> If excess beef consumption were reduced to healthy quantities, as defined by the EAT-Lancet healthy reference diet, and substituted with chicken in forty-eight higher-income countries, the lost calories avoided would be enough to meet the caloric needs of 850 million people.
It's really impressive how efficient chickens are compared to beef. Obviously thinks like legumes are way more efficient, but we've really bred chickens to be meat machines in a way we haven't with cows.
They aren't just amazingly efficient in converting calories to protein, they're great at eating things without much other (agricultural) value to us. They eat the invasive spotted lantern fly!
True for chickens in general! But the Cornish Crosses in the factory farms probably never see a lanternfly, and wouldn't want to get away from the feeder long enough to go after one.
Actually, the last time I looked into it, if you grow 2 acres of corn and 1 acre of soy, and feed it to chickens, you get out a similar number of calories (and more protein?) as 3 acres of soy.
Corn produces something like 15M calories per acre, soybeans like 6-8.
When you feed those 36M calories to chickens, you get back 12M calories of chicken, which is actually less than 6 x 3 = 18M calories for the soybeans, so I'm misremembering something (maybe it's just an equivalent amount of protein? maybe chicken feed is a 3:1 corn:soy ratio?) or was just wrong.
Legumes and soy in particular is a pretty common allergy... it's nearly impossible to get sufficient protein without meat if you have a legume allergy.
The impact of non-natural feeds on the overall nutrition profile for chickens and pork are larger than with ruminant animals. Chickens have been bred and changed a lot through environmental manipulation to grow much faster than in nature.
There are a few breeds of cows that are producing more muscle mass than most, they've gotten quite a bit larger through breeding as well, though the difference in time to maturation doesn't come close to what we've done with chickens... I'm not sure it's for the better though.
Overall legume allergies affect 1-5% of the population, this is all legumes combined including peanuts etc. Soy allergies are 0.3 - 0.5%, not sure what you qualify as pretty common. For the record I have a fairly serious peanut allergy and abstain from meat and dairy with zero issues.
FWIW, I have pretty bad reactions to most foods outside of eggs and ruminant meat... so whatever the limited number of the population; across billions, you're still talking about millions of people. And it's pretty bad when you're one of those people, and there's others literally want to outlaw your food supply.
It absolutely is and in some ways we've only just started! Although we definitely shouldn't move fast and break things with living animals and our food supply;)
On the other hand I read chicken is much worse than beef in terms of animal suffering. But that's much more dependent on the producer than the energy calculation and climate impact I guess.
Yeah, the kurzgesagt episode on meat production did note that overall cows have a pretty good life right up until the final fattening feed lots which is pretty bad.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sVfTPaxRwk
They did note though, that it wouldn't cost that much, relatively, to give chickens pretty good lives. That really we're doing this just to drive the price down by pretty small amounts.
This is the kind of proposal that might fly well when it comes to the discourse over meat. People say “but we could be growing other crops instead of feed for cows”. Well yes, but you need protein in the diet. You can’t grow potatoes and veggies and expect people to survive only on that. Then there’s the question of land utilization. Historically cattle was raised for meat and dairy where agriculture was more difficult as compared to grazing cows, sheep, goats etc. The modern corn, soybean and alpha alpha farms may be able to grow other crops, but would they be able to support the crops that are needed in nutrition? Chicken and other more efficient substitutions may be the answer here.
> You can’t grow potatoes and veggies and expect people to survive only on that.
I'm sure most medieval people survived (without food types being a detriment to their health/lifespan) on vastly less meat than most of us eat nowadays.
I don't want to live a "medieval peasant" lifestyle, obviously, but I don't think the food part of it would be unhealthy (assuming enough food).
Medieval people were a lot shorter too. When I was in Saint Basil Cathedral in Moscow I was amazed how narrow and low were the corridors inside those side towers. I hit my head multiple in that church.
