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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • I disagree. Just following your source to its conclusion, I think it’s safe to say OA (organic agriculture) is better all around:

    7.1 Pros • Lower emissions of CO 2 , N 2 O, and CH4 • Enhanced soil and water quality • Lower energy use per land area • Higher energy efficiency per land area 7.2 Cons • Lower soil profile SOC stocks [i.e. how much carbon is in the soil] • Lower crop yields • Higher land requirement • Lower energy production per land area

    Your conclusion that we’d have to clear more land for agriculture use if we all switched to OA seems flawed; e.g. here in Germany we use about 60% of agricultural land to raise livestock feed like corn etc (https://www.landwirtschaft.de/tier-und-pflanze/pflanze/was-waechst-auf-deutschlands-feldern). Seems to me like eating less meat and growing idk lentils or beans would not immediately lead to food insecurity.

    This is also what the FAO says: yes, OA leads to yield reduction when compared to conventional methods, but not to food scarcity and instead to healthier ecosystems (https://www.fao.org/organicag/oa-faq/oa-faq6/en/).

    (sry gotta go, more.later)




  • Wikipedia in Video Form is a great line! I feel much the same way, but I think that’s not the entire picture. Wikipedia is a lot of declarative knowledge (i.e. what things are and Al’s maybe why they are), but YouTube is a lot of procedural knowledge for me. That is how to X. My GF and I finally found an apartment. I don’t know how to replace broken light switches, but in five minutes YouTube taught me how.

    I didn’t know how to replace a faucet - now I do. I did not know how to insert a metal screw fitting into the furniture I was constructing - now I do. I wanted to measure our energy consumption, figuring there had to be a way to it it smart/connected and Open Source. YT content creators showed me how.

    The list goes oooonnnnnn




  • You are in the wrong side of this.Theres a German doc shedding some light on this issue:

    https://youtu.be/vogs4NzqI3Q (money quote around 7:07), basically “half the perpetrators of child sexual abuse do not feel an attraction to kids. On the other hand, half the people who do feel attracted to kids do not become perpetrators.”

    Basically, half the people abusing kids don’t do so because they’re attracted to kids but presumably because they’re easier victims whereas half the people getting attracted to life feel disgusted by themselves.

    It’s, for all that we know, as congenital as being straight or queer. Now, with queer and straight preference, you don’t necessarily run into consent problems. Imagine you notice yourself being attracted to, idk, 15-year-olds. You’re otherwise a reasonably well adjusted human being. That’s gotta be devastating. You can’t help it, you were born this way. There’s no redemption arc here, the only thing you can do is just never ever give in to this feeling.















  • It’s not “da costs”, it’s actually really, really really expensive to build new nuclear reactors. Most of that comes from increased labor costs, which in turn have ballooned largely due to increased regulation and oversight requirements, which I would argue is not something we should do away with.

    I wouldn’t necessarily mind having a reactor or two acting as base generators especially during the winter, but

    1. In Germany we’ve been searching for a secure waste site since the first reactor went online in 1957. If we haven’t found it yet, we never will.
    2. There’s not really a reason to hope for cost reduction of reactor construction once we do it at scale, because requirements and local acceptance are too heterogeneous to implement any sort of scaling construction. Every jurisdiction will have its own risk assessment and usually the locals are none too happy about a reactor close to them. I just don’t see something happening in that regard. Wind turbines and solar panels on the other hand can be churned out in factories at scale, which is why they’re so cheap, comparatively.
    3. Therefore, personally I’d rather invest in green H2 as an energy storage solution. We can easily generate an enormous electricity surplus during the summer months, but lack long-term storage of the electricity. So we shut off solar and wind farms when they’re over producing. Wouldn’t it be neat to instead let them keep generating and use that surplus energy to power power-to-gas plants E. G. with H2? It’s an enormously power-hungry process, but if you do it when power is basically free…

    Oh wait, we’re already doing that and it’s already cost-effective. Now, if we were to take that process and build it at scale… for example by not spending 12-20 Bn 💶 to build another Flamanville, Olkiluoto or Hinkley Point C… I think that might actually work.