The west has maintained more of the larger, predators certainly. Not as much here in the east. Coyotes are invading and sort of acting in the now unoccupied larger land predator niche but given their small size they still don’t really take out deer in any serious quantity.

They are extremely overpopulated in much of the US, in part because most of the natural predators capable of keeping their numbers down have been killed off and there has been a huge artificial increase in field/forest interfaces where they thrive. Huge amounts of starving deer abound and descend on diminishing native vegetation with a voracious appetite while generally ignoring weird invasive foreign plants. Many native plant gardeners are vexed by their tendency to gnaw native plants, trees and shrubs to death unless those are caged in and some got a taste for venison out of revenge haha.

Would be cool if we could re-introduce red wolves and the like to keep a lid on the deer without like half of the predators ending up shot or run over

Mozambique has you covered

12 inches isn’t that bad as far as subsidence issues can get. The ground below you is filled with very tiny holes and gaps that water seeps down into and fills and flows through, kind of like a sponge. While water fills those pores it’s difficult to squish down the soil.

If a heavy weight is on them like a building, though, that can put on enough pressure to push the water out of those pores and flow down out and around. A mix of soil and voids/air give much less resistance to weight than a mix of soil and water filling the gaps so then the voids get compacted down and the ground sinks. Different soils in different conditions may not evenly subside and that can give you a situation like the Leaning Tower of Pisa where one side was subsiding faster than the other side. In modern construction people try to get the water out and compact the ground ahead of time so that it acts more consistently and doesn’t make big changes when a heavy object is placed on it.

Here’s a picture from an agricultural area in California illustrating ~30 ft of subsidence that occurred in that area over a half century of pumping out the groundwater to water the crops.

(This also makes flooding worse… ground that used to be filled with holes that could channel the water down and away into large aquifers is now compacted such that those holes are gone. So instead water piles up on the surface in huge sheets that flow and wipe out whatever is between them and a lower elevation.)

Tbh Biden did set himself up for trouble on gas prices specifically. He had that make Saudi Arabia a pariah initiative he was giving speeches on when he first got elected, it was going OK while the US held the cards… but after the Ukraine war started and the supply was reduced, gas prices became a giant glowing weak spot that the Saudis could vengefully mash just in time for mid-terms. Biden recognized the danger then and visited hat in hand to ask for forgiveness and more production, but it was too late after making very public positions and statements that the Saudis REALLY didn’t like at all so the trip didn’t amount to much other than embarassing news articles about him crawling back to the guy he had been calling a murderer.

Dang that was one of the three I was first introduced to as a kid. Teacher recommended using AskJeeves, Dogpile, or what she called her “personal favorite”, Google.

Not sure how Dogpile still exists