(In the world graph towards the end the height seems to decrease since 1990s-this is because countries with shorter people have a higher birth rate. Within the same population the height is still increasing)
At 6' I'm unlikely to ever dunk on my 6'4" brother, which is a bummer, but ego aside I'm not really impacted much by my height since I can secure food and shelter by pressing buttons and pushing a mouse. From an evolutionary perspective I understand the preference to be bigger, but I wonder if it's still a logical aspiration for modern humans. More cells means a higher risk of cancer, after all.
Yes, I believe we could cut beef consumption in half in the US and probably be healthier for it, without even compromising people’s standard of living (beef more as a “treat” than everyday ingredient).
We’d be healthier, and the reduction of water use from all of the crops grown for feed would eliminate all water shortages in the west
Starving people in North Korea are surviving (since per definition they are surviving if they are not dead). Doesn’t mean North Korean diet is something we should strive for.
Average North Korean is now about 3 inches shorter than the average South Korean [0]. 70 years ago they were the same people with the same height... Both nations have very little in the way of immigration so this difference is all due to the environment (i.e. in this case nutrition).
I've been building a Thunderbird extension that gives me the mail view I want.
So far it's mostly just configuring hotkeys to tag messages, and settings to hide or fold messages by tag, but I can trivially add functions to parse common messages, send things to my todo list, etc. It's great how easily programmable this is. I threw together a "summarize message with Gemma4 on Ollama", and it wasn't useful, but was a quick and easy experiment.
Thunderbird extensions are just Javascript using the Thunderbird API, and Claude knows the API, so it's a super-low barrier to get started on your own personal extension.
Most people who use Google services don't know about this or simply do not have bare minimum technical knowledge required to set this up or even know why they would need to do backups
It doesn't require any technical expertise to set up--you click a button--unless you want to import into something else. I agree it should be more advertised, but I don't see how an open source tool would require less technical knowledge or be better known.
I've heard this a few times lately, but this past weekend I built a website for a friend's birthday, and it took me several hours and many queries to get through my regular paid plan. I just use default settings (Sonnet 4.6, medium effort, thinking on).
I'm guessing Opus eats up usage much, much faster. I don't know what's going on, since a lot of people are hitting limits and I don't seem to be.
I waited until off peak hours to use Opus 4.6 to do some research. One prompt consumed 100% of my 5h limit and 15% of my weekly usage. Even off peak it's still insane. Opus didn't even manage to finish what it was doing.
Even with Opus I don’t usually hit limits on the standard plan. But I am not doing professional work at the moment and I actually alternate between using the LLM and reading/writing code the old fashioned way. I can see how you’d blow through the quota quickly if you try to use LLMs as universal problem solvers.
Keep in mind this is memory used by a browser tab, not "how bug the website is". Probably a memory leak as the feed is scrolled or something, but it is a massive download when you first load the page.
I'm seeing 72MB in the network tab (7MB transferred--that's due to compression). An incredible 10MB is HTML (800K transferred), a more incredible 11MB of CSS (500K transferred), 25MB of JS (3MB transferred), 16MB XHR (1MB), 17MB images (1.7MB transferred).
A lot of the HTML is inline JS in `window.__como_rehydration__` -- letting a server-side rendered be dynamic as if it were fully client-side rendered.
The size of the CSS also presents in bloated HTML. Why not have 18 classes on your button? `<button class="_5732bd68 _4cbf0195 _00dac29f _737a8a8c b241f848 _9572431e _56fd9a8a ff367c5b f7a6e63a aa661bbd b1e8a5cc d6e0deb3 _0582e059 f7e4b8f0 f9d5d3fb e037a5e8 _340d09d4 fbc7d17b" ...`
So? You guarantee that this setting is durable and will never revert? Or you guarantee that no client-side bug on that page will not override the setting with null value when you click save on something else? Please.
If you use Github, you should have an email from ~2 days ago with the subject "Important Update to GitHub Copilot Interaction Data Usage Policy". Easy to skip over assuming it's just one of a million private policy update emails.
If you don't use Github Copilot, this shouldn't effect you, and may be why you got no email. The current headline is fairly misleading--it's about Copilot usage, not private repos per se.
It's really impressive how efficient chickens are compared to beef. Obviously thinks like legumes are way more efficient, but we've really bred chickens to be meat machines in a way we haven't with cows.
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