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Gyges posted:Water rights and farming decisions made in the past. It takes 5-12 years for an Almond tree to start producing almonds, then that tree is productive for about 25 more years. So an entire cycle for a grove, assuming you planted everything at the same time, is 30 to 37 years. Almonds were first brought by monks from the Mediterranean in like 1850 or so and commercial farming started late in the 1800s, but didn't actually take off until the 1900s due to issues with the climate and planted varieties. This is fascinating, thanks. you said migrate, which got me thinking about tree transplantation. Generally, it's best when the trees are younger and less established. It's almost impossible to conceive moving an entire industrial grove, but is there any merit to the idea of transplanting trees closer to the beginning of their 37 year lifecycle? That cuts water usage immediately while not having to wait 5-12 years for new nuts. I know it's an extreme suggestion and full of unexamined assumptions, but humans do dumb half-thought poo poo all the time so why not get the great almond tree migration started early?
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# ? Apr 12, 2023 12:03 |
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# ? May 25, 2024 11:49 |
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Wheeljack posted:There are all sorts of strategic reasons to run for president besides "I am mostly sure I can win this time." Positioning yourself for a future run, getting your ideas out there in hopes of getting them adopted in the platform or picked up by the other candidates or eventual nominee, becoming prominent enough to get a cabinet post, and, as mentioned, raising your profile for punditry. Yeah, running as a protest candidate was Bernie's whole thing there, the whole "I know I have a snowballs chance in hell, but there are issues I want to address and ideas I want to push forward, and running in the primary is the best way to do it." The fact that young people latched onto him as hard as they did in 2016 was a fluke that literally no one saw coming.
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# ? Apr 12, 2023 12:19 |
Craig K posted:cost, and also "what do you do with the leftover goop that used to be the salt and assorted nasties in the water" People… eat salt though? It’s a product you can sell
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# ? Apr 12, 2023 12:34 |
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You'll get menaced by salt baron goons if you start dumping a billion tons more on the market to cheapen the price.
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# ? Apr 12, 2023 12:39 |
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Does the desalination process produce edible salt though?
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# ? Apr 12, 2023 12:53 |
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Triskelli posted:People… eat salt though? It’s a product you can sell https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sD_8O5pAyes&t=111s
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# ? Apr 12, 2023 12:57 |
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Leon Sumbitches posted:This is fascinating, thanks. Transplanting fruit/nut trees is, at best, going to cause a shock to the tree that will extend how long it takes before it starts to yield. At worst something goes wrong and the tree dies or, even more scandalously, something goes wrong and the motherfucker never bears fruit despite you pouring resources into it. The most big brain business way of doing things is going to be Big Almond running what they have into the ground, while at some point starting new groves in a better place. It's almost certainly not going to happen in the very near term, because they still own the level of water rights that lets them run a hose to the ocean with impunity. The only current pressure on them is water cost and theoretical future scarcity. Currently the most likely scenario is new almond entrepreneurs realizing they can't plant a new grove in California so they go somewhere else. Of course there's going to be extra costs involved because they're going to have to do expensive testing to find out which grafts and species of almond work best in the new location. Triskelli posted:People… eat salt though? It’s a product you can sell We've made very sure that salt and water aren't the only two byproducts of ocean desalination. Mother nature ads in some extra biomass too, but we're putting that hydrocarbon and heavy metal good good in the mix.
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# ? Apr 12, 2023 12:57 |
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Gyges posted:Transplanting fruit/nut trees is, at best, going to cause a shock to the tree that will extend how long it takes before it starts to yield. At worst something goes wrong and the tree dies or, even more scandalously, something goes wrong and the motherfucker never bears fruit despite you pouring resources into it. The most big brain business way of doing things is going to be Big Almond running what they have into the ground, while at some point starting new groves in a better place. It's almost certainly not going to happen in the very near term, because they still own the level of water rights that lets them run a hose to the ocean with impunity. The only current pressure on them is water cost and theoretical future scarcity. Having worked with plants but never agribusiness, this is really interesting. I don't think I can contribute anything except more questions, so I'll ask how could to press them further than just water costs?
