The X service remains available to the people of Brazil, billionaire Elon Musk’s platform said on Saturday.

Wait so what do they mean by stopping operations in Brazil then? Just the offices and staff? The article isn’t super clear on it

Not the person you are replying to but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darknet_market

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.

Raising the wage of 1 million contractors is not just words. Yes, we do need more, but don’t think it’s nothing

Part of the goal is to encourage their campaign to get more of a mastodon presence

Most of those claims about treatment of trans people are just false. They are primarily based on misattributed actions of other people which harris has denounced

Here’s a good article looking at just that

https://archive.is/FNqUx

Not saying she’s perfect, but consider with the two party system in the US, the alternative is far far worse

Harris has generally pushed for minimum wage increases where she can. For instance

August 08, 2023

FACT SHEET: Vice President Harris Announces Action to Raise Wage Standards Over Time For More Than One Million Construction Workers

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/08/08/fact-sheet-vice-president-harris-announces-action-to-raise-wage-standards-over-time-for-more-than-one-million-construction-workers/

She has advocated for $15/hr minimum wage and joined protesting and striking workers in that push before

https://apnews.com/general-news-united-states-presidential-election-6a566fe8785a4ae5aa7963fd3bc5166f

Unlike a certain rich republican candidate who has misused funds, the money goes to their campaign not the person themselves

US elections certainly takes way more money than it should but until Citizen United gets overturned, donating is an unfortunately important part of elections for those who can afford to do so

In most species, bird flu is both highly infectious and very deadly. A disease being very infectious can make up for its lethality

The very study that you cite found it uses more human-edible feed than it produces. That is the more relevant figure

Contrary to commonly cited figures, 1 kg of meat requires 2.8 kg of human-edible feed for ruminants and 3.2 for monogastrics

The first study’s I cited in the previous comment whole goal was to directly measure what amount of their feed was human-edible. It still found it takes more kg of human-edible feed than it produces in kg of meat. These studies aren’t leaving things out, they are just finding the opposite result

Repeating the claim without any evidence does not make it more true

I disagree with your premise that it is misleading at all. Including things that the majority of the population does not do nor can scale to the overall population would not work for a modeling study. Most people are not hunters, including that in a cost estimation study would just be giving people a false sense of true cost. Real world data would be more reliable way for that if you wanted to try to include that in a more realistic way

The article also talks about physical injuries as well. The injury rate is uniquely high for meatpacking

Together, poultry slaughtering and processing companies reported more severe injuries to the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) than many industries that are popularly recognized as hazardous, such as sawmills, industrial building construction, and oil and gas well drilling

https://www.hrw.org/report/2019/09/04/when-were-dead-and-buried-our-bones-will-keep-hurting/workers-rights-under-threat

I cited more than one study. The other ones looked at average real world spending data

I think you may be underestimating the heavy level of subsidies here

Research from 2015 shows this subsidization reduces the price of Big Macs from $13 to $5 and the price of a pound of hamburger meat from $30 to the $5 we see today.

https://www.aier.org/article/the-true-cost-of-a-hamburger/

Even despite that, overall in most countries it actually ends up being cheaper to do a healthy plant-based diet assuming you have more whole-foods and less say plant-based meats

It found that in high-income countries:

• Vegan diets were the most affordable and reduced food costs by up to one third.

• Vegetarian diets were a close second.

• Flexitarian diets with low amounts of meat and dairy reduced costs by 14%.

• By contrast, pescatarian diets increased costs by up to 2%.

https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2021-11-11-sustainable-eating-cheaper-and-healthier-oxford-study

And real world data backs this up

Compared to meat eaters, results show that “true” vegetarians do indeed report lower food expenditures

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0921800915301488?via%3Dihub —(looking at the US)

Based on primary data (n = 1040) collected through an online survey, representative of the Portuguese population, through logistic regressions, it was possible to conclude that plant-based consumers, particularly vegan, are associated with lower food expenditures compared to omnivorous consumers. In fact, plant-based consumers are shown to spend less than all other consumers assessed

https://agrifoodecon.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40100-022-00224-9

It still takes more human-edible crops in than it produces out

1 kg of meat requires 2.8 kg of human-edible feed for ruminants and 3.2 for monogastrics

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211912416300013

Per unit crop land you can produce a lot more with plant-based production

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

For another study

We find that, given the current mix of crop uses, growing food exclusively for direct human consumption could, in principle, increase available food calories by as much as 70%, which could feed an additional 4 billion people (more than the projected 2–3 billion people arriving through population growth)

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/8/3/034015/pdf

For water usage, it’s also draining from places like the drying up Colorado river. We really don’t want to use more water from that area at all

Correspondingly, our hydrologic modelling reveals that cattle-feed irrigation is the leading driver of flow depletion in one-third of all western US sub-watersheds; cattle-feed irrigation accounts for an average of 75% of all consumptive use in these 369 sub-watersheds. During drought years (that is, the driest 10% of years), more than one-quarter of all rivers in the western US are depleted by more than 75% during summer months (Fig. 2 and Supplementary Fig. 2) and cattle-feed irrigation is the largest water use in more than half of these heavily depleted rivers

https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1064&context=wffdocs

We instead grow large amounts of crops that go to animal feed. It takes a lot less cropland for plant-based diets because we don’t have to grow feed to another creature (who then will use up a large amount of that energy)

The research suggests that it’s possible to feed everyone in the world a nutritious diet on existing croplands, but only if we saw a widespread shift towards plant-based diets.

If we would shift towards a more plant-based diet we don’t only need less agricultural land overall, we also need less cropland.

In the hypothetical scenario in which the entire world adopted a vegan diet the researchers estimate that our total agricultural land use would shrink from 4.1 billion hectares to 1 billion hectares. A reduction of 75%. That’s equal to an area the size of North America and Brazil combined.

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets

Plant agriculture still exists?

Haha, luckily wasn’t too bad because it only nicked my finger for a really short amount of time. It rotated past my finger when it flicked around. Could have been much worse

Be mindful that a soldering iron cable can pull a soldering iron from your hand, so don’t have too loose of a grip. Learned that one the hard way :(