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The Unlikely Success of Fish Sticks

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Re: The Unlikely Success of Fish Sticks

#151

Post by imtringued »

shkkmo wrote: post #124
stouset wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we improve things? Sure. Should we invest in improving things? Absolutely. Neither of those permits the kind of pervasive magical thinking people have where we can somehow raise even a fraction of our 7 billion people to anything approximating a typical Western lifestyle without further accelerating environmental collapse. Or even maintaining the number of people with such a lifestyle that we currently do. Our pl…

I think you'd be surprised as how sustainabily we could approximate the western standard of living if we had the will power to try as a whole society. There would certainly be sacrifices, but I suspect we would also gain significant quality if life improvements. What this requires is a change of mindset and I don't think attitudes like yours help. We are hundreds of years from that thermodynamic limit at our current…

>I'm sort of unclear where you are goin with your argument? Are you arguing we need to kill of people or economically retard developing countries energy use? Neither of those seem reasonable stances so I am left wondering what you see as the path forward and what value you see in advancing your argument.

Lack of resources are a common cause of war. Lack of resources was a problem for humanity for its entire existence and only in the last 100 years has it ceased to be a problem. I'd love it if people voluntarily decided to keep this abundance state going instead of doing the usual party everything away until it's gone behavior.

Re: The Unlikely Success of Fish Sticks

#152

Post by stouset »

baggy_trough wrote: post #146
stouset wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is plainly false, if you would actually read what I linked. We simply cannot grow at a 2-3% rate of energy consumption, period, without shortly running into thermodynamic limits of how quickly Earth can radiate excess heat into space. As I said before, this is while completely ignoring greenhouse gases and assuming Earth is a perfect thermodynamic blackbody. And the real Earth is not a perfect blackbody, so real…

How shortly is shortly? The linked paper suggests several hundred years or more. So we certainly don’t have to worry about this as there will be unimaginable technology changes by then.

“Unimaginable technology” does not free us from thermodynamic reality. The Earth can radiate heat into space, but convection and conduction are unavailable.

We have two hundred and fifty years, assuming we completely rid the atmosphere of carbon dioxide, methane, and all other greenhouse gases. Hopefully you can see that this means it will be less than that amount of time.

I don’t know about you but “some amount less than 250 years” to get the entire globe to agree to permanently cap energy production is almost comically implausible. No politician will ever get elected on a platform centered around this, much less an entire planet of such governments. And as with all tragedies of the commons, every individual will have a multitude of reasons to personally use more while hoping that everyone else makes the necessary noble sacrifice.

Has anything about this last year of a global pandemic given you reason to believe that humans as a whole will accept an indefinite future of permanent restriction for the sake of everyone? We can barely get half the American population to obey stay at home orders for a few weeks at a time, and that’s to say nothing of countries like Brazil whose leaders refuse to even acknowledge a problem. Hell, we’re fifty years into scientists sounding the alarm about greenhouse gases, and we’ve only managed to accelerate our production of them in the time since.

I’m honestly just glad I won’t live to see this play out.

Re: The Unlikely Success of Fish Sticks

#153

Post by xyzzyz »

samatman wrote: post #129
klipt wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, because cows run on biofuel that is recently captured carbon, while your car is burning fossil fuel that is long ago captured carbon. Your houseplants aren't recapturing anywhere near that much.

No. They turn that carbon from carbon dioxide into methane, which has a 27x multiplier in warming over its lifetime in the atmosphere. It's not carbon neutral, it's equivalent to 26 extra tonnes for each tonne of CO2 which goes into the feed.

And that methane does not stay in the atmosphere forever, but only for a decade or two. It’s all part of a cycle.

If it makes it easier to think about it, here is one way: imagine a world with no humans, no fossil fuels, but stable population of 10 billion cows. These 10 billion cows produce tremendous amounts of methane. Do you expect this methane to warm the climate over next 1000 years? If you do, you’re wrong: if the population has been and will stay stable, the methane that cows emit is just enough to replace the methane decomposing to CO2 and H2O that was previously emitted by the cows. As long as population numbers are constant, the amount of methane in the atmosphere is also constant, and you’ll see no climate warming.

Re: The Unlikely Success of Fish Sticks

#154

Post by xyzzyz »

aqme28 wrote: post #116
xyzzyz wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This also depends on what you count as carbon dioxide production. For example, cattle produce methane through gut fermentation, which is a strong greenhouse gas. However, it contributes to warming only to the extent the cattle stocks are growing. If cattle numbers are stable for some amount of time, than the methane produced by them does not contribute to new warming, as it forms closed cycle: methane decomposes to C…

> methane decomposes to CO2 in atmosphere in a decade or two, which is then captured by grass But methane is a worse greenhouse gas than CO2, so it's not neutral at all. You're also assuming that cattle are fed naturally occurring grass rather than industrial livestock feed, which I don't have numbers for but I assume is not carbon-neutral.

But methane is a worse greenhouse gas than CO2, so it's not neutral at all.

It is worse, but it doesn’t matter: as long as cattle population stays at constant levels, so will the amount of methane in the atmosphere that resulted from cattle emissions. You only get climate change from growing amount of greenhouse gases.

