Why haven't states setup Covid only treatment centers to relieve the pressure on hospitals? Sure there are only so many nurses and doctors but reducing regulation on who could work in these centers would fix that.
You think it’s more realistic (and better for the environment) to farm seaweed at global beef production scale? You’d have to dredge up so much seaweed and ship it all the way to the cows, it would be insanely bad for marine environments and so expensive to do at that scale. Meanwhile growing feed from the ground can be done right beside the cows at rock bottom prices.
There are millions (billions?) of people that don’t eat cows, it is not unrealistic for people to stop eating them, culture changes very quickly
“I don’t know why we need birth control, people can just stop having sex until they’re ready to reproduce”
When you start your response from a place that is unreasonable, nobody is going to give you the time of day. Telling people to just stop eating beef is both unreasonable and just flat out not going to happen in at least several generations with many steps in between - if it ever happens.
I'm gonna invoke Poe's law here, but respond genuinely.
The only reason beef is so popular is because it's available. It's pretty inefficient in terms of energy input to calorie output and produces even more carbon as a byproduct of it's production. Carbon-cost wise, it should be seen as a luxury.
I also really don't think it would be an issue health-wise and diverting the market to other forms of food wouldn't really put too much strain on people's ability to provide enough food, calories- and protein-wise
> The only reason beef is so popular is because it's available.
Wait, what? Beef is popular because it tastes good. You don’t pay $50+ for a chicken breast, salmon filet, or pork chop. People consume beef because it tastes good. It’s “available” because people like it. If deer or bison sold for more than the price per lbs of beef, the cattle industry would collapse and be replaced overnight. But it doesn't, because people don't like the taste as much.
$20 for a steak, maybe. I would argue that $50 or even $100+ for a steak has far more to do with the scarcity (fillet mignon is, after all, a very small part of the animal) and definitely the status involved.
Also, bison absolutely cost more per pound than beef. Beef sells because it's cheap, not because it's expensive.
No offense, but you're either getting ripped off on the salmon or ordering a cut of steak that's the absolute lowest grade possible. Even decent steak is roughly double the price of salmon per oz. Something like waygu is 10x.
And yes, taste is subjective and the numbers make it pretty obvious that the majority of the population subjectively prefers beef.
Perception is not taste, I'm talking about your idea that "meat has to be better than salmon" that is you perception and it forms how you think meat tastes vs. salmon.
> Carbon-cost wise, it should be seen as a luxury.
Virtually every meaningful part of our lives is a luxury.
Your profile mentions you are a musician and artist: many many people in the world would consider your choices as unnecessary luxuries. In some parts of the world you would be deprived of your choices for the good of others. Surely we could even find people that would judge your art and music as a negative worth to the world.
A world where we only work for the minimum needs necessary to survive (food, shelter, etcetera) would not be worth aspiring for.
Whether or not music and art are a luxury, and should be eliminated because of that, is definitely an interesting discussion
Note that I never argued for the abolition of cattle production, just that it's carbon-cost is not considered a much as it should be (as is the case with most things, I think)
I also never argued against luxury goods or only working for the most efficient means of survival. Luxury is fine, but I think everyone in modern society is going to have to give up at least some amount of the comforts of modern society.
> [meat’s] carbon-cost is not considered a much as it should be (as is the case with most things, I think)
Oh, I strongly agree.
However the majority of the greenhouse gas contribution from meat is methane, which decomposes over many decades. So in the long term, not eating meat is expected to only decrease your carbon footprint by 2% to 4%[1][2].
But meat is expensive, and I suspect that whatever you substitute instead of purchasing meat would generate CO2, so my guess is the impact would be much closer to 0%.
Personally I use money as my proxy for calculating carbon footprint. So your long term footprint is highly correlated and mostly dependent upon your income and the economy you belong to, almost regardless of your actions.
Unless you are doing direct action to capture carbon, not having children, killing people, or reducing your economy’s usage of CO2, then action at an individual level makes very little difference IMHO. Not to say we shouldn’t try!
Edit: also note the 60% headline figure is of 35% agricultural emissions, so actually about 20% of personal emissions. And presumably that is very strongly dependant on the country you in (buying meat from).
> The only reason beef is so popular is because it's available.
You don't think cultures eating meat and integrating meat into their traditions has anything to do with it?
It's difficult to separate the chicken and the egg here because farming meat was super cheap, accessible and beneficial (nutritionally, environmentally and financially) for a lot longer than the last 100 years.
It's "good" to transition to a meatless diet for the sake of the environment. The world is going to have to massively change in order to do that, and the cultures and traditions of a lot of people are going to be casualties along the way. Please don't be so dismissive of that.
"Popular" was probably the wrong word. "Currently ubiquitous" would probably be better.
> was super cheap, accessible and beneficial (nutritionally, environmentally and financially) for a lot longer than the last 100 years.
