Imagine the power of combining this tosser initiative with the revenue sharing aspect of New York’s vehicle idling program. Save the planet and get paid all at the same time.

I’m not sure the builder profits much more by using engineered timber given its expense compared to concrete. Given the environmental cost of building with concrete, it’s important to find alternative materials.

Even in your anecdote, it’s not as though the addition of a single floor was the cause of the fire, just like the material type wasn’t. It’s much easier for an incomplete building to go up in flames than a completed and occupied one.

Technology isn’t always a solution, but it’s not like pressurized stairwells, automatic hallway segmentation, or even sprinkler systems are things of science fiction. These are all pretty established techniques of fire control.

In terms of prevention, given the number one cause of fires in homes and buildings is in the kitchen, the easiest solution is opting out of the methane infrastructure in new projects. Though there’s a rather large industry that pushes for this practice to continue, so that’s a difficult thing to do.

Also, to bring it back to the topic relevant to this post, I’m not advocating to make escape harder in a burning building by eliminating stairwells. My point is precisely what’s in the content of the post - single stairwell buildings in other areas don’t have people on the upper floors dying hand over foot because they had to descend an extra flight or two.

If it was harder, I’m sure we would have heard about the trend of every building seven levels and up having dead bodies pile up in the stairwell after someone tried to flambé a quail.

While it isn’t clinical, I think the practice of building beyond a few levels with a single egress point in so many other countries is sufficient enough evidence to justify changing this building standard.

The multiple references to ‘fire safety organizations’ read to me like ‘fire departments’. Fire departments across North America already dictate what our roads (and therefore cities) look like. Seems like a logical leap they would also impose control over the corridors within buildings too.

I was only meaning that 1% chance bit in reference to someone that had chosen to donate their body to science.

I am for opt out instead of opt in, but making it mandatory would be a step too far. At the same time I find the two opinions of ‘my body my choice’ and ‘after death you cease to exist’ to be a bit counter posed.

I would instead suggest what already occurs in today’s reality: write your wishes down, and hope your wishes are followed by your descendants, or your family, or your executor, or your attorney.

Unfortunately for anyone’s wishes, that’s all they are - wishes. Unless one go to rather significant lengths to erect checks and balances to the following of your desires, whichever individual remains after our demise can simply do away with whatever they please and have an auction to the rich for extra parts while taking sponsorships from big oil.

I wish I could live in that timeline where all morgue attendants got a page when the world’s 1% needs a good looking kidney hahaha.

In fairness, pretty much any subject will have some negatives that could be pointed to and touted as an excuse for not doing something.

If there’s even a 1% chance of your body being properly useful to science in some way, and therefore humanity at large, it’s worth the odds.

Though I’d bet good money that the amount of mutilation and whatnot isn’t particularly common for science bound bodies. Much easier to steal some organs from the morgue bodies marked for non collection.

Yes, I’m rather disappointed in the ‘better of two options’ that was chosen. I just wish we could get away from first passed the post. Maybe one day.

I’m glad to hear this. Yet another reason to relocate.

Yes I suppose, just like anything, a nuance here would be whether or not we expect a person of such political authority to be able to have weekends at all.

On one hand, they’re still a person working a job and no one should be working 365 days a year On the other, the societal cost, in terms of income tax covering travel and security costs, of having a President that travels every weekend is a bit much.

If the President was only golfing on the weekends, and wasn’t charging the government to golf at his own clubs, then this whole thing of him taking leisure every weekend would be a harder thing to argue against without getting into that whole administration work life balance discussion.

Despite the name, it’s nice this isn’t a physical pass that some people will never hear about and still end up paying full pop at these places. Everyone that’s eligible will benefit. That’s great.

But won’t always be if we aren’t vigilant.

The study also shows a noticeable if difficult to measure reduction in number of entangled animals which is great.

When I was young, the grocers tossed the cardboard boxes from deliveries up by the registers for people to use. These days, I have to ask a worker for one as they’re restocking. This practice should return. It would reduce more waste than replacing single use bags with another plastic based bag alternative.

Not for nothing, but the headline of the article is talking about time spent golfing, and so is neon_nova’s comment.

The thing the President did isn’t the problem, or really even the frequency. The problem is the cost to the taxpayer.

‘20,000 American’s pay for President’s golf habit’ would be a better title.

Eight days so far during ‘work week’ time. If he was going on his own dime, this wouldn’t be worth talking about.

It just makes a better talking point to say ‘he’s golfed 37 days out of 152’ despite it not being about how he’s using his weekends (assuming we hold government to the same 5 on 2 off standard as most of us have) when it’s really about how much it’s costing.

A better headline would be ‘President spends income tax of 20,000 Americans on personal entertainment’.

How I wish AI wasn’t such a catch all buzzword.

Oddly enough, last year I used dish soap in the laundry for a few months without noticing, and nothing like this happened. I was surprised when I looked it up and saw this kind of thing as a common occurrence. Couldn’t believe I had picked up this container each weekend for months without noticing the picture of plates and glasses on the front.

I understand now these soaps are quite different from one another and the fact nothing happened to me is a fluke, so definitely don’t do this on purpose.

The saxophone battle that unfurled on the New York City subway ten years ago comes to mind.

Sounds like a supply problem with copper. I read a couple weeks ago about some progress with salt based batteries. Progress is being made on that front. Progress that would be exponentially faster if the manufacturer’s wanted to.

Regardless of the materials issue, the industry could adapt. There’s oodles of money to make significant change, and of course they would if they had to in order to continue making money at all. Just like any industry that experiences challenges. Fracking was once considered far too expensive. Then they figured out how to guide drills beneath the surface and what do you know, now it’s mainstream.

Ideally, if this were to occur, the industry would realize what you’ve pointed out and simply reboot all the small hatchbacks and wagons they used to make, as a method of stretching the amount of minerals we have over a longer period of time.

Blue sky thinking but maybe the governments of the world would realize the mineral issue, and instead of allowing 100 million cars to be manufactured each year, they took those minerals and created a transportation network with them that would render personal vehicles irrelevant.

I don’t see that happening in my lifetime though.

The weight is certainly a large factor in the crumbling of infrastructure. A bridge made 50 years ago was engineered based on traffic loads they extrapolated at the time. In the 1980’s, there were around 100 million vehicles across the United States. Today, that number has nearly tripled.

Combine a tripling of the number of vehicles with the increasing average weight - sedan or not - and that’s a much larger number than a lot of infrastructure was designed to handle. As a result, roads and bridges are degrading faster and faster.

This is a primary factor in the push to get people into smaller vehicles, which weigh less. As FireRetardant pointed out, CAFE makes this difficult as manufacturers are heavily incentivized to make these longer wheelbase vehicles. Which, surprise surprise, weigh more.