> You're also assuming that cattle are fed naturally occurring grass rather than industrial livestock feed, which I don't have numbers for but I assume is not carbon-neutral

In fact, I’m not; I explicitly mention artificial fertilizer, for example, which is typically not used to produce hay. The point is that to assess the effect of cattle on warming, you should focus on fossil inputs into it, not on methane. I think is quite likely that methane production from gastric fermentation in North America these days is lower than, say, in 1500s, where 60 millions bisons alone roamed the plains, along with another tens of millions of deer and other ruminants.

Re: The Unlikely Success of Fish Sticks

#155

Post by sampo »

robocat wrote: post #96
xyzzyz wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This also depends on what you count as carbon dioxide production. For example, cattle produce methane through gut fermentation, which is a strong greenhouse gas. However, it contributes to warming only to the extent the cattle stocks are growing. If cattle numbers are stable for some amount of time, than the methane produced by them does not contribute to new warming, as it forms closed cycle: methane decomposes to C…

Firstly you are presuming cattle are grass fed with no fertilizer used. Nitrogen fertilizer and stock feeds use petrochemicals directly or indirectly. > If cattle numbers are stable for some amount of time Cattle numbers are mostly static. The amount of methane produced is not trivial, although as you point out not the same class of problem as CO² since CO² is cumulative. Was your 40 year figure the half-life? For co…

> Was your 40 year figure the half-life?

Half-life of methane in the atmosphere is 9.1 years (Wikipedia).

Re: The Unlikely Success of Fish Sticks

#156

Post by adrianN »

stouset wrote: post #145
adrianN wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least for energy there is no problem at all, except for investment costs. A reasonably sized chunk of the Sahara, covered with solar panels, could provide all the energy we need. Nuclear is also an option.

This is plainly false, if you would actually read what I linked. We simply cannot grow at a 2-3% rate of energy consumption, period, without shortly running into thermodynamic limits of how quickly Earth can radiate excess heat into space. As I said before, this is while completely ignoring greenhouse gases and assuming Earth is a perfect thermodynamic blackbody. And the real Earth is not a perfect blackbody, so real…

Nobody believes that our energy consumption will continue increasing at the current rate for the time it would require to run into any hard limits. In developed countries energy use per capita is constant or decreasing. Population is expected to top out around 10 billion or so.

Re: The Unlikely Success of Fish Sticks

#157

Post by schwartzworld »

nimvlaj30 wrote: post #132
dweekly wrote: post #40

This made me curious about how it was that Clarence Birdseye came to discover the fast-freeze approach that preserves flavor. The answer is surprisingly straightforward - he was a fur trader in Labrador (northern Canada) and noticed when he pulled fish out they froze immediately and were still delicious months later. So if only you could make fish as cold as northern Canada, you could make frozen fish tasty! It was f…

Sounds like he was inspired to try that by the food company of the same name

Also, what are the odds of Lou Gehrig contracting Lou Gehrig's Disease? So unlucky.

Re: The Unlikely Success of Fish Sticks

#158

Post by schwartzworld »

LambdaComplex wrote: post #138
sweettea wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, I had never heard of a chicken tender until I started reading r/WSB; they've always been chicken fingers or buffalo wings.

Buffalo wings are something completely different though? Those are the thigh/drumstick of the chicken (which is commonly served with a spicy sauce), whereas chicken fingers/tenders are the tenderloin.

Some restaurants serve "boneless wings" which are typically fingies with buffalo sauce.

Re: The Unlikely Success of Fish Sticks

#159

Post by bonoboTP »

jonas21 wrote: post #139
bonoboTP wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do kids eat in other places or at other times? I think kids eat from plates with cutlery in most of Europe both now and in the past. Do kids in the US use plastic cutlery and paper plates or something (and drink from red solo cups)?

When I was growing up (in the US), school lunch would typically be served on a disposable tray with a plastic spork. Similar to this: https://arc-anglerfish-arc2-prod-tronc.s3.amazonaws.com/publ...

Interesting, but so wasteful and hamburgers?

In Hungary kids eat something like these for lunch:

https://m.blog.hu/eo/eokoskodas/image/menza2.jpg

https://kep.cdn.indexvas.hu/1/0/1758/17587/175878/17587888_0...

Far from fancy, but at least real plates and cutlery. I guess American schools are afraid kids will hurt themselves with a real fork or break a plate on each other's head and the school gets sued out of existence by the parents or something?

Re: The Unlikely Success of Fish Sticks

#160

Post by baggy_trough »

stouset wrote: post #152
baggy_trough wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How shortly is shortly? The linked paper suggests several hundred years or more. So we certainly don’t have to worry about this as there will be unimaginable technology changes by then.

“Unimaginable technology” does not free us from thermodynamic reality. The Earth can radiate heat into space, but convection and conduction are unavailable. We have two hundred and fifty years, assuming we completely rid the atmosphere of carbon dioxide, methane, and all other greenhouse gases. Hopefully you can see that this means it will be less than that amount of time. I don’t know about you but “some amount less…

Unimaginable technology also includes technology to increase energy efficiency or to completely change what needs to be done in the first place. People don't care about "using energy" - they care about making themselves happy, which is often related to, but removed from that.
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