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29 results for “bobulous”
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@bobulous Oh I see.
But do you use vim bindings for any other software other than editors?I use a lot of vim bindings out of my editor. In pdf reader ( #zathura ), browser ( #qutebrowser , #vimium ) music player, etc.
I’m afraid if that will conflict with Kokoune.And are there Kokoune bindings for popular softwares?
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@markstos If you're collecting awkward timezone-free clocks, then don't forget my Universal Decimal Time format:
https://www.bobulous.org.uk/udt/index.html
(Wow, the big graphical version really does not play nice on a smartphone screen in vertical orientation. I'll have to try to make it responsive when I get a chance.)
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@DaveMWilburn @carnage4life Wow, fact check says yes:
I always watched the film assuming they had sped up the footage. He runs like an angry rocket.
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@carnage4life Isn't this what bankers did with sub-prime mortgages? Bundle the garbage together into a complicated new product, get someone shady to give it an 'A' rating, then just wait for suckers to queue up to buy it. How did Margot Robbie describe it?
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@molly0xfff He does understand that by taking Wikipedia text under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence he's required to make all future versions of his text available under the same licence, right? Right?
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Really enjoyed this article about Rust newtypes:
https://www.howtocodeit.com/articles/ultimate-guide-rust-newtypes
and was sure I'd arrived there via a recent Mastodon post, but now cannot find it to boost it.
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Did anyone else finish Detroit: Become Human and somehow manage to get the detective thrown off the case and unintentionally get pretty much all of the friendly characters killed?
Not sure I could have made a bigger mess of it if I'd tried.
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@matari Most of your recorded time will actually have been spent on the System.out.println command. And self-made benchmark timers are notorious for giving bad data, so I recommend JMH instead.
You're right that String.format is slower than using the + operator, but a JMH benchmark comparison would show the difference to be much greater. (It would also show that String.format allocates a bunch more bytes to the heap.)
In summary: don't use String.format for simple concatenation.
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Just spent another five hours fixing up a new feature I'm hoping the maintainers of #Servo will accept into their project.
https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/32166
The original prototype code was finished within twenty minutes of fetching the Servo codebase for the very first time, and all of the hours since then have been spent fixing edge case bugs and making sure the unit tests work. Always amazes me how strong the Pareto Principle is when it comes to software development.
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@atamakahere Surely that would need to limit itself to u8 as the input and u128 as the output? And even then you'd need a hard limit enforced on the input value because 255! is equal to more than 3.35E104, whereas u128::MAX is less than 3.5E38.
In fact, the biggest number which fits is 34! equal to roughly 2.95E38.
Factorials grow up so fast.
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@imperio Is it possible to have rustdoc add a table of contents based on headings and sub-headings in the crate-level documentation block?
My "Examples" section in lib.rs has become (necessarily, I feel) rather huge, and a table of contents would really help with navigation.
(This is a naive question rather than a feature request.)
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I like the fact American Fuzzy Lop can be halted and resumed, because I really don't need to have a desktop machine rumbling away in the bedroom while I sleep.
But after 12h12m01s it has so far found zero crashes and zero hangs. So either my XML parser is great at avoiding panics, or my fuzzing method is testing some no-op action. (Though, while I was writing this, it found another path of interest through the executable, so it's doing something.)
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I like the fact American Fuzzy Lop can be halted and resumed, because I really don't need to have a desktop machine rumbling away in the bedroom while I sleep.
But after 12h12m01s it has so far found zero crashes and zero hangs. So either my XML parser is great at avoiding panics, or my fuzzing method is testing some no-op action. (Though, while I was writing this, it found another path of interest through the executable, so it's doing something.)
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I like the fact American Fuzzy Lop can be halted and resumed, because I really don't need to have a desktop machine rumbling away in the bedroom while I sleep.
But after 12h12m01s it has so far found zero crashes and zero hangs. So either my XML parser is great at avoiding panics, or my fuzzing method is testing some no-op action. (Though, while I was writing this, it found another path of interest through the executable, so it's doing something.)
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I like the fact American Fuzzy Lop can be halted and resumed, because I really don't need to have a desktop machine rumbling away in the bedroom while I sleep.
But after 12h12m01s it has so far found zero crashes and zero hangs. So either my XML parser is great at avoiding panics, or my fuzzing method is testing some no-op action. (Though, while I was writing this, it found another path of interest through the executable, so it's doing something.)
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I like the fact American Fuzzy Lop can be halted and resumed, because I really don't need to have a desktop machine rumbling away in the bedroom while I sleep.
