Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well that was a wikipedia link that felt ill to read. Assuming accuracy my apologies for the doubt.
No problem, it does sound like fiction.
Dystopian fiction.
Chinese paddlefish, one of the world's largest fish, declared extinct
191–200 of 212 posts
Re: Chinese paddlefish, one of the world's largest fish, declared extinct
#192I recall visiting the Yangtze river by boat tour around 1997. This was before the dam was built and the place was beautiful. Imagine the grand canyon but it was covered with lush vegetation. We visited a center where there were models of the three gorges dam would soon to be built. On the tour they said we would be the last tourists to see the Yangtze as it stands, after the dam, many landmarks/settlements would be f…
Fun fact, the Three Gorges Dam generates about 112 TWh per year of electricity, which is almost exactly the power consumption of Bitcoin.
Interesting fact. Also all convos lead to bitcoin at some point these days...
Re: Chinese paddlefish, one of the world's largest fish, declared extinct
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
(I'm not American so don't really have a horse to grind or axe in this race, but) why would an American working in manufacturing want American manufacturing to decline? Or do I misunderstand?
Somewhere in this chain, someone was being sarcastic.
Specifically, not all manufacturing processes have moved to China as I understand it, just the ones that tend to be made more problemmatic due to labor cost/environmental controls as far as I'm aware. I'm a bit out of date on my scratching the surface of that industry, but my understanding was things like NAFTA and regulatory requirements tend to lead to an absolute minimum level of parts (I'm bundling in resource extraction and processing into fabrication, which technically, I shouldn't be, that's supply chain management from the manufacturer's perspective) fabrication being done in the U.S., with the main focus being final assembly (read: relatively unskilled or labor conducive to being automated). The rest below a particular fraction needed to claim "made in USA", and thus avoiding some sort of import duty liability or some such. Some places like Boeing make sweetheart deals with suppliers internationally to gain political capital and better treatment incentivewise; other places just run after the cheapest source they can get away with (without robust attention paid to QC from the horror stories I've heard).
There's a bit of an inflection point, because some fabrication/production has proved problemmatic beimg outsourced. For instance, turbine blades for jet engine manufacturing fabricated from certain lots of Chinese steel have had failure traced back to elevated sulfur levels in the atmosphere in China that weren't accomodated for in the original planning. That's just one example I know of.
Take this with a grain of salt. It's a hobby of mine, not my primary day-to-day, so if I'm talking out my rear, I'd love to be corrected by someone inside the industry. I'm a logistics nerd deep down, so I love drinking in these types of arcane quirks of reality vs. in theory.
Re: Chinese paddlefish, one of the world's largest fish, declared extinct
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fun fact, the Three Gorges Dam generates about 112 TWh per year of electricity, which is almost exactly the power consumption of Bitcoin.
Which doesn't matter at all: it's not like the dam wouldn't have been built if there was no Bitcoin, so the implied causal connection is extremely tenuous. Especially since the Three Gorges Dam predates Bitcoin by 2 or 3 decades.
It shows the magnitude of damage that can be caused by generating the amount of electricity used by it.
Re: Chinese paddlefish, one of the world's largest fish, declared extinct
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
Peter Hessler writes about his experience in Sichuan during the time the three gorges dam was being built [1]. Many people have had to sacrifice a lot for these dams. However, IIRC many receive some form of compensation from the government (adequate or not). [1] https://www.amazon.com/River-Town-Years-Yangtze-P-S/dp/00608...
The dam you and he mentioned is Three Gorges Dam built from 1994 to 2003. And the dam in this article, which may related with the extinction of the Chinese paddlefish, is Gezhouba Dam. It was built from 1970 to 1988.
Yes these are separate dams. However, they both have similar effects - flooding of large areas, relocation of people, extinction of species / loss of historical artifacts.
Re: Chinese paddlefish, one of the world's largest fish, declared extinct
#196I didn't see it mentioned, but the whale shark is even larger. One whale shark was found to be 62 feet long.
(Yes, I know: "one of the world's largest")
Re: Chinese paddlefish, one of the world's largest fish, declared extinct
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Execution_van PRC does not deny they exist, nor denies that organs are harvested after. There are pictures of them online, and notable cases where it was the officially recorded method of execution.
Oh wow, there's been heavy editing of that page since I last saw it. All references to the US's lethal injection vans removed for not being "relevant to the article".
Probably the fact that organ harvesting of executees was done in other countries too. But yes, Wikipedia as time goes on is not the best source for politically contentious content.
I used to not really notice it because I actually agreed with the ideological slant of Wikipedia, but contact with other, non-English Wikipedias has seriously forced me to reconsider and now I don't trust any Wikipedia on politically charged content.
Re: Chinese paddlefish, one of the world's largest fish, declared extinct
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Execution_van PRC does not deny they exist, nor denies that organs are harvested after. There are pictures of them online, and notable cases where it was the officially recorded method of execution.
Well that was a wikipedia link that felt ill to read. Assuming accuracy my apologies for the doubt.
I'm going to make you feel a bit more ill - contrary to the intro of the article, the PRC did not actually invent the mobile lethal injection van in 1997.
The first ever mobile lethal injection van was actually, as far I know, from Delaware in 1986 : http://www.doc.delaware.gov/deathrow/history.shtml [1]
Beyond lethal injection vans, around a half dozen countries also employed gas chamber vans, with the first known example being in Nazi Germany.
[1] For some reason Wikipedians came to a consensus that only Chinese execution vans should be mentioned in the article titled "Execution vans".
Re: Chinese paddlefish, one of the world's largest fish, declared extinct
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh wow, there's been heavy editing of that page since I last saw it. All references to the US's lethal injection vans removed for not being "relevant to the article".
Probably the fact that organ harvesting of executees was done in other countries too. But yes, Wikipedia as time goes on is not the best source for politically contentious content. I used to not really notice it because I actually agreed with the ideological slant of Wikipedia, but contact with other, non-English Wikipedias has seriously forced me to reconsider and now I don't trust any Wikipedia on politically charg…
Nah, it was that we in the US had lethal injection vans for a while for a lot of the same reasons as China. We transitioned to lethal injection because it was seen as more humane than hanging or firing squad, but our more rural jurisdictions didn't have the resources to retrofit their prisons on the time table that politics required, so instead would share "mobile lethal injection facilities" starting in the 80s.
And yeah, in my mind Wikipedia has fallen from what it promised to be originally. It's so easy to slant the tone of an article by careful deletion; it's an assymetric battle against free exchange of information.
Re: Chinese paddlefish, one of the world's largest fish, declared extinct
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fishing is highly...and I do mean highly regulated in Montana (spawning grounds). http://fieldguide.mt.gov/speciesDetail.aspx?elcode=AFCAB0101... There are wildlife biologists that harvest the eggs and process the meat for you. You must apply for tags and the season can be shutdown if a limit is reached before the end of the season. I fished it once and was glad I didn't catch anything. My heart wasn't in it after I…
This is going to come off much snarkier than I mean it, but were rice and beans not available in Montana at that time? I am a big fan of seafood but there is a lot of "quality protein" middle ground between meat and mac and cheese.
:). Yeah there were. "Mac and cheese" is a fillin for ramen, rice, beans, ketchup and tortillas, and whatever leftovers I could scrounge from friends and take home from washing dishes in the cafeteria.