matlag

Today we burn tons of oil. Say tomorrow we have switched to all electric. Do you think we'll keep extracting oil and that will create an environmental burden because of that oil sitting around?

That's the same reasoning.

Today we grow megatons of corn,... for different things, including feeding livestocks.

Tomorrow, if we have less livestock, we'll adapt the crops mix, just like rest of the world has been or is still doing fine without having mega-herds of cows.

We don't have too many cows because we had too much crops. We increased the crops to match the herds!

Just how many times did you copy-paste that comment?! Are you a bot or a lobbyist by any chance?

You think that we started producing some grains, and one day we realized we had too much by-products and one smart guy said: "let's start a cows herd so that they'll eat these". Sounds legit. Especially if you consider that eating beef the way we do is very recent in human history, and still inexistent in many parts of the world. Poor folks must be buried under the by-products...

So, since I don't think farmers are total morons, I would rather imagine they would produce different kind of food, such as leguminous.

A non-peered review article from a totally unbiased source.

Coming up next, an article demonstrating the benefit of burning oil for the environment by Shell.

There is no solution to capture methane in the air. Its lifespan in air is 12years, so if we stop emitting, it will go away by itself. Until then, it's quite bad. Capturing it at the source is also challenging (can you hemetically seal a cow's ass without impacting its health?!).

The best solution is... less farms, less cows but that means less meat!

The main issue is probably less meat itself than the ginormous quantities we consume.

Most livestock farming is intensive, meaning they can't rely on grazing alone and need extra food sources, typically corn. They emit methane, a greenhousing gas on steroids.

That grain is produced through very intensive agricultural methods because we can't get enough of it. It consumes ridiculously large amount of water and slowly degrades the soils. Nitrates eventually end up in the sea, causing algea to proliferate while other lifeforms are suffocated. See the dead zone in Mexico's gulf.

71% of agriculture land in Europe is dedicated to livestock feeding.

The percentage must be similar or higher in America, and don't count North America alone: without grains from Brazil, we're dead. Period. So next time you hear the world blaming Brazil for deforestation, keep in mind that a large share of it is to sustain livestocks...

Cattle farming in the USA is heavily subsidized, by allowing farmers to use federal land for grazing for free (I believe something similar is in place in Canada?). The claim they "take care of the land" is absurd: nature has been doing that for millenias without needing any help. First nations have been living in these lands also without supersized cows herds and it was going alright. Farms actually prevent wildlife to take back its place.

But I wouldn't blame them. People in North America (among others, and I live in Canada, definitely me too) eat indecent and unhealthy quantities of meat, and that has to come from somewhere.

Now, simple math will tell you: if everyone in the world was consuming meat in the same quantities as us, there would'nt be enough suitable land on Earth to grow the corn that needs to go with it.

Another thing is not all meats are equal in terms of pollution. From the worst to the least bad, in equivalent kgCO2 per kg of meat you can actually eat: -Veal: 37 -Chicken (intensive, in cage): 18 -Beef: 34 -Pork: 5--7 -Duck, rabbit, pork: 4--5 -Chicken ("traditonal, free range): 3--4 -Egg (for comparison): <2

You can appreciate the orders of magnitude!

There are only 2 ways out of this:

• reduce meat consumption, and pick it right
• grown meat (meat made without the animal around it, in machines)

One can be done today, starting with your next meal. We don't need meat every meal, we don't even need meat every day, but it is true that going full vegetarian force a certain gymnastic to get all the nutriments one need.

The other solution is barely getting there, so there are still unknown (food quality, resources consumption, etc.) and the economics may not help it taking off.

The third (and let's face it: current approach at national level everywhere on this issue) option is to do nothing and keep going as if the problems didn't exist. This is guaranteeing a famine in the coming decades. When we'll fail to feed our livestock, and it will start dying, it will be too late to turn around and get the whole agriculture sector to transition. These things take many years.

We're trying to reduce our meat consumption at home, or to favor the least impacting ones. We still eat too much meat, but I hope we can gradually improve.