But after 12h12m01s it has so far found zero crashes and zero hangs. So either my XML parser is great at avoiding panics, or my fuzzing method is testing some no-op action. (Though, while I was writing this, it found another path of interest through the executable, so it's doing something.)
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I was planning to have my parser and XML parser packages published to crates.io by now, but while writing example code I keep finding new features begging to be added, such as the ability to specify a default namespace before reaching for a chain of child elements.
But I'm pretty sure they say that scope creep always leads to the best outcome, right?
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Hey, #ASUS when are you going to release a patch for the #LogoFail vulnerability for all your active motherboards?
I see you've released a patch for several ROG X670 models, but no fix for the ROG X570 models (one of which I've had for less than three years). You're not going to leave us hanging, are you?
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@imperio I've opened a feature request on the #RustAnalyzer repo:
https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-analyzer/issues/15948
Out of curiosity, what setup do you use for Rust development?
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@RecursiveNeuron Well, I'm using #Java and #SLF4J but this is effectively the same as printf: writing information to the console (on the test environment only). Makes the console tell a story, so you can see where, when, and how your specific logic came off the rails. Using the IDE debugger feels more like taking a magnifying glass to a single grain of sand, but having no idea how it fits into the rest of the beach.
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It took a few hours and some experimentation, but using a new Apple TV 4K box as a Thread border router, plus Eve Motion and Eve Power devices, something critically important has been achieved: the Christmas tree in the back room now lights up when someone walks past it. #Thread #ChristmasTree #ChristmasLights #MotionDetection
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A quotation from Lessing, Gotthold:
«
A bibulous poet downed
his every glass in one;
so warned him his companion
“Stop — that’s enough, son.”
About to lose his balance
He said, “I know my stuff.
It’s one thing to drink too much,
but one never drinks enough.”
»Full quote, sourcing, notes:
https://wist.info/lessing-gotthold/70791/#quote #quotes #quotation #alcohol #drinking #drunkenness #enough #suffice #satisfaction #excess
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And since we're on California Quails...
It's so much fun to watch these borbulous birbs as they dust bathe, peep and cheep, preen, and just look so cute I can't stand it!
Video - The Bird Muse (there are all sorts of quail videos on this channel)
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And since we're on California Quails...
It's so much fun to watch these borbulous birbs as they dust bathe, peep and cheep, preen, and just look so cute I can't stand it!
Video - The Bird Muse (there are all sorts of quail videos on this channel)
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"Des sites montés par des escrocs arnaquent des dizaines de sans-papiers" @streetpress Voilà ce que donne le "tout numérique" #inclusionnumerique #titredeséjour Relayer l'article auprès des premiers concernés et des accompagnants ! 🔁 https://www.streetpress.com/sujet/1741688254-sites-escrocs-arnaque-sans-papiers-immigration-naturalisation-exil-migrants-action-juridique-prefecture-legal-protection-beeexpert-radhi-bouloussa-sylkad
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“Where’s the beef?”*…
There’s been some consternation over the FDA’s new food pyramid, with nutritionists arguing that, while the emphasis on “whole foods” (as opposed to processed) is a plus, the guidance overstresses satured-fat-rich foods and under-recommends gut-healthy fermented foods, and beans and grains (see also here).
There could be material economic costs as well. The Federal goverment already spends over $72 Billion subsidizing livestock— not counting the reduced cost grazing permits offered ranchers on Federal land. And as ranch and farm land ownership has become more and more concentrated in fewer and fwer hands, the benifits are flowing to fewer, wealthier “ranchers” (like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, a clutch of large corporations, and foreign investors).
Then there are the environmental implications. Oliver Milman ponders the potential scale of that impact if the new pyramid is followed…
The Trump administration’s new dietary guidelines urging Americans to eat far more meat and dairy products will, if followed, come at a major cost to the planet via huge swathes of habitat razed for farmland and millions of tons of extra planet-heating emissions.
A new inverted food pyramid recently released by Donald Trump’s health department emphasizes pictures of steak, poultry, ground beef and whole milk, alongside fruits and vegetables, as the most important foods to eat.
The new guidelines are designed to nearly double the amount of protein currently consumed by Americans. “Protein and healthy fats are essential and were wrongly discouraged in prior dietary guidelines,” said Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US health secretary. “We are ending the war on saturated fats.”
But a surge in meat-eating by Americans would involve flattening vast tracts of ecosystems such as forests to make way for the hefty environmental hoofprint of raised livestock, emitting large quantities of greenhouse gases in the process, experts have warned.
