primroot

Here is an anecdote of something that taught me, being a person at the time more unfamiliar with US culture, that perhaps in the US childhood is not seen in the same way as in my country and others (I mean just look at this map https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_the_Rights_of_th... ). 13 years ago I went to an interview at the embassy to apply for my student visa. I was asked at some point about what I did during the 2 months I had spent in the US the last time I went. I very naively proceeded to truthfully describe my activities during those two months, one of which consisted of going to a public school for a short time (maybe three weeks). That was enough to get my visa denied and my tourist visa canceled. It did not make any sense to me that something so innocuous, which I did when I was eleven years old under the command of adults and not from my own will, would need to have, 7 years later, such "consequences." The interviewer of course questioned my knowledge of that word, and demanded proof that I had paid something to the school. I communicated with the school principal and managed to get a receipt of a $14 payment for buying a t-shirt, and got my visa which I had to renew after a year.

There are widely known fresh ingredients containing fat, acidic liquid, or starch (e.g. avocados, tomatoes, sweet potatoes respectively, although tortilla would be a more conventional third example given the first two).

If nuclear is so safe then why the subsidized insurance? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...

Why is this being downvoted? A balanced plate may be easier to wash. Starch absorbs fat, some acidic liquid will keep the fat and starch from sticking too much. Get your plate to the dish washer, rinse, and without need none to little soap will get rid of all the residues. The fat is already stuck to other particles so won't need much soap. What's the point of teaching Chemistry if the kitchen always looks like a cumbersome time-consuming mess to most people.

I'd say this is effectively the opposite of Malthus, since too much food (or rather too many products in general) kills jobs, and more fundamentally, kills the ability to earn rent from investments.

I think this is tangential "International Criminal Court officials sanctioned by US" https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-54003527 .

So looking it up, all I can find is that the brain imposes relatively high caloric needs with respect to other organs, but not that those calories need to come from carbohydrates. Do you have any sources on the latter claim? The last time I got exposed to this claim was when a doctor (not a nutrition expert) told me that we must eat fruit for breakfast because our brains need the sugar. To me, both anthropology and personal experience seem to contradict this idea. Maybe I can change my mind.

They can "not understand the question." https://apnews.com/33a88feb083ea35515de3c73e3d854ad

I only tried it once. The worst I can remember is finding out the next day that there were this very unhealthy substitutes (such as the N-Bomb) being sold instead of the real thing, so I can't tell if I took actual LSD. The experience was fine. It went through several stages. First it was visual, then more introspective. I felt something I can only describe as being dead, meaning that I felt very aware of being matter, and I thought of that beauty around us that is not alive and is simply indifferent and potentially destructive to life and any sense of purpose. Then at some point I was cleaning some fresh basil to prepare something to eat and I found a caterpillar among the leaves and carried it to the garden. The caterpillar jumped and I felt like an electric shock had gone through my body. Later, while sitting with my friend (also on LSD), I narrated this experience to my friend and I started crying. My voice sometimes sounded robotic to my ears.

Everyone responding here shared a similar opinion regarding the idea of laws being responsible for the violence, so let me share another problem where the laws play a role, namely legal dangerous fake substitutes. Take for instance 25I-NBOMe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/25I-NBOMe#Legal_status It remained (has remained?) legal in many places for more than a decade.

That's right. I've seen purselane thriving along with other weeds away from any concrete, growing taller and with bigger leaves during the first month of rains. A week later someone comes with a machete, and that's the end of it. I do think however that most edible weeds require some sort of disturbance that human presence tends to bring.

Yes I agree with you, but maybe I did not express my point with enough clarity. I mentioned this two species because they count as food of negligible caloric value (sidewalk amaranth is mostly useful because of the edible leaves). As far as I understand, human caloric needs at present population levels require the large scale conventional methods of production (including the Haber-Bosch process). But caloric needs aside, there are populations, which are not consuming enough greens or fruit, even when it grows in front of them. I have seen it in the (warm and tropical dry) countryside here, they think they have to eat lettuce, when they have lots of hibiscus plants growing in their garden. It turns out the leaves of hibiscus aren't just edible, but their nutritional value is similar lettuce (I suspect higher in Mg since it's a lot greener). The answer of some technologists to this problem is to grow more lettuce. Another plant that grows plentifully here certain months of the year is Ipomoea Triloba. I don't think anyone should try to produce them at scale following the conventional methods. In the case of cities I imagine there could be gardens with a synergistic diversity of plants, which try to keep a high total yield, but not a high yield of any specific plant.

> You can only grow non-calorically dense foods in vertical farms

Purslane (Portulaca oleracea) grows on the sidewalk already, and often next to some wild amaranth (Amarathus Hybridus). What is the point of more efficiently producing specific crops, when there are all these underutilized nutritious plants growing without any human input (or should I say growing despite human input)? This is another problem that I see with the technification of food production in general (including the Green Revolution). Some food wants to be free, but people keep looking for whatever makes the land produce more money in the short term, not what makes it produce more nutrition, etc., because the latter does not adapt so well to the market.