Meta is unwilling to pay for anything. They don't pay taxes on their benefits in Canada either, after having swallowed almost 100% of the online ads business. But they'll keep talking about how good for Canada and Canadians they are.

"They trust me. Dumb fucks!" -- Mark Zuckerberg

You mean like asking a fair share of Lemmy's instances ads revenues to be given to media companies?

Never seen that one?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OJQdM369msk

Just add it to the list: "The ink used to print this warning is toxic"

There is pretty much nothing done in Matrix that couldn't be done with XMPP. But XMPP suffers from multiple issues:

• The protocol is very well controlled, but the downside is it takes forever to have any extension approved, leaving sometimes features you would want fast in limbo for months, years, and clients/servers dev waiting for the extension to be finalized. The worst example is probably when Google dropped a group video implementation for XMPP in 2005 on the table, (at the time, Google messenging system was using XMPP) with source code, free license and everything. They would just have to take it and use it. Version 1.0 of the protocol extension was released... in 2009! Meanwhile, many clients were just "waiting" for the protocol before starting implementing anything. When the protocol was finalized, XMPP's world could congratulate itself for being 3-4 years late on every other communication system. This story repeated recently with an encryption extension.
• There are many clients project, most of them are carried by 1 or 2 devs, each of them almost single platform.
• As XMPP is "older", it doesn't benefit from any buzz effect, and some of the "waiting for features" have worn out many adopters.

As it was said in another comment, there is a company and some investors behind Matrix, and with that:

• Protocol can change as fast as they need to implement a new feature. Worst case it is updated again later
• Having much more resources, they could develop a true multi-platform client with a quite consistent interface. That eases a lot the adoption by non-technical users.
• Being the new thing and with a bit of marketing, they had a buzz, and that leaded to more servers and more clients developed, though they all have to follow the company's train.

Now, from a self-hosting point of view, Matrix has a huge flaw: rooms are entirely copied and synced on all servers from which a user participates. It takes only 1.

For example: if any of your users join a room with 10k users exchanging thousands of messages per day, your humble server will synchronize the whole flow in a local copy. There is not a chance a small server can take that kind of load. Last time I checked where they were for solutions (it was years ago, might be different today), the proposals were:

• Option for admins to prevent users from joining room bigger than xxx ?
• Wait for a new server implementation that's lighter than the mainstream one? (still not released in prod to date, and won't really solve the problem)

And for some positive points about XMPP:

• It proved its scalability. Whatsapp started as an XMPP server/client with no federation (don't know how far they drifted from the base protocol now, though)
• It is extremely versatile. Right now, there are 2 leading project that include blogging/microblogging features and more

https://movim.eu/

https://libervia.org/

The last has microblogging, events, forum, ticket management, file sharing features, etc.. Still needs a lot of love but it shows the potential of the protocol.

There are other projects using XMPP for whole different things (IoT, ...)

The issue is in your statement: price increases to no limit. One day, though, we won't be able to afford it. You'd be surprised how close we might be from that day...

We already have early warning on the oil: conventional oil production is on a plateau since 2008, and non-conventional might peak in 5--15 years. Without cheap oil, globalization dies. It heavily relies on cheap transportation worldwide. Without globalization, either we're prepared or we collapse!

Right now, not a single country gets prepared.

Exactly because the reasoning you have: modern economy is still based on a hypothesis made at the beginning of the industrial revolution "assume infinite resources", and when you run out, it's just because you don't put enough money to extract more.

We've buried most of what we produced. Yet miners go after ppm or ppb metal levels in rocks rather than just dig out waste and extract metals from them. There is a reason.

No, I don't mean to destroy life in the river. I mean to highlight the difference of impact between going from 90% of your capacity to 0% in one information to reducing from 90% to 80% or even 70%. Shutting down a nuclear reactor is quite a big deal in terms of operations. Restarting it is not like turning back on a switch either. Claiming a reactor was shut down makes it sound like a much bigger deal than what it was.