I’ve never been someone who can eat the same thing multiple days in a row, so i can’t do the “standard” approach of making proportioned meals. I also can’t just eat food I’ve heated back up in the microwave for every meal.

In a perfect week, I’ll make some bread, some rice, a soup/stew, a sauce of some sort, etc. I also make a lot of yogurt and ricotta-type cheese (from milk, not whey), because milk is heavily subsidized where I live.

I basically just try to have different things I can combine in different orders, and typically I’m leaving some part of the process to still be done each night (roasting veggies, boiling pasta, stir frying something, etc).

Roads.

https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policy/23cpr/appendixa.cfm

Roads have an unbelievable cost when you really start to put the numbers together. A lane mile of a new interstate on rolling terrain costs 6.2 million in 2025 $. Keep in mind that is only a lane mile, so for 2 lanes in each direction, it’s $25 million per mile. Multiply that by the 49k miles of interstate, and you have a (super rough) estimate cost of 1.2 trillion to construct it today. Even resurfacing those roads is ~1/10 the cost, which is still a lot of money.

Ignoring interstates and looking at really run of the mill arterial is still staggering.

Picking a random square farming county, McPherson county, KS is an easy example. It is 30 miles by 30 miles, with a paved arterial every mile (ignoring towns). Thats 3600 lane miles. At $3.6 million per lane mile, that’s ~$13 billion to costruct the roads in a county with a population of 30,000, or $432,000 per person.

I, personally, have grown muscle tissue in a laboratory environment, so I know what it takes to actually grow muscle tissue. What I’m not familiar with is what the lab-grown meat industry practices are, but I just looked into it briefly.

There are 2 companies currently with approval to sell a lab-grown meat product in the US: Upside Foods and Good Meat.

Both sell chicken. Upside Food’s process is outlined in their FDA submission. They specifically state: “several media protein components (e.g., bovine serum albumin, growth factors) are required for sustaining cell viability and growth during the culture process” i.e., they rely on albumin from cattle like I suspected.

Unfortunately, since the “creation of chicken cells” is FDA regulated, but “production of chicken meat” is USDA regulated, that document doesn’t actually go into detail on how the cells are turned into the final product. This Wired article, however, says that they are basically just laying out sheets of the cells, and then manually stacking them to give some structure, which is not a scalable solution. Also, it seems like they are somewhat falling apart as a company not that they are running out of VC money. It looks like they are also trying to pivot into producing some sort of primarily plant based sausage with a little chicken cells thrown in. I’m assuming that’s a last gasp to produce something profitable.

Good Meats, on the other hand, I can’t find as much information on. The equivalent FDA document is on the other side of a link that seems broken. According to what they publish on their site, they are essentially vat growing cells, straining them off, and then extruding them into a shape.

In both cases, I don’t think it’s accurate to call the product “meat” since the cells will not have the structure of muscle cells (long strands), and there isn’t any tissue organization or adhesion to an extracellular matrix. It’s more of a pate even though they called a fillet.

The ecological footprint of both of the companies is greater than just conventional chicken production. I know this because both websites try really carefully to make it seem like they are better, but they can’t say that they are.

Upside foods phrases all of their claims as “what if we could do x, y, and z?” Rather than saying that they can do it. Good Meats similarly has an FAQ of “is it better than conventional?” and their response is “we believe it will be”.

A little while after we happen to contaminate said planet with extremophiles accidentally brought aboard our probe/lander

Like Einstein adding the cosmological constant to his equations because he initially couldn’t conceive of the universe expanding, and the equations wouldn’t work otherwise.

In addition to selective breeding like others have mentioned, supply chain logistics have gotten much more advanced over the years. You can get many fruits right at the peak of ripeness year round due to sourcing and better storage methodologies.

Science has also gotten better at giving plants what they need to grow successfully, so almost all agricultural products are much larger than they would have been 50 years ago. If you take an apple tree from an orchard, and stick it in a random person’s back yard and neglect it, it will have way smaller fruit. Irrigation, fertilization, etc, allow things to grow bigger, but the parts needed for the actual reproduction don’t really grow much, so that extra energy just ends up producing fruit that’s more “watered down”.