Even a 25% increase in the amount of protein consumed in this way in the US would require about 100m acres of additional agricultural land each year, an area about the size of California, and add hundreds of millions of tons of extra pollution to an already overheating planet, according to an estimate by the World Resources Institute (WRI), a non-profit research body.
“We are seeing millions of acres of forest cut down and agricultural expansion is the lead driver of that – adding 100m acres to that to feed the US means additional pressure on the world’s remaining ecosystems,” said Richard Waite, the director of agriculture initiatives at WRI.
“It’s already hard to feed the global population while reducing emissions and stopping deforestation, and a shift in this direction would make the challenge even harder. We need to reduce the impact of our food systems urgently and the US is an important piece of the puzzle in doing that.”
While many Americans will simply ignore the guidelines, the new framework will probably influence institutions such as schools and federal workplaces. The average American already eats about 144kg (317lb) of meat and seafood a year, second globally only to Portugal, and ingests more protein than previous federal government guidelines recommended.
Any further increase will be felt in places such as the Amazon rainforest, which is already being felled at a rapid rate for cattle ranches and to grow livestock feed.
Red meat, in particular, has an outsized impact upon the planet – beef requires 20 times more land and emits 20 times more greenhouse gas emissions per gram of protein than common plant proteins, such as beans. The raising of cows, pigs, lamb and other animals for slaughter is also associated with significant localized air and water pollution.
“To the extent that people follow these guidelines and eat more animal protein foods, particularly beef and dairy, they will negatively impact our environment, since the production of these foods emits way more greenhouse gases than vegetable protein foods, or even other animal foods,” said Diego Rose, a director of nutrition at Tulane University.
Choosing beef over beans and lentils is “a big choice we make that has real consequences”, said Waite. “If people want more protein there are ways to do that via eating plant-based foods without the environmental impacts. We can have our protein and our forests, too.”
Animal agriculture is responsible for about a fifth of global emissions, with little progress made in recent years to reduce its impact as more of the world starts to demand meat products. Worldwide consumption of pork, beef, poultry and meat is projected to reach over 500m tonnes by 2050 –double what it was in 2000.
In the US, much of this meat-eating is concentrated in a relatively small group of avid carnivores – just 12% of Americans consume nearly half of the country’s beef, a 2024 study found. But plant-based options, including “fake meat” burgers, have suffered a slump in sales in recent years amid a resurgent trend in meat-eating, fueled by online “meatfluencers” and a broader desire to consume more protein.
The environmental problems associated with the meat industry were previously highlighted by Kennedy himself, when he was a campaigner on green issues. At one point, Kennedy even said the pork industry was an even bigger threat to the US than Osama bin Laden, the terrorist mastermind.
“The factory meat industry has polluted thousands of miles of America’s rivers, killed billions of fish, pushed tens of thousands of family farmers off their land, sickened and killed thousands of US citizens, and treated millions of farm animals with unspeakable and unnecessary cruelty,” Kennedy wrote in 2004.
However, since becoming Trump’s health secretary, Kennedy has sought to elevate meat-eating, dismissing an independent scientific committee’s advice to emphasize plant-based proteins to instead favor meat.
“The Trump administration will no longer weaponize federal food policy to destroy the livelihoods of hard-working American ranchers and protein producers under the radical dogma of the Green New Scam,” a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services said in response to questions about the knock-on environmental impacts of the new guidelines.
“Americans already eat a lot of meat, so this promotion of more meat and things like beef tallow is puzzling to me,” said Benjamin Goldstein, a researcher at the University of Michigan who has studied the huge emissions associated with meat-eating by city-dwellers in the US.
“We needed to be addressing climate change two decades ago and we are still not doing enough now. If we are adding more greenhouse gases to impose unnecessary ideas of protein intake, that’s going to destabilize the climate further. It’s going to have a big impact.”…
Even 25% increase in meat and dairy consumption would require 100m more acres of agricultural land: “Huge amounts of extra land needed for RFK Jr’s meat-heavy diet guidelines,” from @olliemilman.bsky.social in @theguardian.com.
