An average US citizen eats about 3500kcal daily. Half of those calories are from fatty animal foods, half are from refined sugar.
Why is everyone demonizing fatty foods, or sugar, when that 3500 number is screaming at us from afar?!
US citizens eat way to much and move way too little. The side effect is diabetes T2, heart attacks and all sorts of issues.
US citizens also do not know how to eat, their capitalism has failed them, the whole food business is subsidized insanely. So they are "forced" to buy highly caloric foods that kills them (because that food is cheap), and foods with high nutrient to calories ratio are too expensive. Sodie pops and milk cheaper than water, meat cheaper than vegetables, insane.
A lot of this cheap stuff is high-margin "weaponized food" that's had thousands of man-hours thrown at it to make it addictive. Capitalism is optimizing for the wrong parameter, just like it does in just about every other situation related to human health.
These "weaponized food" exist and there is no turning back because people like them. McDonalds sells apple slices and french fries but I bet a vast majority of people choose french fries. But if people took things is moderation it would be much better. Maybe take a small serving of french fries and a glass of water with your burger.
Just like we domesticated cattle, we could do the same with practically all animals.
I mean, cows, pigs, chickens (dogs and cats) are the most docile creatures on earth. How would we enslave, rape, raise, slaughter them if they were angry and combatant and weren't submissive?
Breeding does wonders.
Check out any wild cattle and you'll see how easily, fearlessly they stomp their predators to death.
As for ethical problems, I see no difference between an elephant and a pig. Both are one of the smartest animals on earth. Yet, bacon! :D Given that first world countries enjoy their 99% factory farmed abominations of animal flesh, I'd say ethics was decided as a non-problem by look-the-other-way anthropocentric market agents.
edit: checkout Temple Grandin work with cattle.
you can have a farm with hundreds of milk cows and have 2 people working on it (part time vet that's making all the cows pregnant and managing their calves, and one full time employee). her methods made industrial milk farms manage themselves. cows practically go to the milking robot alone, never stopping, never panicking. when I saw this being done with my own eyes, no wonder family farms can't compete without huge subsidies.
That's for capitalism to decide (and those look-the-other-way market agents).
> It's also pink. Hit me up next time you get confused.
Difference being ethical one, not physical. Giving same moral consideration (no matter how great or small the consideration is) to elephants and pigs would be ethically consistent, yet it's quite clear that consideration isn't equal, due to some flawed/mutated value system of appeals to tradition, popularity and futility.
> Lol, I'm passingly familiar with her work. After the revolution, she's going to gulags. Idk why you bring her up tho.
A good example of how breeding docile, non-aggressive creatures can result in some seriously mind-blowing complacent, plant-like behavior (we see it in the human gulags too, though, and it's documented quite thoroughly in the history of USSR, docile humans at its finest form).
Killing pigs and killing elephants is in a similar category. But it's kind of about context. Kinda like when you get a little less sad when an ISIS fighter dies compared wiyou a kid who dies of cancer.
> Killing pigs and killing elephants is in a similar category. But it's kind of about context.
Yeah, the context being that elephants are glorified by the press, while reporting on mistreatment of pigs (or any farm practices) in the USA is considered a criminal act. [0]
That's the look-the-other-way market agent from up there. The context is also that mentioned mutated set of values.
I don't think the comparison is anywhere close to ISIS.
> Idk what the temple Grandin thing is about.
Well, no one knew you could manage a milk farm with two people, so saying that elephants can't be domesticated is a bit of a stretch.
I agree that they are similarly bad and aggag laws are retarded. It's just that one is already an industry while the other one isn't. I'm in favor of closing the current industry but fundamentally I realize that this will be to go to push through.
Calibre is unfortunately a big mess of spaghetti code. I had a problem with speeds when a book is being added. Couldn't get myself out of the soup to fix it.
Is this a function of the number of existing books in the library? Basically does this appear only with large libraries? Might be worth filing a bug I have found the author to be pretty quick in responding.
