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2·3 days agoBy over top do you mean like going up and around the QR code or in the middle of it? If you mean up and around the QR code that’d probably be fine. If you mean like going through the middle of it, I’m not as sure all scanners would like it
18·13 days agoHe would become a member of parliament and Farage would no longer be a member of parliament. He might have to take off the Binface costume to actually enter parliament though
Count Binface has run in other elections before as a joke of sorts. It’s just that the major parties are not running anyone in this election. Farage resigned and then immediately ran for his by-election to pause the investigation into his 5 million pound crypto “donation” since the body doing it can only investigate while he’s a member of parliament. The other parties aren’t running so that Farage doesn’t get the narrative win of the byelection making him “vindicated by the people”
The meat, dairy, etc. are actually particularly harmful to human workers
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
Revealed: exploitation of meat plant workers rife across UK and Europe
There is evidence that slaughterhouse employment is associated with lower levels of psychological well-being. SHWs [slaughterhouse workers] have described suffering from trauma, intense shock, paranoia, anxiety, guilt and shame (Victor & Barnard, 2016), and stress (Kristensen, 1991). There was evidence of higher rates of depression (Emhan et al., 2012; Horton & Lipscomb, 2011; Hutz et al., 2013; Lander et al., 2016; Lipscomb et al., 2007), anxiety (Emhan et al., 2012; Hutz et al., 2013; Leibler et al., 2017), psychosis (Emhan et al., 2012), and feelings of lower self-worth at work (Baran et al., 2016). Of particular note was that the symptomatology appeared to vary by job role. Employees working directly with the animals (e.g., on the kill floor or handling the carcasses) were those who showed the highest prevalence rates of aggression, anxiety, and depression (Hutz et al., 2013; Richards et al., 2013).
21·14 days agoCopying my comment from elsewhere to reply here:
In the wild chickens often eat their own unfertilized egg to regain the calcium and other nutrients they lost from it. Chicken breeds used lay way more eggs than they would in nature making these losses kind of severe for bone health (10-15/yr in nature vs ~285/yr for commercial hens). A lot of sanctuaries give things to chickens to reduce that egg laying rate and then at that reduced rate feed them back their own eggs (doing so at the unnaturally high egg-laying rate is believed to potentially create issues)
There’s actually another alternative. In the wild chickens often eat their own unfertilized egg to regain the calcium and other nutrients they lost from it. Chicken breeds used lay way more eggs than they would in nature making these losses kind of severe for bone health (10-15/yr in nature vs ~285/yr for commercial hens). A lot of sanctuaries give things to chickens to reduce that egg laying rate and then at that reduced rate feed them back their own eggs (doing so at the unnaturally high egg-laying rate is believed to potentially create issues)
2·14 days agoThe article cites a 2023 figure. The industry was significantly smaller then. The datacenter energy usage changes we’re seeing now are significantly larger than that
Globally, the electricity consumption of data centers rose to 460 terawatt-hours in 2022 […] By 2026, the electricity consumption of data centers is expected to approach 1,050 terawatt-hours
This is also expected to keep going up and up as training energy usage grows ever more. The industry has already delayed fossil fuel phase outs by ramping up demand, and it’s now requiring entirely new capacity to be built
Anthropic estimated that by 2027, training a single frontier AI model will require five gigawatts (GW) of power and projected that the U.S. AI sector alone will require 50 GW of new electric capacity by 2028 to maintain global AI leadership. To put the 50 GW figure in context, it is about twice the peak electricity demand of New York City
[…]
The IEA notes that while a typical data center can consume as much electricity as 100,000 households, the largest next-generation campuses currently under construction will demand 20 times that amount
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/global-energy-demands-within-the-ai-regulatory-landscape/
Before this current AI boom, datacenter usage was almost flat for 20 years and was a small portion of power demand
3·14 days agoI think you may want to read what the article is saying. It is not saying all ultra-processed food are fine. It’s saying that ultra-processsed is an unhelpful label because it lumps too much together
The categories sound tidy. They are not. Many nutrition experts have criticized them as overly broad and hard to apply consistently. Wheat gluten, for example, is an ingredient often added to packaged breads; it’s not used in many household kitchens, and is usually classified as ultra-processed. Yet it’s been used in many Asian cuisines for centuries and can easily be employed in your home kitchen; I use it in my own. There’s no evidence that the ingredient’s rarity in household pantries makes it unhealthy or deserving of a special “ultra-processed” label. Nor is there any reason to assume that a store-bought whole grain bread with added gluten (category 4 under NOVA) is worse for you than, say, a homemade white bread (category 3).
