221–230 of 242 posts
Say what you want but the industry has figured out how to manage public perception and sentiment. Water usage problem is easy to fix, while energy usage is a far tougher nut to crack.
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Factory-farmed beef is the worst source of pollution in the food industry. We definitely need less of that.
"Factory-farmed beef" doesn't even exist. All cows get raised in fields for their first 12-18 months. The ""factory-farming"" is just a feed lot they get taken to for 3-6 months to eat grain before slaughter. If you want to talk about pigs or chickens, that's an entirely different story. Those do get raised full life cycle in factory-like industrial facilities. But those aren't cows.
I agree pigs are raised in abominable conditions.
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To put this in context, it takes about 1 gallon of water per 1g of almond [1]. And in California's dry climate, this water comes from groundwater that doesn't renew as fast as it's depleted. So the next time someone chastises you for your non-low flow showerhead that uses more than 2 almonds of water per minute, remember to put the numbers in context. 1. Numbers from a pro-almond group: https://www.almonds.org/why-al…
I don't know why, but the fact that a "pro-almond group" exists chuckled me up.
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You need protein for sure. But unless you want to win Mr Universe you will probably get enough through regular nutrition. And there are a lot of other things besides protein you need in your food. The current “Protein in everything” trend is just a fad created by industry
How much is "enough" exactly? Can you quantify that for us? There's a huge difference between enough to avoid acute malnutrition in a young person versus enough to optimize healthspan in an older person. Did you even listen to the podcast I linked above? It is totally possible to get enough protein (by whatever metric you choose) through regular food. And yet the reality is that many people don't.
The upper limit seems to be 1g per lb (454g) of body weight. This is for people who lift heavy regularly to build and grow muscle. The lower bound is about 1/3 of that.
A 165 lb person needs about 55g of protein daily for maintenance. This is about one cup of black beans and 3 eggs. Huevos rancheros for breakfast will cover most or all of an average person's daily protein needs and that's before even counting the protein in the cheese or tomatoes.
While vegetables don't have much protein it still adds up. A single medium tomato has 1g, a potato has 3g, 1g in an onion, 0.5g in a carrot, and so on. Eat your daily portion of veggies and you can get maybe 10g of protein. That's nearly 20% of what you need!
Carb-heavy foods such as breads and rice also have some protein. More than veggies, less than lentils, eggs, dairy, and meat. A standard serving of pasta has 7g of protein. A cup of cooked brown rice has 5g.
All of this is to say even vegans who eat a healthy, varied diet are not deficient in protein. If they are ovo-lacto vegetarians it's a layup. They may need to supplement with whey and creatine or eat some chicken a few times a week if they want to squat 3 plates.
Insufficient protein is mostly not a problem in the first-world. The problem is eating crap. Eating grass-fed steaks every meal doesn't compensate for a crap diet.
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How much is "enough" exactly? Can you quantify that for us? There's a huge difference between enough to avoid acute malnutrition in a young person versus enough to optimize healthspan in an older person. Did you even listen to the podcast I linked above? It is totally possible to get enough protein (by whatever metric you choose) through regular food. And yet the reality is that many people don't.
> How much is "enough" exactly? The upper limit seems to be 1g per lb (454g) of body weight. This is for people who lift heavy regularly to build and grow muscle. The lower bound is about 1/3 of that. A 165 lb person needs about 55g of protein daily for maintenance. This is about one cup of black beans and 3 eggs. Huevos rancheros for breakfast will cover most or all of an average person's daily protein needs and tha…
> a commitment to “return more water than it uses by 2030”. How would that even be possible?
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You need protein for sure. But unless you want to win Mr Universe you will probably get enough through regular nutrition. And there are a lot of other things besides protein you need in your food. The current “Protein in everything” trend is just a fad created by industry
How much is "enough" exactly? Can you quantify that for us? There's a huge difference between enough to avoid acute malnutrition in a young person versus enough to optimize healthspan in an older person. Did you even listen to the podcast I linked above? It is totally possible to get enough protein (by whatever metric you choose) through regular food. And yet the reality is that many people don't.
But "Did you even listen to the podcast I linked above" is an insane thing to say in a random online conversation. No, you cannot expect people to listen to a whole podcast to make whatever random unsubstantiated point you have. Explain the important things you took away from the podcast and link it as a reference for if people disbelieve you for whatever reason.
> noted that it would be harder to reach its internal target if its calculations included “secondary” use—water used in generating the electricity to power its data centres, according to the document. Ok, when we're considering how much water a person uses, are we going to include the water used to grow the almonds you ate? Because agriculture is going to dwarf anything that data centers use.
Yes: my understanding is that it’s rather common practice to at least make a best-effort estimation of all these secondary impacts. It’s also absolutely true that “agricultural usage dominating data center usage” is a dirty little secret that a lot of people are very, very incentivized to keep secret. Amazon can’t outright say that, because uh whutabuht mah poor farmers.
IMO, water is a renewable resource and what should count is the use of water in scarce environments from scarce sources directly in excess of what gets renewed. If you're right by the Mississippi river and often see flooding in your region, I don't think using the water for cooling a reactor (steam as the byproduct) is necessarily something that should be considered a negative... it'll come back down as rain somewhere.
I'm not sure why Amazon is "using" so much water, assuming their cooling systems are a closed loop... otherwise, if using evaporation for cooling, like a reactor, it depends on the location, source and usage. "it's complicated"
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This stands against the evidence. Beef is causally linked with the largest killers of Americans, including heart diabetes, diabetes, and obesity in general. "a mostly plant-based diet could prevent approximately 11 million deaths per year globally, and could sustainably produce enough food for the planet’s growing population without further damage to the environment." A "Mediterranean diet" is more healthy than the a…
Beef is not causally linked to diabetes.
This isn't really about using water as much as dealing with all of the heat that comes out of computation. The water is just the simplest way to dispose of the heat. Isn't there some better way we can, perhaps, turn some of the heat back into something useful? Maybe heat a building? Or turn it back into electricity. It doesn't have to be an efficient conversion because it's now 100% wasted.
> Maybe heat a building? I'm a big fan of district heating, but it's something that needs to be built before the datacenter is. It also doesn't really work well if the datacenter isn't in an already cool region. > Or turn it back into electricity. The temps aren't high enough to do that easily. You need boiling water to generate electricity, and chips don't like running at or above 100C. It's possible you could use a…