I'm not sure if it's officially a formal grammer, but there are definitely correct and incorrect phrasings for certain effects, and those are changed over time with official rewordings posted for old cards.

It's one of the ways that unofficial card spoilers are judged. If there are phrasings that sound "out-of-style" for the effect, its usually judged as a fake from the first pass.

There's a pretty solid chance PayPal will have predicted these switches, and keep the old numbers on file.

Because the new policy allows for calling no matter how they get your number, it probably won't help.

Can't hurt to spend a few minutes putting a Twiml file in S3 and buying a number for $1.

I closed my Paypal account today because of this. Not everyone can do that though.

In cases where you're using pull-behind row planters (like this: https://www.kelcomaine.com/webpics/productpics/tp300/tp300-0...), catching on a stump could tear up the equipment or throw the rider off.

That is correct. The most costly operation in afforestation by planting is removing stumps. We did it with explosives.

BigDog would make an excellent tree planting robot.

It's way too slow. A drone has the advantage of being able to navigate extremely rugged terrain, largely avoiding obstacles, and can traverse across rivers without getting wet.

The sorts of areas that desperately need replanting are usually a wasteland to stumps, branches, brush, and lots of rocks.

One of the most efficient Soviet afforestation technology for pine forests is - wait until the good seed year comes in ripe forest. Cut it down the next year. Cones will land. Burn the place with controlled fire. Stumps will go, cones will open! Bummer, young forest in 3-4 years growing real fast.

IIRC pine forests often have microsaplings, lots and lots of tiny pine saplings that will start growing once the old trees goes away.

called podrost in Russia. Not in all types of forests. often they die when you remove canopy. bugs come.

Owning land that has gone through 3 or 4 generations in the same family, while technically an "investment asset", usually isn't treated the same way from a planning perspective as, say, apartments you purchase with the intention to liquidate upon retirement. There may be a lot fewer ways to generate revenue from it, so in all reality you may barely be breaking even on upkeep. You're then forced to decide between giving your children an excellent education which will set the up well in life vs keeping the land which you have a strong emotional attachment to and wish to share with future generations.

I'd argue that those sort of investments would be better gated by knowledge than available finances. There's no reason a early employ that made <$1m in a buyout shouldn't be allowed to invest 10k in another startup. He absolutely knows what he's investing in, and it's his choice if he's willing to take that risk.

I think it's sad that we've gotten to the point where we're telling people who remained consistent over time to "be more like the politicians, and just lie to suit the masses." It seems like we'd be complaining about that in a different post.

I only have a vague memory/understanding the subject, but I believe the Bitcoin protocol supports the concept of multi-signature contracts. That could be used to create decentralized escrow/trading/exchanges, which means that you would never have to let a single entity control your private keys. (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Contracts)

I don't think there is a working implementation of the multisig contracts in the wild yet, but the protocol does support a way to solve these problems.

That won't work for traders, transactions on the blockchain are too slow to do what exchanges really do. Traders would not use such an exchange, it'd be too slow.