* Wendy’s advertising tagline (from 1984)
###
As we deconstruct diet, we might send bibulous birthday greetings to William Claude Dukenfield; he was born on this date in 1880. Better known by his stage name, W.C. Fields, an actor, comedian, juggler, and writer, became a vaudeville headliner, “the world’s greatest juggler” [which he may have been], then transitioned to Broadway (e.g., the Ziegfeld Follies revue and Poppy, wherein he perfected his persona as a colorful small-time con man) and began appearing in silent films. In the 1930s, Fields wrote and starred in a series of successful short films for (his golf buddy) Mack Sennett, then appeared in 13 feature films for Paramount. An illness sidelined him in the late 30s, but he roared back in the early 40s with Universal classics like My Little Chickadee, The Bank Dick, and Never Give a Sucker an Even Break.
Now widely regarded one of the comic geniuses of the 20th century, the Surrealists loved Fields’ absurdism and anarchistic pranks. Max Ernst painted a Project for a Monument to W. C. Fields (1957), and René Magritte made an Homage to Mack Sennett (1934).
The Firesign Theatre titled the second track of their 1968 album Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him “W. C. Fields Forever,” a riff on the Beatles song “Strawberry Fields Forever.”
“I personally stay away from natural foods. At my age I need all the preservatives I can get.”
– W. C. Fields
Source #agribusiness #agriculture #art #climateChange #comedy #culture #economics #environment #Food #foodPyramid #history #humor #land #livestock #nutrition #WCFields -
“Where’s the beef?”*…
There’s been some consternation over the FDA’s new food pyramid, with nutritionists arguing that, while the emphasis on “whole foods” (as opposed to processed) is a plus, the guidance overstresses satured-fat-rich foods and under-recommends gut-healthy fermented foods, and beans and grains (see also here).
There could be material economic costs as well. The Federal goverment already spends over $72 Billion subsidizing livestock— not counting the reduced cost grazing permits offered ranchers on Federal land. And as ranch and farm land ownership has become more and more concentrated in fewer and fwer hands, the benifits are flowing to fewer, wealthier “ranchers” (like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, a clutch of large corporations, and foreign investors).
Then there are the environmental implications. Oliver Milman ponders the potential scale of that impact if the new pyramid is followed…
The Trump administration’s new dietary guidelines urging Americans to eat far more meat and dairy products will, if followed, come at a major cost to the planet via huge swathes of habitat razed for farmland and millions of tons of extra planet-heating emissions.
A new inverted food pyramid recently released by Donald Trump’s health department emphasizes pictures of steak, poultry, ground beef and whole milk, alongside fruits and vegetables, as the most important foods to eat.
The new guidelines are designed to nearly double the amount of protein currently consumed by Americans. “Protein and healthy fats are essential and were wrongly discouraged in prior dietary guidelines,” said Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US health secretary. “We are ending the war on saturated fats.”
But a surge in meat-eating by Americans would involve flattening vast tracts of ecosystems such as forests to make way for the hefty environmental hoofprint of raised livestock, emitting large quantities of greenhouse gases in the process, experts have warned.
Even a 25% increase in the amount of protein consumed in this way in the US would require about 100m acres of additional agricultural land each year, an area about the size of California, and add hundreds of millions of tons of extra pollution to an already overheating planet, according to an estimate by the World Resources Institute (WRI), a non-profit research body.
“We are seeing millions of acres of forest cut down and agricultural expansion is the lead driver of that – adding 100m acres to that to feed the US means additional pressure on the world’s remaining ecosystems,” said Richard Waite, the director of agriculture initiatives at WRI.
“It’s already hard to feed the global population while reducing emissions and stopping deforestation, and a shift in this direction would make the challenge even harder. We need to reduce the impact of our food systems urgently and the US is an important piece of the puzzle in doing that.”
While many Americans will simply ignore the guidelines, the new framework will probably influence institutions such as schools and federal workplaces. The average American already eats about 144kg (317lb) of meat and seafood a year, second globally only to Portugal, and ingests more protein than previous federal government guidelines recommended.
Any further increase will be felt in places such as the Amazon rainforest, which is already being felled at a rapid rate for cattle ranches and to grow livestock feed.
Red meat, in particular, has an outsized impact upon the planet – beef requires 20 times more land and emits 20 times more greenhouse gas emissions per gram of protein than common plant proteins, such as beans. The raising of cows, pigs, lamb and other animals for slaughter is also associated with significant localized air and water pollution.
“To the extent that people follow these guidelines and eat more animal protein foods, particularly beef and dairy, they will negatively impact our environment, since the production of these foods emits way more greenhouse gases than vegetable protein foods, or even other animal foods,” said Diego Rose, a director of nutrition at Tulane University.
Choosing beef over beans and lentils is “a big choice we make that has real consequences”, said Waite. “If people want more protein there are ways to do that via eating plant-based foods without the environmental impacts. We can have our protein and our forests, too.”
