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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • I’m going to take a minute to respond to the argument I think you’re trying to imply here, that organic food leads to e-coli outbreaks in humans.

    While there is some validity to this, it’s an oversimplification. The vast majority of e-coli is not problematic. The stuff that’s actually a threat comes from sick animals. So when you have AFOs with tons of animals in close proximity, the manure tends to be more likely to be contaminated. And when that contaminated manure gets used as fertiliser, it makes contaminated vegetables.

    This doesn’t necessarily only affect organic vegetables, btw, as the runoff from AFOs can also be a contaminant, so it can affect neighbouring farms as well, organic or otherwise. This is how you can get e-coli contaminated lettuce because it was washed with contaminated water.

    Personally, the reason I’d buy organic produce would be a) generally better quality produce and b) avoiding glyphosate and PFAS in pesticides. I think that Monsanto has played out billions in settlements related to roundup speaks volumes.

    That said, I’m not nearly crunchy enough to think that artificial fertilisers are problematic. Heck, I use them in my own garden. Stuff that kills stuff tends to be more dangerous than stuff that makes stuff grow, but ofc dosage is everything.

    All that is to say, I’d posit that the real problem here is intensified animal agriculture, and corner cutting (both in fertiliser production and sourcing), not organic farming per se.








  • The problem in this is that you can substitute either the Harris campaign or the Muslim voters for “they”

    Lol! You’re absolutely right. From my point of view, though, the democratic party is so fully captured and out of touch with actual issues that they’re beyond being reasoned with, so it should almost go without saying who I’m referring to. And yes, I acknowledge how completely fucked that is.

    They’ve created this absolutely monstrous situation where we always have to choose between letting people we care about get hurt, or a tiny glimmer of hope of something better, and even though I pushed to avoid the former, I’m fully sympathetic to both sides.


  • I personally agreed with undecided in principle and was sympathetic that Harris largely ignored them. The problem is that trying to leverage their position for actual good policy outcomes made for this nasty prisoner’s dilemna situation where both parties chose the bad option.

    I honestly thought that they’d eventually come around because of just how bad Trump was going to be for democracy, and moreover for the people they cared about. Sadly, they were so devoted to their game of chicken that some of their loved ones will pay for it.

    I also don’t think it’s that callous to engage in a little bit of “I fucking told you so.”

    Most people I saw here were just trying to achieve the most favourable outcome, given the reality at the time.






  • Moreover, that’s not how probability works in independent events.

    It’d be like saying “I flipped coin A 1 billion times and got half a billion heads, so now that I’m flipping coin B 100 times, I probably won’t get any more heads.”

    It should be fairly obvious that you can say the exact same statement about tails, and get a completely contradictory statement.


  • Yeah, I was trying to compute the “ballpark” of the odds, but it’s actually hard to do because of how astronomically improbable it is. Even computation systems that are designed to compute rather big/small numbers (think 100,000,000^1,000,000 big) fail.

    Here’s another example: If a human only had 1,000 gut microbes, the chance that over 900 of them get snapped is 1 in ~10^162 [WA]. (This was roughly the biggest number I could get WA to yield a non-zero answer for a >90% snap.)

    Now if you do that for every human on earth, the probability is still essentially zero. [WA]

    When you consider that humans don’t have 1000 gut microbes, they have over 10 trillion, it’s just mind bogglingly improbable.