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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 1st, 2023

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  • Not OP, but as someone who was at one point excited by the potential of crypto, the ecosystem has moved more and more towards what it claimed to stand against initially

    It’s supposed to be decentralized, but things like mining pools have lead to heavy amounts of centralization in block production. If we look at Bitcoin, for an example, we see that over 51% of block production is controlled by just two mining pools. That’s not limited to just Proof of Work mining either. Proof of stake sees centralization in staking pools as well. That’s only just looking at one aspect of the network

    It has also not really been seen as a currency. People’s view of it as an “investment” which have the opposite qualities you really want to see. People are encouraged to hold it and never let go, meaning they won’t want to spend it which is adverse to its use as a currency. This has also lead to it being incorporated and dominated by the very financial systems it was initially supposed to move away from

    I don’t want to type out an essay, but I could keep going on in other ways that’s not really lived up to its promises.












  • Land usage is still lower

    we show that plant-based replacements for each of the major animal categories in the United States (beef, pork, dairy, poultry, and eggs) can produce twofold to 20-fold more nutritionally similar food per unit cropland. Replacing all animal-based items with plant-based replacement diets can add enough food to feed 350 million additional people, more than the expected benefits of eliminating all supply chain food loss.

    https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1713820115

    Complete proteins matter much less than you’d think. As long as you get the other proteins in at some point in the day you are fine. It doesn’t take much for that as just adding rice to beans is enough to make it complete for instance

    The bioavaliability of protein metrics are highly misleading when applying them to plant-based foods due to some their assumptions

    While multiple strengths characterize the DIAAS, substantial limitations remain, many of which are accentuated in the context of a plant-based dietary pattern. Some of these limitations include a failure to translate differences in nitrogen-to-protein conversion factors between plant- and animal-based foods, limited representation of commonly consumed plant-based foods within the scoring framework, inadequate recognition of the increased digestibility of commonly consumed heat-treated and processed plant-based foods, its formulation centered on fast-growing animal models rather than humans, and a focus on individual isolated foods vs the food matrix. The DIAAS is also increasingly being used out of context where its application could produce erroneous results such as exercise settings. When investigating protein quality, particularly in a plant-based dietary context, the DIAAS should ideally be avoided.

    https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s13668-020-00348-8.pdf





  • The issue is how then do you get that systematic change? Governments are going to be extremely hard to convince to do anything as along as people expect to consume animal products en mass. It’s going to have to start with individual action until systematic change is palatable

    And with systematic action, it’s still going to have to involve change in consumption in the end. Factory farming is pretty much the only thing that scales. Want to avoid it? We’re going to need to see great drops in production and in turn consumption

    The impacts of people taking action do add up. For instance, in Germany there’s been declines in per capita meat consumption over the past decade

    In 2011, Germans ate 138 pounds of meat each year. Today, it’s 121 pounds — a 12.3 percent decline. And much of that decline took place in the last few years, a time period when grocery sales of plant-based food nearly doubled.

    https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23273338/germany-less-meat-plant-based-vegan-vegetarian-flexitarian


  • Only in a select few places. It doesn’t scale super well among other potential issues

    They have not yet tried to sell the technology to the US egg industry but, even if they did, the volume it can handle is currently too low for this technology to be used to get rid of chick culling across the board.

    […]

    One issue that complicates these efforts is the difficult-to-answer question of when an embryo becomes a chick. Some researchers say day seven is when chick embryos can begin to experience pain. If that’s right, sexing the eggs eight to 10 days after incubation as Respeggt does, and 14 days as Agri-AT does, may still end up inflicting pain on the embryo, which could be trading one animal welfare problem — culling — for another

    https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22374193/eggs-chickens-animal-welfare-culling