Animal agriculture is responsible for about a fifth of global emissions, with little progress made in recent years to reduce its impact as more of the world starts to demand meat products. Worldwide consumption of pork, beef, poultry and meat is projected to reach over 500m tonnes by 2050 –double what it was in 2000.
In the US, much of this meat-eating is concentrated in a relatively small group of avid carnivores – just 12% of Americans consume nearly half of the country’s beef, a 2024 study found. But plant-based options, including “fake meat” burgers, have suffered a slump in sales in recent years amid a resurgent trend in meat-eating, fueled by online “meatfluencers” and a broader desire to consume more protein.
The environmental problems associated with the meat industry were previously highlighted by Kennedy himself, when he was a campaigner on green issues. At one point, Kennedy even said the pork industry was an even bigger threat to the US than Osama bin Laden, the terrorist mastermind.
“The factory meat industry has polluted thousands of miles of America’s rivers, killed billions of fish, pushed tens of thousands of family farmers off their land, sickened and killed thousands of US citizens, and treated millions of farm animals with unspeakable and unnecessary cruelty,” Kennedy wrote in 2004.
However, since becoming Trump’s health secretary, Kennedy has sought to elevate meat-eating, dismissing an independent scientific committee’s advice to emphasize plant-based proteins to instead favor meat.
“The Trump administration will no longer weaponize federal food policy to destroy the livelihoods of hard-working American ranchers and protein producers under the radical dogma of the Green New Scam,” a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services said in response to questions about the knock-on environmental impacts of the new guidelines.
“Americans already eat a lot of meat, so this promotion of more meat and things like beef tallow is puzzling to me,” said Benjamin Goldstein, a researcher at the University of Michigan who has studied the huge emissions associated with meat-eating by city-dwellers in the US.
“We needed to be addressing climate change two decades ago and we are still not doing enough now. If we are adding more greenhouse gases to impose unnecessary ideas of protein intake, that’s going to destabilize the climate further. It’s going to have a big impact.”…
Even 25% increase in meat and dairy consumption would require 100m more acres of agricultural land: “Huge amounts of extra land needed for RFK Jr’s meat-heavy diet guidelines,” from @olliemilman.bsky.social in @theguardian.com.
* Wendy’s advertising tagline (from 1984)
###
As we deconstruct diet, we might send bibulous birthday greetings to William Claude Dukenfield; he was born on this date in 1880. Better known by his stage name, W.C. Fields, an actor, comedian, juggler, and writer, became a vaudeville headliner, “the world’s greatest juggler” [which he may have been], then transitioned to Broadway (e.g., the Ziegfeld Follies revue and Poppy, wherein he perfected his persona as a colorful small-time con man) and began appearing in silent films. In the 1930s, Fields wrote and starred in a series of successful short films for (his golf buddy) Mack Sennett, then appeared in 13 feature films for Paramount. An illness sidelined him in the late 30s, but he roared back in the early 40s with Universal classics like My Little Chickadee, The Bank Dick, and Never Give a Sucker an Even Break.
Now widely regarded one of the comic geniuses of the 20th century, the Surrealists loved Fields’ absurdism and anarchistic pranks. Max Ernst painted a Project for a Monument to W. C. Fields (1957), and René Magritte made an Homage to Mack Sennett (1934).
The Firesign Theatre titled the second track of their 1968 album Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him “W. C. Fields Forever,” a riff on the Beatles song “Strawberry Fields Forever.”
“I personally stay away from natural foods. At my age I need all the preservatives I can get.”
– W. C. Fields
Source #Health #agribusiness #agriculture #art #climateChange #comedy #culture #economics #environment #Food #foodPyramid #history #humor #land #livestock #nutrition #publicHealth #WCFields -
“Where’s the beef?”*…
There’s been some consternation over the FDA’s new food pyramid, with nutritionists arguing that, while the emphasis on “whole foods” (as opposed to processed) is a plus, the guidance overstresses satured-fat-rich foods and under-recommends gut-healthy fermented foods, and beans and grains (see also here).
There could be material economic costs as well. The Federal goverment already spends over $72 Billion subsidizing livestock— not counting the reduced cost grazing permits offered ranchers on Federal land. And as ranch and farm land ownership has become more and more concentrated in fewer and fwer hands, the benifits are flowing to fewer, wealthier “ranchers” (like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, a clutch of large corporations, and foreign investors).
