And yet somehow it is still cheaper to fly than to take the train.

If praying worked we would know by now.

The 1970s is pretty recent in evolutionary terms! It was just a way to say that these birds are beautiful and fun but they’re also an invasive species.

Feral population descended from escaped pets.

Here nobody pays any attention to them, basically they’re pigeons but greener and LOUDER. I believe they were eating trash. Alas.

An urban car park far from South America.

An unusually clear explanatory article. This problem needs fixing. As a layperson it looks to me like the “discussion” mentioned needs to crystallize into a proper meeting of all stakeholders so as to get a binding decision about how to fix it.

Veo intends to charge Denver residents $0.25 per minute to rent their vehicles, compared to the current $0.44 per minute charged by Lime and Bird. Users will still pay the same $1 unlocking fee.

Damn. You Yanks must be really rolling in it.

Not mentioned in this fluffy article is that the buses will have been acquired (possibly using loans) from China and were made possible by the massive investments in green tech that only China is bothering to do. Meanwhile, off the coast of Senegal, Chinese industrial fishing boats are pillaging the seas and depriving local fisherfolk of their livelihood. So it’s a mixed bag, but the electrification of the world’s urban transit is a massive deal and China deserves credit for this.

Since I owned and used it for a year or two, yes, I did probably know one or two things about it. Better just to make your point if you have one to make.

I bought one way back in 2015. A BQ Aquaris E5, quite decent hardware, factory-installed with Ubuntu Touch. It was an absolute disaster: buggy as hell, even the most basic native apps (SMS etc) hardly worked. Obviously no way to run Android apps. Somehow I made it work for about 3 months before giving up and flashing a CyanogenMod ROM.

There was one silver lining. At one point during those 3 months I managed to lose the phone in a (completely anonymous) taxi. The interface was obviously so weird and crappy that the taxi driver actually replied to my SMS and returned the thing to me.

Any decade now it will be ready!

Unintentional ambiguous image? The rock is a turban, the bottom ankle is a chin.

Even in broad daylight I would have completely missed this owl.

Fair points. My other arguments stand.

First, why jump straight to insulting accusations of bad faith? Why not just be civil and respond politely to the argument made? i.e. as you did in the 3rd sentence of your post.

The web, by definition, is open source (PS: notwithstanding Wasm and unreadable minification). That is not the case of the vast majority of mobile apps. We have few means of checking what they’re up to besides traffic analysis and trusting their creators. Apps can use lower-level device APIs than web apps and they frequently demand access to them without justification. Apps are distributed by app stores, which are under the thumb of the corporate mobile OSs. They are currently turning the screws using threats of device attestation, putting the future of the open app store F-Droid in doubt.

There are reasons that tech giants and developers alike are constantly pushing us to use apps and not the web. Disappointed (not to mention surprised) to see that some members of this forum seem to be with them.

Well done for being honest and don’t be discouraged by the (predictable) hate and scorn you’re getting for your efforts. Ahh, social media! If you had said all this in person to them, these same people would be pushing back with civility and human decency, but with the barrier of a screen they feel empowered to shout and mock. We still haven’t learned.

Looks great. I don’t know why he’s playing dumb about the quirky product description. It’s obviously just auto-translated from Chinese, like with pretty much any manufactured product these days.

Personally I’m bothered by this talk of “empathy”. To me, animal welfare is an entirely different subject from biodiversity. And obviously it begs the question: what about empathy for the out-competed native creatures? Empathy can be dangerous here, IMO. For example, feral cats are a major hazard to biodiversity (not to mention their prey). This is an invasion case that is eminently solvable. Except it turns out there are a lot of humans with outsized empathy towards pussycats (see: New Zealand).

You’re within your rights to dismiss my points because I refuse to read the article, but I’m certain I’ve heard all these arguments before (including as you just outlined). Basically it’s a calque of the culture war onto science. I’d bet money the word “racist” is in it somewhere, or at least immigration. If the author is suggesting concrete ways to preserve biodiversity, then great. If it’s just to wage politics by another means (again: “prejudice”, “nativist dogma”), I’ll pass.

To be clear (and not having read the article because I know the argument already): the problem with anthropogenic species invasions is they reduce biodiversity in the short to medium term. Yes, sure, “life finds a way”, and on the 100m-year horizon everything will have recovered (perhaps on a different trajectory). But not in a timespan relevant to us. And a biosphere with less diversity is going to make things less pleasant and much harder for us, possibly quite badly and quite soon.

The article presumably recommends a more targeted and effective approach to conserving biodiversity. Fair enough if so, but words like “prejudice”, “nativist” and “dogma” are not encouraging me (personally) to give it a full hearing.

PS: if the added quotes are representative, and the author did not in fact go full “antiracist” on a topic of science, then credit for that at least. Clearly there are many cases where it makes little sense to push back against a fait accompli (Burmese pythons, cane toads, etc). But in other cases the “native” argument which so triggers the author might prove to be a useful lever for mobilizing useful action.

PPS: upvoted anyway, in the name of debate! Keep 'em coming.

People will bang on about it being a water displacer. Know what else displaces water? Oil. Grease. Pretty much anything else that doesn’t mix with water.

Glad to see I’m not going mad. “Water displacer”? Any oil is a water displacer duh.

As for being a degreaser, like dissolves like. Non-polar chemicals like oil and grease are generally miscible in other non-polar substances, so a lighter oil will help to thin out thicker grease so that they’re easier to clean away.

This was my hypothesis but you put it in impressively fancy terms so it must be right.

The stuff about other solvents makes sense too. Really helpful feedback, thanks.