I believe what you're calling the "outer wall" is just the edge of the excavation grid, not a wall in the original city. The grid plan used by the archeologists won't necessarily align to the city plan.
As someone leaving Austin after 10 years, one limiting factor to growth here is water. All of the municipal water for the metro area comes from Lake Travis. There's a hard limit to how much growth the city can support even if infrastructure and housing was prioritized.
Not really, most of it comes from the Edwards aquifer and the CO river (which Lake Travis is a damned portion of).
If we stopped selling so much water to rice farmers in east texas at a hilarious discount per acre foot we wouldn't have a shortage. Utilities also haven't lowered water prices since they hiked them during draught conditions even though we've had a surplus of supply for years now. Rice farmers are still paying pennies on the dollar for thousands of gallons.
A shower doesn't have to involve soap to be a shower. I generally stick to using soap just three times a week (M/W/F) otherwise my skin dries out. The best thing that ever happened to my skin was realizing I didn't need to use soap every day to be clean. Everyone is different so figure out what routine works best for you.
They feared that because people were being poisoned. Pewter plates were common at the time and the tomatoes acid leached the lead out causing acute lead poisoning!
Even the “sweet” tomatoes have pretty close to the same pH, it’s just the sugars covering the tang, like soda or honey.
As a bitter taster it doesn’t matter how much sugar you put on the tomato it’s still too much. About the only thing IMO that you can put on a tomato to make it acceptable is a bacon cheeseburger.
Then any other equally acidic food on pewter plates should have caused lead poisoning too? E.g. if they ate salads in those days, with a squeeze of lemon juice?
You should read about the step up in basis loophole that happens when you die. That's the biggest one I'm aware of where your estate doesn't pay taxes after death that you would have owed in life. I'm sure there are many others I'm not aware of, but this is one everyone should know about.
Climate change doesn't necessarily mean everything will get hotter and scorched and we all have to move to northern Canada. It means things will be different than they were historically in ways we don't necessarily understand that well. There's plenty of evidence that past warming periods caused the Sahara to green by shifting the African monsoon patterns farther north on the continent.
Current climate change seems to be messing with the jet stream in North America in ways that diverge from historical data. Then you get things like your yard scorching in Portland this summer and my hedges freezing and dying in Austin this winter. We've built a huge amount of infrastructure on assumptions about local weather patterns that may now be invalid.
That's basically how tea cultivation has historically worked. If you let a goat loose on a tea field it will eat literally everything but the tea plants.
I think this was covered in the article. His assets have grown 20% (inflation adjusted) since retiring and that's with a number of years having higher than average expenditures due to unplanned medical issues. His financial plan didn't really collapse per se.
Nitpick: Average IQ cannot increase by definition. The median IQ value is defined to be 100 IQ points and one standard deviation in either direction is defined to be 15 IQ points. It's normally distributed so median==average as well. People overall can become more intelligent and the average IQ value will still be 100.
I believe the comment you are replying to is referring to the Flynn effect [1] which shows a ~3 point rise in IQ per decade in absolute terms. That is, someone who is 100 IQ in 1950 would only be 97 IQ measured by 1960 standards.
