Skua

I've personally never been to Texas and it's a long time since I went to Bavaria, but doesn't that description of Munich vs the surrounding countryside more or less work for Houston vs the surrounding countryside?

I don't think it's even necessarily a left vs right political thing either, both regions also just have quite distinct and independent cultural traditions from the rest of the country

Well yeah, every map projection has to mis-represent something. In this case they're arguing that presenting area is more important than presenting angles. Outside of long-distance travel on ships and planes, which are not using general-purpose world maps, nobody is navigating with a world map, so I think that they're probably right here. It seems more important to me to understand the relative size of Africa to other landmasses than it is to know that the Korean peninsula is actually a few degrees off of being straight north of Borneo

They did. They are specifically advocating for the Equal Earth projection.

I personally think that Eckert IV is a little more visually pleasing while otherwise achieving all the same benefits as Equal Earth, but both are good

Ehhhh honestly saying that you hate Coldplay has been a thing for quite a while. They're a highly successful pop act that is well past the peak of their popularity, that's just gonna happen

X&Y is still a great album though

Seriously, I've never worked anywhere dealing with anything so sensitive as "the government raiding homes" and yet still several of them would have rightly chewed me out if I was using whatsapp for business

Do you have actual data for that? Here are some comparisons of population density and emissions per capita:

The first chart is every country and territory that wikipedia had numbers for on both population density and emissions per capita.

The second has outliers with the highest densities and emissions per capita removed in order to make the rest visible (removed entries are Bahrain, Bangladesh, Barbados, Bermuda, Brunei, Gibraltar, Hong Kong, Kuwait, Macau, Maldives, Moldova, New Caledonia, Palau, Qatar, and Singapore. I hope you agree that these are not particularly comparable to the US or China for a variety of reasons and are okay to exclude).

The third cuts it down to only countries that have a "very high" rating (at least 0.8) on the Human Development Index, as a proxy for advanced economies. As you can see, there is not a strong correlation between high densities and low emissions. Chile, Sweden, Argentina, and Norway all actually have both significantly lower densities than the US and significantly lower emissions (and there are more, I'm just counting some with populations of at least ten million). Same goes for NZ, there are several countries with comparable or lower densities and also lower emissions. The densest countries are not particularly low emitters, and the sparsest cover the full range.

I can think of a few potential factors explaining it. Yes, high density makes transport easier, but it also means less access to land for clean energy (which is generally much less compact than fossil fuels). Additionally, even in very sparsely-populated countries, most of the population actually tends to be fairly concentrated around a few cities anyway. Consider Australia; it's not like Australians are evenly distributed across the continent, so the very low population density isn't particularly representative of the infrastructure challenges for most people there

Germany is worse than average for Europe, but it's far better than America and about on par with China. Per capita emissions are a little lower than China's, but China is a bit better if you look at consumption-based emissions instead

National emissions should be approached per capita. It'd be silly to expect that Luxembourg and France should have the same total emissions

Going by the Forbes article's numbers on adult human water consumption, 6.6 billion m^3 would be pretty damn close to the entire human population's water needs. 2.6 litres per adult per day is 0.949 m^3 over a year, so multiplying that by a world population of 8.2 billion people (I know that's adults and children but I'm approximating for scale here) is 7.7 billion m^3 of fresh water

Ramming the other Chinese ship definitely wasn't intentional, but I'm considering the behaviour of both Chinese ships as attempts to ram the Filipino one. If it wasn't an intent to ram then it was an utterly reckless risk of ramming

Respect to the Filipino sailors for offering to help the people that literally just tried to ram their ship