Then there are the environmental implications. Oliver Milman ponders the potential scale of that impact if the new pyramid is followed…
The Trump administration’s new dietary guidelines urging Americans to eat far more meat and dairy products will, if followed, come at a major cost to the planet via huge swathes of habitat razed for farmland and millions of tons of extra planet-heating emissions.
A new inverted food pyramid recently released by Donald Trump’s health department emphasizes pictures of steak, poultry, ground beef and whole milk, alongside fruits and vegetables, as the most important foods to eat.
The new guidelines are designed to nearly double the amount of protein currently consumed by Americans. “Protein and healthy fats are essential and were wrongly discouraged in prior dietary guidelines,” said Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US health secretary. “We are ending the war on saturated fats.”
But a surge in meat-eating by Americans would involve flattening vast tracts of ecosystems such as forests to make way for the hefty environmental hoofprint of raised livestock, emitting large quantities of greenhouse gases in the process, experts have warned.
Even a 25% increase in the amount of protein consumed in this way in the US would require about 100m acres of additional agricultural land each year, an area about the size of California, and add hundreds of millions of tons of extra pollution to an already overheating planet, according to an estimate by the World Resources Institute (WRI), a non-profit research body.
“We are seeing millions of acres of forest cut down and agricultural expansion is the lead driver of that – adding 100m acres to that to feed the US means additional pressure on the world’s remaining ecosystems,” said Richard Waite, the director of agriculture initiatives at WRI.
“It’s already hard to feed the global population while reducing emissions and stopping deforestation, and a shift in this direction would make the challenge even harder. We need to reduce the impact of our food systems urgently and the US is an important piece of the puzzle in doing that.”
While many Americans will simply ignore the guidelines, the new framework will probably influence institutions such as schools and federal workplaces. The average American already eats about 144kg (317lb) of meat and seafood a year, second globally only to Portugal, and ingests more protein than previous federal government guidelines recommended.
Any further increase will be felt in places such as the Amazon rainforest, which is already being felled at a rapid rate for cattle ranches and to grow livestock feed.
Red meat, in particular, has an outsized impact upon the planet – beef requires 20 times more land and emits 20 times more greenhouse gas emissions per gram of protein than common plant proteins, such as beans. The raising of cows, pigs, lamb and other animals for slaughter is also associated with significant localized air and water pollution.
“To the extent that people follow these guidelines and eat more animal protein foods, particularly beef and dairy, they will negatively impact our environment, since the production of these foods emits way more greenhouse gases than vegetable protein foods, or even other animal foods,” said Diego Rose, a director of nutrition at Tulane University.
Choosing beef over beans and lentils is “a big choice we make that has real consequences”, said Waite. “If people want more protein there are ways to do that via eating plant-based foods without the environmental impacts. We can have our protein and our forests, too.”
Animal agriculture is responsible for about a fifth of global emissions, with little progress made in recent years to reduce its impact as more of the world starts to demand meat products. Worldwide consumption of pork, beef, poultry and meat is projected to reach over 500m tonnes by 2050 –double what it was in 2000.
In the US, much of this meat-eating is concentrated in a relatively small group of avid carnivores – just 12% of Americans consume nearly half of the country’s beef, a 2024 study found. But plant-based options, including “fake meat” burgers, have suffered a slump in sales in recent years amid a resurgent trend in meat-eating, fueled by online “meatfluencers” and a broader desire to consume more protein.
The environmental problems associated with the meat industry were previously highlighted by Kennedy himself, when he was a campaigner on green issues. At one point, Kennedy even said the pork industry was an even bigger threat to the US than Osama bin Laden, the terrorist mastermind.
“The factory meat industry has polluted thousands of miles of America’s rivers, killed billions of fish, pushed tens of thousands of family farmers off their land, sickened and killed thousands of US citizens, and treated millions of farm animals with unspeakable and unnecessary cruelty,” Kennedy wrote in 2004.
However, since becoming Trump’s health secretary, Kennedy has sought to elevate meat-eating, dismissing an independent scientific committee’s advice to emphasize plant-based proteins to instead favor meat.
“The Trump administration will no longer weaponize federal food policy to destroy the livelihoods of hard-working American ranchers and protein producers under the radical dogma of the Green New Scam,” a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services said in response to questions about the knock-on environmental impacts of the new guidelines.
“Americans already eat a lot of meat, so this promotion of more meat and things like beef tallow is puzzling to me,” said Benjamin Goldstein, a researcher at the University of Michigan who has studied the huge emissions associated with meat-eating by city-dwellers in the US.
