The Robots are coming (Page 99) zeffur: re: "The Senate passed the United States Innovation and Competition Act Tuesday with surprising bipartisan support." A fine example of corporate welfare at the taxpayer's expense...it's been going on for a long time--nothing new there, really. They will spend some part of that on real R&D & the rest will end up as massive bonuses for corporate executives--as is often the case... (Edited by zeffur)  TheCovenant: Zeffur, there are just winners and losers and don't get caught on the wrong side of that line. I will help you. how much will it cost you? Nothing actually. How much will it cost me? everything.... Reichmarks to Rubbles and back again....  ghostgeek: Americans will eat about 2bn chicken nuggets this year, give or take a few hundred million. This deep-fried staple is a way of profiting off the bits that are left after the breast, legs and wings are lopped off the 9 billion or so factory-farmed chickens slaughtered in the US every year. Like much else that is ubiquitous in contemporary life, the production of nuggets is controlled by a small group of massive companies that are responsible for a litany of social and ecological harms. And, like many of the commodities produced by this system, they are of dubious quality, cheap, appealing and easy to consume. Nuggets are not even primarily meat, but mostly fat and assorted viscera – including epithelium, bone, nerve and connective tissue – made palatable through ultra-processing. As the political economists Raj Patel and Jason Moore have argued, they are a homogenised, bite-size avatar of how capitalism extracts as much value as possible from human and nonhuman life and labour. [ https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/jul/29/lab-grown-meat-factory-farms-industrial-agriculture-animals?utm_source=pocket-newtab-global-en-GB ] ghostgeek: But if chicken nuggets are emblematic of modern capitalism, then they are ripe for disruption. Perhaps their most promising challenger is a radically different sort of meat: edible tissue grown in vitro from animal stem cells, a process called cellular agriculture. The sales pitch for the technology is classic Silicon Valley: unseat an obsolete technology – in this case, animals – and do well by doing good. ... Long the stuff of science fiction and philosophical musing, cellular agriculture is fast becoming a reality. In December 2020, the San Francisco-based food company Eat Just launched the world’s first commercially available cell-based meat at the private 1880 club in Singapore. Its form – a chicken nugget – was partly symbolic, partly necessary: the technology isn’t advanced enough yet to replicate a chicken’s breast, wings or legs. But the entire animal kingdom is ripe for replication. The first cellular agriculture prototype presented to the public was a burger patty created by a research team at Maastricht University in 2013. The company that grew out of that project, Mosa Meat, is now speeding toward market release of cell-based beef. Aleph Farms, an Israeli startup, has 3D printed a cellular ribeye steak. Shiok Meats of Singapore is cultivating shrimp without the shrimp. Berkeley’s Finless Foods is tackling the endangered bluefin tuna. And Australia-based Vow wants to diversify beyond the most commonly eaten species to zebra, yak and kangaroo. [ https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/jul/29/lab-grown-meat-factory-farms-industrial-agriculture-animals?utm_source=pocket-newtab-global-en-GB ]  kittybobo34: that would be ideal if they could grow chicken nuggets in a vat, cheaper than torturing living chickens. zeffur: Lol@torturing chickens. Chickens are one of the dumbest creatures on the planet. Modern processing of chickens is quick--they don't likely even realize what happened before it is too late... kittybobo34: Actually beef would be the one most likely to be replaced, its much more expensive and resource intense to grow beef than a cultured meat product would be. kittybobo34: ghost,, "last time the globe warmed" video above, I think that is our fate for the future if we don't get our act together. (Edited by kittybobo34) ghostgeek: Yes, yes the world is doomed unless we act NOW! Trouble is, the doom merchants are, like the poor, always with us. Remember when they were telling us we would all freeze in a new ice age, yet now we're all going to broil? Go back a little further and the Commies were on the march. Go back further still and witches were the terror that kept people awake in their beds. When one fear gets stamped on, another replaces it. ghostgeek: Climate science is no longer science, it's a holier than thou crusade