A tree well is an area around a tree that receives less snowfall than the surrounding area, due to the foliage of the tree blocking it. This results in a pit or "well" in the snow around the tree.

Tree wells are dangerous even in non-avalanche conditions because someone can fall into them and be unable to escape. Falling into a tree well can be lethal in the worst cases. I suspect they would be particularly problematic if you were washed into them by an avalanche because it could bury someone even deeper than normal as you would essentially be pushed into a hole and then the hole covered up.

You don't get anything extra, yes. Only about 50% of stocks pay dividends, which means investors can see the profits of their investments go into increases in the stock price or get paid out directly in the form of dividends. A stock represents a share of ownership of the company which includes the bank account from which dividends are paid, so paying dividends reduces the value of the company. In essence it is just converting something a stockholder already owns into cash in their hand.

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Imagine that I gave you a task:

"Start counting up in integers (1, 2, 3, etc.). When you finish counting all the integers then you can have a slice of cake."

When are you going to have your slice of cake? You are never going to run out of integers since you can keep counting up for an infinite period of time, so in theory you should never reach the point where you can have the cake, right?

Now imagine that as you are counting the time between 1 and 2 takes a second, but you start speeding up so that the time from 2 to 3 is only a half second, from 3 to 4 a quarter of a second, etc. Conceptually this doesn't matter since we didn't really care about how quickly you were counting in the first example, as the issue of the integers being infinite was the real issue. But in this case somehow you "finish" and eat the cake?

This is the idea behind Zeno's Paradox. In order for the hare to pass the tortoise it must first reach the tortoise, and in order to do that it must reach half the distance between it and the tortoise. If it reaches the halfway point then it must next reach the new halfway point, and when it does that reach the new new halfway point, etc. In concept this cycle can be continued infinitely since distance is infinitely divisible and so there are equally an infinite number of steps to this task as there are integers in the previous examples. Yet in this case we know the hare will be able to pass the tortoise. Somehow an infinite series of tasks was completed in finite time.

The fundamental idea is that sometimes people will be arrested and charged with a crime but have an extended period of time before a trial can be held. Most people do not want to wait in jail for that period of time, and the legal system recognizes that it would be unfair to force someone to do so unless there is a reasonable cause to think letting them go free would be a danger to the community or that they would escape entirely. Presuming that a judge considers it reasonable to let them return to the community in the meantime there still needs to be some incentive for them to return for trial.

That is what "bail" is, an amount of money handed over to the court which will be returned in full if the accused shows up for trial at the appointed time. It is supposed to be significant enough that the accused will be reluctant to just leave it behind and avoid the trial completely. This can be in the form of cash or potentially other assets can be pledged such as one's house.

It is possible that this significant sum of money is not something the accused has conveniently on hand. They could instead borrow money in order to pay their bail, and a provider of such a specific kind of loan is known as a "bail bondsman". What they offer is to pay the accused's bail themselves for a set fee, typically 10% of the total bail. When/if the accused shows up to their trial the bondsman gets their money back in full and keeps the 10% fee from the accused.

If the accused doesn't show up for their trial then the bondsman doesn't get their money back. This is a significant risk but there is one way they can mitigate their losses. If the accused is caught and turned over to the courts then they will return the bondsman's money, and in order to make this happen they will offer a "bounty", a reward of money for the capture and return of the accused to the court. The bondsman will need to pay off the bounty but they will get their money back from the court so overall they will lose less money (assuming the bounty is less than the bail + 10%). Those who seek to fulfill the bounty are known as "bounty hunters" and due to the unique legal challenges of a private citizen who's trade is tracking down other people and capturing them against their will, such a trade tends to be strictly licensed so such people are qualified professionals.

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I think there is a healthy amount of tradition and folklore at work here.

The idea isn't that it is going to somehow get more rain to fall on the roof than if it was evenly sloped, which as you rightly guessed would be impossible.

Instead what the steps are intended to do is slow down the flow of the rain as it runs off the roof so that it can be caught by the gutters and stored in a tank under the house. If the roof was just a straight slope then the water would hit the gutter going quickly and some portion of it could splash over. Instead by increasing the surface area while not changing the overall slope the friction of the water flowing is increased and its speed reduced.

I assume by "parallel" you mean like their orbits are all on the same plane. This is no accident or coincidence, it is a result of how they formed. The solar system and the sun itself formed from the collapse of a giant cloud of dust and gas, and that cloud had some amount of rotational momentum. Such momentum is conserved and like how a spinning skater will speed up as their mass is pulled in closer, the bits of the massive cloud of dust collected into planets and formed sustained orbits. Those orbits will all be on the same plane because that is the net result of the conserved momentum.

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Technically that is two escalators which increases the cost.

They don't need to be two flights but they take up half the footprint that way making them much easier to fit into a design. An escalator can't make such turns so they need to be straight, making them a bit awkward to plan around.

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Suppose you are a company that makes widgets. You make 1000 widgets a month and sell them at the market price, which is determined by many other companies which make widgets as well and the demand for widgets in the world at large.

Now suppose something happens that disrupts the supply chain leading up to your making widgets. There is less of the raw ingredients you need to make widgets available, or they are more difficult to acquire, and your costs increase somewhat as a result. Overall widget production may drop as well. For your company however you keep making 1000 widgets per month but you pay a bit more in material costs.

The demand for widgets though hasn't dropped off. Now those who want widgets need to compete to obtain them, pushing the price to be higher. When you go to sell your 1000 widgets at the market price that price may have increased more than your costs to produce them, meaning your overall profit is higher than before!

But it is still harder to obtain your materials to make widgets and looking forward the same problems that caused the disruption in widget materials supply look like they might cause a downturn in your business in the future. You forecast that in the coming months or years you are only going to be able to sell 750 widgets. In response you start to lay off some of your employees.

The result is that you make record profits then turn around and lay off employees, looking on the surface like a cartoon villain.

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When you purchase a house the money you pay goes to the previous owners. I would think that would be pretty obvious.

A newly built house is often built on land which is owned by some kind of developer who paid the construction company to build said house. Your purchase of the lot and house would be the return on the investment of the developer, who makes back the cost of the house and land plus presumably some amount of profit.

In the process of purchasing the house you will often pay a real estate agent or agency to provide various services related to completing the transaction. This percentage is usually split 50-50 between the agent for the buyer and the seller, but the percentage of the overall cut varies.

The bank is usually providing a loan in the form of a mortgage to make this all happen, so it is the bank's money being distributed and then the buyer will be paying the bank back over a longer period of time. The bank collects significant amounts of interest on this long term loan but again the percentages vary.

No, they aren't the same thing. "Food grade" is a regulated term while "non toxic" is basically unregulated. Because "food grade" is regulated it also doesn't make much sense to pay for the testing and verification required to make it conform to those standards when it isn't supposed to be eaten.

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