This is the kind of service government should provide. Would you go to a restaurant where they make you calculate your own bill, and if you calculate sales tax wrong, you get penalized? It’s up to the service provider to say how much you owe.

Very valid points. I forgot WordPad existed and I use Notepad way more than I’ve ever used WordPad. But many people still havent really used computers much in depth beyond specific things they’ve been shown.

I know I could just use Google Docs or throw LibreOffice in there, but many people now in retirement age have still managed to dodge learning much about computers.

If you deliver a new computer that can’t type a letter, send an email, and play YouTube out of the box, that seems like a fail. And I feel many that won’t know what do do without something like WordPad also may not have an Internet connection, nor should they have to if they just need a presentable looking doc.

The bat is definitely cute!

I enjoy that I can no longer tell if you are serious or not!

What a country! 😂

I had heard the kiwi stuff, but you had me second guessing myself!

I did look up the island names since I had never heard Aotearoa before, and a few of the blurbs say there are a few hundred actual islands that make up New Zealand, but it seems nobody can agree on an actual number because they all have a different estimate.

Lol, you two have me picturing literally just 3 bats in the whole country and the middle one being upset he isn’t biggest or smallest and is plotting to take one of the other 2 out.

Thank you! Those are some pretty significant facts. I’ve got much to learn about things over there!

Thank you for all that! As I said, we don’t seem to get taught much about that part of the world. LotR is probably the only NZ thing I can recall of the top of my head, which is pretty embarrassing.

The only one I know off the top of my head is the coelacanth that I was thrilled to get to see a preserved one at the Smithsonian.

Here’s some more examples

There’s some more I found. The bird in this article is the prettiest of the list. The others may be a bit underwhelming.

I’m from the US, and usually all we hear about Australia and New Zealand is of the scary, deadly animals. I’ve been happy to see so many articles on Lemmy about all the work they are doing on endangered animals like this bird and the bandicoots.

I’m also surprised that so many of these programs seem to involve indigenous people. I don’t know much about that part of the world, but I wish we would involve our native people in things like this. It feels we still keep ourselves cut off from each other. It makes all these feel good animal stories into feel good people stories.

That’s horrible! What a shame. At least they owned up to doing it, but that had to be devastating to anyone in the recovery effort.

Bio Char vs Charcoal: 6 Key Differences

Similar, but more refined process to achieve specific characteristics in the end product, like oil>kerosene>diesel>gasoline.

This article hints at a lot of interesting things, but doesn’t really go into any of them. I’ve learned a lot trying to answer the comments here.

That’s just because right now used coffee is trash and sand isn’t. If you remember back when bio diesel started getting popular, all of a sudden people were stealing fryer oil from restaurants. If you see a smelly looking black dumpster behind a restaurant, that is the used fry oil.

I wish they had a bit about that in the article itself, but they did link another article about biochar creation and its byproducts. I linked it in another comment here.

I feel there’s a lot of assumptions here that no one actually reads articles.

Nice work. I tried to thumbs down it, but it wanted a log in.

It’s a shame someone can read articles from decent sources and still be so ignorant.

The article they link about pyrolysis is worth a read too. The main source of CO2 emissions from cement production is cooking down limestone into lime IIRC. I was curious how much energy is used to turn the biomass into the end product and what waste is generated. It’s a bit too detailed for me to understand, but the process ends up with 15-25% biochar (the stuff they’re promoting in this article), some potentially useful byproducts, and some regular combustion pollution.

I’m glad to see research into this. Sand for concrete is a specific type of sand (nice and bumpy so it likes to lock together like a jigsaw puzzle) and people get killed by what are basically sand cartels. This was the “legitimate” mob business in the last season of Barry.

Portland cement is about 2/5 sand, so we’ll need to start drinking more coffee! I was glad to see they’re testing other organic matter since coffee is very susceptible to climate change, ironically caused in a large part by cement production. Unless you believe the reader comment on the article begging people to realize climate change is a hoax…

To be fair, that policy has worked for numerous people through history! 😓

Doesn’t have to this time though!

Agreed. If there’s evidence you did something, there’s only yourself to blame. I don’t care if it’s Trump, Hunter, the Sacklers, whoever. Own up to what you did. And if you’re ok with someone hurting people or try to cover it up, you aren’t really any better

For all the cries about it being political persecution, I haven’t seen anyone prove any of the evidence being used against him is false. Courts don’t take up cases without merit. The actual abuse going on is a minority of politicians trying to suppress the will of the American people.

These crybabies won’t do anything to start a civil war. They’re spread too far apart, they don’t have enough of their own resources, and if somehow they were able to break off some piece of the country, who is going to be trade or political partners with a cesspool that is still surrounded by a super power and it’s friendly neighbors? This isn’t the 1770s or the 1860s. They have no powerful support abroad. This isn’t a group of people with plans. Just a bunch of scammers pulling a long con on rubes.

Ignore them. Let them eat themselves. Let them keep telling us who they really are. From watching the debates, half of them seem tired of this BS themselves.