• TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      If there is no demand for wood, forests have no value and will be cut down to make room for something valuable by the invisible hand of the market.

      • Zerlyna@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        I used to buy boxes for almost 10 years. Paper companies plant trees to replenish their supply. I bet they’ve sold off parts of their forests since the internet and “paperless” started. Lost jobs for loggers, paper mills have shut down, and then all the lost loads for truckers. Switching from bottles to cans equals less boxes. Emails and PDF is less paper. If we weren’t ordering online all the time the impact would be even greater.

  • Kelly@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    They might be silent when spoken but still offer disambiguation between words/meanings when written e.g. “dam” vs “damn”.

    • Eheran@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Many words are written the same way. In both cases, context is what does the actual trick. If you read “the damn was 10 meters high” it goes as far as assuming a typo.

      • Kelly@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        True context helps - but I wouldn’t want to consciously smurfify the language.

        • Eheran@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          I agree and would go further, simplifying words so they more closely match how you pronounce them. So that there are not 3 completely different words, written exactly the same.

      • WarmSoda@lemm.ee
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        8 months ago

        If it was written out as “God damn that damn is 10 meters tall” People would complain that they’re spelled the same way.

        • Kelly@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          Another example: “Dam that river!” vs. “Damn that river!” could be confused.

    • Kelly@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      A lot of paper is wasted because we tend to use standard “document sized” paper (A4, US Letter).

      For content that is not designed to fill the page (poster or whatever) it will fill a random amount of the final page and on average half of that sheet will be wasted.

      If smaller paper sizes were used more often it could save a fair bit.

      • xigoi@lemmy.sdf.org
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        8 months ago

        Smaller paper sizes would waste a lot more paper because the margins would be a bigger portion of the sheet.

  • JackGreenEarth@lemm.ee
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    8 months ago

    Not sure about silent letters specifically, but we could certainly compress our language to the smallest lossless format.