- land meats were all but banned in Japan for centuries prior to Perry's ultimatum, encouraging the development of alternatives in flavor and nutrition like natto and katsuobushi

- geographically, Japan had less access to land crops (even wheat was not common!) and more access to fish and seaweed than Korea

A pumped-storage dam also doesn't increase the area subject to flooding. If the upper dam fails, it flows into the lower lake. This can potentially be a design consideration. It's not like a greenfield hydropower dam.

If you want to play the rare catastrophic risk card, battery fires can release highly toxic hydrogen fluoride. But the damage of climate change is far greater than the very small risk from either dams or batteries, which is preventable in both cases with proper maintenance and monitoring. I think the tail risk question is moot, honestly.

I'm a little bit sad that pumped hydro doesn't get more attention in the discussion. It might be too late for it to matter, with improvements in battery prices and ongoing lithium discoveries. But that only underscores the fact that it should have been allowed to matter twenty years ago. Utilities have slow-walked solar all around the world because of concerns about the grid stability, which has been well within the reach of pumped hydropower to fix since many years ago. In fact major pumped hydropower projects were mostly carried out in the United States during the nuclear power optimism era.

It is a little destructive to construct pumped hydro reservoirs. But it generally isn't as damaging as a conventional hydroelectric dam. The reason lies in the source of the water. In a conventional dam, you need a lot of water flowing in from up high, so you dam a major river near its lower cataracts. This disrupts the migration of fish and animals along the river and impacts the whole ecosystem of the rather large drainage basin upstream, and disrupts the migration of fish. But when a closed-loop pumped storage reservoir is created above an existing lake, usually a much less important stream is selected. Its immediate valley is still inundated, but the area of effect is much less. It does tend to prolong the use of the existing dam, but we are already preserving basically all existing dams.

It might still be appropriate in some places where imports are less affordable like Latin America or it might appeal to protectionists in the West. In general, hydro is usually cheap.

The best measure to reduce homelessness is to provide timely support for people who are being evicted from their homes before they lose their jobs (which they might still have) and before their mental health deteriorates. This is the point at which assistance is most effective. You have heard the saying, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure". Such programs have been applied to great effect in e.g. London.

The way to respond to people who have experienced chronic homelessness with complications is different and more difficult.

Tangent, I know, but the climate change horizon is very long, much longer than 50 years. For example, a common projection is that the sea level will rise by almost one meter by 2100. This is already an unpleasant forecast. But it will continue to rise: under a 2 C warming scenario, sea levels reach (median prediction) 2.7 meters above the 2000 levels in 2300, which would be catastrophic. 2300 may seem far away, but it will come.

The current estimate is that we need to eliminate emissions this century and we will thereafter still need to do mitigation and removal to undo the damage, or extant coastal settlements will be destroyed. It is a very long process. See e.g.:

https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate1584

But those kings were (legally) absolute monarchs, while Venice was (somewhat) a republic. This isn't a trivial distinction. The young kings of the various Carolignian successors also tended to inherit their titles when their fathers were killed, while Venice occupied a highly defensible geographic location (a swamp) which supported institutional continuity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_in...

Venezuela is an unusual case because their economy has been a disaster for the last half decade. And I agree that the data aren't so straightforward.

There is a hidden upside to all this hydro: it could potentially be upgraded to pumped storage and support a massive expansion of solar and wind. However, no SA country has such a forward-looking energy policy.

If someone is willing and able to pay, they have a source of money. If they aren't allowed to buy something, that control should be applied at the level where they get the money. If the child is using an adult's credit card, responsibility lies with the adult. If children need to have their own credit cards, the obvious point of control is the credit card itself.

But also, most porn is ad-supported, pirated or free. Directly paid content is a small fraction. So all of this is moot for porn.

I agree with this in principle but have to point out a few flaws in practice.

First, the immediate product of fermentation is not methane, despite what your high school biology teacher told you. It's hydrogen. In fact, bacteria do not produce methane at all! Only archaea are capable of methanogenesis. This is a rather surprising fact nobody mentioned in school:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanogenesis

>Organisms capable of producing methane for energy conservation have been identified only from the domain Archaea, a group phylogenetically distinct from both eukaryotes and bacteria, although many live in close association with anaerobic bacteria.

So there is some room for error here. When methanogenesis occurs, the volume of gas is reduced by 80%:

4 H2 + CO2 >> CH4 + 2 H2O (l)

But I have never seen any evidence that the amount of archaea or the extent of methanogenesis in the digestive tract varies with diet. However, it does change under certain circumstances, and more methane in enteric gas is generally correlated with less hydrogen:

https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/bmfh/45/1/45_2025-044/_...

>However, methane gas production was not changed by dietary intake, suggesting that intervention with prebiotics may be necessary.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1752-7155/7/2/024...

>Usually patients produce either hydrogen or methane, and only rarely there are significant co-producers, as typically the methane is produced at the expense of hydrogen by microbial conversion of carbon dioxide. Various studies show that methanogens occur in about a third of all adult humans

(The second study is less optimistic than I am about methanogens reducing intestinal discomfort.)

But there is another thing that can change the amount of noticeable farting: unnoticeable farting. The digestive tract has its own nervous subsystem which reacts to stimuli and processes information. It's plausible that if you produce a lot of gas for a long time, your digestive tract learns to let it out gently. This may reduce irritation of the epithelium.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotka%E2%80%93Volterra_equatio...