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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Summary: China is not a friend country. It’s a hostile country. Yes, we know.

    But the news is… so is the USA to Canada now. A hostile country threatening to annex Canada and trying to cripple the economy as a way to achieve the goal. So either we slap 100% tariffs on US made cars, which would hurt Canadians, or we apply the same tariffs on Chinese cars, so reduce them from where they are at the moment.


  • Because that’s not about privacy, that’s about the trade war. Retaliatory tariffs on US cars increase cost of cars for Canadians, as there are almost no car assembled in Canada. Reducing or eliminating tariffs on cars from China would lower cost of new cars for Canadians while keeping the tariffs up.

    For privacy and security, not a single new car on the market is decent right now. That should be regulated, but that’s no concern for any politician at the moment.













  • Could we define a trade-off system? Classic broadcasting can take way too long to send out a large catalog. Streaming is, as you say, a heavy resources consuming system.

    So how about a combo of a box or a software that can follow a broadcast N times faster than human, and broadcast N movies/series episodes a day? The application let you pick what you’d like to get on your box/app, and then it’s like classic video recording, but on steroids.

    It would be like live-streaming, but at 2, 3, 10 times the normal speed. No human needs to follow that.

    Of course, you still have the issue of glitches, communication interruption, but we’ve dealt with those for years, and there are certainly ways to indeed stream the missing parts, or use rediffusion.

    You read it first here. I’m off to file for a patent and make billions (or not…)


  • 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.




  • Looks like it’s happening already. Natural disasters are on the rise, costing billions, insurance companies start bailing out of some area. I was also wondering if international help would come back every year to address a fraction of the wildfire in Canada, Spain, Italy, Greece, and soon pretty much everywhere.

    Pretty sure the cost of the disaster is soon going to be unbearable and we’ll start abandoning places and infrastructures instead of rebuilding (not officially, of course, we’ll just “push back until conditions allow to rebuild” and forget about it as more disasters will occur).

    It will be a slow death, though.


  • Theyve had to start shutting down nuclear reactors in summer when water levels get too low,

    This is a fake news. Period.

    Some reactors had to REDUCE THEIR OUTPUT because otherwise they would exceed the temperature increase they’re allowed to cause in the river, this to preserve life in the river. No reactor was shutdown because of a low water stream.

    What happened last year is a systematic defect was found in an external protection layer, and the decision was made to fix all the reactors having the same potential defect at once. The work took longer than expected, and that caused France having very limited capacity for months, causing worries about power outage.

    Not to say it could never happen in the future, but it didn’t yet.