“We needed to be addressing climate change two decades ago and we are still not doing enough now. If we are adding more greenhouse gases to impose unnecessary ideas of protein intake, that’s going to destabilize the climate further. It’s going to have a big impact.”…
Even 25% increase in meat and dairy consumption would require 100m more acres of agricultural land: “Huge amounts of extra land needed for RFK Jr’s meat-heavy diet guidelines,” from @olliemilman.bsky.social in @theguardian.com.
* Wendy’s advertising tagline (from 1984)
###
As we deconstruct diet, we might send bibulous birthday greetings to William Claude Dukenfield; he was born on this date in 1880. Better known by his stage name, W.C. Fields, an actor, comedian, juggler, and writer, became a vaudeville headliner, “the world’s greatest juggler” [which he may have been], then transitioned to Broadway (e.g., the Ziegfeld Follies revue and Poppy, wherein he perfected his persona as a colorful small-time con man) and began appearing in silent films. In the 1930s, Fields wrote and starred in a series of successful short films for (his golf buddy) Mack Sennett, then appeared in 13 feature films for Paramount. An illness sidelined him in the late 30s, but he roared back in the early 40s with Universal classics like My Little Chickadee, The Bank Dick, and Never Give a Sucker an Even Break.
Now widely regarded one of the comic geniuses of the 20th century, the Surrealists loved Fields’ absurdism and anarchistic pranks. Max Ernst painted a Project for a Monument to W. C. Fields (1957), and René Magritte made an Homage to Mack Sennett (1934).
The Firesign Theatre titled the second track of their 1968 album Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him “W. C. Fields Forever,” a riff on the Beatles song “Strawberry Fields Forever.”
“I personally stay away from natural foods. At my age I need all the preservatives I can get.”
– W. C. Fields
Source #agribusiness #agriculture #art #climateChange #comedy #culture #economics #environment #Food #foodPyramid #history #humor #land #livestock #nutrition #WCFields -
“Where’s the beef?”*…
There’s been some consternation over the FDA’s new food pyramid, with nutritionists arguing that, while the emphasis on “whole foods” (as opposed to processed) is a plus, the guidance overstresses satured-fat-rich foods and under-recommends gut-healthy fermented foods, and beans and grains (see also here).
There could be material economic costs as well. The Federal goverment already spends over $72 Billion subsidizing livestock— not counting the reduced cost grazing permits offered ranchers on Federal land. And as ranch and farm land ownership has become more and more concentrated in fewer and fwer hands, the benifits are flowing to fewer, wealthier “ranchers” (like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, a clutch of large corporations, and foreign investors).
Then there are the environmental implications. Oliver Milman ponders the potential scale of that impact if the new pyramid is followed…
The Trump administration’s new dietary guidelines urging Americans to eat far more meat and dairy products will, if followed, come at a major cost to the planet via huge swathes of habitat razed for farmland and millions of tons of extra planet-heating emissions.
A new inverted food pyramid recently released by Donald Trump’s health department emphasizes pictures of steak, poultry, ground beef and whole milk, alongside fruits and vegetables, as the most important foods to eat.
The new guidelines are designed to nearly double the amount of protein currently consumed by Americans. “Protein and healthy fats are essential and were wrongly discouraged in prior dietary guidelines,” said Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US health secretary. “We are ending the war on saturated fats.”
But a surge in meat-eating by Americans would involve flattening vast tracts of ecosystems such as forests to make way for the hefty environmental hoofprint of raised livestock, emitting large quantities of greenhouse gases in the process, experts have warned.
Even a 25% increase in the amount of protein consumed in this way in the US would require about 100m acres of additional agricultural land each year, an area about the size of California, and add hundreds of millions of tons of extra pollution to an already overheating planet, according to an estimate by the World Resources Institute (WRI), a non-profit research body.
“We are seeing millions of acres of forest cut down and agricultural expansion is the lead driver of that – adding 100m acres to that to feed the US means additional pressure on the world’s remaining ecosystems,” said Richard Waite, the director of agriculture initiatives at WRI.
“It’s already hard to feed the global population while reducing emissions and stopping deforestation, and a shift in this direction would make the challenge even harder. We need to reduce the impact of our food systems urgently and the US is an important piece of the puzzle in doing that.”
While many Americans will simply ignore the guidelines, the new framework will probably influence institutions such as schools and federal workplaces. The average American already eats about 144kg (317lb) of meat and seafood a year, second globally only to Portugal, and ingests more protein than previous federal government guidelines recommended.
Any further increase will be felt in places such as the Amazon rainforest, which is already being felled at a rapid rate for cattle ranches and to grow livestock feed.
