lithocarpus

This is true but the last few years have seen this dislike grow and spread a lot more than it was before - in my personal experience.

Most people I talk to use it because it's useful, but also hate what it means and what it is doing to the world.

There definitely has been a broad change in public perception of big tech and the future that it is taking us toward.

Thanks, that's interesting. I mostly agree. I'm not sure the dominant tree species would vary much, as Finland's forests, both old growth and managed, are mostly scots pine, norway spruce, and birch -- which looks to be what we see here in both the old forest and the trees around the edge of what Google cleared.

Definitely an older forest will have more complexity and thus diversity of understory etc.

I imagine a lot of the beneficial aspects of old forest, e.g. structural complexity, snags and downed logs, canopy gaps where trees fell, etc will develop on their own given time, in many of Finland's managed/logged forests. I think this is what we see in the "old forest" examples. And it is what I've seen in the areas I've lived in the USA. And, humans can try to help these things develop sooner, which like you say is often expensive and complex.

Some places like California, eucalyptus will come in and completely take over some forested areas after they're cleared, and so it won't naturally become like old native forest again. I don't think they have something quite like that in Finland but I'm curious if they do. I don't know what will happen with these patches of eucalyptus in another few hundred years if humans don't intervene.

I agree, and, want to point out this wasn't old growth forest. At least, none of the standing trees in the photos look like old growth. If it was, that would be a huge story, but it would have been very odd for Google to put a data center in old growth forest. Almost all of Finland is covered by managed/logged forests like this, so it's kind of inevitable if building a datacenter there that it is going to replace forest.

The same is true in much of the world actually, over half of the earth's surface was forested before humans started clearing it.

This is probably all native scots pine or norway spruce, as that is what almost all of finland's forests are, and they don't plant sitka spruce plantations there like they do in Ireland or other places in Europe.

That said, there's very little old growth forest in finland and this obviously is not old growth.

I'm curious though if you know, what other species you'd expect to see here if it was properly restored?

All the other forms of life are also sentient. We are literally relatives of theirs, even if distant.

Exactly, forest fires usually don't kill most of the trees in an old growth forest. The trees are much bigger, hold a lot more water, and have much thicker fire-resistant bark. This is why you usually see charred parts on the bottom of living old growth trees - they survived fire.

Because the old growth was logged, the fires we have now are often able to kill 100% of the trees in an area because the trees are all small and young and vulnerable. And this is self perpetuating, because after such a fire the soil often erodes, and sun hits the ground directly keeping it dry - it takes a really long time to recover from in some places.

Each cycle of logging removes even more soil and makes the landscape drier, and resets the timer on how long it will be before the forest is able to survive a wildfire. It's a short term thing.

I'm not saying no one should ever cut a tree or use wood - and it can be done in better and worse ways, it's really complex. But in general, the repeated clearcutting of the pacific northwest is steadily degrading that landscape the same way repeated intensive till farming of the prairies is degrading that landscape - it's a relatively short term thing with diminishing returns.

Old growth forest continually grows becoming richer and richer, until one of those major setbacks which often are many thousand years in between.

Old growth forest creates more wood per year per acre than second or third growth after the old growth is cut. It also produces more food for humans and habitat for wildlife. It literally stabilizes the weather and pumps moisture inland by storing water and then releasing it. It holds water in the ground so that streams don't go dry and can support fish. It is much more resilient to wildfire.

In the redwood forest for example, 95% of it was clear cut, for a short term benefit. 90% of this wood that had been accumulated by the forest over thousands of years has now burned or rotted away within 100 years, and is gone.

What we're doing now is rapidly consuming everything, and these resources are steadily declining, and will run out and the human population will crash.

But yes, I do think more abundance and diversity of life is an intrinsic good, both for its own sake and for the long term thriving of humans on earth. Like any population of animals, if we consume everything that we live on and undermine the capacity of earth to support us, we will collapse.

That said humans can figure out how to help ecosystems recover and be more abundant. So it's not all over. But clearing the old growth forest is one of the worst things we do - up there with reckless mining that contaminates water.

Sure, from a deep time perspective it's maybe no big deal, but the loss of the forest affects all of us including future generations significantly in the meantime.

There are often other factors too, than just the direct fishing, that keep a population low.

In the west of North America, like most places, almost all of the old growth forest was logged.

Some places where the soil and subsoil was particularly vulnerable to erosion and landsliding or just didn't have a lot of water capacity in the first place like on dry mountains, after these trees were removed and most of the soil washed away from rain, the forest simply has not come back a hundred years later. There are little trees gradaually getting started, and lots of mostly bare soil or rock still where erosion from rain is able to outpace the vegetation growth. It will likely take many thousand years for trees to get to the size they were before, and to build up the capacity for holding water like it had been.

In more abundant forests, trees regrow faster. But even there, a hundred years later, the total biomass per acre is often 10% of what it was as old growth forest, and the capacity for holding water on the land similarly much reduced. The old growth forests were the result of nature doing its thing often with help from humans for thousands of years and continually becoming richer. Eventually a major disturbance sets it back, but this might only happen ever 5 or 10 thousand years. This time humans did it.

Not to detract from your point that chemicals are not necessary for high food production.

But just to point out that Europe does use glyphosate, on something like 1/3 of crops.

https://doi.org/10.3390/su12145682 Antier et al. (2020) Glyphosate Use in the European Agricultural Sector and a Framework for Its Further Monitoring, Sustainability, 12(14), 5682.

In simpler language:

The top 0.1% increased their share of the total wealth by 67%.

The top 1% increased their share of the total wealth by 40%.

And the bottom 50% decreased their share of the total wealth by 30%.