2422 books here all of the above ought to be small though as noted. I think it would be interesting to profile and figure out which part is slow. Is it equally slow if you run calibredb add in the terminal?
Unfortunately, going to a pharmacy as opposed to a grocery store isn't enough to ensure that you will get something actually helpful. CVS, Walgreens, and Rite Aid all have plenty of homeopathic offerings.
Worse, the labeling as homeopathic is often not very prominent, and these products are shelved with the non-homeopathic products that treat the same thing the homeopathic ones purport to treat. It is easy to not realize you have picked a homeopathic product if you are in a hurry, or if whatever you are there to get help for has left you kind of zonked out.
Given an animal that can produce sounds, if sounds are meaningful enough it can be a big advantage. Given more animals that produce sounds, the ones that can transmit more information will survive.
It's weird to think that there's nothing between complex (human) and simple (sheep) when it was the result of a gradual evolution. Big jumps are rare.
What's the evidence showing it was gradual? Big jumps may be unusual statistically [what set are you sampling? 'planets with apex predators that are bipedal mammalians' looks like too small of a sample to make statistical inferences??] but then so is genesis and it seems that happened.
I remember a study many years ago that found that bird songs get longer and more complex for captive birds than they do for wilds ones. It seemed to suggest that a dense population and more free time were very important to the evolution of complex language.
I'm not sure if it's as clear-cut as you say. It seems like complex sounds could be harder to differentiate and could take more energy to recognize. What specifically will kill you if you transmit less information?
This expression is more symbolic than to be taken at face value.
> meaningful enough - OP
this means there's an optimum
> Given more animals that produce sounds, the ones that can transmit more information - OP
This means animals below (a?) optimum threshold. Shannon called that threshold the bandwidth, I believe.
> [complex sounds] take more energy to recognize
So this is the other side of the equation. We have a signal to noise ratio that limits the bandwidth. Energy is Information and Energy conversion, ie. Information transmission is inherently lossy, because Entropy decreases in closed systems. The trick then is to use the information to expand the frame of reference, to grow as an individual and as a species. That gives a lower bound on what information has to be converted into the system - that's what OP is talking about.
> What specifically will kill you if you transmit less information
In the limit, not transmitting any information means heat death. So, OP was talking hyperbole, obviously. The question for a local optimum is obvious - birds proliferate and not in a small niche. A global optimum in the infinite, infinite bandwidth at some point, or infinitely increasing bandwidth in infinite time are obviously out of scope - even if we like to dream on cosmological scales. Hence, OP's leading statement is rather symbolic than to be taken at face value.
big jumps in the domain are rare, but bifurcations can easily be the result of little jumps in the domain. The map of genome to organism is not "differentiable".
Too much subsidies in farming business. No true capitalism. When I see how much of EU money goes to farmers, it's ridiculous. It funds the destruction of rainforests all around the world, ecosystems, oceans etc.
Yes, the food wouldn't be as cheap, but at least there would be a huge incentive for people to find cheaper ways (maybe finally someone will make an effort to improve hydro/aeroponics).
Of course, capitalism is greedy, not globally optimal, so it is necessary that certain restrictions are made by law. Complex issue I guess, EU is on a good path IMO.
What's wrong with regulating farming practices and, if food prices rise, give the poorer consumers more money (as in negative income tax, basic income, whatever) so they can choose to spend on food or anything else? How does subsidizing producers help regulate their practices?
For a single 100 acre field there might be as many as 4 different areas that need a different regulation. You cannot bring that national scale, it requires humans on the ground running soil tests and looking at the results.
Supply side policies have greatly distorted many of our markets. What is the true price of anything any more? How are we supposed to manage stuff if all the numbers are make believe?
I support price transparency, accountability, information symmetry.
The cost of food goes up, so we give say 40% of the population money to spend on food. This increases the demand so the cost of food goes up again, so we increase the benefit. This goes on forever, take a look at student loans in the US before federal intervention and now.
