So, thanks to President Biden’s Infrastructure Bill, remote locations on the Navajo Nation Reservation will be receiving electricity for the first time — ever.

Also, water treatment devices are being developed to help the tribe access clean running water. After decades without.

#controversial opinion: the infrstructure bill was one of the most important bills passed in the past decade (or even... longer)#the fact that biden got it passed can never be understated. that bill sat in congress for YEARS.#we're fixing problems that have been problems for decades because of this bill

Besides all the money to fix all the shit that's broken in the last forty years since we haven't been maintaining things properly and/or replacing them as they wear out, it also includes

$39 billion to modernize transit and improve accessibility--you know how a lot of public transit is not usable for people with disabilities? Here's $39 billion to fix that! And you know how a lot of public transit isn't actually very well designed so it's cumbersome and inefficient to use? Here's money to fix that!

$66 billion for passenger and freight rail--rail is by far the most environmentally friendly and financially efficient way to move people and freight. And we're actually investing in it for the first time in a century.

$7.5 billion to build a national network of electric vehicle chargers to make electric vehicles more practical.

$73 billion to overhaul the nation's power infrastructure, clean energy transmission, and overall energy policy--you know how leftists have been saying for years that renewables are ready to go, why aren't we moving in that direction? Well, that takes money to transition the infrastructure, and here is the money to do it.

$65 billion for broadband development--bringing broadband to rural places where the big corporate ISPs aren't going to bother because they're not profitable enough. With today's economy, a lack of broadband access leaves people isolated disconnected. This is fixing that.

It also MASSIVELY ramps up what the US is doing to make sure everyone has clean water

$15 billion for local governments to replace lead water pipes

$9 billion to address emerging contaminants such as PFAs

$3.5 billion to build water and sewer systems on Indian Reservations

$7 billion to FEMA for handling climate change-related disasters

Many of these line items are orders of magnitude more money than the US has spent on these things before. This is transformational. But the thing is, the Infrastructure Bill was not a one-and-done thing. It's designed to work over several years, because major infrastructure work doesn't just start on a dime. If Trump gets re-elected, all of this goes away.

I have friends who live in Puerto Rico, where the infrastructure is...not great, and this bill gave the island 950 million, which is more than the value of the entire current infrastructure. My friends say since the bill passed they've seen crews out constantly fixing roads, bridges, electric, all the things.

And even with all that, Biden is still cutting the National Debt, and will cut it further with taxing the mega wealthy....if he can get everyone else (Senators/Congressmen) to come along with him.

i watch this and think "oh how prett-OH WOW" every single time

i wanna adopt them as my grandmas

Ancient redwoods recover from fire by sprouting 1000-year-old buds

Article | Paywall free

When lightning ignited fires around California’s Big Basin Redwoods State Park north of Santa Cruz in August 2020, the blaze spread quickly. Redwoods naturally resist burning, but this time flames shot through the canopies of 100-meter-tall trees, incinerating the needles. “It was shocking,” says Drew Peltier, a tree ecophysiologist at Northern Arizona University. “It really seemed like most of the trees were going to die.”

Yet many of them lived. In a paper published yesterday in Nature Plants, Peltier and his colleagues help explain why: The charred survivors, despite being defoliated [aka losing all their needles], mobilized long-held energy reserves—sugars that had been made from sunlight decades earlier—and poured them into buds that had been lying dormant under the bark for centuries.

“This is one of those papers that challenges our previous knowledge on tree growth,” says Adrian Rocha, an ecosystem ecologist at the University of Notre Dame. “It is amazing to learn that carbon taken up decades ago can be used to sustain its growth into the future.” The findings suggest redwoods have the tools to cope with catastrophic fires driven by climate change, Rocha says. Still, it’s unclear whether the trees could withstand the regular infernos that might occur under a warmer climate regime.

Mild fires strike coastal redwood forests about every decade. The giant trees resist burning thanks to the bark, up to about 30 centimeters thick at the base, which contains tannic acids that retard flames. Their branches and needles are normally beyond the reach of flames that consume vegetation on the ground. But the fire in 2020 was so intense that even the uppermost branches of many trees burned and their ability to photosynthesize went up in smoke along with their pine needles.

Trees photosynthesize to create sugars and other carbohydrates, which provide the energy they need to grow and repair tissue. Trees do store some of this energy, which they can call on during a drought or after a fire. Still, scientists weren’t sure these reserves would prove enough for the burned trees of Big Basin.

Visiting the forest a few months after the fire, Peltier and his colleagues found fresh growth emerging from blackened trunks. They knew that shorter lived trees can store sugars for several years. Because redwoods can live for more than 2000 years, the researchers wondered whether the trees were drawing on much older energy reserves to grow the sprouts.

Average age is only part of the story. The mix of carbohydrates also contained some carbon that was much older. The way trees store their sugar is like refueling a car, Peltier says. Most of the gasoline was added recently, but the tank never runs completely dry and so a few molecules from the very first fill-up remain. Based on the age and mass of the trees and their normal rate of photosynthesis, Peltier calculated that the redwoods were calling on carbohydrates photosynthesized nearly 6 decades ago—several hundred kilograms’ worth—to help the sprouts grow. “They allow these trees to be really fire-resilient because they have this big pool of old reserves to draw on,” Peltier says.

It's not just the energy reserves that are old. The sprouts were emerging from buds that began forming centuries ago. Redwoods and other tree species create budlike tissue that remains under the bark. Scientists can trace the paths of these buds, like a worm burrowing outward. In samples taken from a large redwood that had fallen after the fire, Peltier and colleagues found that many of the buds, some of which had sprouted, extended back as much as 1000 years. “That was really surprising for me,” Peltier says. “As far as I know, these are the oldest ones that have been documented.”

... “The fact that the reserves used are so old indicates that they took a long time to build up,” says Susan Trumbore, a radiocarbon expert at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry. “Redwoods are majestic organisms. One cannot help rooting for those resprouts to keep them alive in decades to come.”

-via Science, December 1, 2023

so i have a cat now

little lady Socks is 7 years old today!!!!!

mentally i’m a slut physically i’m scared of intimacy 

Life must be rough for you

life is rough for everyone kimberly

did you think they forgot to teach her about plagiarism at the miami school of law?

I MESSAGED HER ON INSTAGRAM AND SHE BLOCKED ME LMFAOOOO

stop lmfaoo

Remember that the laws establishing and protecting the rights of unions were a shaky truce made by governments afraid of being overthrown. They’re a way to pacify unions, give them what they want so they don’t get angry enough to start burning shit again

Those laws aren’t what makes unions possible, viable, or effective. Those laws exist because unions were so effective even without them

People act like they can’t unionize just because they live in America, or their state is Right to Work, or the company they work for is notoriously anti-union. But labor movements survived periods of being literally mowed down with machine guns by the US Army - so we don’t need to be scared off by a few posters

The fundamental power of a union comes from the fact that we outnumber them, and that the workplace doesn’t move without our labor. That power doesn’t need to be permitted and can’t be legislated away. So join a damn union!

Feet first... into fun!

Republicans in Congress and State Houses lie to you because they have no science, just their arbitrary opinions.

Huh?

Whuh?

PERCY JACKSON Percy Jackson And The Olympians (2023-) Season 1

Have the guts to look them all in the eye and warn them first.

"percy manipulated bob" "percy manipulated charon" i think the thing we all need to focus on more is the fact that he accidentally manipulated the whole of the pjo fandom into seeing him as dumb and stupid when he was just insecure as hell

The moon dressed as Saturn.

silly moon, you aren't a gas giant that's 990.44 million miles away