He/him. Chinese born, Canadian citizen. University student studying environmental science, hobbyist programmer. Marxist-Leninist.
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Replace socialism with capitalism and this meme becomes accurate.
The US has a higher per capita rate of both food insecurity and extreme poverty than China, Cuba, Vietnam, and the former USSR.
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1 out of every 7 US citizens needs to visit food banks to survive, despite having enough food to feed 10 billion people. Half of all food produced is thrown away by retailers.
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In the US alone, 20-40k deaths every year because of lack of health insurance / care. On average, that’s 300k over the last decade.
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80% of US workers live paycheck to paycheck, 40% cannot cover a $400 emergency.
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70% of US citizens say they are struggling financially. In the 2020 Covid-19 Pandemic, Unemployment claims went to 6.6M in one week, compared to ~700k at the peak of the great depression. Food banks are running out of food in places like New York and Pittsburgh, and hospitals are short on ventilators needed to keep people alive. Lines outside an NY soup kitchen, May 2020. Americans turn to shoplifting food as 1 in 8 are food insecure as of late 2020.</div>
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US Life expectancy peaked in 2014, is on the decline, and is now lower than in China., 2
Meanwhile…
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USSR had a more nutritious diet than the US, according to the CIA. Calories consumed surpassed the US. source. Ended famines.
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Had the 2nd fastest growing economy of the 20th century after Japan. The USSR started out at the same level of economic development and population as Brazil in 1920, which makes comparisons to the US, an already industrialized country by the 1920s, even more spectacular
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Free Universal Health care, and most doctors per capita in the world. 42 doctors per 10k population, vs 24 in Denmark and Sweden, 19 in US.
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Had near zero unemployment, continuous economic growth for 70 straight years. The “continuous” part should make sense – the USSR was a planned, non-market economy, so market crashes á la capitalism were pretty much impossible.
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USSR moved from 58.5-hour workweeks to 41.6 hour workweeks (-0.36 h/yr) between 1913 and 1960
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USSR averaged 22 days of paid leave in 1986 while USA averaged 7.6 in 1996., 2
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In 1987, people in the USSR could retire with pension at 55 (female) and 60 (male) while receiving 50% of their wages at a at minimum. Meanwhile, in USA the average retirement age was 62-67.
Many more links here: https://dessalines.github.io/essays/capitalism_doesnt_work.html
I’m honestly just surprised that people are putting up with their horrible redesigned webclient and app. I use Reddit a lot less than I used to specifically because of Lemmy, pretty much only for more niche tech/programming stuff not yet found on Lemmy, but when I do it’s strictly old.reddit.com and Slide for Reddit.
Being able to only see two or three comments deep in a forum specifically designed around nested comments is unacceptable.
Make sure you never connect it to the internet either.
TVs can record snapshots of what’s being displayed on screen and send it for analytics. They’re supposedly only recording a scattering of pixels throughout a screen and trying to match it to those same pixel values at the same positions generated by scenes in known media properties, which would in theory mean they can’t really recreate what is actually on screen or identify any media personal to you that’s not on their media database. (Honestly even that is creepy as fuck.)
But since the code is proprietary, who’s to say they’re not just taking full blown screenshots of literally what’s on screen every now and then? If they sent a full screenshot and compressed it with LZMA or something on the highest compression power, every hour or so and slooowly sent it a few bits at a time over the course of that hour, you’d most likely never notice since it would likely be encrypted with SSL and not be so much data that would be easily discernible from other random network activity from someone who was monitoring their home network traffic. They could totally say it’s simple HTTP requests for software updates or grabbing the latest Netflix listings or whatever. (And even then very few people actually monitor what their devices are sending. Even companies that eventually had scandals where they sending unauthorized analytics frequently and in plaintext, as in you only had to hook it up to Wireshark a single time to realize what they’re doing, still manage to get away with it for years before someone noticed.) Or, the TV could be built with a trigger where it normally doesn’t record your screen, but if you were a person of interest, they could start monitoring you whenever they want by sending a signal to your TV.
And I’m sure if you at any point connect your smart TV to the internet, it’s definitely been caching all those past analytics to send in one burst. So don’t do it.
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- hilabete bat
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Except direct energy input into photosynthesis is only one part of the equation with farming. Yes, if you had a certain land area, you can only do so much photosynthesis with the sun. “Coincidentally,” that’s about equal to a single layer of plants on that land area, not that groundbreaking of a conclusion. Then again, open field farming does not come even close to the maximum density of plants that can be energized by the sun. Think about how barren a farm field looks compared to a thick rainforest. Most of the sun’s energy is still hitting the dirt of the farmland, not the plants. So, if you put solar panels on the roof of a vertical farm, even with the losses in energy conversion, you can probably power grow lights for at least several layers of a vertical farm, so it’s not like all the energy needs to be piped in.
But also, consider the other factors in growing large amounts of plant biomass. Fertilizer is one: using chemical fertilizer in an unconfined open field is really bad because it can and will run off and contaminate the ecosystem. Leading to oversaturation of nutrients in the surrounding soil and especially rivers, streams and lakes, causing uncontrolled microbe growth and quite likely collapsing the ecosystem. This happens all the time. Not to mention, nutrients that run off are wasted. So using said fertilizer in a confined system where it can’t easily escape is much better for the environment and much more efficient. Same with pesticides (actually, if you contain your vertical farm well, you really shouldn’t need to use much pesticides or at all), as well as GMO crops, where the biggest concern with them is those genes spreading into the ecosystem.
Second, consider land use change. Conventional farming is the single largest contributor to deforestation, which is one of the major contributors to climate change. So, if you reduce the land area required to grow your crops, yes you get less energy from sunlight to help you along, but get this, that sunlight can then be used to recover forests, which, you know, is important on an existential level.
Finally, a huge amount of energy use associated with farming goes into moving stuff. Moving in fertilizer, water, etc, moving out the grown crops, moving around giant machines to tend to the fields, moving workers as they commute, etc. So if we can increase the density of farming and can move it closer to or even inside of population centers where the food needs to be distributed, it will go a long way toward reducing the energy use for the non-photosynthesis parts.
Energy may be an Achilles Heel for vertical farming, but just like how Achilles was still a powerful warrior despite his heel, vertical farming has many more benefits beyond this one drawback. It’s not like we can only get clean energy from solar. Wind, hydro, geothermal, hell even nuclear. We will have enough clean energy for vertical farming if we play our cards right. As @yogthos@lemmygrad.ml mentions, obviously in an energy crisis this energy requirement isn’t ideal, but do we plan on being in energy crisis forever? I hope not.
George Takei is on there too.
Isn’t this from a movie?