Everyone felt sad for the penguin walking alone and the monkey rejected by his mother. But this video is far more heartbreaking, yet it didn’t receive the same attention.
This cost them about $1 trillion.
The truth is, you cannot build systems like this exclusively on the logic of profit. You cannot expect to break even in 20 or 30 years. Projects of this scale are built because the government decides they must exist to serve the people.
And this is a problem with systems that are strictly, or overwhelmingly, capitalist. If you leave every problem in your society to the spontaneity of the market, some challenges are so large and so unprofitable that you will never have sufficient incentive to solve them.
Mi padre está en huelga de hambre porque le dan comida podrida en la residencia, mi hijo se ha quedado sin plaza en la FP, a mi hija le han negado la beca comedor y a mí me han dado cita con el dermatólogo para dentro de año y medio.
Pero oye, Ayuso le ha bajado los impuestos a los ricos y, aunque soy pobre y no me afecta para nada, estoy dando saltos de alegría.
Las próximas elecciones le volveré a votar.
VOX: PRIORIDAD NACIONAL
- Perfecto limitemos la compra de vivienda de los extranjeros no residentes.
No pero eso atenta contra...
- Y expropiemos las casas especulativas de los agentes extranjeros y se las cedemos a las familias de autoctonas.
A ver cuando hablan de prioridad nacional hablan de...
- Y destruyamos los acuerdos con agentes extranjeros que quieren interferir en los intereses de nuestro Estado como Estados Unidos e Israel.
No a ver... tanta prioridad nacional no...
- Y limitemos el turismo para evitar que España siga siendo el cubo de vomitos de medio mundo.
No a ver porque los hosteleros....
- Pues prohibamos que las empresas privadas extranjeras controlen servicios básicos de la población como la luz, agua, gas, ferrocarriles etc.
No porque eso va contra la libertad de comercio y claro...
Y asi con todo.
Su prioridad nacional es el simple lema de legitimar el asesinato del pobre.
Mercadona en la crisis de 2008 daba la orden a sus trabajadores de echar lejía a la comida que tiraban a punto de caducar para que no la recogieran las personas sin hogar. Despidieron a uno de sus empleados por negarse. Ahora venden comida basura como si fuera un restaurante.
Went down the rabbit hole on this. A firefly spends up to two years underground as a larva, hunting slugs in the dirt. Then it crawls out, grows wings, and gets maybe three weeks as the glowing thing you remember from childhood. Three weeks to find a mate and reproduce. Then it's dead.
So when the tweet says "some scientist" warned we're the last generation to see them, that's real. A Belgian firefly researcher named Raphaël De Cock said it, and the clip blew up on TikTok. But I dug into the actual science, and the picture is weirder than the headline.
We know of about 2,200 firefly species worldwide. Scientists have studied fewer than 150 of them. That's less than 7%. Of the ones they looked at, about 14% are at risk of extinction. And here's the part that got me: we know so little about more than half the species we've found that scientists can't even tell if they're dying off. If those mystery species are disappearing at the same rate, 1 in 3 North American fireflies could be in trouble. We might be losing species nobody's even properly named yet.
A major 2024 study by Penn State, the University of Kentucky, and Bucknell examined 24,000 citizen surveys across the eastern U.S. The number one thing killing fireflies turned out to be weather and climate shifts. Their larvae need wet soil to survive those two years underground. Too dry, they die. Too flooded, they drown. The second biggest killer: artificial light. Night skies are getting about 10% brighter every year. A quarter of Earth's land is now lit up at night. And fireflies talk to each other with light. Their whole mating system runs on flashing patterns in the dark. Flood that with streetlights and porch lights, and the signal disappears.
This isn't abstract. In Hong Kong, one firefly species lived along 1.8 kilometers of a single hiking trail. Street lamps went up in 2018 and 2019. The population is gone. Critically Endangered now. In Delaware, the Bethany Beach firefly exists in a few tiny salt marshes, and coastal construction is eating them up.
But your common backyard lightning bug, the one called Photinus pyralis, is fine. Ben Pfeiffer, who runs Firefly Conservation and Research, said it straight: "We won't be the last generation to see fireflies." What's actually vanishing is the variety. The weird ones. The specialists. They get replaced by the one tough generalist that can survive anywhere.
One last thing that stuck with me. A firefly turns chemical energy into light at about 41% efficiency, with almost zero heat lost. Our best LEDs just recently hit about 40%. We spent decades of engineering to match what a beetle worked out 100 million years ago.
And we're blinding them with the lights we built to copy them.