matlag

All inventions being based on some previous work, is it not the Wright who invented the airplane, and Lilienthal who invented the glider?

This is obviously fake. That’s what other CEOs think, not Musk.

The only duty of CEO Musk is to himself!

Inflation reduces the value of money at the bank: the money saved as well as the money borrowed.

In an ideal world, wages are indexed on inflation (way of calculating inflation in this context can be discussed), and inflation is kept above present targets levels (central banks try to keep it at 2% these days).

That makes your debts easier to reimburse, and limits returns on savings. Have you ever noticed that people who keep talking about the “value of work” actually push for low wages and no or low taxes on capital gains, so actually wants the capital to make more money than work?

A low inflation allows big money to hoard more and more. Higher inflation means money that’s not actively contributing to the economy will lose its value over time, and that’s exactly what you, at the bottom of the ladder, want (and considering top of the ladder is hundreds of billions of $, ever 6 figures employees are bottom of the ladder).

Too high inflation leads to an uncontrolled spiral. Deflation is also very bad (no investment will ever happen if your money just appreciate by doing nothing). But the 2% target is not to protect you. It’s made for money to make more money.

But about the link between wages and inflation: what we have today is a situation where we let cost of life dramatically outpace wage growth. So where did the inflation come from? Profits! That needs to be rebalanced.

From 1945 to the early 80’s (before the €), France and some other countries minmum wages were indexed on inflation. If doing so would instantly crash an economy, we would have noticed…

No, we had cotton before we had 1billion cows, and it was working fine. We had corn before we had 1 billion cows and we were doing fine.

And other regions in the world have crops and never needed mega-herds of cows to deal with by-products.

We don’t need more cars because of all the oil we extract. If we don’t need oil, we’ll stop extracting oil. That’s not speculation.

Today we burn tons of oil. Say tomorrow we have switched to all electric. Do you think we’ll keep extracting oil and that will create an environmental burden because of that oil sitting around?

That’s the same reasoning.

Today we grow megatons of corn,… for different things, including feeding livestocks.

Tomorrow, if we have less livestock, we’ll adapt the crops mix, just like rest of the world has been or is still doing fine without having mega-herds of cows.

We don’t have too many cows because we had too much crops. We increased the crops to match the herds!

Just how many times did you copy-paste that comment?! Are you a bot or a lobbyist by any chance?

You think that we started producing some grains, and one day we realized we had too much by-products and one smart guy said: “let’s start a cows herd so that they’ll eat these”. Sounds legit. Especially if you consider that eating beef the way we do is very recent in human history, and still inexistent in many parts of the world. Poor folks must be buried under the by-products…

So, since I don’t think farmers are total morons, I would rather imagine they would produce different kind of food, such as leguminous.

A non-peered review article from a totally unbiased source.

Coming up next, an article demonstrating the benefit of burning oil for the environment by Shell.

There is no solution to capture methane in the air. Its lifespan in air is 12years, so if we stop emitting, it will go away by itself. Until then, it’s quite bad. Capturing it at the source is also challenging (can you hemetically seal a cow’s ass without impacting its health?!).

The best solution is… less farms, less cows but that means less meat!

The main issue is probably less meat itself than the ginormous quantities we consume.

Most livestock farming is intensive, meaning they can’t rely on grazing alone and need extra food sources, typically corn. They emit methane, a greenhousing gas on steroids.

That grain is produced through very intensive agricultural methods because we can’t get enough of it. It consumes ridiculously large amount of water and slowly degrades the soils. Nitrates eventually end up in the sea, causing algea to proliferate while other lifeforms are suffocated. See the dead zone in Mexico’s gulf.

71% of agriculture land in Europe is dedicated to livestock feeding.

The percentage must be similar or higher in America, and don’t count North America alone: without grains from Brazil, we’re dead. Period. So next time you hear the world blaming Brazil for deforestation, keep in mind that a large share of it is to sustain livestocks…

Cattle farming in the USA is heavily subsidized, by allowing farmers to use federal land for grazing for free (I believe something similar is in place in Canada?). The claim they “take care of the land” is absurd: nature has been doing that for millenias without needing any help. First nations have been living in these lands also without supersized cows herds and it was going alright. Farms actually prevent wildlife to take back its place.

But I wouldn’t blame them. People in North America (among others, and I live in Canada, definitely me too) eat indecent and unhealthy quantities of meat, and that has to come from somewhere.

Now, simple math will tell you: if everyone in the world was consuming meat in the same quantities as us, there would’nt be enough suitable land on Earth to grow the corn that needs to go with it.

Another thing is not all meats are equal in terms of pollution. From the worst to the least bad, in equivalent kgCO2 per kg of meat you can actually eat: -Veal: 37 -Chicken (intensive, in cage): 18 -Beef: 34 -Pork: 5–7 -Duck, rabbit, pork: 4–5 -Chicken ("traditonal, free range): 3–4 -Egg (for comparison): <2

You can appreciate the orders of magnitude!

There are only 2 ways out of this:

• reduce meat consumption, and pick it right
• grown meat (meat made without the animal around it, in machines)

One can be done today, starting with your next meal. We don’t need meat every meal, we don’t even need meat every day, but it is true that going full vegetarian force a certain gymnastic to get all the nutriments one need.

The other solution is barely getting there, so there are still unknown (food quality, resources consumption, etc.) and the economics may not help it taking off.

The third (and let’s face it: current approach at national level everywhere on this issue) option is to do nothing and keep going as if the problems didn’t exist. This is guaranteeing a famine in the coming decades. When we’ll fail to feed our livestock, and it will start dying, it will be too late to turn around and get the whole agriculture sector to transition. These things take many years.

We’re trying to reduce our meat consumption at home, or to favor the least impacting ones. We still eat too much meat, but I hope we can gradually improve.

The worrying thing here is the assumption that we can choose…

The world has 2 billions individual cars. Lithium extraction rate may not be sufficient to make 2 billions cars by 2030… and that’s assuming we don’t need lithium for computers, smartphones, but also not for batteries for the grid (because no solar cell works at night and wind farms are not on demand erther), and… not for electric trucks! Then comes the question of the other metals: copper, nickel, cobalt, …

Trains will not work everywhere for everyone, but not deploying them now and fast will be a severe issue for North America when resources will get scarce.

We need a smart mix of trains, buses, subways, tramways, shared vehicles, bikes, everything but one individual car per person. That era will come to an end because we’re closer to the bottom of our planet’s natural resources stock than the beginning.

There’s not even a real option of keeping gas cars a little while more, as cheap oil is also coming to an end.

The difference between accepting this and “choosing” individual cars is how ready countries will be when resources will get scarce. It may get ugly…

On the former, there is always a risk for the scraper. For example, you could scrape 100% of Youtube, but good luck spreading any piece of video out there.

My concern is on the latter and you don’t need to do anything: if one user from Threads decides to follow you, you implicitly gave Threads permission to proceed, because the instances are federated. If I misunderstood their terms and conditions, I will happily welcome the correction.

All instances can collect some level of info about you. Only one decided it’s entitled to distribute it to third parties, use it to train its algorithms, and generally speaking make as much money as possible out of it.

But in the process, you will also have a “monetize content from other instances users” phase.

It IS literally a Linux distribution, based on Debian with a layer on top of it for easy admin and managing applications. So you don’t install it on Linux, you just install it.

So, if you don’t know yet what you’re doing, I wouldn’t host anything critical yet, but I’m using:

https://yunohost.org/

And so far, very few troubles. It’s a layer on top of Debian to ease self-hosting. Comes by default with email and XMPP server. You can add Nextcloud and many other services as you wish.