321–328 of 328 posts
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Your thought experiment incorrectly assumes trucks, cars, and motorbikes have the same number and size of tires. Trucks have more, larger tires to allow for more wear between replacements.
Is it the magnitudes more though rather than 8x or 2x? I've seen it often said that a fully loaded truck is equivalent to 1,000 cars wrt road wear. Even accounting for tyre numbers and thickness/sizes, it doesn't add up. > Considering that the truck has eight axles and the sedan has two, the relative damage caused by the entire semitruck would be 625 x (8/2) -- 2,500 times that of the sedan. https://www.insidescience…
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These two pages, the kurzgesagt video linked above, and virtually every source I came across before all say cow feed uses corn, maize, soy. Not the human inedible parts but the actual cereals/beans: https://vetmedicinebd.com/list-of-cattle-feed-ingredients/ and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_feeding . You won’t do me once me that feeding cows food humans could eat is a good thing, or that raising meat isn’t a…
I've never in my life seen people feeding corn, maize, or soy that is human-edible to cattle. I can't imagine why you'd do that, either, because it's not very nutritious for them and there's a limitless amount of grazing. Is it possible you're concentrating your view of livestock farming to the very artificial "feedlots" that they have in parts of the US where there's basically nothing for anyone to eat and no water?
If this was true, 87%+ of US beef wouldn't be from feedlots; they'd be grazing on limitless grasses instead.
In the USA in 2019, about 87% of beef came from large feedlots. A lot of other farming is done in densities too high for grazing, so they are bulked up on externally sourced grasses and grains until slaughter. Some may spend time outside or actually grazing, but in North America this isn't common and it isn't in many other countries either. Feedlots are commonplace in Europe and Asia as well.
Canada is not much better with 69% coming from feed lots in 2020. Interestingly, and sadly, national herd size is decreasing while feedlot capacity is increasing. If this is to keep up, that 69% will balloon quickly and real grazed beef will be a rarity.
The bottom line is that we like to imagine our meat comes from nice places, but statistically that is exceedingly improbable for the majority of people. We are dreaming. We say no way, the meat I eat comes from [insert nice idea here], I'm an exception, but the reality is that's likely something that was marketed to us at best and not reality.
> I've never in my life seen people feeding corn, maize, or soy that is human-edible to cattle
This isn't relevant. The plants we feed livestock don't magically appear; we grow them in order to feed livestock. We could stop. They are resource intensive products we produce specifically for feeding livestock. In the case with soy, a lot of it is pressed for oil and the remaining defatted material is fed to cows. Should that material be waste? No, of course not. Could we use better oil crops with less edible/waste byproducts? Absolutely. Soy is viable as an oil crop because it's so heavily subsidized; we could be investing in higher quality oil crops instead and using land to grow soy for humans instead of livestock.
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The trucks that endanger cyclists aren’t going anywhere. They’re absolutely necessary to get goods from rail depots to markets so (among others) our dear cyclists can purchase them.
It's possible to restrict vehicle size in urban centres, plenty of cities do. You can move things with smaller safer trucks and vans for the last mile. In some cases, this is even done with cargo bikes.
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> I know my phone battery is made with slave labor, but it's not like I can choose to buy the one that isn't. But you can choose to go without the phone that requires the battery. Now I know the canned response is “it’s not practical these days to not have a smart phone”, but going without one will not kill you. If the only phone available killed one person for every phone sold would you still demand to have one?
Ok, so let's say I don't have a phone. But computers contain thousands of components, many of which contain minerals mined by slaves. So no computer either. Without access to the internet, there's almost no way to get a job. Nevertheless, I go to the employment center and say that my only condition is that the job does not require me to interact with any computers or other devices that contain minerals mined by slave…
All you’ve pointed out here is there’s a limit to what you’re willing to do for your beliefs, and that at some point you’ll accept someone performing slave labor to keep your fancy, but still not required, electronics.
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As someone who lives in the Netherlands it's certainly true that our country is well-optimized for bicycles, and I personally do everything either by bicycle or by public transport as I do not even have a driving license, but it's also true that the Netherlands is easy mode for building the necessary infrastructure - extremely flat, densely populated, and wealthy. This isn't meant to disagree with you or the people w…
It isn't well-optimized. It's certainly more optimized, but anything outside a major city is optimized for cars first and foremost. Anything below the size of Eindhoven included. The stats reflect this (car usage is still going up / barely going down, car size increasing) and it is easily explained given how far people are expected to live away from work without paying a small fortune in rent. On top of that, infrast…
I have to disagree. I have lived in Drenthe all my life and what you are saying is just not true where I live. Maybe it's different in the south.
Also hard disagree on WFH, NL has an old and well-established WFH culture and the highest rate of working from home in Europe according to some quick searching. [0]
I agree that public transport is too expensive though - I'm still technically a student so I benefit from freedom public transport, but it would be a serious expense if I had to pay for it.
[0] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/02/europeans-work-home-c...
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Oh awesome, I've always wanted to talk to someone with experience in the global meat industry. Can you answer a few questions?
I'm guessing you're a vegan?
So no, not vegan.
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> You're using "Northern California" and "Southern California" differently from everyone else; in normal use, Northern California is the Bay Area, not the north of the state. No, norcal is north of LA, not just the bay area. I’ve never heard of anybody referring to the bay area as norcal, it’s always “bay area”
I mean, I assume there's a vaguely-defined line between San Francisco and Los Angeles that notionally separates the north from the south. It doesn't make any more sense to say Southern California is nothing but LA than it does to say Northern California is nothing but the Bay Area. But my point is that the region to the north of, say, Berkeley, is not part of "Northern California". It's too far north for that.
We consider ourselves part of Northern California and have since at least the 70s. For many up there, the Bay Area is only nominally part of Northern California, in fact as a kid I didn’t think it was. But having gone on to live in San Francisco for a long time, I came to realize that the the Bay Area, for better or for worse, has more in common with Redding then it does with Manhattan Beach.
But I can’t figure out what you think the too-northern Northern Californians should call themselves if they let you lop off the Bay Area (and most would thank you for it).