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# ? Apr 12, 2023 13:11 |
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Clarste posted:Does the desalination process produce edible salt though? I adore the article title on the US government of all places on this subject, why ocean salty. That said, they report that the United States Government posted:The two ions that are present most often in seawater are chloride and sodium. These two make up over 90% of all dissolved ions in seawater. The concentration of salt in seawater (its salinity) is about 35 parts per thousand; in other words, about 3.5% of the weight of seawater comes from the dissolved salts. In a cubic mile of seawater, the weight of the salt (as sodium chloride) would be about 120 million tons. Sodium chloride is a fancy, chemical term for saying table salt.
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# ? Apr 12, 2023 13:17 |
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I still wonder how the meat/dairy industry pulled off getting almonds to be the biggest focus on CA water usage instead of alfalfa. Congrats to them, I guess it worked *I don’t want to single out a single post, but I’m talking about how a lot of posts in the past page or two talking about water usage are overwhelmingly focused on almonds without mentioning alfalfa Kalit fucked around with this message at 13:23 on Apr 12, 2023 |
# ? Apr 12, 2023 13:18 |
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Rappaport posted:I adore the article title on the US government of all places on this subject, why ocean salty. That said, they report that The fact that the ocean contains salt doesn't mean the desalination process produces salt. I mean, the traditional process of getting edible salt out of the ocean certainly doesn't produce drinkable water. We are not magically separating it into its component parts. There is a specific process which creates specific byproducts. Clarste fucked around with this message at 13:26 on Apr 12, 2023 |
# ? Apr 12, 2023 13:24 |
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Desalination produces brine, not dried salt ready to be used in other processes. It's a somewhat minor problem with desalination plants. If the waste brine is dumped in a bay or behind barrier reefs or something it can end up concentrating high enough to kill stuff off, but it's still just really really salty water. Not dried crystals of table salt ready to be put on the market for other uses.
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# ? Apr 12, 2023 13:30 |
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Leon Sumbitches posted:Having worked with plants but never agribusiness, this is really interesting. I don't think I can contribute anything except more questions, so I'll ask how could to press them further than just water costs? We wait until the water dries up, overhaul water rights to something sane, or destroy the precious freedoms of the almond growers via dastardly legislation. Kalit posted:I still wonder how the meat/dairy industry pulled off getting almonds to be the biggest focus on CA water usage instead of alfalfa. Congrats to them, I guess it worked It's most likely less the meat industry, more conservatives trying to own almond milk loving liberals. The topline numbers are always going to make almonds look worse than alfalfa just because nuts are a ridiculously inefficient crop from a water usage perspective. So everyone agrees to throw all the shade on almonds while everyone else continues to guzzle the rivers dry. It's the usual thing where it's way easier for the lay person to identify the various composite parts of the problem than it is to identify the overall foundation of the problem itself. Almonds aren't single-handedly draining the river, the F-23 isn't why the Military budget is FUBAR, 6-pack rings aren't the foundation of ocean pollution, and earmarks aren't the true bane of wasteful government spending. bird food bathtub posted:Desalination produces brine, not dried salt ready to be used in other processes. It's a somewhat minor problem with desalination plants. If the waste brine is dumped in a bay or behind barrier reefs or something it can end up concentrating high enough to kill stuff off, but it's still just really really salty water. Not dried crystals of table salt ready to be put on the market for other uses. Maybe we could dump it in the salt lake, or blast it into the sun with all our nuclear waste. Gyges fucked around with this message at 13:40 on Apr 12, 2023 |
# ? Apr 12, 2023 13:37 |
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Clarste posted:The fact that the ocean contains salt doesn't mean the desalination process produces salt. I mean, the traditional process of getting edible salt out of the ocean certainly doesn't produce drinkable water. We are not magically separating it into its component parts. There is a specific process which creates specific byproducts. Right, but that wasn't the question originally posed. The salts you get out of desalinization are "edible", as you put it, as the chemicals themselves. That the process doesn't produce table salt per se is a question left for the markets, or socialism, to solve. edit: I flubbed, and I'm sorry. I read your question more as "are they bringing plutonium salts out of sea water" type thing, when you were asking if these salts have commercial uses already. Rappaport fucked around with this message at 13:46 on Apr 12, 2023 |
# ? Apr 12, 2023 13:38 |
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Gyges posted:Maybe we could dump it in the salt lake, or blast it into the sun with all our nuclear waste. Generally unnecessary, I specifically mentioned bays and stuff because it turns out we have a few really, REALLY big bodies of salt water around the globe to dilute brine in to. Usually the same sources that the salt water is coming from in the first place. Just have to put in a little bit of extra effort to pump it out in to the ocean a moderate distance instead of dumping it in some place that's going to be cut off and let the concentration build up. It's a minor problem that just a little bit of preparation can easily solve.
