Star Trek's McCoy delivers a grim description in "The City on the Edge of Forever", about how primitive 20th century medicine once relied on crude and bloody procedures. I think once lab-grown proteins are common in markets across the world, ethicists and historians will be more free to point to these last 50 years as the most horrific, in terms of inhumane treatment of animals on an amazing scale (I just looked this cheery tidbit up, 166,000 pigs are slaughtered per hour, year round, worldwide.) I'm 100% complicit in this. I eat meat, but for some reason as I get older it's harder for me to keep a comfortable distance from this issue.
I feel the same way, but I grew up on a small farm. I've got a thing where I can make peace with it if the animals are treated well or as my friend calls it "one bad day policy". I drive by huge mega farms where the animals never go outside and they smell horrid (I love the smell of a small farm, but yes, they all have a smell) and can't really feel good about buying meat or dairy from these places.
> it's never been easier to find high-quality info about vegan nutrition and recipe ideas
Veganism is probably too far for the broad population. Ovo-lacto vegetarianism, where you're purchasing eggs and dairy from a specific farm (or reputable brand), is more accessible and close in terms of ethical and environmental impact.
For now veganism is outside the Overton window but this is changing, and it needs to, because it's actually much better & cheaper than ovo-lacto vegetarianism even via a "better" commercial farm - they still get rid of the newly born males, they usually get rid of the older "less productive" females, feeding animals is still an inefficient use of land & energy, and cows still generate methane..
> this is changing, and it needs to, because it's actually much better & cheaper
Cheaper doesn’t mean better. And perfect is the enemy of the good. We are generations away from ovo-lacto vegetarian dominance, let alone veganism. If I were tasked with defeating vegetarianism, I’d push a vegan or nothing mantra.
If you mean can we sell 8 billion people on ovo-lacto vegetarianism, I don’t know. What I know is it’s easier than selling even one billion on veganism.
If you mean can we literally maintain the supply chains the answer is obviously yes. We already produce enough food for everyone in a world where 6+ billion eat meat.
> purchasing eggs and dairy from a specific farm (or reputable brand)
What does this even mean anyway? Current system works because of being able to buy from multiple sources through the global supply chains and commoditizing food. Specific farms won't work for 8 billion people.
I immediately got it. Understanding that the typical reader in this space is generally atypical “find the next best thing” would likely mean "look here to find the thing that's better than the current best." I guess it largely depends on who your audience is.
Indeed, one of the more memorable set pieces in chapter 1:
"He traveled to a city, which was located, he would only say, somewhere in America. He walked into a building, just as though he belonged there, went down a hallway, and let himself quietly into a windowless room. The floor was torn up; a sort of trench filled with fat power cables traversed it. Along the far wall, at the end of the trench, stood a brand-new example of DEC’s VAX, enclosed in several large cabinets that vaguely resembled refrigerators. But to West’s surprise, one of the cabinets stood open and a man with tools was standing in front of it. A technician from DEC, still installing the machine, West figured.
Although West’s purposes were not illegal, they were sly, and he had no intention of embarrassing the friend who had given him permission to visit this room. If the technician had asked West to identify himself, West would not have lied, and he wouldn’t have answered the question either. But the moment went by. The technician didn’t inquire. West stood around and watched him work, and in a little while, the technician packed up his tools and left.
Then West closed the door, went back across the room to the computer, which was now all but fully assembled, and began to take it apart.
The cabinet he opened contained the VAX’s Central Processing Unit, known as the CPU—the heart of the physical machine. In the VAX, twenty-seven printed-circuit boards, arranged like books on a shelf, made up this thing of things. West spent most of the rest of the morning pulling out boards; he’d examine each one, then put it back.
..He examined the outside of the VAX’s chips—some had numbers on them that were like familiar names to him—and he counted the various types and the quantities of each. Later on, he looked at other pieces of the machine. He identified them generally too. He did more counting. And when he was all done, he added everything together and decided that it probably cost $22,500 to manufacture the essential hardware that comprised a VAX (which DEC was selling for somewhat more than $100,000). He left the machine exactly as he had found it."
That reminds me of the US, during the cold war, intercepting the soviet "Lunik" satellite, in transit by truck, which was being exhibited in the US(!), and overnight completely disassembling/reassembling it before letting it go on it's way with the soviets none the wiser.
“I am going to a commune in Vermont and will [In my mind I've always heard a 'henceforth' inserted here for some reason] deal with no unit of time shorter than a season”
One of my favorite quotes in the book - when an overworked engineer resigns from his job at DG. The engineer, coming off a death march, leaves behind a note on his terminal as his letter of resignation. The incident occurs during a period when the microcode and logic were glitching at the nanosecond level.
His resume doesn't really indicate he didn't join a commune. Leaving Data General in 1979 and joining ComputerVision in 1979 wouldn't preclude joining a commune for a season. However, a letter to the editor in 1981 [1] provides evidence that he left Data General specifically to work for ComputerVision, with both events happening in Spring.
Highly efficient Mini-split heatpumps are becoming simpler for the moderately technical homeowner to install everyday. 5-6 years ago installation typically involved a vacuum pump, a gauge set, sometimes a flaring tool to re-dress factory terminated line fittings, etc. Fairly inexpensive new 4th gen Mini-split heatpumps are drop-shipped from Amazon, have pre-evacuated line-sets that just bolt up to the inside head and pre-charged outside compressor units. I wonder how wide availability of these relatively cheap units are going to impact the bullish picture described in the WSJ article.
"Smartphones are substitutes for a lot of things: playing football with a friend; human ad-hoc conversation at a bus stop; playing Candy Crush instead of reading newspapers on your morning commute; entertaining yourself and your date at a romantic dinner."
It's a treacherous slide from Visceral to vicarious, to finally virtual.
If you've been rear-ended, chances are the person behind you wasn't a very good driver. If you've been rear-ended 7 times, chances are that you are the person who isn't a very good driver.
"..the nine-year veteran of the force.." 11 more years is a long time to spend as a pariah. Then again it took a strong belief in ethics to do what he did, and he had to have chosen to go in this direction with his eyes open. Hopefully he's strong in other ways, because I would imagine it's going to be hard on the streets effectively alone.
re: Steady-state pumping - I wonder if we'll discover that the physiology of body has evolved to prefer (at least in the long term) pulsed blood pumping. That the change state from no velocity to high velocity has some beneficial scavenging effect on the arterial walls or something.
