It's not the only reason. During Covid there were repeated lockdowns in China, and foreign corporations have become more hesitant about relying on Chinese subsidiaries and suppliers in their supply chains. At the same time infrastructure and education in India has dramatically improved, making it a more attractive option. There are still many places with much cheaper labour.

Note that this is comparing the export and import market values. You can add value economically without adding bulk agricultural goods. So the true import/export ratio of tonnes of flowers is probably somewhere in between 1/7 and 1.

Instantaneous communication leads to quite a few problems of the "grandfather paradox" type. For example, the relativity of simultaneity means that according to some observers, the response to a query will be given before the query itself.

A radio broadcast is made by waving around electric charges in a broadcast antenna. It is received by those radio waves themselves waving around electric charges in the receiver antenna.

Those categories are not unambiguous either.

Bioluminescence produces light at all wavelengths of the visible spectrum.

The problem with your question is that there is no unambiguous way to define a "number of colours." Not only is there a visible spectrum with infinitely many distinct wavelengths, each in principle corresponding to a different colour, those wavelengths can be combined in infinitely many ways to form composite colours.

These are pre-tax numbers.

Since you already know about Fourier transforms, it's easier to explain. The Fourier transform of a monochromatic (single wavelength) source is a function that is constant in time. But no realistic phenomenon in nature is infinitely-long-lived. So it's not only common for realistic wave forms to be composed of many wavelengths, it's the case for every naturally occurring source.

Yes, that is my point. Both the number of people aged 85+ and the percentage of those people with a licence are potentially relevant numbers, but mixing them into a composite measure just obfuscates the picture.

Why "per 10K residents" and not the percentage of people 85+ with a licence?

Let's do a back-of-the-envelope calculation. A mole of gold has a mass of about 197 grams, in the ballpark of our hypothetical deck of cards. The lattice constant of gold is about 0.4 nm (in a fcc structure, but let's assume simple cubic for simplicity). A commenter mentions a thickness of 2 atoms, but that's a very fancy setup, so let's go for something that's feasible with modern techniques currently applied in industry: 10 atoms. Arrange our tenth of a mole into a square and we get sides of a bit more than 2*10^(11) atoms, corresponding to a square with 80m sides. Actually not that far off from a tennis court - I would have guessed it would be bigger.

>It is literally illegal for them to not do what's going to provide the best return to shareholders.

Yes, management famously only takes decisions that are best for the company. All they have to do is pinky swear that they believe they are acting in the best interests of the company.

>nobody is doing a stock buyback to personally enrich themselves.

Well, except for the ones who are.

>Do you think there's a difference between owners and shareholders?

No? God forbid people use synonyms!

>Cashing out means selling shares

No, not necessarily.

>doing a buyback relies on the market to uphold the current valuation and increase the share price to keep the market cap level

So what?

>If the market thinks insiders are only doing the buyback to 'cash out' and that it's not in the best interest of the corporation, that won't happen.

"The market" thinks Bitcoins are worth $16,524 and that Gamestop increased in value more than 50-fold in a few months' time.

It's good for the shareholders' bottom line short-term, but can be bad long-term if good investments are withheld.

Of course the owners of the company (and their proxies, i.e. management) have every right to cash out now when the company is doing well and it's understandable they care more about nice things now than the future of the company, but to suggest this is somehow a "responsibility" is some bizarre balls-gargling.

Aren't the leadership shareholders themselves? If so, it's more of a strong statement that they like money.

Yes, you can manipulate gases using magnetic fields with magneto-optical traps. Among other applications, this is essential for creating Bose-Einstein condensates, and for certain quantum computing and quantum simulation architectures. One neat thing they have done with such systems is to create vortex lattices, see e.g. Phys. Rev. Lett. 83, 2498 (1999).

Regardless, the cheapest brand costs about €2/litre.

Off-brand rapeseed oil costs about €2/litre.

The better way to address the problem is to create a level playing field: eliminate poverty and provide universal access to high-quality primary and secondary education. How can we ever convince people to not discriminate based on irrelevant traits when the system does it itself?

Discrimination is not.

Yep - but that empire was much smaller. My point was just that the British didn't glue together some disparate small realms, there was a precedent for a (mostly) unified Indian subcontinent.

As mentioned, Occitan was a major one. Other languages with formerly large minorities include Alsatian, Basque, Breton, Dutch, Provençal (the latter is sometimes considered a variation of Occitan) and others. Of these, only Breton and Alsatian survive with a significant number of speakers today, though Alsatian is also rapidly dying.

Napoleon Bonaparte was from Corsica and not a native speaker of French.

The Mughal Empire lasted about 2 centuries, so not that short-lived.

Anyway, that the ruling class doesn't speak the language(s) of the people they are ruling was the norm until quite recently - colonialism didn't invent this. The Qing court used Manchu - a now practically extinct language - until the 20th Century.

Most of what is today India was controlled by the Mughals before the British conquered it. So there was a "country," just not one with a dominant single language. The idea that a nation state should be associated with a single culture and language didn't gain traction until the advent of nationalism. As a second example, French was not spoken as a native tongue by a majority of the French population until about 100 years ago. The adoption of a single lingua franca was accelerated by the start of WW1 and the popularization of radio in the 20th Century.