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Civilizational Collapse, Part 4

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Re: Civilizational Collapse, Part 4

#111

Post by ptah »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #89
ptah wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> doesn't scale to high population densities that's where we are right now so anything that doesn't scale is practically irrelevant

Given the climate of our world, we have a certain amount of arctic tundra etc. The best way to extract nourishment from that is foraging by e.g. reindeer. That holds irrespective of the population density. Also, reindeer is one of the most ethical ways of modern husbandry. Animals live out in the wild, supported by humans e.g. adding feed when there is little to eat, protecting them from carnivores etc, and then they…

that is a very long chain of ifs, any of which can evaluate to false EDIT: there is also no precedent for what you propose and if we go by the partial match of grass-fed beef, the yield will be so small compared to the population as to be pointless

Re: Civilizational Collapse, Part 4

#112

Post by dredmorbius »

ekianjo wrote: post #18
ddxxdd wrote: post #12

This feels reminiscent of the current issue of long-term data storage. Flash drives are volatile and can lose your data any minute. Solid State drives are slightly less volatile, and a hard disk has magnetic fields that will last decades, but nothing will keep our gigabytes of data alive and intact for future archaeologists. If the Library of Alexandria can burn, then so can any form of digital storage. On a side not…

> If the Library of Alexandria can burn, then so can any form of digital storage. There is no form of storage that cannot be destroyed. Even stone scriptures eventually erode and fade away. The best thing we can do is duplicate everything as much as we can and hope to reduce the loss over time.

All knowledge is a palimpsest, I'm increasingly convinced.

Re: Civilizational Collapse, Part 4

#113

Post by GVIrish »

squish78 wrote: post #80
ahelwer wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and the vast amounts of land used to grow those things can be redirected to other things that humans can eat. I have no idea why otherwise smart people get such a brain block on the topic of meat-eating. These "gotcha" points fall apart if you take 10 seconds to think about it.

Those vast amounts of land usually don't have viable soil for multi-year agriculture. Arable land is limited

Arable land is getting cleared out en masse to farm cattle. Cattle farming is not driven by the inability to grow crops on that land, it's driven by the demand for red meat (and dairy products).

Re: Civilizational Collapse, Part 4

#114

Post by nvahalik »

Carioca wrote: post #105
nvahalik wrote: post #47

When reading about what Physcon, I reminded me of an interview[0] I recently listened to with Drs. James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian. They bring up some of these very ideas and how they are encountering them today in our society: i.e. people who see science and reason as "master's tools" of "oppression". It seems that everything old is new again. [0]: https://youtu.be/YDFL3xwEEG8

As a Brazilian, I see a MUCH larger threat from the current right-wing government than from lefties inside academia. While the relationship between natural/hard/exact sciences and social/soft sciences can indeed be very strained, there's very little interference in the actual content of research. Meanwhile, the State Assembly of São Paulo formed an Investigative Comittee that just requested the content of all researc…

I don't think either "side" can claim any sort of moral high ground on this issue. In the case of the video I'm referencing above, the issue is decidedly from the left which has been trumpeting a post-truth, highly individualized, no-harm-freedom, and consent-based understanding of personal conduct.

But on the other hand, I think you are right in that there are people who can and will say _X is unquestionably always true_ by calling out to something like truth even though it has little to no basis in reality.

Re: Civilizational Collapse, Part 4

#115

Post by Kaiyou »

mc32 wrote: post #6
frankbreetz wrote: post #2

If our current civilization completely collapsed, I would think most of our technology would be gone forever. It is hard to imagine another civilization figuring out how to read a hard drive.

A lot more people are literate and we have lots of libraries everywhere. So for that to happen there would have to be a complete directed effort to abandon learning. By all countries. It’s highly unlikely even if we had a catastrophic natural disaster like an asteroid hit taking out or majorly degrading infrastructure. Such an event on the contrary would probably prompt the most able country left to seek to become th…

Looking at what goes around inside schools, there seems to be an ongoing directed effort to abandon learning, already.