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# ? Apr 12, 2023 13:54 |
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Gyges posted:nuts are a ridiculously inefficient crop from a water usage perspective. Are they? I calculated corn vs. almonds once, and I got only 3x water usage per kg of crop produced. If you change the figure of merit to water used/kcal of crop, then almonds don’t meaningfully use more water than corn since almonds are much more energy dense. I get the feeling that this not a real problem—it is just a manufactured culture warfare thing.
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# ? Apr 12, 2023 13:58 |
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As I understand it, the real problem is mostly the water rights thing: farmers have no incentive to save water and in fact an incentive to WASTE more water since they get a set amount of water for free and any they don't use is effectively leaving money on the table. So they will specifically plant crops that will use up all that extra water. Focusing on almonds or alfafa is missing the point entirely; even if we made them both illegal tomorrow they'd find another way to waste all that water because that's what their economic incentive is.
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# ? Apr 12, 2023 14:14 |
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Clarste posted:As I understand it, the real problem is mostly the water rights thing: farmers have no incentive to save water and in fact an incentive to WASTE more water since they get a set amount of water for free and any they don't use is effectively leaving money on the table. So they will specifically plant crops that will use up all that extra water. Focusing on almonds or alfafa is missing the point entirely; even if we made them both illegal tomorrow they'd find another way to waste all that water because that's what their economic incentive is. Yeah, I remember an episode of Last Week Tonight where they talked about that, and it's very literally a Use it or Lose it system, which is why they grow so much thirsty poo poo like alfalfa.
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# ? Apr 12, 2023 14:20 |
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Gyges posted:It's most likely less the meat industry, more conservatives trying to own almond milk loving liberals. The topline numbers are always going to make almonds look worse than alfalfa just because nuts are a ridiculously inefficient crop from a water usage perspective. So everyone agrees to throw all the shade on almonds while everyone else continues to guzzle the rivers dry. TBH, I don't think generic conservatives are smart enough, or care enough, to do it. For a while it seemed like all of the media outlets were heavily focused on things along the lines of "CA drought is being heavily exasperated by all of these almonds!!!!". If conservatives wanted to own the libs, they would do what they always do, which is to blame minorities for the problem. E: And as silence_kit alluded to, the story changes a lot when you look at it from a calorie perspective. At a quick glance of https://www.watercalculator.org/water-footprint-of-food-guide/, almonds use only slightly more water than, for example, milk. Per thousand calories, it's ~737 gallons of water for almonds and ~644 gallons of water for milk. Once you start looking at things like cheese/meat/etc, it's a higher water usage. Kalit fucked around with this message at 14:46 on Apr 12, 2023 |
# ? Apr 12, 2023 14:24 |
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I might be googling wrong but it is saying a pound of beef requires 1,847 gallons of water to produce while a pound of almonds takes 405 gallons? Maybe we could all eat almond burgers to save water.
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# ? Apr 12, 2023 14:34 |
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Meat is just generally extremely inefficient because you waste a bunch of energy keeping a cow warm and alive until you kill it. Moving to veganism is politically even more impossible than usual though.
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# ? Apr 12, 2023 14:39 |
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All livestock rearing is an the inefficient process where we
It's going to be rather hard to find a plant that is less resource intensive than whatever dumb herbivore we're eating. Omnivore livestock are even worse since they're sometimes eating something that ate something else first.
