that we even have a saying for it: “actions speak louder than words”.

The picture in the op doesn’t look like agrivoltaics though. Compared to the agrivoltaics examples of the wiki article, the panels in the op are more densely placed, placed flatter, and placed closer to the ground. Nothing is getting harvested there, the most they could do is keep rabbits under them. From what I’ve seen in person, the non agri kind with panels over monoculture grass fields is much more common than agrivoltaics with cultivated fields.

That’s literally the meaning of the word, what it has always meant.

You’re saying this as if being liberal is a bad thing.

“Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, right to private property, and equality before the law.”

Rights, liberty, consent, equality … I get why authoritarians hate liberalism, but lots of other people consider these values as something positive.

False prophets (or self serving scam artist demagogues) have always existed. So have gullible and greedy people that follow those demagogues. War, famine, disease and death were nothing new either. It’s all just normal human behaviour, sadly enough.

One thing also leads to another: If a self serving demagogue gets too many followers, then it’s going to lead to lawlessness and war, which are usually accompanied by famine and plagues, which result in lots of excess deaths. That situation is going to cause societal upheaval and maybe even a societal collapse, which the incumbent powers didn’t want, so they created cautionary tales to hopefully teach the people how to recognize demagogues, to prevent those from getting too many followers in the first place.

I do believe that it used to be a real company with a few real employees, they show a few old projects on their website and those seem well executed. Their old specialization seems to be small scale renovations on culverts and small industrial basins with lots of nooks and crannies. They did the kind of jobs that their bigger competitors would rather not do. Which is probably also how they ended up renovating Trump’s pool: the actual pool companies didn’t want the headache of working for Trump org.

But then this massive paint job is like you described it. Too big for the company, done with loads of temp guys, with materials that they have no experience with … anything goes.

History repeats itself. The bible stories are based on things that had happened before, so with stories they tried to warn people not to fall for it again or the bad times would come back, and now people are falling for it again.

The work was done by Atlantic Industrial Coatings from New Canton Virginia. Their website: https://vaspray.com/aic/

According to their website they have experience with liners, but there’s no mention of using paint. My guess is that they placed an expensive liner in a pool on one of Trump’s properties, but Trump doesn’t want to pay that bill, so to compensate them, AIC got to do this cheap ass botch job for an inflated price for the us government.

With paint instead of a liner, they will have had to waterproof all the joints between the slabs as best as they could. That waterproofing will have become damaged when Trump’s motorcade drove over it.

Pretty much this. A 0.02% error margin when there are tens of thousands of visitors per year, means it’s almost guaranteed to have errors.

99.9% ^700 = 49.6% chance of no errors occurring.
99.98% ^3466 = 50% chance of no errors occurring.
99.98% ^23000 = 1% chance of no errors occurring.

The problem is wider than the tech companies, so personally I’d prefer a wider definition that includes the non tech bad actors. Something like “Return of the Robber Barons”.

Robber Barons = By the late 19th century, the term was typically applied to businessmen who used exploitative practices to amass their wealth. Those practices included unfettered consumption and destruction of natural resources, influencing high levels of government, wage slavery, squashing competition by acquiring their competitors, and to create monopolies and/or trusts that control the market. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robber_baron_(industrialist)

That description seems like a perfect match for the present day USA economy.

(Rhetorical) Why is it restricted? With this kind of restriction, my first thought is that something must have happened to cause the restriction to be implemented.

I can imagine a few good reasons (+ also some bad ones) for why the restriction is there, but imo it would be best practice to explain why it’s there. So that people don’t have to speculate, and also to pre-emptively take the wind out of the sails of mysogonists that want to use it as a pretext to attack the organisation.

I doubt it, for example Wikipedia is about as clean as it gets for knowledge sites, and their traffic is down significantly. The ai summaries of wiki articles are usually almost the same as the summary at the top of the wiki page, so if people have enough info with the summary, then they’re not clicking through.