You give the money, they spend it on the providers of their choice, and then you tax the money back out.
You say, why would the providers accept it? Because they have to. It would only get the minimum a person needs to survive.
Or a better way with less force on producers: a single payer system like SNAP program, that mandates producers sell basic food amount for a certain price if someone comes with food stamps. Because everyone needs food. Why would proucers accept this? Because they make up for it on volume of everyone who has the food stamps (in this scenario, everyone).
Same as why doctors currently accept Medicare even though it pays less on average.
What do you mean by that? Tax producers at a higher level to remove the subsidized profits from the system? That will have the same effect as before except higher taxes and decreased supply will be the cause of the price increase instead of simply decreased supply. As prices rise more people will need that assistance, thus causing prices to increase faster and faster.
Tuition costs seem to follow the enrolment rates pretty closely. It seems the biggest factor is the fact that almost nobody attended postsecondary schools in the past, and now almost everyone does. Supply and demand.
> The truth is soil is likely less important than this article would have you believe. Modern farming and fertilizers have rendered it obsolete.
This can be true to some farmers, but it is not to the big ones. Sure you can apply fertilizer, but you pay for that. If you build your soil the first 7 years you will spend more money for less yields, but after 7 years your better soil will yield more than someone who tries to just apply fertilizer.
The other problem with the apply fertilizer theory is you can only apply so much. Corn needs nitrogen, but too much will kill (or stunt) the corn. Good soils will produce nitrogen every day in smaller amounts.
Of course with we are talking about potassium, that is a mineral and you need to replace what you take off the land either way. So soil health alone cannot be the answer, soil health with fertilizer is ultimately a much better answer.
>The truth is soil is likely less important than this article would have you believe. Modern farming and fertilizers have rendered it obsolete.
Having lived around farming for a few years and known / worked with many farmers, this isn't true at all. Soil and soil health is incredibly important.
Why must the State own them in order for that to happen? History - especially that of the USSR in recent times - suggests that there are better alternatives.
The State owning them is a proxy for shared responsibility. Because in democracies, the people controls the State by means of parliaments/senates/etc.
Besides, the State doesn't have to own everything. There's a middle ground between the flexibility of private ownership and the rigorousness of public management.
In the USSR everything was controlled by the State, and the State wasn't accountable by means of democracy.
I must say that from were I come, I have some pretty good examples of good public management, like healthcare and water management.
When the food runs out, it is 3 days too late for the revolution.
But food running out isn't the problem you are talking about. You are talking about the failure of the logistics of the supply chain to grocery stores. Those stores carry a 3 day supply for their area, and most people are 100% reliant on them. And if they fail, the towns go hungry. Therein is the single point of failure.
Our mitigation for that is to split the food supply for our family in thirds... we still buy about a third from stores, like everyone else. We grow a third ourselves, and we get a third from other farms, some local, some remote from whom we ship things in monthly.
It is completely feasible to diversify your own food supply. If everyone did it, we'd still have pains if the supply chains failed. But they would be survivable pains.
If the grocery store supply chain falls apart, it is unlikely you will be able to get any food from afar for the same reason (or, at very least, the people normally performing the deliveries will be too hungry to provide delivery service). Local farms are going to want to hang onto their production for themselves now that they have no other food source.
Realistically, that leaves the food you are growing yourself. 1/3 of your normal intake does sound like a struggle already, but to compound the difficulties, you have to ensure that you have the food available when you need it which is more complex than setting up a garden. Not impossible, but certainly a lost art. I'm not sure it really is feasible to expect many to follow through with this.
If you removed the trade barriers that prevent the developing countries from competing in agriculture, that would change rather quickly. They'd have a better shot at actually becoming "developed," too.
If you removed all barriers on agricultural products being sold to developing countries, their local agriculture would be pancaked by cheap wheat, corn, and rice grown in more agriculturally productive regions.
