Sadly, there are plenty housing plans where the developers didn't bother to plant that even those lone trees. They're all easy targets for mass tree planting, and with people actually living on and tending to the property, the survival rate for the new trees go way up compared to planting massive numbers of saplings en masse.
What's kind of surreal is that people aren't doing already planting them on their own. Even if we completely ignore any potential long-term climate benefits from urban/suburban trees, planting trees around your house is basically just a big bundle of benefits with some relatively minor maintenance costs (dealing with leaves if you so choose, pruning, etc.). They increase property values and personal satisfaction, provide shade that makes activities outside more pleasant and can decrease your HVAC bills by shading your house, help control water runoff, decrease urban heat island effects[0], and more.
Street trees (closely lining the street) are even better because they can serve as traffic calming measures. When big tree branches overhang a road, they force drivers to slow down and pay more attention to their surroundings while simultaneously reducing driver frustration.[1] There's also growing evidence showing improvements to pedestrian safety.[2] Stick a sidewalk on the other side of the trees, and besides being more pleasant to walk under, those same trees will do a great job of shielding pedestrians from any errant automobiles.
Beyond that, street trees can decrease noise and increase the aesthetic quality of a neighborhood. If you look at old historic housing areas in cities and towns across North America that were built before the rise of the automobile, you'll generally find lots of mature trees that contribute to the "charming " atmosphere (or whatever adjective people want to use to describe them).
At least seven or eight of my parents' neighbors have cut down their mature trees in recent years (most being least 25+ years old). I'll give them every benefit of the doubt and assume that there was a problem with the trees (disease or severe damage, etc.) even if I couldn't notice anything from afar, but I every time I go past those houses now, I so desperately want to ask: "ok fine, maybe it had to go but why the fuck aren't you replacing that tree?" Do people honestly think it looks better? Do they like mowing the grass under the hot sun without a tree in sight to give them even a modicum of shade? Those parts of the neighborhood now clearly look like something is missing.
> ... I cannot imagine my mom going through anything like this, so for her the media landscape has gotten only worse.
I setup a Jellyfin server for my parents. It works, but ripping blu-rays--even with my efforts to largely automate and simplify things--is a nuisance they tend not to bother with. You can expect some phone calls and/or stacks of discs that were "forgotten" when you're around :).
Even then, it's still a more pleasant experience for them than the fragmented mess streaming has become, where added friction and annoyance are the glue that hold streaming apps together. IMO, setting up your own server is worth the occasional added hassle. Not that it eliminates streaming, sadly.
Now, if you're willing to spend a large sum of money to make the process painless, Kaleidescape[0] makes home media servers for the ultra high-end home theater/home AV market. They originally sold massive 300 Blu-ray disc changers you'd hook up to their system, adding more as your collection grew, but now you buy servers from them and download movies with with Blu-Ray-level bitrates from their store.
Of course, the same ~$300-500/TB for just the servers alone will buy you a hell of a lot of tech support for a Plex/Jellyfin setup.
> - if applicable, swap the default, white Bowden tube by one that's heat resistant (Capricorn comes often as a recommendation), that's for your health
Capricorn makes great bowden tubes, but even they're quite explicit about the risks of using any PTFE tubing--theirs included--inside a hot end at ABS temperatures.[0]
The health risks come from toxic PTFE off-gassing above the normal temperatures for PLA (though it starts off-gassing in small amounts at around 200°C). It's nasty shit, and you don't want to be breathing it in. Heat resistant bowden tubing doesn't do anything about that off-gassing; it's just meant to help mitigate deformation of the tubing at higher temperatures.
You're infinitely better off just tossing the PTFE-lined hot end and upgrading to an all-metal one. That anyone--cough, cough Creality and others in the inexpensive intro printer market--is shipping them on any of their printers in 2023 is just insane.
I think it is less of a problem than it used to be, but historically PTFE-lined hot ends have been prefered for budget machines because they are more forgiving if all you want to do is print PLA.
When everything is working right there should be no difference, but when things go wrong, not having plastic stuck to the heat break makes it more likely that a beginner can fix their own problem.
We're talking a few dollars per unit for the various capacitive buttons, if that. Steering wheel controls already connect over CAN bus so it's not like you're saving a great length of wire, for example. They still connect to controllers, etc. Even tiny savings add up, but the cost of non-capacitive buttons is something they could recoup with almost zero effort.
Instead, it's almost certainly a design choice: they're easier to design around and 'feel' futuristic. Or that's what the designers and marketers think, anyhow.
The bigger cost-savings are in the touchscreen infotainment systems, where they get to eliminate the physical cost of a ton of buttons while simplifying manufacturing and parts inventory (no having to deal with a bunch of different trim parts to accommodate buttons for various options, etc.). That's probably the biggest reason why consumer pushback against touchscreens has taken so damn long to barely start having an effect.
There's nothing wrong with MDF for certain applications. You just have to recognize the tradeoffs and how they affect the piece. Anyhow, to answer your question, there are different grades and qualities of MDF. If you go to a local plywood supplier, you'll find they tend to source higher-quality MDF than you'll get at a home improvement store like Home Depot. The same goes for plywood and even the small selection of hardwoods home improvement stores carry. If you can find a wholesaler who doesn't have minimum order sizes, it can even be less expensive. Just don't expect them to break the sheets down to fit in a car.
