With temperature, light and humidity controlled across 12 growing ‘rooms,’ pollination of plants has also been engineered to be more efficient than bees.

I need more details on this “more efficient than bees” claim. I grow a couple of hydroponic strawberry plants for fun, and every strawberry is a result of my swirling a toothbrush around a flower. I am having a hard time imagining scaling that up without bees.

Physical trauma makes sense for large animals. If you have 50 lab rats that you need to euthanize, a gassing setup can make more sense than individually whacking them.

Co2 reaction is highly, highly concentration-dependent. Rodent euthanasia ideally starts around 20% which makes them cranky and sleepy, they go to sleep, then concentration is upped to around 80% and they die very quickly. Yes, they feel bad when they go to sleep, but it is a mild bad and it’s all over quickly. Rodent euthanasia horror stories are about getting the concentration wrong, not the co2 itself.

Nitrogen - as long as the flow is strong enough to remove exhaled co2 - won’t make anyone cranky, but it takes longer, and the longer it takes the higher the risk of something going wrong with the setup. So, tradeoffs.

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The New York times did a video analysis that pretty convincingly showed it was a bullet. Why Trump is hiding evidence is just bizarre, like the idea of having to support anything he claims - even true things! - is offensive.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/26/us/politics/trump-shooter-bullet-trajectory-ear.html

In some takes on the trolley problem (do nothing, five people are run over by a trolley an die, flip a track change switch and two people are run over by a trolley and die) flipping the switch is the morally worse option because then those two people’s deaths are your fault, whereas the five people who die because you did nothing are someone else’s fault. I don’t agree with that take, but it’s taken seriously in philosophy circles.

I don’t get how in the Levant, where both Hamas and the Israelis have significant factions that want to genocide the other people, a situation where Hamas does the genociding (because an Israel without attack capability de facto also loses defense capability) is somehow more moral than a situation where Israel does it.

The problem is the very pro-death penalty camp wants the dying process - not the being dead part after - to be the punishment. The pro-humane camp is generally anti-death-penalty enough they don’t get a seat at the method-decision table.

Alabama tried that and managed to screw it up. You have to remove the carbon dioxide in the exhales to prevent the feeling of suffocation, and they didn’t provide enough nitrogen flow to do that. Took like twenty minutes of clearly desperate gasping and convulsions for the guy to pass.

There will always be some level of unemployment (a percentage of people who want job a won’t have found one), but if automation made the unemployment rate permanently go up, all the people who used to hand knit socks who lost jobs to powered looms, all the people who used to drive plows with oxen who lost jobs to combines, all the blacksmiths who lost jobs to powered forges, and equivalent percentage of the population for subsequent generations forever would remain unemployed. And yet, somehow, subsequent generations have managed to mostly find jobs.

Jobs are not a finite resource. If there is a pool of people who want to work, someone will find stuff to pay them to do.

I seriously would love for my entire current set of job responsibilities to be automated. There are a couple of value-adding full-time jobs’ worth of work I could be doing for my employer that are just being left on the table right now.

Unfortunately, the alternate option was not “let them stay hostage a while longer”. It was “let the hostages die”. And maybe that would have been the more ethical call. But let’s not delude ourselves that they could have been kept alive any other way.

Does Arizona not have an online free system? Illinois has a very hand-holding guided set of questions and has for years, it’s always been our federal taxes that make my head hurt to fill out via the IRS’s FreeFillableForms site.

Her son died of cancer as a young adult. I have wondered if the abdominal xray while she was pregnant contributed to that.

It happened in Maine. And Alaska. And is on track in Nevada.

Modern industrial farming is not sustainable for the next hundred years, no, but there are a lot of levers to work to transform it into something that will reliably feed future generations.

One lever is amount and kind of meat in the average diet. It takes something like seven pounds of grain to make one pound of beef. Modern chicken breeds are amazingly efficient at converting feed grain to chicken meat, but even they are something like two pounds in to one pound out. Reducing the percent of meat in our diets would make our food go significantly further.

The plants use energy from the sun to turn carbon dioxide from the air into edible calories. When our animal bodies “burn” the food we eat, that turns it back to carbon dioxide, which we exhale.

The energy input is the sun, and most of the calories come from the air (carbon dioxide). Given so much external input, harvesting from a plot without reducing soil fertility is totally possible. With nitrogen-fixing crops (soybeans being the poster child), even the nitrogen fertilizer comes from the air.

Technically correct is the best kind of correct