Zero roadkill as Amazon canopy bridges secure 15,000 crossings

I'd actually say climate/environmental news has had an optimism bias because there was a strong strain of thinking reporting on how dreadful certain things are would cause people to give up. I'd say Mongabay is mostly focused on solutions but does not shy away from covering environmental injustices.

If you want something more hopeful, it's hard to suggest news in general, but I really like Shareable's focus on community solutions https://www.shareable.net/stories/

And I also enjoy updates from certain orgs that are actually doing projects:

- Andrew Millison taught permaculture at Oregon State and then worked for the United Nations. His channel is an incredible gallery of amazing climate solutions around the world: https://www.youtube.com/@amillison/videos

- Mossy Earth is a nonprofit that does a lot of cool restoration and rewilding projects that have had tremendous success: https://www.youtube.com/@MossyEarth/videos

- Ecosia (yes the search engine) also does similar work. They collaborate with a lot of nonprofits around the world so its also a good jumping off point to find other groups: https://www.youtube.com/@Ecosia/videos

I meant look at the titles of the recent videos, it's all about disaster recovery/prevention, saving wildlife & nature and getting the perspective from native populations, some stuff will be happy, some stuff will indirectly/directly be not so happy. Maybe I wouldn't call it "happy news", maybe "pensive" is more fitting?

>doomer scale

Well the environment keeps getting worse and nobody is doing anything about it. So I'd say any source is pretty good

A lot of Christians argue that it does say exactly that. In Genesis 2:15, God tells Adam to care for the planet:

The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.

Of course fundamentalists tend not to see it that way.

Well no king would ever accept and propagate that religion.

There are infinite alterations you can make to the bible to make it more moral, like remove the parts where innocent people are punished on someone else’s behalf (raped, stoned, killed) or commanded to enslaved others and take virgins as the spoils of war.

Thankfully over the centuries some people have used their human moral intuitions to gloss over some of the worst parts. But would’ve been much nicer to not have those parts at all.

The tribe with the bible that directed to multiply would have conquered the tribe with the bible that directed respect the earth and all living beings because back then, might was proportional to population.

All living being want to literally eat you in one way or another. You can respect the earth, but first you have to subdue it and have dominion, otherwise it will kill you.

It would look like India.

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"be fruitful" and "replenish the earth" is already aligned

As for "subdue", ask anyone maintaining a large garden how much they have to work to keep it from reverting back to a wilderness. Gardening is choosing which species stay and which are forcibly removed and optimizing the environment to enable your chosen species to thrive. If the words "subdue" and "dominion" freak you out, pick your brains up off the floor and go touch grass.

Western civilization has decided that it wants to keep the primate species and is dissatisfied when they become roadkill, so it altered the environment to enable the chosen species to thrive. This article is a gardening success story. Gardening requires dominion. We have dominion over the primates and we have chosen to be benevolent with that dominion.

Microsoft doesn’t belong in this list after they trademarked Windows, Word, Works (remember, Microsoft Works is an oxymoron) and others.

If you count Google as an appropriation of Googol, surely Nvidia appropriates Invidia?

Facebook isn't a new name either. Some schools would publish and distribute a book of student photos with names at the beginning of the school year, to help recognize peers; these were called a facebook. Yearbooks are similar, but published at the end of the year and also have a lot of content about what happened that year and organizations and sports.

A face book is a generic term for a school directory with photographs. That's why Zuckerberg called it The Facebook to differentiate it from all the other face books.

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

Related - companies named after animals or use animal names as part of their name /logo /mascot should at least contribute a share of their profits to its conservation

nVidia comes from the Latin word invidia, which means things like envy, or jealousy.

Microsoft (originally Micro-Soft) is a portmanteau of microcomputer and software.

Facebook, as others have mentioned, is a compound word that was borrowed from what literal books of faces [and names] were called.

When I think of non-dictionary names, I think of things like Mosptnspg.

I don’t think Google should be on that list. The word is “googol.”

Wildberries

> Pet peeve: companies that appropriate a dictionary term for their name, e.g. Apple, Google (& Alphabet), Amazon, Oracle.

Hard disagree. Consider "Oracle," a truly inspired name for a database company. It's an admirable choice. Here's the computer science definition.

> In complexity theory and computability theory, an oracle machine is an abstract machine that can query a black box called an oracle, which is able to give an answer to any instance of a certain problem in a single operation.

There's also the wealth of linkages with classical oracles, e.g., Delphi, Cumae (technically a Sibyl), Dodona, etc. [1] Taken together, it's hard to think of a better name.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_machine

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle

He also wasn't bald when he started selling books.

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazon-25-the-m...

At the cost of $115M we could have built a new public university or added more light rail somewhere it's desperately needed like Orange County or San Diego. I am not against land crossings for animals, but the way the government just blows tax money with no accountability on projects the public has almost no direct benefit from is quite extraordinary.

I think the idea of more opportunities to cross is good but the pricetag is absurd still. After all, they are terraforming a hillside. I think it is a little misplaced though. We assume animals need this to cross but it seems they can take a regular old bridge just fine. You can probably build a cheap "animal only" overpass, e.g. maybe a light load mesh metal or plank bridge or somesuch, for a fraction the cost and offer many fold more crossing opportunities across more of the freeway vs just one big budget spectacle. I'm sure the contractor was connected in some way. A sort of storm drain like underpass design would probably also be cheap if done during routine freeway work.

Or maybe it's just a good project for lawyers and lobbyists to get kickbacks...

Sure, but that's not the point. My point is that infrastructure costs are like 20-50x more in California than in other developed countries for no apparent reason. We spend a million dollars of tax payer funds to build one single public bathroom in LA or even more in SF. There's something fundamentally broken... I appreciate seeing cost effective solutions that actually works. In California, it seems like most government 'solutions' are a complete scam to divert tax dollars into someone's pet project and create a funnel for their own income/profit.