High quality MDF tends to be denser, has a more consistent surface quality, and the composition of the wood fibers tends to be finer and more consistently distributed throughout the board. You'll get finer quality cuts (though 99% of the time, you'll want to edge band the MDF anyhow), for example. That said, you don't really go and get a stock list ordered by MDF density (beyond normal and lightweight MDF, anyhow). It's more just a characteristic of the better quality MDF, with relatively minor density differences between brands/product lines.
The bigger benefit is that they're much more likely to stock certified low and no-added-formaldehyde MDF, which make a big difference in formaldehyde off-gassing. Some people are more sensitive to it than others, and the last thing you want is for a beautifully veneered furniture piece to have to be returned because it's irritating the hell out of someone's eyes and nose.
It's a small tower, but I'd think it'd probably still weighs a couple thousand pounds. I could be way off there and it's smaller than it looks in the CNN photo, but you're likely looking at using a construction helicopter and needing experienced people capable of rigging the tower and actually lifting it without killing everybody.
My guess is that they just dropped it and chopped it up. A helicopter seems ridiculously over-the-top and cartoonish for a couple hundred bucks in scrap metal value you'd gain from the theft. You'd waste more than that in just fuel for the helicopter.
Plus it would have to be a $100M military super stealth chopper to do a theft in the night, and would probably also have to be operated by that same military to force all the air traffic infrastructure to look the other way and see nothing.
I think we have our answer. Obviously that station was spreading the wrong ideas to the public, and now they are not.
Why would it have to be stealthy? Even if they did it in broad daylight, announcing their presence with a loudspeaker, "We are taking this tower." Would I, a random bystander care? For all I know, they were contracted by the owner.
As long as the ADS-B transponder is on, yeah. I'm guessing if you're about to do a short flight to hijack a radio tower, you might want to turn that off.
Considering the fact that the commenter's father lost or wasted all of it, he'd have probably been better had it sat in a checking account for the intervening years. Or under a mattress in wadded up dollar bills. Even if you're completely clueless about investing and you just walk into your bank and ask to talk to someone about what to do with it, you'd still come out ahead even if they push you towards mutual funds with excessive fees. Pretty much anything would have been better.
I'm not a parent, but I have trouble imagining how I'd ever feel comfortable directly managing my (hypothetical) kid's earnings like that. It just seems like, no matter what you do, you're creating a dynamic that could undermine or outright destroy your relationship. Especially if some of those investments go poorly.
I was raised to believe that the entire reason I existed was to take care of my parents. Pops really didn't have a division between "his property" and "my property."
One of the last things he did was sell me the land I'd built my house on. With a personal loan from one of his banker buddies with a 25% APR.
Should we just lock prisoners up for life? Or perhaps we should skip that and murder them behind the courthouse after they've been convicted, saving some taxpayer dollars in the process?
Neither is a practical or morally justifiable answer, of course. Other than cases where defendants are sentenced to life without parole, most of the people incarcerated in the United States will eventually be released from prison (whether it be through parole or because their sentence has been completed).
A purely punitive prison system does nothing to prepare prisoners for their eventual release back into society. Which, again, will happen for most prisoners. Even setting aside the moral questions with that approach, you merely increase the odds of re-offending. How is that better for society?
I could see Tesla flagging videos containing nudity to exclude them from their normal analyses/processes, but if you don't restrict access or just delete the videos outright, all you've done is make it easier to find the videos in question.
What's kind of surreal is that people aren't doing already planting them on their own. Even if we completely ignore any potential long-term climate benefits from urban/suburban trees, planting trees around your house is basically just a big bundle of benefits with some relatively minor maintenance costs (dealing with leaves if you so choose, pruning, etc.). They increase property values and personal satisfaction, provide shade that makes activities outside more pleasant and can decrease your HVAC bills by shading your house, help control water runoff, decrease urban heat island effects[0], and more.
Street trees (closely lining the street) are even better because they can serve as traffic calming measures. When big tree branches overhang a road, they force drivers to slow down and pay more attention to their surroundings while simultaneously reducing driver frustration.[1] There's also growing evidence showing improvements to pedestrian safety.[2] Stick a sidewalk on the other side of the trees, and besides being more pleasant to walk under, those same trees will do a great job of shielding pedestrians from any errant automobiles.
Beyond that, street trees can decrease noise and increase the aesthetic quality of a neighborhood. If you look at old historic housing areas in cities and towns across North America that were built before the rise of the automobile, you'll generally find lots of mature trees that contribute to the "charming " atmosphere (or whatever adjective people want to use to describe them).
At least seven or eight of my parents' neighbors have cut down their mature trees in recent years (most being least 25+ years old). I'll give them every benefit of the doubt and assume that there was a problem with the trees (disease or severe damage, etc.) even if I couldn't notice anything from afar, but I every time I go past those houses now, I so desperately want to ask: "ok fine, maybe it had to go but why the fuck aren't you replacing that tree?" Do people honestly think it looks better? Do they like mowing the grass under the hot sun without a tree in sight to give them even a modicum of shade? Those parts of the neighborhood now clearly look like something is missing.
0. https://www.epa.gov/heatislands/using-trees-and-vegetation-r...
1. https://depts.washington.edu/hhwb/Thm_SafeStreets.html
2. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00014...