wolfyvegan

This will probably be less destructive than a road or a mining project, but if this increases trade with China, then it increases the profit incentive for production of all of those deforestation-linked commodities that are produced in the Amazon and Cerrado biomes, and possibly in the Atlantic Forest as well. The main problem is therefore not the destruction caused by the railway itself but by the production of the things that it transports.

Another (potential) problem with this railway is that it creates a new profit incentive for deforestation. If speculators buy land in key locations along the railway and deforest it in anticipation of the demand for a settlement or trading hub, the damage is done, even if nothing is ever built there. Better than the semi-permanent destruction of having a town or road or mining project or cow pasture there, and maybe it won't happen at all, but it still isn't exactly good news. If the railway were replacing a road network which would be closed off and allowed to reforest itself, then that would be progress.

Anyone know if Sarawak is still relatively LGBTQ-friendly?

A) As the previous commenter said, if you buy ETF shares from someone who is selling them, you are not financially supporting the corporation. Only buying their IPO would do that. These corporations will succeed or fail, do evil shit or do not-so-evil shit, based on supply and demand (and subsidies, and lobbying...), not based on whether you personally own shares in them.

B) You can't predict the future. Common sense says that equities' historical growth cannot continue forever. It's up to you to decide whether the risk of equity investing makes sense for your personal situation and investment time horizon. Diversifying your investments across asset classes (equities, bonds, precious metals, CDs, fruit trees, real estate...) is probably the most assured way to reduce volatility, and it may or may not result in higher risk-adjusted returns, but this probably won't translate to higher gross returns compared to investing in equities alone (unless the stock market crashes while you are still invested and never recovers).

Probably the strongest case for investing in equities would be: If you expect the next stock market crash to be accompanied by the end of the monetary system as we know it, then any cash that you currently have lying around will become worthless at that point whether you invest it in equities or not. (So you might as well invest it and make some money while you can.)

Probably the strongest case for NOT investing in equities would be the facts that the growth in equities cannot continue indefinitely and that investing any extra money in tangible assets (e.g. land to grow your own food, solar panels and batteries, or other infrastructure that contributes to your independence from the system while reducing your ongoing expenses) is of real benefit to you regardless of what the stock market does.

Source: I grow fruit trees. You'd be surprised at how many parallels there are to financial investments. (Pro tip: the risk-free rate of return is the banana yield that a given area of land could produce.)

Grafted tree, I presume? If it can ripen all of the fruits this year, then it will have passed the test. Exciting things to come.

I have even heard tell of a pawpaw that tasted like durian, but I cannot verify that claim.

No reason to stop at vacant lots. Parks, hiking trails, cleared areas in their native forests...

Is it the first time that the peach tree is fruiting? :)

I don't deny that these are difficult problems, and I won't attempt to address everything that you mention, but "can’t exile them without a power structure that can use force on them" isn't true. The use of force doesn't require any sort of formal vertical power structure. Problems of global scale are just combinations of many individual actions at the local scale, and at the local scale, if someone is committing violence or endangering others, all it takes is a few concerned people to team up and remove them using whatever force needed. Firearms help, but even those are not strictly necessary. If such problems are addressed quickly enough at the local level, then they are less likely to scale up to the global level in any organised way. If many people are already committing violence together on a larger scale, then removing them becomes a matter of tribal warfare or genocide. Ugly, and not something that I recommend, but far from impossible, as history has shown.

Or if you weren't lucky enough to be born human. Then the indigenous people fuck you too.

Climate change will affect the whole world, but some areas will be more affected than others. Higher elevations at the equator should remain relatively stable.

Deforestation is part of it. With continued climate change, such drought or flood events will only get more and more frequent outside of the equatorial region, with the most severe adverse weather events expected between 30°N and 60°N. The ocean will buffer the UK a bit from temperature extremes, but the inherent seasonality of the climate will still result in large variations in both temperature and precipitation. The temperature of the Atlantic Ocean is a major influence as well.

And let's not forget those delicious ovaries! Sweet, juicy, engorged ovaries... Yum! 😋