domain:youtube.com
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
1m 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
12m 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
12m 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
18m 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
20m 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
21m 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
22m 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.
anti_dan
28m ago
This seems like a non-sequitur. We aren't talking about things that are vaguely politically associated, but rather things that exist within the same particular moral niche.
doglatine
30m ago
No rhetoric intended — “Mycoprotein” can include regular mushrooms but in the meat replacement context, it’s usually used to mean microfungi like Fusarium venenatum. These are cultivated in big vats in roughly the same way you’d cultivate brewer’s yeast, rather than on more traditional farms like field mushrooms.
I’d be pretty surprised if the issues you raise were a serious problem. We have a huge amount of experience at preventing bacteria or pathogens getting into a whole range of industrial biotech processes, and in this case we can very tightly control the inputs and monitor conditions. Hell, if necessary, you could just include antibiotics as inputs into the process, though I doubt it’d come to that.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
32m ago
"Destroy your opponent before they can destroy you" does not at all sound like the "reasonable answer". Especially since this won't literally destroy them, they'll still exist and be even more ravenous to seize the reins of power. 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.
I don't even get why there are "sides". I don't care whether the meat I eat comes from a "farm" or a "lab", I just care whether it's cheap, tasty, and nutritious. Let them both try their best and we can judge them and eat them according to our own preferences. I'm on team freedom, and that means nobody gets shut down pointlessly just to "own" the other side.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
33m ago
You've already called me a liar and and stated that I should not be listened to. Why are you still trying to talk to me?
anti_dan
38m ago
Most cows don't eat cultivated plants for their entire diet. They graze on "free" grasslands.
No_one
38m ago
In much of Europe, meat is almost banned in public institutions.
City canteens rarely serve it, university canteens the same. E.g. in Berlin, the limit is one dish with meat per day on 4 different days.
anti_dan
42m ago
I mean, lab grown meat is an "elite" thing though. Never heard someone stocking at a Wal Mart warehouse talk about it.
No_one
42m ago
BioTech investors.
These also include the 5 food corporations that own almost all food processing and would love to have a new, very safe market.
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
43m ago
Ban their stuff before they ban ours.
I don't see why the do gooders couldn't undo this ban and ban real meat anyway if they have the kind of influence to enact a ban on real meat in the first place. "Get them before they get us" doesn't apply if you are not, in fact, getting them.
I don't really believe in first mover advantage for laws, laws get overturned all the time. What appears as first mover advantage is likely just durable public sentiment.
anti_dan
45m ago
Brewing uses strong disinfectants (which meat cultures could also use between batches I suppose) and the yeast also has its own natural defenses against bacteria. Mushrooms also have their own natural defenses (nice rhetorical trick attempt with "mycoprotein" I suppose). The problem with meat is meat is not a full organism, its a part of an organism. It doesn't have a billion years of evolution on its side. You have to re-create that for the beef ribeye you are trying to recreate.
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
47m ago
This doesn't constrain their future actions. It's just as easy to repeal this law and ban real meat as it was before the ban. Maybe if it were a constitutional amendment or something you'd have a point.
TitaniumButterfly
50m ago
It's gonna be California first.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
50m ago
The FBI only has 35k employees, not just special agents, and is in a similar situation with a wider breadth of requirements.
This "they can't catch everybody" argument is tiresome, because it's true of every police force ever. According to the 2022 figures on this page, the case clearance rate for murder is only 52.3%, and this doesn't count the portion where the courts fail to convict. Thus, in the majority of murderers in America, the killer gets away with it. Does this mean laws against murder are pointless, and we shouldn't bother enforcing them? For auto theft, the closure rate is only 9.3%. Does that mean that the laws against carjacking have been "nullified"? Their aren't enough traffic cops to catch even a tiny fraction of speeders or red-light-runners; does this mean enforcing traffic laws has no effect at all, and is a waste of money?
This is a fully-general argument against law and government in general. No society in human history has ever been able to catch all criminals… but they don't have to. You just need to catch enough, and punish them harshly enough, to have a significant deterrent effect on the general population.
jake
50m ago
A tad late to this but can give info as a former reddit powerjanny (I figure Zorba knows who I am, or will with this mention)
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, we had bots that would ping if a thread was linked and we would sometimes get warnings from other mods, but that's it. My default when I see a locked thread with mods complaining about brigading is the thread was just especially provocative.
Spam is the majority of bad user activity on reddit. If it's a picture of the sort of shit you'd find in a gift shop--like shirts and mugs--in almost every instance it was a spammer. A second account would comment asking "Where can I get this?" and then either OP or a third account would reply with a link. Then there's the submission and comment reposting mentioned here, very common, and accounts we'd label auction accounts. Those accounts followed a pattern so clear you could look at the first page of their profile and know, not that this was hard. It'd be like 2-3 submissions, 2-3 comments made in the last few days from a >6 month old account. These were different than the word-for-word repost bots, as repost bots only very rarely messaged modmail while the latter would frequently message with invariably broken English of such content as "Why ban" or "And why is ban??" (That why.)
There is also the paid political activity on reddit. Some are mods, most don't need to be paid, they happily follow party line. It's easy to look at political subs, especially the new ones that have started popping up this year and will continue to pop up ahead of the election, and see the same usernames in the mod lists, and other usernames posting links to those subs and other political subs, all pushing narrative. I'd imagine if you opened politics right now it wouldn't take long to find a year-old account with more than a million post karma that constantly posts articles hating on the right, that person is paid for what they do. And, yknow, don't forget Ghislaine Maxwell. 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.
As for LSC, I'd imagine most specifically bad use there is spammers and powerusers farming karma, with a minority of the paid users who will post whatever boo Trump or boo Righties article to every possibly relevant sub.
I'd be happy to answer or try to answer other questions. I started before Trump arrived and the site lost its mind, I thought it'd be interesting, it was, it quickly turned terrible. I stayed day-to-day to ban spammers, I stayed long-term to enforce no politics and keep frothing ideologues off the mod list.
TitaniumButterfly
51m ago
Penguin steaks would be a terrible idea (don't ask me how I know) but I think you're on to something overall.
doglatine
53m ago
There are lots of other large scale processes that have very high cleanliness standards and can’t use strong disinfectants, from brewing to mycoprotein cultivation. Honestly seems like one of the less difficult things to get right.
TitaniumButterfly
54m ago
It's probably a lot more expensive than real meat in any reasonable scenario.
Makes a ton of sense once you're in space. Delivering cow chunks from the surface of the earth could be extremely expensive (not to mention time-consuming) while assembling cow chunk analogues on site from available raw materials could be quite cheap given the right technology.
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.
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