Red meat, in particular, has an outsized impact upon the planet – beef requires 20 times more land and emits 20 times more greenhouse gas emissions per gram of protein than common plant proteins, such as beans. The raising of cows, pigs, lamb and other animals for slaughter is also associated with significant localized air and water pollution.
“To the extent that people follow these guidelines and eat more animal protein foods, particularly beef and dairy, they will negatively impact our environment, since the production of these foods emits way more greenhouse gases than vegetable protein foods, or even other animal foods,” said Diego Rose, a director of nutrition at Tulane University.
Choosing beef over beans and lentils is “a big choice we make that has real consequences”, said Waite. “If people want more protein there are ways to do that via eating plant-based foods without the environmental impacts. We can have our protein and our forests, too.”
Animal agriculture is responsible for about a fifth of global emissions, with little progress made in recent years to reduce its impact as more of the world starts to demand meat products. Worldwide consumption of pork, beef, poultry and meat is projected to reach over 500m tonnes by 2050 –double what it was in 2000.
In the US, much of this meat-eating is concentrated in a relatively small group of avid carnivores – just 12% of Americans consume nearly half of the country’s beef, a 2024 study found. But plant-based options, including “fake meat” burgers, have suffered a slump in sales in recent years amid a resurgent trend in meat-eating, fueled by online “meatfluencers” and a broader desire to consume more protein.
The environmental problems associated with the meat industry were previously highlighted by Kennedy himself, when he was a campaigner on green issues. At one point, Kennedy even said the pork industry was an even bigger threat to the US than Osama bin Laden, the terrorist mastermind.
“The factory meat industry has polluted thousands of miles of America’s rivers, killed billions of fish, pushed tens of thousands of family farmers off their land, sickened and killed thousands of US citizens, and treated millions of farm animals with unspeakable and unnecessary cruelty,” Kennedy wrote in 2004.
However, since becoming Trump’s health secretary, Kennedy has sought to elevate meat-eating, dismissing an independent scientific committee’s advice to emphasize plant-based proteins to instead favor meat.
“The Trump administration will no longer weaponize federal food policy to destroy the livelihoods of hard-working American ranchers and protein producers under the radical dogma of the Green New Scam,” a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services said in response to questions about the knock-on environmental impacts of the new guidelines.
“Americans already eat a lot of meat, so this promotion of more meat and things like beef tallow is puzzling to me,” said Benjamin Goldstein, a researcher at the University of Michigan who has studied the huge emissions associated with meat-eating by city-dwellers in the US.
“We needed to be addressing climate change two decades ago and we are still not doing enough now. If we are adding more greenhouse gases to impose unnecessary ideas of protein intake, that’s going to destabilize the climate further. It’s going to have a big impact.”…
Even 25% increase in meat and dairy consumption would require 100m more acres of agricultural land: “Huge amounts of extra land needed for RFK Jr’s meat-heavy diet guidelines,” from @olliemilman.bsky.social in @theguardian.com.
* Wendy’s advertising tagline (from 1984)
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As we deconstruct diet, we might send bibulous birthday greetings to William Claude Dukenfield; he was born on this date in 1880. Better known by his stage name, W.C. Fields, an actor, comedian, juggler, and writer, became a vaudeville headliner, “the world’s greatest juggler” [which he may have been], then transitioned to Broadway (e.g., the Ziegfeld Follies revue and Poppy, wherein he perfected his persona as a colorful small-time con man) and began appearing in silent films. In the 1930s, Fields wrote and starred in a series of successful short films for (his golf buddy) Mack Sennett, then appeared in 13 feature films for Paramount. An illness sidelined him in the late 30s, but he roared back in the early 40s with Universal classics like My Little Chickadee, The Bank Dick, and Never Give a Sucker an Even Break.
Now widely regarded one of the comic geniuses of the 20th century, the Surrealists loved Fields’ absurdism and anarchistic pranks. Max Ernst painted a Project for a Monument to W. C. Fields (1957), and René Magritte made an Homage to Mack Sennett (1934).
The Firesign Theatre titled the second track of their 1968 album Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him “W. C. Fields Forever,” a riff on the Beatles song “Strawberry Fields Forever.”
“I personally stay away from natural foods. At my age I need all the preservatives I can get.”
– W. C. Fields
Source #Health #agribusiness #agriculture #art #climateChange #comedy #culture #economics #environment #Food #foodPyramid #history #humor #land #livestock #nutrition #publicHealth #WCFields