I wouldnt take my family to a trip to US these days for example, no such issue with China. One sample aspect, a very practical one too, but there are many others.

Say what you want, but a government that is swapping out and replacing its own people (as von der Leyden basically admitted two days ago), all while claiming to be “democratic” (while not allowing anyone to vote on their own replacement) is exponentially more diabolical and evil than what you are highlighting. The western governments don’t “silence political dissent”? “Enforce social order through fear”?

Are you just lying to yourself of how can you not be aware of what is going on outside of what is likely an ideological bubble? What was the Palestine protests situation on college campuses in the U.S., if not “silencing political dissent” and “enforcing social order through fear”?? Now the Zionists are demanding America basically cancel the first amendment.

Can you raise public objections about tens of millions of Africans and Asians flooding into your communities that used to be safe in Europe, or will you be terrorized with judicial persecution and be downvoted online and censored simply because you have reasonable objections to being abused and harmed?

An American was just stabbed in the face by an “asylum seeker” in Germany, because he was trying to intervene in him attempting sexual assault on a woman. Did you hear about that? Do you know that rape in Europe had sky rocketed everywhere because of all the “asylum seekers”? Do you feel pangs of anxiety at hearing that and urges to make excuses for it or the fact that people who do excise it are accessories to those violent crimes that are being perpetrated all across Europe?

And that’s without even all the many other examples one could list to day’s end. You seem to be fooling yourself for some reason. This is not a sportsball game where “my team good, their team bad”. Let’s be principled here, regardless of team.

I don’t actually blame China for what you accuse them of, because there are long standing hostile, strategic plans that go well beyond what most people have any kind of understanding for, whose objective is basically destroying/taking over China just as they want to take over Russia in order to achieve total world domination. And no, you don’t have to believe me, you can read any of the many “think tank” and niche journal articles where they not only lay out their objectives, but also their strategic and tactical plans they’ve been executing for decades. I have even worked with them and discussed these types of plans with them. They’re insane and a certain kind of stupid, a kind of fools stupidity.

Frankly, what the Chinese themselves also probably do not understand is that those 600,000 Chinese students Trump wants to let in, are part of a strategy to prevent a two-front war with China and Russia and to separate and dominate them both, regardless of how successful that will be. (It won’t)

Microgravity is not the target environment for the technology , and it verifying its operation in microgravity feels like a very minor breakthrough compared to the tech itself.

So sending it to space is performance to show off and make headlines.

Its very important tech. If their claims are true its amazing... but doing it in orbit is not the amazing part.

China is doing alot of great research, and the idea that china is behind is laughable in many sectors. But sorting through the real science is so much harder in the noise of empty papers and puffy articles.

> That's quite optimistic.

Urgh. One can dream i guess

I suggest travelling around the world a bit and visiting ie Borneo how entire rainforest ecosystem is being reduced to nothing just due to palm oil plantations, mostly for biofuel and cheap&bad for health food additive.

Similar sight across many places out there. What you wrote ain't valid for a single one.

Methanol is also known as "wood alcohol", and can be made at ~40% yield by cooking down wood ("destructive distillation") in a specific fashion, or made from too-cheap-to-meter natural gas if you've got it. Anything you can do with natural gas can also be done with anaerobically fermented methane. You can also use ethanol (fermented from any carbohydrate crops) instead of methanol, creating a biodiesel with slightly different but still usable properties.

...

Sunflower, rapeseed, and soybean oil have very well-established agricultural workflows which require very little labor input.

Palm oil is substantially higher yield, but more labor intensive and is associated with tropical rainforest destruction.

...

You don't necessarily even need to react your vegetable oil. The original Diesel Cycle demonstration engines ran on straight peanut oil, and there are some truck engines out there (like the 12 valve Cummins) that will happily run on filtered waste fryer oil all day long. It's just a matter of tuning, viscosity, compression ratios, seal materials, and the like, being slightly different from petrochemical diesel fuel. Reacting vegetable oils into fatty acid esters ("biodiesel") does attain some modest engine benefits, but mostly it's to match compatibility with petrochemical diesel grades so that you don't, eg, need to replace your fuel lines & pumps with different diameter fuel lines & pumps.

False dichotomy. There are places where food does not grow at all and can be used to grow fuel crops. Say, the ocean.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algae_fuel

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RuBisCO

Of glucose, not a hydrocarbon, but there are plenty of organisms that use hydrocarbons directly.

We don't because we use glucose as our easily transportable fuel, which we evolved because plants happened to produce glucose when we evolved. If there were plants producing some hydrocarbon in fruits we'd have evolved mitochondria to use that instead.