Other nations regularly poach in the Georges Bank? That's pretty crazy.

You're really triggering Poe's Law here for me.

It doesn't need to change the total catch. You can lower the minimum size if you impose a maximum size. Same fraction of the total fish allowed to be caught. Large fish tend to be much better reproducers than small ones, so you may actually be able to allow an even larger fraction of the fish to be caught each year.

You better put the word "findings" in quotation marks. This "study" is a preprint, has not been peer reviewed, and it's being widely mocked for its bad methodology. But the media is just loving to run with it. Even the lead author is complaining about the media's "LLMs cause brain damage!" hot takes.

(BTW, that's the reason why "Saran Wrap" is no longer made of Saran. Saran is a far better barrier polymer than the polyethylene that Saran Wrap is made of today, but Saran is polyvinylidene chloride, aka chlorinated - and almost invariably ends up in the trash, where it will get burned. The decision to switch to inferior polyethylene wrap was so that it would burn cleaner)

People usually assume that all the plastic they see around food is "waste", when in reality it's usually carefully engineered to maximize shelf life, and thus minimize food waste. And the energy / resources needed to make that miniscule amount of plastic and the issues with its disposal are well worth offsetting wasted energy producing, processing, and transporting a larger fraction of food that just goes to waste.

Plastic around fresh fruit? That's maintaining it at an optimal humidity and/or reducing the risk of scratches that lead to spoilage. Metalized plastic wrap around your cookies in a box? The alumium is applied to that plastic to decrease water and oxygen transport by orders of magnitude, veritably eliminating the main ways in which food goes bad. On and on. And you know what the alternative is to maximize the shelf life of foods? Preservatives. You want more preservatives in your food? No? Then be happy with better-protective packaging.

And we all would love all of the plastic to be "biodegradable", but the problem is that waste doesn't come with a switch that says "Okay, now I'm done with you, fall apart". There's a steady process of biodegradable polymers becoming weaker and weaker, and letting orders of magnitude more oxygen and moisture through them. Basically, by the time they're at your supermarket, if it's at all easy to biodegrade, it's already doing a crappy job. Some products reduce (but not eliminate) these problems, but usually via requiring special conditions for quick decomposition, such as particularly high temperatures - but most landfills don't reach those conditions. And again, we're talking about generally grams of plastic, or even milligrams. This just isn't the big issue people make it out to be. Just burn it. Have good pollution controls on the incinerator, and just burn it. Just avoid chlorinated and fluorinated polymers that tend to produce more problematic combustion products.

Sorting plastic is useful even if most of it is going to be burned.

  * Some types of plastic are much easier to recycle than others
  * Some types of plastic can't be easily recycled, but are good for downcycling (such as use as filler materials)
  * Most types of plastic are fine to burn, but you don't want to burn chlorinated or fluorinated plastic (at least not with very strong pollution controls)

So sorting your waste is good. In our system, we have four types: "hard plastic" (which is probably manually or automated sorted for things that are readily recycleable and to remove PVC, etc); "plastic packaging" (probably burned); "plastic foam" (probably densified and not burned); and "large plastic film" (such as from greenhouses, row covers, construction plastic, etc; I'm not sure what they do with it).

Also:

The low price of wind and solar allow them to be overbuilt while still being affordable - and if you do that, with a mix of wind, solar, and battery storage, you can affordably build a grid that provides e.g. 90%, 95%, 98%, even over 99% of your electricity - but you never get to 100%. You still need some sort of peaking, which needs some sort of bulk storable energy medium. Well, one possibility for that is waste - it's storable and can be burned. Waste / biomass commonly provides a couple percentage of nations' total power needs - which, in a high-renewables grid, may be most or all of your peaking needs.

The suggested regulations I've seen to counter these evolutionary pressures are IMHO pretty clever: you impose both minimum *and maximum* sizes on your catch. You can only keep fish that are between the minimum and maximum sizes. So growing fish have a certain size where they're in the "danger zone", but if they get bigger than it, they can keep spawning to their heart's content with no danger from humans.

** near that size

Evolution works regardless of whether you think it should or not.

If you stand a high chance of being killed if you exceed a given size, that is intense evolutionary pressure to stop using your energy resources on growth as you near that height, and instead focus it on reproduction.

Whether you think that evolution should just stop working and cod should just keep growing the same as before regardless of whether it gets them killed (and thus unable to reproduce further), it will continue to work on the species.

It doesn't always work the way you want; there may not be a commercial interest in what replaces the fish you remove. For example, globally, jellyfish populations are soaring - because we've been (A) removing their predators, and (B) leaving more food behind for them.

Some people eat jellyfish, but they're comparably a tiny market.

(That said, due to the low cost, maybe their popularity will increase. Lobster used to be seen as poor-people's food after all, disgusting bottom-dwelling crustaceans, before the general population got a taste for them)

(And even if you don't have a size limit, as others note, nets let smaller fish escape, and in effect impose their own sorts of size limits. Even longlining with given-sized hooks and specifically chosen baits favour fish of certain sizes)

Back at you with your smartass response.

Most fish have minimum size regulations. I'm not sure about current limits, but as of 1975, for cod in Iceland, the minimum length was 43cm. Cod under 43cm have to be thrown back. If you're going to argue that this doesn't impose massive evolutionary pressure for cod to slow size increases and max out at just under 43cm (focusing their energy intake on reproduction rather than growth), you know nothing about evolution. If you went around every year and randomly shot a sizable minority of all men taller than 165cm / all women taller than 155cm - heights in which the average person is still growing - exactly what do you think is going to happen with the human population's mean height over time?

It's been obvious for ages that we've been imposing intense evolutionary selective pressure on fisheries to reduce in mature size.

Sure but the advantage of crops is you can easily scale your solar collectors by planting more acres. There are soybean farms with a half million acres out there that would produce significant amounts of biodiesel if used for that purpose. Now algae is a lot more efficient in a physics sense, but an equivalent algae facility would be on the order of 100,000 acres. The water requirements and environmental impacts of open algae pools would be almost unimaginable. Solar powered bioreactors would increase yields and minimize environmental costs, at enormous financial costs, although possibly this would be offset by economies of scale.

Either way a facility that produces economically significant amounts of algae biodiesel would be an engineering megaproject with higher capital and operating costs than crop based biodiesel, but an algae based energy economy is a cool idea for sci fi worldbuilding. In reality where only the most immediately economically profitable technologies survive, I wouldnâ(TM)t count on it being more than a niche application.

It isn't just fanboys. Tesla stock is astronomically overpriced based on the sales performance and outlook of what normal people consider its core business -- electric cars (and government credits). For investors, Tesla is *all* about the stuff that doesn't exist yet, like robotaxis.

Are they wrong to value Musk's promises for Tesla Motors so much? I think so, but it's a matter of opinion. If Tesla actually managed to make the advances in autonomous vehicle technology to make a real robotaxi service viable, I'd applaud that. But I suspect if Musk succeeds in creating a successful robotaxi business, Tesla will move on to focus on something other than that. Tesla for investors isn't about what it is doing now, it's about not missing out on the next big thing.