In 27 years

The top 1% went from holding 22.8% of wealth to holding 31.6%

The bottom 50% went from holding 3.5% to 2.5%.

That's what I meant, but you put it a bit more clearly.

I do know a lot of people who grind their own flour fresh - that is real homemade bread and not ultra processed, and agreed, not magically unhealthy.

Maybe true as long as you make it the same way at home as the ultra processed version from the store. But you usually can't since you don't have the machinery.

Homemade wheat bread made of just wheat/water/salt is an entirely different thing from most "whole wheat bread" in the food industry.

Same for yogurt etc.

Even to whatever extent this is what's happening, a stopped clock is right twice a day applies.

"Beaver attacks on people are rare and are thought to primarily involve rabid animals" - the article

There's no way 7 in 10 people were prescribed antibiotics in 2024. This looks like a simple and egregious misinterpretation of the data, which seem to be all too common. I could believe there were 700 prescriptions given in the US per 1000 people in the US population. But many of those would be repeats to the same smaller number of people. I still would say there's way too much antiobiotic use - every time doctors have wanted to give me antiobiotics it wasn't necessary.

Both humidity and temperature matter, it's a complex thing going on.

But yes I'm mostly in a dry environment doing this, I haven't tried it anywhere that was warm and humid at the same time.

It helps a lot to not seal the leftovers but let them have airflow and dry out on the surface. Sealed containers with moisture in them get nasty much faster.

I've gone without a fridge for 8 years now and do something kind of like this usually - I'll cook a pot of food and then steam or boil it again after ~24 hours to reset the clock on it rotting. It's handy for things like eating a whole chicken or other large soup. I switch between being home and on the road a lot so my pot just comes with me and can be re-cooked on my car stove or my home stove. I tend to cook or re-heat once a day. Ideally I'd rather be sharing freshly prepared food with other people every meal and I do that when I can, but this works for when I'm feeding myself alone - cheaper and easier than any other approach.

Can confirm, have made hundreds from playing music after four years of several hours a day. Still probably only made 25% the cost of instrument and strings though.

Parent's question isn't answered in the article - no figure is given for how many deaths under 30 there are as a baseline.

From the article:

“We estimate that since its introduction [in 2008], HPV vaccination has prevented nearly 200 young women from dying from cervical cancer in England.”

This is an estimate of 200 total of any age total across 18 years. The article doesn't say 3300 die each year, 3300 are diagnosed each year.

Totally agree - I don't mean to promote or defend all NIMBYism - and a lot of it is simply "I got mine and don't want to share".

And there's also something to be said for NIMBYs protecting the habitat they live in or near.

Didn't read the article, but regarding the title, this is kind of fundamental.

NIMBYs want to protect some aspects of a particular place usually because it is their home.

Capitalism largely lives on destroying particular places to benefit people who are [mostly] somewhere else.

This is the only thing happening in capitalism but it's a big part of it. The end game of this kind of capitalism is that every place is destroyed (ecologically) and it gradually grinds to a painful halt.

Maybe there's a way to have some elements of capitalism in a society that doesn't destroy places but I don't know.

And... sometimes stats and population level studies take a very long time or (more often) are never done at all and so if we only rely on this to tell us what to do, we'll miss a lot.

There are common sense ways to reduce cancer risk that have been obvious to and practiced by many people for a long time, before the studies showed that they were right. For example, all of the many new synthetic materials and chemicals that have been found to be carcinogens. I just assume any novel chemistry exposure is a risk, to eat it, drink it, touch it, breathe it. I can't and don't avoid all of it, but I can avoid a lot of it in terms of dose, compared to people who don't think about this at all.

I'm sure someone is thinking that job loss needs to be gradual enough that they can get technology to the point of having killer drones ready to take out any individual instantly, before any uprising threshold is crossed. If the abundance of drones keeps rising and surveillance continues toward "total", then we are headed toward this possibility.

Who wants to uprise if it means instant death for the uprisers and everyone they care about?

And if things move gradually enough we are like frogs in boiling water. Think about how if many of the things openly happening today were to happen 50-100 years ago how much resistance there would have been.

There are clinical tests for systemic inflammation. But there are also lots of potential causes of systemic inflammation, so testing for high inflammation consistently will tell you there's something wrong, but not what exactly is wrong or causing it.

It doesn't require credentials to identify obvious ways in which a given study or paper doesn't show the thing it is being claimed to show.

Technically extra virgin olive oil should not be refined.

I'm always a little dubious because of the financial incentive to cut unrefined oil with some amount of cheaper refined oil, but I don't have any idea how much this actually is done with olive oil.

The label usually won't say what the process was in my experience, but you can look into what processes are used for refined olive oil. Just avoid refined oil entirely. And if I see "olive oil" as an ingredient in something or at a not-high-quality restaurant, I'd assume it's refined.

There are tons of possible symptoms because systemic inflammation including from dietary causes basically damages the entire body. But here's a list of some common symptoms from one source:

persistent pain, chronic fatigue or insomnia, joint stiffness, skin problems, elevated blood markers (such as C-reactive protein), gastrointestinal issues (constipation, diarrhoea, acid reflux), depression, anxiety and mood disorders, unintended weight gain or loss, frequent colds or flu.

https://stories.uq.edu.au/research/2023/9-signs-you-have-inf...

For myself, when I eat processed food I mostly feel fatigue and low energy and gastrointestinal pain. But it's been extremely rare for me to eat these things in the last 10 years.

Most of the US population are systemically inflamed including from diet basically all the time, and most of the US population are suffering from several of the above symptoms chronically. (Not to claim that it's definitely or only because of food, but I'd bet it's a big part of it.)