That "cheap wheat, corn, and rice grown in more agriculturally productive regions" is cheap because its production is heavily subsidized. When economists talk about removing agricultural subsidies (pretty much the only thing almost all macroeconomists agree on, for what little that's worth), they're generally talking about removing trade barriers and removing agricultural subsidies in the form of payments to farmers. I suppose it's true that if you fixed tariffs without fixing the other side, you'd still have a problem.
There are lots of other reasons why farmers in developed countries can grow food cheaper than those in developing countries:
- access to capital. A modern family farm has several million dollars worth of land and several million dollars worth of machinery. Farmers don't buy $500,000 combine harvesters for no reason -- in the long run they're cheaper than the alternatives.
- security. A modern farmer just leaves millions of dollars worth of machinery in his yard, usually unlocked.
- information. In developed chemicals the government & universities put out lots of information about techniques, seed varieties, chemicals, machinery, timing, weather forecasting, et cetera
The interesting thing is, agribusiness can take its technology to the developing world and do the same work there that it does here (with less security but also with fewer environmental and labor related restrictions and costs). Right now there are just very strong disincentives to do so in many cases.
I can't speak to the state of information and knowledge of agriculture in the various countries we'd consider "developing," and how it compares to universities and government here, but I bet it varies quite widely. That's a good point, though - it matters a lot.
Iowa is number one in corn because it has the best soils in the world for corn. There is no third world country that can compete with the native soils of Iowa. You can solve all the other issues (many of which are real) and they still lost the location lottery and cannot compete. (some regions can grow two crops a year though which might make them better than iowa despite not as good of soils)
That would be the nice thing about an open market: different areas could stay focused on what they're particularly good at. Iowa would definitely stay involved in corn.
But as you sort of alluded to, in a free market some areas could put downward price pressure on corn even if they're not as efficient as Iowa. If they've got land that isn't very well suited for anything else, and it's a choice between making a little money on corn and little or no money at all with their arable land, they'll probably go for it...
> When I see how much of EU money goes to farmers, it's ridiculous.
True, but at the same time the EU piles on an endless stream of regulations on the farmers, forcing them to invest in heavy machinery, and undergo rigorous inspections to be able to sell their produce.
How are EU subsidies funding destruction of rainforests? And why in your, as you say, opinion the EU is on a good path? Does it have something to do with #Covfefe?
That doesn't have anything to do with subsidies, and at most indirectly depends on unrelated parts of protectionist agricultural policy i.e. tariffs. Then how the EU is anyhow responsible for predatory industries in Argentina? And how the global markets would fix any of that if only relieved from the cancer of EU subsidies?
Just because they don't bear the full responsibility doesn't mean they don't bear any responsibility. If the EU participates in a damaging market, it really doesn't matter if they are contributing to the supply-side or demand-side, since they have some ability to mitigate the damage regardless. In the end it doesn't even matter who's responsible, only what the outcome is.
This is pure rethoric on your side and not addressing actual stated question: how thigs would go better without subsidies. This is such a leaping sledge of hand at first, then a misleading argument (not that part of EU policy) and then difussing the argument into such generalities. You see a bad outcome and can't really tell if it would be better or worse without subsidies. You don't even bother arguing the point.
By the same token I could argue that all people die so medicines are suspicious or overusing vitamin C is the culprit. There is no concieveable argument except one demanding politicians be omniscient and rational policies blamed because every policy ultimately leads to death, as people die, thus markets should sort things out.
No, this behavior is likely not biological. It's not a universal behavior, there are cultures where this phenomenon is reduced or completely lacking. That means it is likely a social construct, not biological.
There are social constructs but I would not deny biology. Effect of testosterone and estrogen on behavior has been studied extensively and it is quite clear from that why men and women behave the way they do.
Is women avoiding STEM a social construct? It most definitely is. Is women having lower salaries a social construct? In some cases yes, in some cases it is quite clear that they are not as risk taking as men, and are much more agreeable (they will not risk by asking a higher salary during a job interview).