Contrast this with J.S. Mill.

"Hitherto it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being. They have enabled a greater population to live the same life of drudgery and imprisonment, and an increased number of manufacturers and others to make fortunes. They have increased the comforts of the middle classes. But they have not yet begun to effect those great changes in human destiny, which it is in their nature and in their futurity to accomplish. Only when, in addition to just institutions, the increase of mankind shall be under the deliberate guidance of judicious foresight, can the conquests made from the powers of nature by the intellect and energy of scientific discoverers, become the common property of the species, and the means of improving and elevating the universal lot. "

>> ... over there for them to be "recycled", and by "recycled" I meant burned/melted in open air dumps.

I thought the Basel convention covered this in some way. Larry Summers had (has?) a rather infamous opinion on this [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summers_memo

Which reminds of this story from the Zhuangzi. I hope it is not too irrelevant.

"Zhuangzi was walking on a mountain, when he saw a great tree with huge branches and luxuriant foliage. A wood-cutter was resting by its side, but he would not touch it, and, when asked the reason, said, that it was of no use for anything, Zhuangzi then said to his disciples, 'This tree, because its wood is good for nothing, will succeed in living out its natural term of years.' Having left the mountain, the Master lodged in the house of an old friend, who was glad to see him, and ordered his waiting-lad to kill a goose and boil it. The lad said, 'One of our geese can cackle, and the other cannot - which of them shall I kill?' The host said, 'Kill the one that cannot cackle.'"

https://ctext.org/dictionary.pl?if=en&id=2853

I once saw sugared colored water brought from the US sold as food for humming birds at a store here in Panama. Just imagine how much industry would be lost if we had a better education system.

Actually I just remembered a more recent case. After a very rich old lady showed up in TV last year explaining to people how access to drinking water is not a human right, videos came out on social media showing bulldozers destroying orchards in one of the Pearl Islands. They've been doing it since at least 2012. The rich lady's family wants to build some nice hotels there.

Just a few years ago, the weekend before May Day, a lawyer was stopped by the police here in Panama. The police searched through their database and found the lawyer had been accused of "economic terrorism." The lawyer was immediately put in jail. He worked pro bono defending the rights of informal settlers who have lived for years in vast areas of land owned by a very rich family. Given the amount of time these people have lived there, some argue they should at least be allowed to pay water and electricity. Instead, the government sends riot police to pull them out of their homes. The lawyer was released a few days later. This is only the most recent case that comes to my mind here in my country. I don't think it is that different in the rest of the world. Ownership of land is tied to violence.

"Evolution equipped our species with powerful defense mechanisms to deal with this foreknowledge—in particular, psychological suppression and religion."

Religion is a result of evolution?

No+AFP (No more AFP) is a common graffiti in Chile, and also a common protest banner during the past week. Measures regarding an increase in pensions were also among the promises of the president on Monday 10/21.

Also relevant "Twitter’s ‘head of editorial’ for Middle East is officer in British Army’s information warfare unit" https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/twitter-exec...

"Anyone can be a journalist." Yes. That is what one should expect of any country with a minimum of press freedom.

Universale tempus coordinatum (because of grammatical gender agreement)

“In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity—the epidemic of overproduction. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.” - Marx

> two political correctness peaks: one in the early/mid 90s, and the other starting from about 2013 to now.

Could this be related to economic circumstances, and a spread of a sense of defeat among adherents of economic progressivism? Postmodernism came around the time, when knowledge about communist atrocities became more established. The political correctness peak of the nineties maybe reflected changes in the dominance of the Neoliberal End of History way of thinking. 2013 occurred four years after an event that threatened the Neoliberal economic narrative. I mean, the US is special in the way the Neoliberal ideology almost takes a new shape, by itself making political correctness into a useful mask. In the third world, religions such as postmodernism do take a steady hold. I see it as reflection of the hopelessness around the (geo)political and economic systems.

I don't see your point. If I say a military invasion is not semantically equivalent to an "effort to stabilize," I leave open the possibility that some invasions do have a stabilizing effect, but that is never something evident but something that has to be argued for. I don't feel like digressing into drawing Venn Diagrams.

"Turkish guards at the border with Syria are indiscriminately shooting at and summarily returning asylum seekers attempting to cross into Turkey, Human Rights Watch said." https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-mideast-crisis-syria-turke... This occurred during Operation Olive Branch.

1. Criticism is not blocking.

2. It's a military invasion. The precedent of Operation Olive Branch indicates that calling this an "effort to stabilize" is an abuse of semantics.

3. Do you have any source indicating that Kurdish control is contributing to the displacement of people?

4. More about "efforts to stabilize": "Criticism of Turkish alleged support for Jihadists, including ISIL, and of targeting Kurds" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_involvement_in_the_Syr...