intent on punishing wicked humanity. We are told that 97% of scientists believe climate change is caused by humans, so don't dare criticise it. That isn't science, that's politics and religion tangoing. (Edited by ghostgeek) kittybobo34: Ironicly we could end up with a global freeze. There is a theory that when enough ice melts it shuts down the gulf stream current, this would freeze Europe and North America in one season, the left over white snow would keep the planet cool through the next summer. So both over heating and freezing are possible. ghostgeek: Whether it's hot, cold, wet or dry, there's one thing we can bank on, it seems. It's all humanity's fault. If there's ever a time to leave for the moon, I think now is it. zeffur: Task the chicken littles with coming up with sound energy replacements for fossil fuels that won't produce deadly byproducts...They don't get to fearmonger until they produce a solution that is better than fossil fuels for electricity, heat, & transportation....  freedomfirst1797: I never could understand the yearning for Global Stasis. Our earth has been much hotter and much colder before. In fact, we are currently on our third atmosphere. The first two wouldn't support life. Entire continents have moved to new locations, some breaking off from one and joining another. And all this happened LONG BEFORE mankind even existed. And long before anyone had invented an internal combustion engine. OK, I get the part where they like the way things are and don't want them to change in any way. I really do understand that. But change is inevitable. It will happen whether or not we all buy $50,000 electric cars. (The textbook definition of a first world luxury.) Science tells us that we must adapt or die. That is precisely what we have done for the past 200,000 years and what we will need to do in the future. I think Charles Darwin told us about this long ago. And this is the real science, not political propaganda, or a cult religion about preventing the earth from changing. The good news is that this type of change happens pretty slowly. The oceans warming two degrees every hundred years sure beats an asteroid causing cataclysmic extinction. (And shouldn't we be planning for that too?) ghostgeek: There seems to be a lot of rushing to get electric cars on the road but are hydrogen powered vehicles a better bet? ghostgeek: Europe’s truck-makers have agreed to work together to help create the right conditions for the mass-market roll-out of hydrogen trucks. Iveco, Daimler and Volvo have joined forces with energy companies Shell and OMV to form H2Accelerate. They say hydrogen will be an essential fuel for the complete decarbonisation of the truck sector. [ https://www.commercialfleet.org/news/truck-news/2021/01/28/hgv-giants-agree-to-collaborate-on-development-of-hydrogen-trucks ] ghostgeek: A survey of 1,000 senior motor-industry executives carried out by KPMG in 2017 found they believed hydrogen fuel cells had a better long-term future than conventional electric cars, with 78 per-cent saying they would represent 'a real breakthrough'. The short refueling time was seen as a major advantage, with 62 per cent saying that the infrastructure changes required for battery-powered vehicles likely to be their undoing. Mr Bamford argues that Britain should pull away from the rush to invest in battery technology, saying that the UK – and it's European neighbours – missed the boat many years ago. "China has 73 per cent of the battery market, and when somebody has that sort of dominance, it’s going to be difficult to knock them off their perch," he says. "China controls every part of the supply chain, it owns all the cobalt, copper and lithium mines, whereas if we invest in hydrogen in this country, we can steal a march." The other exciting thing about hydrogen fuel-cell technology is that it's not limited to cars, buses or lorries. Mr Bamford reckons with a couple of years it would be possible to have hydrogen-powered trains, and hydrogen-powered ships three years after that. In the longer term it could power aircraft, and provide sustainable energy for homes. [ https://www.shropshirestar.com/news/environment/2021/03/29/could-hydrogen---and-not-electricity---be-the-answer-to-our-transport-needs/ ] zeffur: Hydrogen would be better if we could generate a sufficient quantity in real time to power a vehicle, but it's dangerous othewise, imo--and PEM tech isn't as efficient as electric. kittybobo34: there have been some breakthroughs, storing hydrogen in ammonia,, then burning it in a fuel cell, that combined with batteries is very efficient. | Politics Chat Room 44 People Chatting Similar Conversations |