Re: Civilizational Collapse, Part 4

#116

Post by dredmorbius »

solotronics wrote: post #46
chrisco255 wrote: post #41

This quote: "Ecologically, these Archaic hunters and gatherers had moved one entire link down the food chain, thereby eliminating the approximately 90-percent loss in food value that occurs when one feeds on an animal that is a plant-eater." This is just completely false. All meat consumed is bioavailable protein and nutrients. Even more so when it's cooked. Plants have reduced bioavailability due to high oxalate, ph…

Also, animals can digest many forms of plant that are useless as human food such as plains grasses and tree leaves. Vegetarianism is elitist in that many people on earth cannot afford to foregoe any availible source of protein and food, there are starving people already and telling someone in Africa they shouldn't eat a chicken that forages near their house is pretty narrow minded. I tend to eat vegetarian on my own…

"What can" arguments are frequently blind to "what is" facts.

The bulk of present livestock animals raised for food either directly consume feed which could be eaten by humans, or consume feed which grows on land that could be used to grow foods eaten by humans.

Net grazed livestock, especially in the US, is rare. Where such livestock do exist, they tend to be on already marginal lands -- if something better could be grown there it would be. The consequence being that its carrying and feeding capacity is highly limited. And even historical herd-keeping practices have proved highly damaging to long-term land quality, helping in the destruction of forests through much of the middle east, as an example. "The pines of Lebanon" is not just an allegorical phrase.

The split between animals which do effectively forage and those which don't, I'm not immediately aware of, though

Re: Civilizational Collapse, Part 4

#117

Post by dredmorbius »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #96
spodek wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does being vegetarian have to do with telling other people what they should or shouldn't eat?

The old joke: "How can you tell if someone is a Vegetarian? They'll tell you."

How can you tell if someone is a meat eater?

They'll complain that you're a vegitarian.

Re: Civilizational Collapse, Part 4

#118

Post by JoeAltmaier »

HNcantBtrustd wrote: post #110
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm trying to figure this out. I see chicken breast at $3 for 450g which is about 900 calories? So 1/3 penny per calorie? A tomato is 16 calories per 100g which cost 50 cents so what, 3 cents per calorie? Did I do that right?

You'd like Efficiency Is Everything. But I was particularly talking about per calorie rather than "per dollar"

Dollars can be a pretty good measure of the 'cost' of something - energy, transportation, land use, labor. If vegetables cost more to deliver to the grocery store, that cost is pretty related to the environmental cost?

Re: Civilizational Collapse, Part 4

#119

Post by squish78 »

GVIrish wrote: post #113
squish78 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those vast amounts of land usually don't have viable soil for multi-year agriculture. Arable land is limited

Arable land is getting cleared out en masse to farm cattle. Cattle farming is not driven by the inability to grow crops on that land, it's driven by the demand for red meat (and dairy products).

Rainforest land is not arable. Farmers who try to grow crops (typically soybean) in the Amazon get 2-3 years of crops before the land becomes infertile, then it has to fallow again. Their only option is to add massive amounts of chemical fertilizers which washes out into the Amazon basin. Aside from leaving the forests undisturbed (which is my preference), raising cattle is better for that ecosystem than agricultural farming would be.

Re: Civilizational Collapse, Part 4

#120

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

eitland wrote: post #101
ahelwer wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and the vast amounts of land used to grow those things can be redirected to other things that humans can eat. I have no idea why otherwise smart people get such a brain block on the topic of meat-eating. These "gotcha" points fall apart if you take 10 seconds to think about it.

As someone who grew up on a steep farm where grass, fruits and potatoes where the only options that worked out in practice (most of it is steep, summer is short and unpredictable) I'd say maybe you should reconsider. One easy thought experiment that helped me understand: given how extremely poor our ancestors where and how hard they worked to make ends meet there must have been some advantage to keeping animals. Othe…

Yes, but remember that pigs are probably the only animals that are grown only for their meat. Cows, sheep and goats are grown for their milk also, sheep for their fleece, chicken, duck and geese for their eggs etc. Eggs and dairy are valuable sources of protein that can last a lot longer than slaughtering and eating the animal that produces them. So, in many places, where people raise animals they keep them alive for the small but steady supply of eggs and milk, and only kill them for their meat on special occasions (like religious festivals and so on).

That's my experience anyway. I spend my summers in a friend's farm and they have a small army of chickens, a plattoon of goats and in different times, a couple of pigs or so. We get fresh eggs and fresh goat's milk, but all the meat we eat is bought from outside the farm. It seems to be a very good deal actually, which was surprising to me when I first realised it, because of course the chickens and goats have to be fed. Then again- they often eat what we do (or rather, our leftovers).

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