171–180 of 226 posts
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The modern agriculture just means automating depleting natural aquifers and using up topsoil and abusing chemicals at massive scale. Its the agricultural equivalent of optimizing for next quarter, but losing out on next decade.
How would greenhouses use up top-soil?
One of the strangest feelings I've had is flying from Amsterdam to Johannesburg. It's a super long trip and so mentally I was expecting jet lag. But there was no time change. The season flipped but the time of day was right in sync with everyone back home in Budapest.
I traveled from San Francisco to Johannesburg. It was two flights, one to Berlin and then on to Johannesburg. The first flight gave us the usual jet lag going to Europe. The problem was our flight from Berlin to Johannesburg left in Berlin’s evening. It’s an 11 hour flight so the idea is that you sleep on the plane and arrive in the morning after 8 hours of sleep. But that only works if your body is already in GMT+1!…
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> The US can be seen as a single market, the same applies to China and India. Europe has the schengen area, the EU and the EEA. Africa needs similar initiatives. Yes, but you don't need much international cooperation to get a single market or visa free travel: individual countries can unilaterally declare free trade and open their borders. (And economic theory is in favour of that, too.)
You get an imbalance with free incoming trade but taxed/impaired outgoing trade. Perhaps a massively importing country can live with it if importers get better deals as a consequence. But otherwise bilateral arguments would be the long term viable approach.
Africa has 54 countries, thousands of languages and 1.2 billion people. As an African, whenever I see this map I'm more astonished by how densely populated Europe and India are, how big and populated China is and how homogeneous the US is compared to its size.
I'm always surprised to hear people say "The world is overpopulated" - I'm thinking there's plenty of room to grow in regions that live sustainably.
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I prefer the (related) Dymaxion approach myself, but I'll admit it's not quite as accessible.
I really like the Dymaxion projection as well, especially the fact that one can easily see that all major land masses are separated by only small distances of water. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map
Of similar interrupted style, I think butterfly projections are even better. They might distort land masses slightly more, but are immensely more readable. And they have very pretty symmetric outline.
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That really depends on where you draw the borders on Europe. The population density of the EU is 105 people per km2. Include some or all of Russia and things look rather different. Similarly, Finland is 8% of the EU’s land area but only has 16.3 people per km2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_European_U...
That has to be including all of Russia as part of "Eastern Europe" (indeed, if you drill down into the data, that's what's happening). When we're talking about geography, you can't include anything east of the Urals in the European subcontinent.
What impressed me most recently, was the size of Brazil. I flew from Montevideo to Madrid and around one third of the 12 hour flight you just fly over Brazil
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I’m not a fan of AuthaGraph at all. It has horrible distortion look at Brazil or Alaska - and it’s proprietary (creator never released the actual map details, so you can’t make your own...) The worst thing, in my eyes, is that the distortion is unpredictable. Looking at a map where Canada is too big, you can mentally imagine Canada as smaller. But you can’t mentally undo the multi-direction transformation of Alaska i…
If one really cares about accuracy, why not getting a globe.
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As the other commenter responded, I'm referring to the linguistic, socioeconomic and judicial homogeneity. Even though the US is culturally diverse, it still has a single currency, a single dominant language and a single jurisdiction (with minor state specific legal requirements). I only need one US visa to travel to all 52 states. A software company taking payments in the US has access to all 52 states. A peach cobb…
Everything you said is correct and makes a lot of sense with the exception of the number of states. There are 50 states in the US. Better luck next time DC and Puerto Rico.
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None of what you write makes any sense. Spain and Germany have hugely different history, completely different food, different weather, they speak two non-compatible languages sets (Romantic vs Germanic), they have different laws, different stores, different banks, anything. Texas and California speak the same language, have similar makeup of people, are similarly wealthy, they have the exact same stores, your bank ac…
Don't want to interrupt this nice discussion but the head topic was about Africa for once, and here we are talking about Europe and US again. Funny we can't switch even for a moment. I bet Africa sees a lot of this.