My office space in china would keep the temperature around 24-26C in the summer. My arms would literally sweat to the desk when typing (I'm not a completely in the air tyoer, as a programmer I don't need to be). I had to hit a cooler Starbucks with a laptop to get things done it was so annoying. I much would have preferred it being a bit colder, around 20C is best, even if I would wear a light jacket at that temp...at least I could type.
It sounds very weird. If the space is closed, the AC makes the air dryer, so sweating should be minimal on these low temperatures (dampness is hell).
Are you sitting next to a window that is blasting its rays over your body?
Is the building badly designed?
Are you protected by a layer of fat cells?
Sweating at 24-26C without sunlight blasting at you is very anomalous.
Lowering the AC to 20C or below is such an insanely wasteful thing to do it ought to be forbidden. The biggest CO2 footprint is us, the first world, heating and cooling.
As someone that lives in the UK, 24-26C is where you would find me in a T-shirt and shorts and probably still feeling warm. Any physical or mental exertion will probably lead to a bit of sweating.
21 degrees is what I would consider a 'normal' room temperature, anything above 23 I would consider 'warm'.
I don't disagree with you but I'm not sure all your questions are reasonable/respectful. Here are a few examples from my situation.
The AC in Japan has two settings--one is cool and one is "dry" for dehumidify. The cool setting does not dry the air (or if so, ever so slightly). We have high humidity so 26 degrees can feel hot indoors.
There are some seats in the office that are close enough to have the sunlight hit the desk. I'm not in one of those seats but can imagine it feels very hot.
Our office is "set" to 25 but at my desk it is often over 28 degrees (all the towers are on the tables and the AC is far from my location). I consider myself in fairly good shape but sweat quite a lot when it's over 28 degrees with a PC tower blowing hot air at me.
> The AC in Japan has two settings--one is cool and one is "dry" for dehumidify. The cool setting does not dry the air (or if so, ever so slightly). We have high humidity so 26 degrees can feel hot indoors.
I'm curious how this works. In America, we have only one setting, and it does both. The indoor air is 23 degrees or so (22 in busy offices, 25 in frugal/environmentally conscious homes...28 would be considered oppressive heat, no matter the humidity). But the evaporator coils in the air handler should be cooled to about 5 degrees in a properly functioning air conditioner. If the air is humid when it cools on these coils, it drops below the dew point, and humidity condenses out of the air to be drained out of the building. If the AC is properly sized, it keeps the air indoors comfortably dehumidified (if too large, it will cool a small amount of air by a lot, and run too infrequently to dehumidify; if too small, the air temperature will not drop enough to cause condensation).
We also have dehumidifiers, which are practically identical to air conditioners but have the condenser coils in the same machine to warm the air back up before it exits (and to simplify construction/improve efficiency). These actually add a bit of heat to the room, but do dry out the air. Typically, these are only used when a home doesn't have an air conditioner.
The office HVAC was one of those new green energy efficient one. It didn't seem to extract humidity as well at higher temps. I complained about the humidity level, but it was easier just to move to a cafe with decent AC.
I wasn't sweating heavily, or any at all, just my arms were sticky to the desk. It was warm enough that long sleeves were out of the question, so contact was unavoidable. Also, my desk was next to a window facing east, and our blinds were a bit tricky to raise and lower (decide between, darkness and heat filtering).
It is easier to deal with 26C as a baseline temperature in LA than BJ given that humidity is much lower in the former.
Why is everyone demonizing fatty foods, or sugar, when that 3500 number is screaming at us from afar?!
US citizens eat way to much and move way too little. The side effect is diabetes T2, heart attacks and all sorts of issues.
US citizens also do not know how to eat, their capitalism has failed them, the whole food business is subsidized insanely. So they are "forced" to buy highly caloric foods that kills them (because that food is cheap), and foods with high nutrient to calories ratio are too expensive. Sodie pops and milk cheaper than water, meat cheaper than vegetables, insane.