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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • It’s a slow day in some little town… The sun is hot… the streets are deserted. Times are tough, everybody is in debt, and everybody lives on credit. On this particular day a rich tourist from back west is driving thru town. He stops at the motel and lays a $100 bill on the desk saying he wants to inspect the rooms upstairs in order to pick one to spend the night. As soon as the man walks upstairs, the owner grabs the bill and runs next door to pay his debt to the butcher. The butcher takes the $100 and runs down the street to retire his debt to the pig farmer. The pig farmer takes the $100 and heads off to pay his bill at the feed store. The guy at the Farmer’s Co-op takes the $100 and runs to pay his debt to the local prostitute, who has also been facing hard times and has had to offer her services on credit. She, in a flash rushes to the motel and pays off her room bill with the motel owner. The motel proprietor now places the $100 back on the counter so the rich traveler will not suspect anything. At that moment the traveler comes down the stairs, picks up the $100 bill, states that the rooms are not satisfactory, pockets the money & leaves. NOW,… no one produced anything…and no one earned anything…however the whole town is out of debt and is looking to the future with much optimism.

    That version from here: https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/01/an_answer_to_a.html


  • Lyrl@lemm.eetoScience Memes@mander.xyzAlgae Rock!
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    19 days ago

    It’s not just the uptake, it’s whether it stays at the surface, ultimately releasing the carbon back into the atmosphere via decomposition gases, or sinks to the ocean floor, thus locking up the carbon in oceanic rock.

    We have a good handle on understanding the uptake. It’s the float vs sink part that has the critical uncertainty.


  • Lyrl@lemm.eetoScience Memes@mander.xyzAlgae Rock!
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    19 days ago

    To work as a carbon capture mechanic, iron fertilization-driven algae blooms would have to die and sink to the bottom of the ocean, thus locking up their carbon in oceanic rock.

    The concern is they would die and float, releasing all that carbon back into the atmosphere via decomposition gases. Then we would have all the effort of the fertilization, all the ecosystem disruption of the algae bloom, and maybe negative benefit as far as carbon since the ecosystem disruption could mess up carbon sinks that were actually working.