Because owning a motorcycle is a huge pain in the ass on account of motorcycles costing a decent amount of money, weighing 300lbs, going on the highway. If a $1000 ebike can only hit 40mph and weighs less than 100lbs, why not let people just buy them and ride them with a normal drivers' license?
Because e-bikes have effectively done regulatory arbitrage and the sky didn't fall. You want more people using small electric vehicles where before they would have used a car, you lower the burden to get one on the road.
How about the teachers who despite the comprehensive takedown in "Sold A Story" just love the "coziness" of the failing methods and promise to continue using those proven-to-fail methods of teaching reading? Or the ones sexually assaulting students?
In your work, do you exclusively work with people at your own skill level? Is that an effective way to become more skilled?
In this context, a cavity produces one part. A cavity can only produce, lets say, 200k parts. If you produce 400k parts, you only need a single mold, but you've only used 25k wear on each cavity, but you paid more for the mold instead of only 2 of the cheaper single-cavity molds.
Congress has merely secured the financial pool; the decision on whether and how the money will be spent ultimately lies with the Secretary of War (Defense).
This is such a cunningly disingenuous portrayal though when you're just leaving it at that, the US has provided billions in aid already and allocated hundreds of million more for this year. Yet the counter argument here is to just ignore all of that and pretend like they've gotten zero through omission of all the times they haven't, while relying on a totally uncited assertion that none of this year's allocation has been spent.
Sure but the question is are they helping the U.S. that helped them. It's pretty clear that the Trump administration is a completely different beast than typical US administration. Look at things like its pro offensive war stance (see unofficial name change of DoD) or that it does not support Ukraine (see lack of funding/intelligence since Trump). Maybe Ukraine will think it's supporting the Americans that helped them and hurting the Americans that are pro or compromised by Russia by withholding aid and letting Trump wallow in what he's reaped.
I'll add that trump has made clear that U.S. administrations are not beholden to previous international policy decisions and so unless congress reins in the executive or trustworthy actors hold the mantle again other nations should treat the US with short term policy decisions in mind and not rely on long term reciprocation.
My understanding is that cellophane generally does biodegrade in most settings. Polylactic acid (those cornstarch-derived bags) mostly biodegrades in hot enough compost or (after several years) in ambient-temperature soil, but not very well in cooler water (One study: "The half-life period of degradation [of polylactic acid in artificial seawater] is 12 [days at 90° C] or 468 days [at 60° C]").
Those temperatures are certainly hard to find in nature, outside of hot springs! Even if this is an error and we are talking about 90°F/60°F, the higher temperature is pretty much constrained to the tropics, so we're talking a year+ to degrade in real conditions. It is better than centuries, but not exactly rapid?
Yeah, I imagine it's considerably slower at ambient ocean temperature. Don't throw your PLA bags in the ocean or a river. Here's a different paper:
> For example, PLA is not biodegradable in freshwater and seawater at low temperatures [32,36–39]. There are two primary reasons for this: (i) The hydrophobic nature of PLA, which does not easily absorb water [40–42]. In aqueous environments, the lack of hydrophilicity diminishes the hydrolysis process, which is crucial for the initial breakdown of PLA into smaller, more degradable fragments. (ii) Resistance to enzymatic attack; the enzymes that degrade PLA are not prevalent or active under typical freshwater and seawater conditions [39,43,44]. The microbial communities in these environments may not produce the necessary enzymes in sufficient quantities or at the required activity levels to effectively breakdown PLA. Additionally, the relatively stable and crystalline domains of PLA can further resist enzymatic degradation.
Also:
> It should be emphasized that neat PLA cannot be classified as a completely biodegradable polymer, as it generates microplastics (MPs) during biodegradation.
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