tryptaminev 🇵🇸 🇺🇦 🇪🇺

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • We don’t need industrial farming to feed the world. We need industrial farming to provide excess amounts of meat and dairy products and sustain an abhorrent food waste.

    In western countries half to two thirds of farmland are used for animal feed. by reducing our meat overconsumption by half, which would still far exceed what is considered a healthy diet, we could make 25% of farmland available for feeding humans. 30-40% of food in the US is wasted. About 10% of food in the EU is wasted. So if the US would reduce its food waste to European standards that would make another 20-30% of farmland available.

    So simply by cutting down overconsumption and food waste, we could increase the available farmland by 50% and accept 2/3s of current yields per hectar in the US w.o. any reduction in available food. When looking at farmers who switched from industrial to more sustainable farming, they achieve the same and sometimes increasing yields, as the crucial natural ability is restored with a healthier soil and more biodiversity, protecting against all sorts of pests and allowing for pollination.

    Industrial farming is a death sentence to the world, as it destroys the very foundation of farming. An intact soil and an intact ecosystem to allow the plants to grow.



  • I disagree with that. In Western countries typically half to two thirds of agricultural land are used for meat and dairy production. We have plenty of food available to sustain the current or even growing populations without depending on mineral fertilizers. Farming techniques have significantly evolved over the past two hundred years and the crop yield of an intelligently managed field without mineral fertilizers is not signficantly lower than what is achieved by conventional farming. With the added difference that conventional farming is actively destroying the soil and killing the insects that are vital to maintaining agriculture.








  • Unless you are forced to life in that area you are making a choice. And you are not forced to life there. It comes with trade offs. The trade offs are traded in the housing market. People fled the cities in the 80s to move into suburbs. Now people want to life in the city again.

    And cost of living of course includes the coffee and toast. You see that in areas that are gentrified, forcing people who dont make the 100k a year to move away. Where before the coffee was 3$ it now is 15$. And someone is paying for that, otherwise the business would not work. So again people are making that choice. And the people with 100k make the choice actually forcing the hand of people who only make 30k and are literally forced out of their neighbourhood.

    Of course then there is all the more compulsion to claim, that they had no choice but to gentrify and had no choice but to drive people out of their neighbourhoods. Because if the people with 100k weren’t forced to do so, then they would need to take responsibility for their role in that market. Of course the main responsibility remains with the landlords who are happy to drive rents up and people out. But then again i doubt there to be many six figure engineers who are devout to left parties (in case of the US, the Democrats are not a left party by any outside standard.)


  • But then why is it an acceptable choice for the commuting grocery store worker, but not for the engineer? There is a quality of living involved here that the engineer chooses to pay for, which the grocery store worker doesn’t have.

    Thats what i mean with unrealised luxuries. They claim to live paycheck to paycheck because their understanding of what a “normal” standard of living ist, is very different, from what “normal” people actually have as a standard of living.

    This is not to say, that theses conditions are a good society or dont need changing. But who can get such an engineering job definetely chooses to have a quality of life that he pays all his paycheck for. If it wouldn’t be a choice the grocery store workers wouldn’t exist.



  • I get the concept. But realistically that would mean three things:

    In a region where people make 250k a year for them to live paycheck to paycheck the cost of living would need to be somewhere around 4-5x higher than in an area where people would make 50k a year.

    That would further mean that in the areas where people make 250k a year noone would exist that could afford anything less than that. So the grocery store cashier and the gas station clerk and the postman would all need to make the same money as google software engineers. That is clearly not the case.

    And thirdly that means that either the people who make that much money living paycheck to paycheck are economically illiterate and dont grasp such simple concepts… Or which is far more likely, the quality of life in high cost of living areas is in fact so much better, that it is worth paying the extra.

    Either way someone who can make 250k a year is choosing to life paycheck to paycheck by choosing to pay such expenses. They definetely have the means to work somewhere where the difference between cost of living and paycheck allows for saving signficant amounts of money over time. Claiming those people would be victims of the system who were forced to live paycheck to paycheck is simply not true. It is still very much their own choice.






  • I used to work at an utility company that started to build, or rather started to plan to build a new site, for something that mostly exists in developed countries already. The normal projects thus were usually expansions, upgrades and refurbishments.

    Getting to build from scratch, and especially at that size is an amazing opportunity. Unfortunately though mixing the slower processes of a utility company with political interference in an unstable political environment, company leadership where the CTO role was vacant for multiple years and the rest of management is classical business school people w.o. engineering background and insane ideas about new management practices, bogged the whole thing down pretty harshly.

    With the managing practices i’m talking about things like bonus systems that most companies tried in the 90s and got rid of again. This is particularly absurd as the companies goal is to provide the utility at cost coverage, not to maximise profit. But it gets even worse, as the main issue is lacking cooperation cross departments. In an environment where people are already clingy to “this is our department standard, i will follow it precisely because i dont want to take risks”, adding on top conflicting KPIs that impact peoples salary is a recipe for desaster with a 100% guarantee.

    Also they got an insane idea about “desk sharing” to cut down on office space rented, since most people are working from home. But they didnt increase the allowance of work from hom days. So you are basically forced to stay at home on specific days and go to the office on other days, so you can meet both quotas, effectively taking all the benefits for the employee away.

    I left and i’m not looking back. I would have loved to continue working with the colleagues though and i am still amazed by how they try to make the project happen despite every boulder the company throws into their path.



  • There is a regular governmental press conference, usually monday, wednesday and friday where the speakers of the chancellor and the ministries are invited by an independant journalist organization. The organization is called Bundespressekonferenz.

    Since about ten years the journalist Tilo Jung is recording most of the press conferences and uploading them to his youtube channel I highly recommend you to watch the latest video on the massacre in Gaza. The current government called it an “tragic use of shooting weapons”.

    I cannot find the specific video right now, because the topic of mass surveillance through automated scanning of messengers, or by allowing back doors has been a topic since at least the past 5 or 6 years. Please note that i was refferring not to this but the previous german government, albeit the current chancellor party SPD was also in the previous government and the chancellor Scholz was the last finance minister under Merkel.

    If you believe my statement to be implausible without video evidence, i’d like to invite you to meet our former minister of defence in the current government, Lambrecht, who resigned after referring to the war in Ukraine as an opportunity to have met many nice people in a social media video. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-64288267

    Before she was defence minister under this goverment, she was minsiter of justice under the previous government. There she demanded that all websites should hand passwords over to the police as demanded. When it was pointed out that there is no use with hashed passwords, she asked to just safe them in plain text then. Alongside where further demands for extensive backdoors, violation of encryption and automatic scanning. It took months of heavy criticism to get her to drop it, despite the main point being that most of what she proposed was in violation of other laws including EU regulation.

    https://netzpolitik.org/2020/hacker-interessieren-sich-nicht-fuer-stopp-schilder/
    https://www.heise.de/news/Justizministerium-WhatsApp-Gmail-Co-sollen-Passwoerter-herausgeben-muessen-4615602.html