In a grain, for example, theres 3 parts: germ, bran, and endosperm. The germ is the little start of the seedlings, and it contains protein, minerals, and fats. The bran is the other coating that has fiber, protein, and minerals. The endosperm is mostly just carbs. In modern grain, the endosperm takes up a much larger percentage of the grain than in older varieties (and non-fertilized/irrigated/weeded/pest controlled fields)

And poison ivy more powerful

I’m very much not up-to-date on the lab grown meat industry (so take this with a grain of salt), but I have done cell culture.

There’s a reason most scifi with food grown in vats references bacteria, yeast, and algae. Single celled organisms have to be relatively self sufficient. You can grow more yeast/bacteria by feeding plain sugar to it. There are other nutrients eventually needed, but they can be given in simple forms (e.g., oxygen, inorganic salts, etc.) that you can isolate or create through simple chemistry alone.

Vertebrate cells are part of a highly complex system where they require sugars/salts/etc, but also growth factors, antibodies, and a whole host of other proteins, fats, steroids, etc. Some of those can be created in a lab with chemistry or special bacteria/yeast, but for the most part, scientists use fetal bovine serum. It’s a byproduct of slaughtering pregnant cattle, and it contains a lot of those things that are just too hard to create otherwise.

Cells also need to be given the right niche do grow and differentiate into the target cell type, so muscle needs to exercise, arteries need pulsatile fluid flow, nerves need electrical signals, etc. Without an immune system, everything needs to be done in a sterile environment.

All of that adds up to an ecological footprint that’s extremely difficult to reduce below the natural product.

People usually don’t log stuff that they see every day. So a person who lives in Oregon (statistically more likely to be in doug-fir country) goes east and notices that a different tree predominates and they want to know what it is, they’ll log it.

Personally, I log stuff that I don’t normally see cause there’s a chance that it’s either: a rare native plant, a native plant on the edge of its range, or a non-native. Those are all things that I’m less likely to know off the top of my head, and I think it’s probably more important to tag for scientific purposes.

I can’t stand the amount of times my phone tries to force apostrophes into places that don’t need them. So many plurals that should just end in " s " become " 's ". “Were” also gets changed to “we’re” despite it not making any sense in context.

Also, separate issue, but it seems like autocorrect can almost never comprehend the possibility that I hit the wrong button for the first letter of a word.

Agreed. Sometimes, a sentence that ends with a preposition sounds weird. Oftentimes, a sentence that has been completely rearranged to not end in a preposition sounds weird.

Not only is it fine, but it’s the most common (and i would say most correct) way to write scientific papers.

The tone of scientific papers is usually supposed to focus on the science, not the scientist, so you have “reagent A was mixed with reagent B”, not “I mixed reagent A and reagent B”.

An added bonus is that it prevents having to assign credit to each and every step of a procedure, which would be distracting. E.G., “Alice added 200 ml water to the flask while Bob weighed out 5 g of sodium hydroxide and added it to the flask”.

Yeah, it’s really frustrating when someone with higher body fat that floats like a cork tries to tell you how to do it.

Technique can’t overcome density. I will say that I got slightly better at it after learning to SCUBA dive (or maybe I just got fatter). In scuba, you move up and down in the water column by adjusting the range of your breathing. You basically try to get your neutrally boyant setpoint at 50% lung capacity. To go down, you try to control your breathing from 0-50% and to go up, you breathe from 50-100%. It made me slightly better at keeping my lungs really topped up with air.

To float, I basically have to hold my lungs at max capacity, and then exhale-inhale as fast as possible, which is unnatural and takes concentration. I usually have to use my arms for a little bit of upward thrust through that breath.

There’s no lungs in my legs, so those will sink no matter what. People claim you can “use your core” or some other BS to keep your legs afloat, but the fact of the matter is that if your upper body is positively buoyant and your lower body is negatively buoyant, there will be a rotational moment pulling your legs down, and it can only be counteracted by external application of force (i.e., kicking your feet). I can either float on my back with a mild amount of kicking, or i can do like a face-in-water deadman float, and just pull my head out of the water occasionally to quickly breathe.

I’m going to disagree with everyone here. Loads of people throughout history have learned to swim by literally being thrown in. It’s not a good way to learn, but people do it. Even babies can do it.

Given a little bit of reading first, you’d do just fine. Yeah, the motions might be a little off cause it’s hard to learn a complex movement from a book, but it would be good enough.