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# ? Apr 12, 2023 14:52 |
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Clarste posted:As I understand it, the real problem is mostly the water rights thing: farmers have no incentive to save water and in fact an incentive to WASTE more water since they get a set amount of water for free and any they don't use is effectively leaving money on the table. So they will specifically plant crops that will use up all that extra water. Focusing on almonds or alfafa is missing the point entirely; even if we made them both illegal tomorrow they'd find another way to waste all that water because that's what their economic incentive is. Yep, and the states really don't want to get into a fight with the farmers and be the bad guy, so they have been waiting for the federal government to do so, thus the state lawmakers can blame the "nasty" federal government for "making" them do what they should have done decades ago.
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# ? Apr 12, 2023 14:54 |
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Clarste posted:Meat is just generally extremely inefficient because you waste a bunch of energy keeping a cow warm and alive until you kill it. Moving to veganism is politically even more impossible than usual though. And this is exactly why lab-ground meat is going to eventually overtake and replace animal husbandry in my opinion. It'll just be significantly more efficient and cost-effective. The problem right now is simple production pipeline issues.
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# ? Apr 12, 2023 15:12 |
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Nelson Mandingo posted:And this is exactly why lab-ground meat is going to eventually overtake and replace animal husbandry in my opinion. It'll just be significantly more efficient and cost-effective. The problem right now is simple production pipeline issues. TBH, humanity will probably be dead from climate change before lab grown is the default meat source on a global level E: To add more context, I would love for lab-grown meat to take off like crazy, it would be so much better for everything climate related. However, it's such a slow development process and will take forever for it to even have a decent market share in the US. And then having that spread from the US (and/or wherever else) to the rest of the world that won't be able to afford to manufacture it And that's not even taking people's attitudes/skepticism into account Kalit fucked around with this message at 15:26 on Apr 12, 2023 |
# ? Apr 12, 2023 15:15 |
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^^^^^can we not, with the doomerism?Nelson Mandingo posted:And this is exactly why lab-ground meat is going to eventually overtake and replace animal husbandry in my opinion. It'll just be significantly more efficient and cost-effective. The problem right now is simple production pipeline issues. It’ll be insect-based protein, actually. Cultured meat simply isn’t viable at scale. Producing a small sample of meat to drum up venture funding is a far cry from producing it at scale.
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# ? Apr 12, 2023 15:18 |
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Asking people to eat bugs is probably the one way you'd get a french style peasant revolution in the modern age.
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# ? Apr 12, 2023 15:21 |
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Pleasant Friend posted:Asking people to eat bugs is probably the one way you'd get a french style peasant revolution in the modern age.
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# ? Apr 12, 2023 15:31 |
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Kalit posted:I still wonder how the meat/dairy industry pulled off getting almonds to be the biggest focus on CA water usage instead of alfalfa. Congrats to them, I guess it worked Another thing a lot of people don't know about almonds is that the require bees to pollinate the trees to produce the almonds. There are not enough bees for them to do it locally and bees hives literally get trucked in every year to do the pollination from across the country. I live in Georgia and personally know beekeepers that do this and they make a ton of money to truck bees from Georgia to California and back every year.
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# ? Apr 12, 2023 15:40 |
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silence_kit posted:Coastal Californians love almonds/almond milk, and all that stuff. They are partially the ones driving the production of the crop but at the same time, they complain about it. Almonds consume 17% of CA's water. https://www.c-win.org/cwin-water-blog/2022/7/11/california-almond-water-usage Agriculture uses 80% of CA's water. https://water.ca.gov/Programs/Water-Use-And-Efficiency/Agricultural-Water-Use-Efficiency 21% of agricultural use is pretty significant, and 17% of the total is 85% of CA's non-agg water use. You're posting on vibes, not actual data, and almond farmers aren't poor low class farmers being picked on by the mean coastal Californians. Alfalfa takes even more water. But why bother to look anything up if you can "suspect?"
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# ? Apr 12, 2023 15:51 |
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lil poopendorfer posted:^^^^^can we not, with the doomerism?
