domain:kvetch.substack.com
Felagund
27m ago
Eh, is it actually all that weird to consider rationalist nerds elites?
My sense was that EA, at least, had plenty of money, especially before FTX exploded.
And I'm sure they're having a sizable impact on AI policy.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
32m ago
I see where you're coming from, but I'd say nazism was an ideology, not an ethnicity. The comparison then would be to feminism, not to women.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
44m ago
Oh lol. I haven't noticed it before, but it turns out privacydevel pushed a shell script handling it already (twitter_oauth.sh), so I think I'll be removing the Python one.
What pro-union socialist heads of industry can you name?
Oh give me a break. You could be a literal Stalinist, if you're against MeToo / BLM / TransWomenAreWomen / the lastest Current Thing, approximately no one on the left is going to accept you as a leftwinger. There was a time when economic issues were what defined the left, but that time is long over.
SoonToBeBanned
1hr ago
This whole "red-blue tribe" obsession and talk is utterly useless, imo. It's long turned into an excuse to vigorously engage in naked tribalist politics while hypocritically professing to speak about and above such.
Getting that off my chest, of course the heads of industry "lean right." They "lean right" everywhere. What pro-union socialist heads of industry can you name? Honestly, trying to do away with simplistic political memology, what do you think California is? Some Communist monolith? The is the state of Nixon and Reagan, "right to work" laws, and prop 13. There's millions of people of every political stripe.
sliders1234
1hr ago
The evidence synthesized infant formula is bad is entirely from confounded studies showing mothers who breast feed lead to better results. But mothers who breast feed have a lot of other advantages for kids.
jeroboam
1hr ago
Start a cult.
If you aren't charismatic enough find a charlatan and then be his right-hand man that handles the finances.
The Bagawan is a good model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajneesh
I would slam the button even if the odds were a coin flip: it's still a far better outcome than what will actually happen thanks to decades of zero resistance from "constitutional conservatives."
I am going to die when leftist looters burn my family alive FC. Any opportunity to win and then mulch them first is worth taking, no matter how bad the odds are (I'm assuming "ceases to exist as a sociopolitical force" means no effective resistance to mop-up mulching after victory, since a random 5% is far too low to include that part)
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1hr ago
We can synthesize infant formula but it's not as good as the real thing. We synthesize fake sugar, fake chemical food (by which I mean things like jelly beans - highly processed food with paragraphs of exotic-sounding ingredients). That was instrumental to the global obesity crisis and millions of premature deaths yearly.
Why would we be capable of synthesizing meat that's just as good as real meat? We probably couldn't tell if the synthetic meat was bogus in some subtle way. Maybe it has the wrong hormones, or the wrong mix of hormones or an absence of certain kinds of proteins. The people who brought us the food pyramid are hardly going to help. After obesity, microplastics and an ongoing crisis of mental illness we should be very wary of any novel synthetic-agricultural processes.
jeroboam
1hr ago
It's all so depressing.
We're banning a future of delicious and nutritious food with zero animal cruelty.
We'll probably end up at a future where we're forced to eat seed oils and government workers are paid to torture animals as a jobs program.
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
1hr ago
the sheer idea that their performative ascetism is moot must gnaw at their bones (veganly).
It's a little confusing to read this when it's not the vegans that are passing bans on lab grown meat.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
2hr ago
I fail to see how this analogy is remotely appropriate.
The primary reason that people who are vegan/vegetarian (for non-religious reasons, and even plenty of those) condemn the consumption of meat is because their heart aches at the idea of eating cute little animals, with souls, emotions and a life of endless frolicking in the pastures to look forward to. Most of the arguments advanced alongside that primary concern, such as "sustainability" and environmental issues or resource consumption, are there just to buttress their core concern.
I wholeheartedly agree with @Quantumfreakonomics when he says that:
I am not a person that cares much about the suffering of animals, especially not the ones that taste good. Still, strictly speaking, the suffering is not an integral part of the process. If it could be removed, all else being equal, that would not decrease my utility in any way. I am agnostic on lab-grown meat. If it tastes good, is cheap, and is of comparable healthiness to legacy meat, I will eat it.
After all, I've repeatedly said much the same myself.
