This page seems to suggest that poplar seedling density in clearcut areas is on the order of thousands per acre, which then thin out considerably as the trees mature. See the "seedling development" section.
It's a testament to the brilliance of game show producers that they took something like this that both the contestant and the audience will misunderstand (but looks so simple!) and made a long running show out of it, making millions along the way.
Where did you find that 100 trees per acre figure? That sounded really low to me, so I did some googling and found numbers more along the lines of 300-400 per acre.
Poplars are considered to be among the best trees in terms of carbon sequestration according to studies done thus far. In addition, if they're converted to paper and other wood products, they continue to sequester the carbon for the life of those products.
I would regard it as prima facia deeply unlikely that processing wood into paper is carbon-negative, regardless of how long you then store the paper. It takes power to turn trees into paper.
It's easy enough to calculate: Do you need more than an equivalent amount of paper burned into energy, to make that paper.
The answer is no, paper mills power themself from trimmings from paper making. They use much less than the mass of paper they produce.
Making paper does not take very much energy. The energy used in cutting and preparing wood is not that much when compared to the amount of wood produced.
So yes, turning wood into paper is carbon negative (in a way, technically it's the growing of the tree).
Yellow Poplars in Georgia grow at pretty much that same rate naturally. When I was living there I let a portion of my backyard go from lawn to natural, and the poplars were amazingly fast.
Speed- The difference is after that 10 minutes, the transaction is settled. The money has moved. What you have with a credit card in 10 minutes is a promise that the money will move, possibly days or even weeks later.
The bitcoin can be moved again (spent by the receiver) after 10 minutes. Try that with money you received by a credit card payment.
This really is the fundamental difference of bitcoin- once the money has moved, it's really moved. It takes some time and thinking to appreciate how that opens things up quite a bit.
> The difference is after that 10 minutes, the transaction is settled. The money has moved. What you have with a credit card in 10 minutes is a promise that the money will move, possibly days or even weeks later.
In a spherical-cow sense bitcoin is better. In practice, if I'm paying with amex I tap my card on the reader and the waitress hands me the cup of coffee in seconds; if I'm paying with bitcoin I'm standing there for half an hour.
> The bitcoin can be moved again (spent by the receiver) after 10 minutes. Try that with money you received by a credit card payment.
If a friend's sending me money it's by "faster payment"; theoretically it can take up to 2 hours (similar to bitcoin's max times), in practice it's a couple of minutes. My bank's happy for me to "spend it instantly" in terms of not charging me an overdraft fee (in fact I can spend it before I get it, as long as I put the money in by the end of the day), so I have GBP1500 (let's call it $2500) of float.
There are edge cases where this doesn't work - more than $2500, or paying internationally over the internet. But they really are edge cases; the problems bitcoin solves are problems I've never had, and I suspect that's true for the vast majority of "normal people".
> In a spherical-cow sense bitcoin is better. In practice, if I'm paying with amex I tap my card on the reader and the waitress hands me the cup of coffee in seconds; if I'm paying with bitcoin I'm standing there for half an hour.
This is a myth. Once the transaction has propagated through the network, it's pretty difficult to double-spend, even with zero confirmations. So difficult, in fact, that payment processors like Stripe/Coinbase/BitPay will completely absorb that risk for you and consider the order complete within a second or two of seeing the transaction on the network.
Try buying something online with Bitcoin sometime, it really is faster and easier than using a credit card (if you already own some).
Which pizza place? Was this in-person or online? The animation on Stripe's launch page is pretty much what buying things with Bitcoins is like for me: https://stripe.com/bitcoin.
Pembury Tavern. Last time I went there they weren't advertising "pay with bitcoin" any more, only "send us bitcoin tips", which avoids the problem. Maybe the tech's gotten better (this was a year or so ago now), but from here that looks like at least one early adopter who's given up.
Current block size limits bitcoin to ~3 transactions per second. It would take bitcoin 22 days to handle just 1 day of Visa's global transactions.
This is a serious problem because in order to increase the block size, it requires a consensus amongst all miners, merchants, etc.
Bitcoin effectively suffers from Tragedy of the Commons, because it can't scale unless every rational actor stops trying to get their own profit out of it.
Trendy brands are fashion items with limited product histories? Who would have guessed?
In any case, it's instructive to look at old menus and wine lists to get a feel for what was actually on offer way back when. For the most part, cocktails as we know them don't show up until the 1940s or so. Though it's worth noting there aren't a lot of speakeasy menus around.
On the other hand, generic types of liquor like "old tom gin" or "rye" date back well into the 19th century.
Wine brands certainly date back even further, and interestingly it's the champagnes that have changed very little in the top brands for centuries. Some beer brands, particularly Guinness and Bass have been popular on American menus for a long, long time.
Browse the New York Public Library's historic menu collection here- http://menus.nypl.org/
If it's not something you think much about, the history can be pretty surprising. I happen to have spent much of the past few years rummaging about in the archive closets of the Industrial Revolution -- its emergence and development. Part of that story is of development of technologies and products, some is how those came to be branded and merchandised.
It's fascinating history.
James Burke in his 1979 series Connections dates modern consumer goods to Wedgwood China in the 18th century.
The first real "personal appliances" -- consumer mechanical products -- were the bicycle and sewing machine, both emerging in the 1880s.
Edward Bernays and principles of modern PR and advertising would make another excellent topic of exploration.
All of which goes over and elucidates a tad more than snark.
I was looking for something on r/askhistorians I saw a while back about a hot sauce bottle found in Virginia City ruins, indicating a brand that had gone national in the 1870s or so.
Haven't found it yet, but did find this- a discussion of the saloons of the city, which mentions the Irish bar in town a few times, as well as Tennent's Ale, which was a growing global brand at the time.
In any case, I spend a fair amount of time browsing 19th century American magazines and newspapers (for fun, I suppose), and you can see the early national brands growing over the decades. The railroads were what made it all possible, they really did transform daily life in substantial ways. Certainly in places that were directly connected, but also even in more remote towns. Goods moved much more quickly, and growth hacking of all sorts was rewarded quite handsomely.
This was also part of the Survival Swimming course that used to be mandatory at Georgia Tech back in the olden days. At some point in the class, we had to jump off the high dive, use our pants as described, and remain floating in the deep end of the pool for some length of time (30 minutes I think?)
Fun class, but I shouldn't have taken it in a poorly insulated gym at 8 am Winter Quarter. Brrr.
Combine this with pg's essay on the importance of importing the 'best and brightest' to America and some things start to make sense. More minds working where they can be aimed in the 'desirable' direction.
Yes.