Average American "cardboard house" is better insulated than average European brick or concrete house. Having heavy walls make your house feel "sturdy" but it has nothing to do with energy efficiency. A lot of houses in Europe are just brick or concrete with no additional insulation. In US it's it's rare to have uninsulated houses.
In US more people live in very hot places like Texas and Arizona and people mostly live in single-family houses. Single-family houses obviously takes more energy to cool than "flats". Plus average American house/flat has twice the living area.
ICON has been building houses like that for a while. You can find walkthroughs of their houses on YouTube to understand what to expect.
https://youtu.be/vcSaUXViD9g
It could be that dolphins are smarter than humans. Dolphins didn't build civilization, but it could be because they don't have flexible enough limbs for tool making. Maybe humans just got lucky with a combination of relatively high intelligence, language and flexible limbs.
Man has always assumed that he is more intelligent than dolphins because he has achieved so much--the wheel, New York, wars and so on -- while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But, conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man -- for precisely the same reasons.
They used to be land mammals. Maybe they had a civilization, but they ruined the climate with it, then evolved to be sea mammals but kept their intelligence?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis
Yes! another fan of the Silurian hypothesis. I know most dismiss it but there really are oddities in the geological record that are somewhat consistent with it.
Also you can't make fire underwater (setting aside elements like potassium that aren't readily obtainable in large quantities the way wood and coal are). This makes it a lot more difficult for an aquatic species to have an Industrial Revolution. I guess in theory you could burn aquatic plants like kelp, and burn them at the surface, building 2D floating factories at the surface of the ocean, but this sounds vastly more difficult than what we humans did. You'd have trouble finding enough kelp to burn, and the waves of the ocean would mean that your factories couldn't be on a stable foundation. I suspect you'd also have trouble making a spark for ignition, and you might have to be very patient and wait for a lightning strike or something.
> Why would the fact that the loans are now from the government mean that universities no longer had to compete on costs? The bill ultimately goes to the student in either case.
Because 17 years old student taking out the loan is not financially experienced, so the issue of cost is often not properly considered.
The students were 17 before 1993, just like they are now.
Maybe what you're trying to say is that the private lenders vetted their loans better than the government does. And that might be true, but nothing in the article backs it up. In addition, note that even before the Omnibus bill, the government still insured the loans. So private lenders had basically no risk, and hence no incentive to deny a loan.
Modern houses have PEX plumbing. It has some advantages over copper, e.g. it won't burst if it freezes. But the main advantage -- it's less labor to install.
> But the main advantage -- it's less labor to install.
Another huge advantage is you can easily do plastic pipe plumbing yourself. You just need one clamping tool, that costs less than one hour of plumbing labour would cost. Plumbing with copper piping or steel pipes requires way more time, skill, and expensive tools.
PVC drain pipes are also simple to install correctly: a tape measure, a saw, and some PVC solvent cement is all you need for simple jobs.
Probably not - the plastics harden are a different type with different properties. The industry was burned with early plastics that did have problems and is paying attention to this. PE has been used in plumbing for more than 50 years with no problems, PEX should last even longer.
Assuming you follow directions of course: PEX has zero UV resistance and if exposed to the sun for a couple months will break down and be useless.
Are you sure the difference is not in your head? Try to do a blind experiment. Ask someone to pour a glass of milk from plastic container and a another glass from paper container and see if you can tell which is which.
Yes, but where would water come from? What you are describing is regular pumped-hydro storage. It uses two reservoirs with different elevations. It works well when there are two naturally occurring reservoirs with elevation differences. You are suggesting to create low-elevation reservoir artificially by digging a hole. It would be very expensive because hole would need to be either very deep or very large.