Hence the recent fad, only just losing steam, of feverishly trying to find vegan substitutes for meat products. Impossible Burgers and all that jazz. Vegans, begrudgingly, note that they either like meat or that people who otherwise care dearly about animal welfare are dissuaded by the dullness of a life without nice steaks or a side of ribs to go with it.
So lab grown meat completely cuts the Gordian knot. No cute animals were hurt (or at least far fewer, if you don't look too closely at where fetal bovine serum comes from, but presumably we can avoid that too). What's there left to object to, on primary moral grounds? A chunk of vatgrown muscle tissue is probably less sentient than an equivalent amount of fungi.
But of course, like the environmentalist movement and the cleanest and greenest source of energy we had/have/can have*, nuclear, much of the opposition arises from the abhorrent idea that their self-flagellation and virtue signaling will become entirely redundant. What brownie points do you get for not eating a cow, when the average Joe who just wants to grill is using a steak that's indistinguishable from one made the old fashioned way, tastes just as good, and might even be cost competitive?
We're not there yet, and the last overview I read of the topic suggested it's not going to be easy at all, but the sheer idea that their performative ascetism is moot must gnaw at their bones (veganly).
*Barring fusion, or farming black holes I guess.
Great post and I think it provides valuable context.
powerusers farming karma
But... why? There is no use to karma. I have lots of karma on Reddit. Trust me it's useless. This isn't Twitter. Posts from users with 1 million karma are not given more visibility than posts from users with 100 karma.
The game is not farming karma for $$$. The game is trying to capture Reddit for the left. And it worked.
Mods of even the largest subs are given no tools to identify bad users. We were never told by admins when a brigade was happening, we had no method of specifically detecting brigades
As to those random subs popping, the paid users either start new ones or take over dead ones, then upvote bot submissions in their critical windows so they're pushed to wider visibility and actual users start upvoting.
It's just so easy. 0.01% of users can control the narrative quite easily. Just create a bunch of accounts to upvote/downvote during the critical window right after posts or comments are submitted. They aren't even "bots". They're real people using VPNs.
Trump supporters did it back in 2016. Then they got banned. Now only the left is allowed to do it.
In both cases, doing some reforms but not going in the direction of black communist nationalists would definetly be much better than handing power to black communist nationalists like Mugabe and the ANC. Indeed, if you want to avoid racism, you not only don't handle power to them, you suppress them by force and not allow them to have organizations. What we got now, is liberal parties worldwide trying to copy the ANC agenda. Global liberalism supporting ANC coming to power is also condemnable. Modern new left liberalism is a very radical ideology that doesn't get sufficient negativity for it.
Even if you have a multiethnic country that isn't going to seperate, you should supress by force this kind of ideology and politics on the basis of protecting a group, in this case whites, either as minority, or as a larger demographic. Democracy as it is understood does not necessarily imply allowing all sorts of policies and the tyranny of progressive supremacists. But in any case, it is the better choose to suppress the choice of voters for black communist nationalists, and even of elites who bypass agenda of voters and are even more supportive of such ideology as has been the case in some european countries. Or even of very influential NGOs of this ideology which become a state within a state.
A South Africa that didn't allow parties like ANC and those more extreme, and such politicians found themselves in prison, and parties and organizations with such agenda banned, would be both a better governed one, and one that seeks the common good and respects the rights of its people, over following an agenda to screw whites, for blacks and promote communist nationalism which is also horrible policy in general. Doubly so when it is black communist nationalism against whites, that pretends their contributions to the economy is due to legacy of apartheid and racism. In both a democratic, and non democratic system you should suppress this ideology and its organizations.
Of course, if a significant part of a different ethnic group population has an agenda that is about screwing over the other ethnic group and pretend they are antiracist when doing so, then I don't see why separation is necessarily the wrong choice. Less problem of inequality between blacks and whites in the same country, if they are in a different country.
It raises the question of what the purpose of government is (ie is it about creating a good life or is it about self determination). If the latter, then what is the SA argument against allowing the Boers to form their own separate country. There isn’t even the anti colonialism argument.