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# ? Apr 12, 2023 16:12 |
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I’m open-minded, but after trying fried crickets, gently caress eating bugs. I will simply go vegan before that happens.
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# ? Apr 12, 2023 16:22 |
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'Farmers' haven't been 'low-class' in our lifetimes. They're landowners, and business owners, and with all that implies. The workers are mostly migrant labour which both parties ignore.
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# ? Apr 12, 2023 16:40 |
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The EPA just rolled out the strictest emissions standards for vehicles in history with requirements that would effectively ban the sale of most current models of gas-powered cars by 2032. The rules require automakers to reduce the emissions on their cars by over 50% in 6 years. The EPA estimates the proposals are large enough to avert the equivalent of two full years of nationwide carbon-dioxide emissions. These emission rules would be the strictest in the world (although the E.U. standards eventually have a higher cap, they have a much longer phase-in time). Some members of the auto industry are upset and claim that those figures can only be met with the subsidies from the IRA, but the sourcing requirements for EV components in the bill will force them to redo their entire supply chain to meet them and it will be difficult to meet the deadlines if they have to start their sourcing and manufacturing process from scratch. https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/1646117154599649284 quote:Biden to remake U.S. auto industry with toughest emissions limits ever
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# ? Apr 12, 2023 16:53 |
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The doomerism on cultured meats (and things with technological solutions and viable proofs-of-concept already existing, generally) strikes me as really weird and shortsighted. If the past 200 years has taught us anything about humanity's capacity for invention, it is that we routinely develop and scale things that were thought just one generation before to be impossible or unworkably complex.
I'm picking on the meat thing partly for selfish reasons (I love meat but I am a vegetarian for reasons that lab cultured meats could potentially solve/alleviate to the degree that I'd be comfortable) so maybe it's just wishcasting. But I don't get the kneejerk "well yeah but I mean we can't do it right now so maybe in 200 years it will be possible". Look around the room you're in and make a list of poo poo that is in there that would have been hard or impossible to produce when your parents were your age. It's going to be a really long list.
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# ? Apr 12, 2023 16:58 |
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Kith posted:my commentary about them loving up is not about immediate consequences for the GOP, it's about how they made a massive unforced error and gave their opponents an enormous PR win for zero gain. That's what loving gets me about it, they did the bad thing for obviously bad reasons and there's not a single part of how it played out that didn't undercut their own position and make their attempted victims out to be heroes, inspiringly thwarting the 80s movie villains Usually there's some ground trading even in profoundly one sided outcomes, but here it's like spaceman sideshow bob visits Rake Planet
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# ? Apr 12, 2023 16:59 |
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Sub Par posted:The doomerism on cultured meats (and things with technological solutions and viable proofs-of-concept already existing, generally) strikes me as really weird and shortsighted. If the past 200 years has taught us anything about humanity's capacity for invention, it is that we routinely develop and scale things that were thought just one generation before to be impossible or unworkably complex My doomerism is because when it comes to human invention, including all of the items you listed, it always prioritizes convenience over everything, especially environmental impact. Now hey, maybe we’re finally focusing on the environment enough. But that’s not a bet I’d be willing to make. On top of that, IRL I mostly hear about lab grown meat from people who resist eating less meat*. Which I feel like is a deflection mechanism in those people. So I’m admittedly biased in that regard *This is absolutely not directed at you, as you already clearly stated you are veg Kalit fucked around with this message at 17:12 on Apr 12, 2023 |
# ? Apr 12, 2023 17:10 |
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Who is going to be the first person to volunteer to make cultured meat out of their own butt and then eat their own butt?
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# ? Apr 12, 2023 17:13 |
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Pleasant Friend posted:Who is going to be the first person to volunteer to make cultured meat out of their own butt and then eat their own butt? Think bigger. Who will be the first person to eat a celebrity or historical figure's butt
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# ? Apr 12, 2023 17:15 |
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# ? May 25, 2024 11:49 |
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Issei Sagawa has entered the chat.
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# ? Apr 12, 2023 17:18 |