That’s not true. With no controls, there is no significant difference in tolerance by sex. When controlled for height, females have lower tolerance than males. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3753357/

Most people in America have health insurance through their employer. This was originally designed to be a perk of jobs back in the day, but now it unfortunately links healthcare to employment. If you are retirement age, you can get Medicare, which is government sponsored healthcare that still works through the private system, so there are no “government doctors” or anything like that for that population. Similarly, for disabled folks, or those poor enough (which can be hard to prove), they can get Medicaid.

If you lose your job, there’s a system to pay to extend your employer’s insurance policy until your next job’s plan kicks in, but it’s expensive cause your old job is no longer paying a big percentage of it, so a lot of people gamble on not needing insurance if for example, they end one job in May and know they have a new job starting in September.

With insurance, there are some government mandated policies. For example (and don’t quote me on this cause I don’t know the exact policies), things determined to be “preventative” have no out of pocket cost, so you won’t generally pay for a regular yearly checkup, vaccines, etc. There are often options for insurance types to pick from depending on if you anticipate needing lots of care (e.g., a healthy young person probably won’t, but if you are trying to have a baby, you know there are a lot of costs associated).

My employer pays for my insurance. If I were to get cancer, I would probably end up paying for a couple thousand dollars of appointments, scans, etc (called the deductible). Then I’d reach a point where my insurance covers most of the cost, and I kick in 20% (called the coinsurance level). Eventually, if my costs hit a certain limit (the out of pocket limit), insurance covers everything. I think it’s like $8k or something like that for me. That’s the most I could ever have to pay in a year.

People get screwed over by a few things. First is that while I could put together $8k if I had to, many people still have trouble with that. The second is people falling through the cracks of the labyrinthine system, and they end up without insurance while in between jobs or whatever. The third thing is that insurance decides what is necessary, so if you live in the middle of nowhere, and your child gets a specific type of cancer, you might not want to settle for whatever the “standard of care” is at your local hospital, you might want to fly across the country to go to the best hospital for that cancer, and your insurance isn’t going to cover that cost.

And it is incredibly important to note that the insurance companies don’t play fair. When your doctor tells the insurance company that you need a certain procedure, they have an automated system send out a “no”. Your doctor then has to spend time to appeal the decision. Eventually, you might get the care you need paid for, but by engaging in these practices, they are hoping you will either 1: pay yourself, or 2: die.

Also, a final note that I think is important is that cancer, and many chronic illnesses, makes people desperate, and willing to try anything. There is a huge ecosystem (and it probably exists in your country, too), of people selling alternative (i.e., fake) medicine to cure them. Yeah, it’s possible to wind up with a $50k bill for real medicine, but you also have people paying large sums to feed bleach to their autistic kids and then trying to pay for it with go fund me.

Yeah, the focus the landscaping part is weird. It seems more relevant to me that 5 years ago, he was in high school, rather than that he did landscaping.

Seriously, I think a big part of solarpunk ethos is combating the notion that everything has to always be available 24/7. Society pays a lot to deliver every convenience like fruit out of season from the other side of the world.

Generally, when you want to heat the beer is after fermentation has peaked. Higher temps means faster fermentation (obviously to a point), and fermentation generates heat (positive feedback loop), which is why you need to cool beer through the initial stages of fermentation). After peak though, the temperature drops and causes a positive feedback loop downwards. This means that your beer really crawls to the finish line. Your beer might be 90% done after 3 days, but then take a couple weeks for that last 10%.

Another benefit is if you are bottling the beer, you need to know how much sugar to add. Calculators ask for the beer temperature post fermentation to determine residual CO2. With a dropping temperature, it’s hard to say what that point is, and if fermentation is just stalled, not complete, you could have residual fermentation sugar. Bumping the temperature up at the end solves both problems.

I also second adding a fan. No need for anything crazy, just something little to move the air. I used a old computer case fan wired to a random DC charger from the “miscellaneous chargers” bin at the thrift store: just make sure the voltage works with the fan.

Moisture can be an issue when you are keeping a fridge above the designed set temperature, but below ambient. I just keep a long sock filled with silica beads in mine. To recharge, I can just pop it in a low oven. They sell devices to do this (evadry is the brand name), but you might get literally 20x less silica for the convenience of a case and built in heating element.

The last paragraph is a good catch. Someone from outside the US is not going to catch the difference between “a Wisconsin state senator” and “a senator from Wisconsin”.