Absolutely valid point, for which the answer is that the movement that is against Boers having self determination is a hypocritcal antiwhite black nationalist and other intersectional alliances movement. It isn't a consistent movement that consistently follows principles for, or against self determination, or for, or against racism. It is who/whom that animates this movement. Even though there are definitely supporters of it who don't see themselves that way.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2hr ago
Lab-grown meat has made it surprisingly far given how many people hate it for different reasons
Notably, several countries in Europe (searching tells me France, Italy, and Austria, among others) are also looking to ban lab-grown meat, although their reasoning looks a lot more like the controlled-origin laws from what I can tell. IMO there's something to the "this is how we've always made it" that may merit protection, although I'm personally more ambivalent on the subject. Or the various labeling disputes for the current generation meat substitutes, which I think probably merit clear labeling.
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
2hr ago
Don't know much about German city canteens (??) but Germany has the fourth highest meat consumption per capita in Europe, so I am not convinced that meat consumption is endangered there. Per capita consumption in 2020 was actually higher than in 2017.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
2hr ago
The purpose of debate is not to convince the other side, it's to convince the audience. It is to their benefit that I address the claims you make, rather than allowing those claims to sit un-rebutted.
You're wrong, and I'm not going to stop pointing out when you're wrong.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
2hr ago
Coordination is an actual problem, a very serious one.
And yet, you don't seem to think that the Red tribe's deep hostility to coordination of any kind is an issue with respect to their odds of success. How do you solve the coordination problem with the regular in Sarah Hoyt's comment section who declared that, even in a SHTF situation, everyone will do their own thing, fort up their own homestead themselves, and if you come around to his place talking about "organizing" or "joining up" or "coming together," it won't matter how long he's known you or how close a friend you are, you are The Enemy and he will shoot you dead on the spot?
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
2hr ago
I presume the primary proponents are persons who prefer to partake of provisions procured without the pain of prey.
(Sorry, got to "proponents" and couldn't help myself.)
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
2hr ago
from brewing to mycoprotein cultivation
AIUI, most of these involve single-celled organisms, with their own abilities to fight off rival microbes that animal muscle cells, adapted to the presence of a broader immune system, lack. And for the rest, look at how much the products cost — and that's usually chemicals produced by the organisms rather than the cultured cells themselves. Or how much a financial hit is taken if a vat or batch "goes bad." You'll be required to maintain a food production plant more sterile than a medical lab, at industrial scale.
Again, I read a lot of stuff without remembering where I read it, so I don't have cites on hand, but a quick google search gave this link: "Lab-grown meat is supposed to be inevitable. The science tells a different story."
It’s a digital-era narrative we’ve come to accept, even expect: Powerful new tools will allow companies to rethink everything, untethering us from systems we’d previously taken for granted. Countless news articles have suggested that a paradigm shift driven by cultured meat is inevitable, even imminent. But Wood wasn’t convinced. For him, the idea of growing animal protein was old news, no matter how science-fictional it sounded. Drug companies have used a similar process for decades, a fact Wood knew because he’d overseen that work himself.
…
Wood couldn’t believe what he was hearing. In his view, GFI’s TEA report did little to justify increased public investment. He found it to be an outlandish document, one that trafficked more in wishful thinking than in science. He was so incensed that he hired a former Pfizer colleague, Huw Hughes, to analyze GFI’s analysis. Today, Hughes is a private consultant who helps biomanufacturers design and project costs for their production facilities; he’s worked on six sites devoted to cell culture at scale. Hughes concluded that GFI’s report projected unrealistic cost decreases, and left key aspects of the production process undefined, while significantly underestimating the expense and complexity of constructing a suitable facility.
…
“After a while, you just think: Am I going crazy? Or do these people have some secret sauce that I’ve never heard of?” Wood said. “And the reality is, no—they’re just doing fermentation. But what they’re saying is, ‘Oh, we’ll do it better than anyone else has ever, ever done.”
…
GFI’s imagined facility would be both unthinkably vast and, well, tiny. According to the TEA, it would produce 10,000 metric tons—22 million pounds—of cultured meat per year, which sounds like a lot. For context, that volume would represent more than 10 percent of the entire domestic market for plant-based meat alternatives (currently about 200 million pounds per year in the U.S., according to industry advocates). And yet 22 million pounds of cultured protein, held up against the output of the conventional meat industry, barely registers. It’s only about .0002, or one-fiftieth of one percent, of the 100 billion pounds of meat produced in the U.S. each year. JBS’s Greeley, Colorado beefpacking plant, which can process more than 5,000 head of cattle a day, can produce that amount of market-ready meat in a single week.