3·15 days agoThis industry is happy to let manure runoff into local ecosystems and lead to massive waterway pollution and toxic algae blooms. Biogas is no better with the tanks used for holding manure for biogas regularly leaking out and/or overflow
This is not an industry that is super concerned about fertilizer shortages and usage. Animal agriculture makes fertilizer demand increase and worsens the problem, even if manure was used 100% optimally
Thus, shifting from animal to plant sources of protein can substantially reduce fertilizer requirements, even with maximal use of animal manure
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0921344922006528
For an example of how large the fertilizer difference can be: Producing 1kg protein from beans uses 12x less fertilizer than doing the same from beef
To produce 1 kg of protein from kidney beans required approximately eighteen times less land, ten times less water, nine times less fuel, twelve times less fertilizer and ten times less pesticide in comparison to producing 1 kg of protein from beef
To clarify, this is being pitched by the beef and dairy industry. It’s certainly not a vegan solution and it does not work as well as the industry claims
I see, I see
9·1 month agoGood news is that they already have dropped the up charge entirely and an increasing number of chains are doing so around the world. From the article:
Notably, all three chains dropped their surcharges before the class action was authorized. Starbucks removed the upcharge in November 2024; Tim Hortons followed in January 2025, and Second Cup in February 2025. The lawsuit, filed by Montreal law firm LPC Avocats, seeks retroactive accountability for charges collected during those periods.
2·1 month agoAnimal agriculture is especially worse because it plainly demands much more agriculture to happen due to it’s inefficiencies. It requires growing huge amounts of animal feed where most of the energy is lost. Even it’s best case is bad compared to the worst case for eating plants directly
Transitioning to plant-based diets (PBDs) has the potential to reduce diet-related land use by 76%, diet-related greenhouse gas emissions by 49%, eutrophication by 49%, and green and blue water use by 21% and 14%, respectively, whilst garnering substantial health co-benefits
[…]
Plant-based foods have a significantly smaller footprint on the environment than animal-based foods. Even the least sustainable vegetables and cereals cause less environmental harm than the lowest impact meat and dairy products [9].
What you want to rent a bridge instead? Get roommates for your bridge?
The FAO, unfortunately, has quite a history in downplaying things and sticking their thumb on the scale in favor of the meat and dairy industry on things like this
In a sign of the atmosphere in the FAO at this time, a fourth veteran insider, “Mary Wagyu”, claims to have been admonished after preparing Meatless Monday leaflets for distribution in the cafeteria of an FAO heads of state food security summit in 2008. “Remove and destroy them,” a senior FAO executive said, according to Wagyu. “These will not be put in people’s trays.”
In 2009 a second FAO report called Livestock in the Balance was delayed for several months while the FAO’s leadership tried to dilute references to harm caused by the meat industry, arguing that this had already been covered by Livestock’s Long Shadow. When the research team resisted the pressure, management stepped in and manually rewrote key passages over their heads, sparking what Steinfeld called “a mini-revolution”. About a dozen staff members involved in preparing the report withdrew their names from the paper in protest.
[…]
Between 2012 and 2019, “the lobbyists obviously managed to influence things”, Holstein said. “They had a strong impact on the way things were done at the FAO and there was a lot of censorship. It was always an uphill struggle getting the documents you produced past the office for corporate communications and one had to fend off a good deal of editorial vandalism. You had to accept relatively small steps forward in changing the narrative on livestock.”
Steinfeld added that meat lobby representatives and diplomats would talk to senior FAO managers and encourage them not to invest in work that dealt with environmental impacts.
Graph from the article:
Per capita beef consumption is down slightly, but not as much as chicken / poultry consumption has increased. People are generally eating much more meat overall per capita. Chicken and poultry still have a pretty heavy emissions profile, it’s just that beef is somehow worse. The net increase in meat consumption is still a massive net negative on the climate
In terms of ethics, switching to chicken results in significantly more induvidial chickens being killed because of their lower slaughter weight. The factory farms that house the vast majority of chickens keep growing larger and larger and quite disturbing. This is true around the world. For example just in England alone, there are at minimum over 700 factory farms for chickens, four of which have over a million chickens
3·1 month agoOne way we can help nudge that is to reduce the demand for fish overall and go for for plant-based foods instead. Illegal fishing is unfortunately quite rampant even for places that ban specific practices. It’s really hard to ban enforce bans when most of it all happens quite far away in the oceans
>>> print("proof by counterexample in a python REPL") proof by counterexample in a python REPL >>> x = 2; print(x) 2 >>> print("this is not ignored"); print("it's just mostly useless"); print("but you can use as many as you want") this is not ignored it's just mostly useless but you can use as many as you want
Not sure I get the joke?
Agreed that land and water are smaller compared to agriculture, but the electricity usage change is significant. The LLM boom is unlike prior datacenter workloads. The electrical demand is far higher due to the more power hungry chips and running them at full utilization. It’s projected to go from 5% to 15% of all US electrical demand in quite a short amount of time
This is delaying the closures of fossil fuel plants (here’s an example of 15 coal plants in the US last year), and starting to rely more heavily on generators to install capacity faster despite solar/wind being far cheaper
Not all QR code scanners are equal on unusual conditions, so it’s not guarantee it’s true of all ways to scan unfortunately. The other concern is that it might make it not look scanable and invite more griefing and the like by making it look like the QR code is not maintained
If you did want to maybe go up and around, the colorful border we have could be replaced with green in the upper / lower half