Interesting sidenote, I recently heard someone talk about how cattle was an extra good form of livestock because it "converted" an inaccessible form of energy (grass, which humans can't eat) that would otherwise be sitting there useless, into a useable form. With (most) modern farming, this is no longer the case.
Note that I never argued for a meatless diet, or even a beef-less one, and I don't think going to that extreme would be necessary or even the best outcome. And I recognize that doing so would mean many many generations of cultural shift and concerted effort. Just that beef farming in its current form should be considered more of a luxury in terms of cost to the environment than it currently is
Because it relies on the majority of the population to unanimously change their mind and diets. Between economic reasons (alternative diets can be more expensive to a family that has no time to cook every meal), health reasons, traditional reasons, societal conceptions, and downright stubborn people, it's essentially not possible without multiple generations worth of effort. That's much less realistic than changing mandated farming practices which could be done in a matter of years.
Seaweed per year for cow population := 31,025,000,000kgs
Global seaweed production := 6,350,293,180kgs
So, we'd need to increase seaweed production by 5 times. We would then need to distribute this from the largest producers (China, Japan, Korea) the countries that consume the most (Europe, US). This isn't a problem that can be solved by mandated changes in a matter of years, and I have no idea what the CO2 output would be for this sort of production and shipping.
None of this needs to be binary this or that though. We can limit or eliminate our intake of meat products through personal choice AND engineer solutions to minimize environmental harm. We can do both and it does not have to be unanimous.
Also, there absolutely is a very real cultural shift happening right now that is embracing flexitarian/vegetarian/vegan diets.
I also don't have data on this, but I think there has been a much bigger rise in performative veganism than actual veganism. For example many popular twitch streamers say they are vegan, and then the next week viewers point out they are eating a cheeseburger on stream and they'll say "well I'm not today obviously".
Unfortunately, as is becoming more and more true in our pretty weird modern inter-connected world there's no substitute for getting your own hands dirty, reading primary sources and trying to understand what's true and what's bullshit yourself. Only then can you really evaluate who is worth listening to and what is actually interesting (I found the above stuff I linked to be good, but you should judge them for yourself).
The 'investment' bit is kind of secondary (https://soliditylang.org/), I personally think BTC, ETH, and Coinbase stock are the main long term bets - other stuff has extreme risk and requires a lot of attention to know if it's worthwhile or not. I do think the ZCash privacy model is cool.
Basically, I wouldn't invest unless you're going to sort through the nonsense yourself. Though like any investing the stuff where the value is harder to see is also where the bigger returns are (and the bigger failures).
DYOR (Do Your Own Research), don't fomo into coins just because they are pumping in price. Read through their code (or how many contributors, how much contributions it gets, etc) which is something that you can't do with current financial system and if any of those projects don't open source their code, stay as far away as possible. Inspect the on-chain data to see how much is it actually used, etc. Look at Google Trends, look at their community sizes, etc.
There's a lot of datapoints that you can use or you can find reliable people and rely on their judgments. Also, if you're simply looking for investment, you can't go wrong with BTC/ETH portfolio, they have been proven to work over many years now and most of the remaining altcoins are correlated with them in price anyways.
Honestly I would avoid asking Internet forums for advice, you paint yourself as a target
HN is probably fine, I just feel bad for anyone who learns about crypto on YouTube and asks a newbie question in the comments - they are swarmed by bot armies recommending “investment strategies” over WhatsApp
You can do a quick search to have the answers to all these simple questions, it has about ~200k transactions per day which settles about ~2B$ worth of Bitcoin a day (which is up very significantly since last year and down quite a bit from few months ago).
Are you trying to argue that transaction capacity is the most important metric?
If so, then you don't want Bitcoin. You can use Paypal.
However if you want to own an asset that can't be debased by central banks, where your transactions can't be censored, where you can participate from anywhere geographically, then you might want Bitcoin.
Those features come at a transaction capacity tradeoff.
I'm not trying to argue that transaction capacity is the most important metric, but it's a metric you yourself mentioned as important and it's a metric I have not been able to verify for many cryptocurrencies I've looked at.
If you say "Choose proven cryptocurrencies with transactions" I am going to assume you don't mean ten transactions/day.
I do not think it is unreasonable to ask "How many people are actually transacting with this cryptocurrency?".
Health care costs in the US can have the same effect on the population as a tax even though it does not get go through the government. The goal should be to lower the healthcare cost per person, not squabble about who is paying.
The Netflix API does not let you create a player. As far as I know Netflix built the player for every device (Ipad, Playstation, Blueray...). If they did not build the player for a device they had to give the device manufacturer a secret API that I am not aware of.
Also, for the curious, their player is all HTML5 driven. They basically compile a browser for each device and build the UI with HTML5.
https://github.com/pygments/pygments