And yet, at a projected cost of $450 million, GFI’s facility might not come any cheaper than a large conventional slaughterhouse. With hundreds of production bioreactors installed, the scope of high-grade equipment would be staggering. According to one estimate, the entire biopharmaceutical industry today boasts roughly 6,300 cubic meters in bioreactor volume. (1 cubic meter is equal to 1,000 liters.) The single, hypothetical facility described by GFI would require nearly a third of that, just to make a sliver of the nation’s meat.
…
It’s a complex, precise, energy-intensive process, but the output of this single bioreactor train would be comparatively tiny. The hypothetical factory would need to have 130 production lines like the one I’ve just described, with more than 600 bioreactors all running simultaneously. Nothing on this scale has ever existed—though if we wanted to switch to cultivated meat by 2030, we’d better start now. If cultured protein is going to be even 10 percent of the world’s meat supply by 2030, we will need 4,000 factories like the one GFI envisions, according to an analysis by the trade publication Food Navigator. To meet that deadline, building at a rate of one mega-facility a day would be too slow.
All of those facilities would also come with a heart-stopping price tag: a minimum of $1.8 trillion, according to Food Navigator. That’s where things get complicated. It’s where critics say—and even GFI’s own numbers suggest—that cell-cultured meat may never be economically viable, even if it’s technically feasible.
…
“A key difference in the CE Delft study is that everything was assumed to be food-grade,” Swartz said. That distinction, of whether facilities will be able to operate at food- or pharma-grade specs, will perhaps more than anything determine the future viability of cultivated meat.
The Open Philanthropy report assumes the opposite: that cultivated meat production will need to take place in aseptic “clean rooms” where virtually no contamination exists. For his cost accounting, Humbird projected the need for a Class 8 clean room—an enclosed space where piped-in, purified oxygen blows away threatening particles as masked, hooded workers come in and out, likely through an airlock or sterile gowning room. To meet international standards for airborne particulate matter, the air inside would be replaced at a rate of 10 to 25 times an hour, compared to 2 to 4 times in a conventional building. The area where the cell lines are maintained and seeded would need a Class 6 clean room, an even more intensive specification that runs with an air replacement rate of 90 to 180 times per hour.
The simple reason: In cell culture, sterility is paramount. Animal cells “grow so slowly that if we get any bacteria in a culture—well, then we’ve just got a bacteria culture,” Humbird said. “Bacteria grow every 20 minutes, and the animal cells are stuck at 24 hours. You’re going to crush the culture in hours with a contamination event.”
Viruses also present a unique problem. Because cultured animal cells are alive, they can get infected just the way living animals can.
“There are documented cases of, basically, operators getting the culture sick,” Humbird said. “Not even because the operator themselves had a cold. But there was a virus particle on a glove. Or not cleaned out of a line. The culture has no immune system. If there’s virus particles in there that can infect the cells, they will. And generally, the cells just die, and then there’s no product anymore. You just dump it.”
If even a single speck of bacteria can spoil batches and halt production, clean rooms may turn out to be a basic, necessary precondition. It may not matter if governments end up allowing cultured meat facilities to produce at food-grade specs, critics say—cells are so intensely vulnerable that they’ll likely need protection to survive.
…
Of course, companies could try. But that might be a risky strategy, said Neil Renninger, a chemical engineer who has spent a lot of time around the kind of equipment required for cell culture. Today, he is on the board of Ripple Foods, a dairy alternatives company that he co-founded. Before that, for years, he ran Amyris, a biotechnology company that uses fermentation to produce rare molecules like squalene—an ingredient used in a range of products from cosmetics to cancer therapeutics, but is traditionally sourced unsustainably from shark liver oil.
“Contamination was an issue” at Amyris, he said. “You’re getting down to the level of making sure that individual welds are perfect. Poor welds create little pits in the piping, and bacteria can hide out in those pits, and absolutely ruin fermentation runs.”
…
The risks are even more dire when it comes to slow-growing animal cells in large reactors, because bacteria will overwhelm the cells more quickly. At the scale envisioned by proponents of cultured meat, there is little room for error. But if aseptic production turns out to be necessary, it isn’t going to come cheap. Humbird found that a Class 8 clean room big enough to produce roughly 15 million pounds of cultured meat a year would cost about $40 to $50 million dollars. That figure doesn’t reflect the cost of equipment, construction, engineering, or installation. It simply reflects the materials needed to run a sterile work environment, a clean room sitting empty.
According to Humbird’s report, those economics will likely one day limit the practical size of cultured meat facilities: They can only be big enough to house a sweet spot of two dozen 20,000-liter bioreactors, or 96 smaller perfusion reactors. Any larger, and the clean room expenses start to offset any benefits from adding more reactors. The construction costs grow faster than the production costs drop.
Also "Is Lab-Grown Meat Commercially Feasible?":
The first of Humbird's grievances is the need for a cheap and plentiful supply of nutrients for the cells. [15] Currently, such cell food is produced for pharmaceutical purposes, so is expensive and not produced in the vast quantities required have cultured meat supplant animal meat on the global market. [15] In fact, nutrients are the currently the most expensive part of cultured meat production. [15] On top of that, the most popular source for key biochemicals needed for proper cell growth is fetal bovine serum (FBS). [16] FBS is harvested (lethally) from unborn cattle after the mother is slaughtered. [16] A replacement for FBS will have to be found to keep the ethics people on cultured meat's side. Additionally, the cells' food would need to be extremely clean. In the case of animal meat, any trace toxins in the animal feed are (mostly) filtered out by the animal's liver, and do not end up in the muscle. However, for cultured meat, the cellular slurry inside the bioreactor has no liver, meaning any toxin left in the feed is put directly on your plate.
An effective scale-up of cultured meat production would also require an incredibly clean work environment. The warm, nutrient-rich bioreactor, ideal for animal cell growth, is also the perfect environment for pathogens (bacteria and viruses). If a single pathogen managed to get a foothold in the bioreactor, it would quickly overwhelm the animal cells, killing the entire batch. This restriction requires labs to be at least Class 6 cleanrooms. [15] Importantly, since that level of sanitation requires all pipes, windows, etc. to be perfectly sealed, as well as ventilation replacing the air 25 times an hour, they get much more expensive with size. Essentially, you can have a large factory or a clean factory. Cultured meat requires both. In animals, pathogens are mostly dealt with by the immune system. Since the cell slurry has no immune system, great care and expense must be invested to ensure the cells' safety.
The final problem I'll discuss is the limits on the size of the bioreactors. Larger bioreactors are more space-efficient, allowing you to have smaller cleanrooms, reducing those sanitation costs. However, larger bioreactors are also more susceptible to disease, since pathogens can ruin the entire batch. Beyond that cost balance lies another problem with larger bioreactors: waste management. When left to their own devices, cells build up waste products which slow down future cell growth. Cycling out this waste effectively is only possible in small bioreactors, requiring more reactors, therefore larger and much more expensive cleanrooms. [15] Another possible solution is to use slow-growing cell cultures, since they are more waste-efficient, however less frequent batches means again more reactors are required, again ratcheting up the price. [15] In animals, waste is extracted via blood vessels. Since cell cultures have no blood vessels, cell waste becomes a problem.
Jiro
2hr ago
Lab-grown meat strikes me as like deciding that it's evil to draw pictures of Mohammed, but if you use a special light refraction method, you can have something that looks sort of like Mohammed but doesn't count as a picture for religious purposes, so Muslims lobby for use of this method and dozens of scientists spend millions of dollars figyring out how to get people to accept this method instead of normal photography.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2hr ago
It seems like the actually reasonable answer is to de-escalate and decrease the power and influence of the government so people can make their own choices about their own personal lives.
The experience of the past few years clearly shows that that would make them more ravenous to seize the reins of power.
Could it be they farm for getting above a threshold -- some subs have a minimum karma for posting or commenting -- and the farmers sell on to Guerilla marketing for the product placement con job that amazingly many don't see through.
It is a miracle that anyone volunteers to use Reddit at all given the degree of fake corporate slime, censorship and totalitarian level groupthink.
Of course I browse it a lot and only have the dopamine addiction to blame. I have given up commenting as it's lower resolution than ChatGPT4.
More options
Context Copy link