at a bare minimum they are less likely to eat some of your food.

Gut bacteria are not "eating your food", they're making food for you. They consume that which your body was not able to break down (such as some types of starches and sugars) and produce things that the body can absorb, like short chain fatty acids. Rodent studies show that if you kill all of a rat's gut flora with antibiotics that they have to consume about 30% more calories to maintain the same weight.

If gut bacteria were consuming significant amounts of our calories we would have long ago evolved to fight them off. They help us get more calories from our food.

Going from fatty to not fatty requires precisely one thing: reducing the amount of calories in versus the amount of calories out.

Nothing else.

Some routes may be easier to take than others, reducing cravings and the like. But it all comes down to energy in vs. energy out. One can diet on eating nothing but twinkies.

Aspartame does break down into poison. One of the components it breaks down into is methanol. Wood alcohol. The stuff that makes you blind. Drinking the amount of aspartame found in 14 cases of pop every day would fill your system with a large amount of methanol. No question that's going to have negative effects.

The amount of methanol actually found in *normal* consumption of diet sodas, however, is similar to the amount found in things like fruit juice. If your body can deal with fruit juice, it can deal with aspartame-sweetened drinks. As always, it's the dose that makes the poison.

Yes, there is a positive correlation between drinking diet sodas and being overweight. But that's an expected correlation, not a causation. Seriously, what sort of person who's not prone (for whatever reasons) to weight gain is suddenly going to decide, "You know, I want to switch from normal pepsi to diet."? The people who start drinking diet are the ones having trouble with weight gain already. The problem is, a can of pepsi is 150 calories. That's the amount of calories in 1/3 cup of raisins. Yeah, it helps somewhat with your calorie consumption, but it's not the big picture on its own.

No, TFA was talking about picking machines from Spain, and even said that they're from Spain. Both of the two systems mentioned, AGROBOT and Plant Tape, are from Spanish companies. The AC saw the word "Spanish" and stupidly thought that means "Mexican".

The AC said something stupid, I pointed out what they said that was stupid, and that should have been the end of it. Instead we have you trying to pretend that what they said wasn't actually stupid. It was. Let's accept that and move on.

It's possible to have a car powered by a windmill on its roof, in the same way that it's possible to sail faster than the speed of the wind.

I've noticed most criticisms of EV charging simply relate to a total lack of imagination about how to address engineering issues. For example I've seen people rant and rave and run all sorts of calculations about how it's impossible to run large amounts of power through a manageable cable for an electric car, and therefore fast chargers are a big scam... pure vitriol, and overlooking one tiny detail: ... nobody says that your cable has to be passively cooled.

All of those cable thickness guidelines for home wiring and the like are for passively cooled cables. You don't have to use a cable the thickness of your wrist to deliver a fast charge, you just have to wrap it in a cooling sheath. Some of the highest power chargers already do this. Problem solved really, really easily.

It's worse than that. Your diesel engine may be 30-40% efficient when running in its optimal power band, but of course it doesn't sit around at its optimal power band all the time while a car is driving. In practice diesel cars average about 25% efficient, gasoline cars about 20%. They're slowly improving, mind you.

"Maybe, maybe not"? Please, you know that the answer is "not even remotely close". Even when you start with petroleum as your feedstock and only waste 10-15% of the energy it contains in refining and distribution, you've still got the car only turning 20% of the energy therein into useful kinetic energy (25% in the case of diesels), versus an average of about 85% of the electricty into kinetic energy (minus about 8% transmission losses), plus automatically gaining hybrid-style regen. Even if the process was 100% efficient - which it won't be anywhere even close to that - just the difference in propulsion technolgies would put the EV at 4 times the efficiency. Based on related processes, I'd wager that this tech is probably along the order of 30% efficient, so you're looking at about 13 times more range per kWh on an EV than a ICE car fuelled by this fuel. Which means 1/13th as many square kilometers of wind turbines, 1/13th as many solar panel factories, 1/13th as many dammed rivers, etc. Yes, it really matters.

But come on, don't play dumb and pretend that you actually think that the efficiency of taking electricity, extracting gases from the air, converting them into a mixture of complex hydrocarbons, then burning them in an ICE and facing Carnot losses, is somehow "maybe, maybe not" more efficient than using the electricity directly.

it has a higher energy density than batteries, which is super important for vehicle applications.

It really, really isn't. Almost everyone on the planet would be driving an EV at today's energy densities if one factor was significantly improved, but that factor isn't energy density. It's cost per kilowatt hour.

A 250Wh/mi EV that can go 400 miles (8 hours driving without a stop at an average speed of 60mph) needs 100kWh. At a reasonably good but not spectacular 200Wh/kg, that's 500kg. Due to electric drivetrains' superior power density, switching a low power gasoline drivetrain to an equivalent electric one saves about 100kg. Switching a high power gasoline drivetrain to electric can save a couple hundred kilograms. So you're increasing the weight of a car by a few hundred kilograms. You really think your average consumer would give a rat's arse if their car is a couple hundred kilometers heavier if it lets them drive on fuel that costs a third as much?

Of course, these are only a couple of the issues (I'll ignore environmental ones for now because I know a lot of people here don't give a rat's arse about them). Added weight hurts handling on cornering. But EVs make better power to weight ratios easier, and especially improve performance on low end torque. They also give designers a lot more flexibility on placement of components, which can translates into things like more spacious interiors for a given vehicle footprint, and almost always means a lower CG. One has to charge, but one never has to go to a gas station, and most people would find plugging in in their garage much more convenient than a special trip to a gas station and standing outside in whatever weather. This leaves open the question of charge times, of course. But if you can drive hundreds of miles on a single charge and charge up on a fast charger during lunch and then take off again, it's pretty irrelevant. Gasoline cars need big tanks to minimize the inconvenience of having to stop for gasoline regularly in your daily life. Using fast chargers of course means having a fast charger infrastructure, but that's an eminently addressable chicken and egg problem. Modern li-ion batteries deal quite well with fast charges.

The short of it is, if today's batteries were cheap enough - no better density or anything else - electric cars would very quickly take over the market place. Other improvements in technology will improve the sales proposition, but they're not essential.

I hate to break it to you, but the original article stated "The labor shortage spurred Tanimura & Antle Fresh Foods, one of the country's largest vegetable farmers, to buy a Spanish startup", and its link to the company website brings up a page that starts off with "Plant Tape is a visionary and innovative company founded in Spain".

The AC responded "So the guys from Mexico will be replace with... hardware from Mexico?"

Why you're mentioning the word "hispanic" is beyond me.

Or more to the point, to compete with strawberries grown in other countries under whatever conditions they deem acceptable.

I've long supported the concept of a VAT-equivalent for pollution (PAT = Pollution Added Tax), where goods are taxed at fixed rates for different pollutants embodied by each manufacturing step, goods leaving the PAT zone are rebated, and goods entering the PAT zone are taxed based on an estimate of their embodied pollution, similar to how VAT works with value changes / rebates / taxes. VAT serves as a way to tax goods without unfairly harming the competitiveness of your products and favoring imported goods, and PAT could extend that logic to pollution controls. But maybe PAT isn't enough. Maybe we also need a HRAT, a "Human Rights Added Tax", which imposes extra fees based on things like human rights abuses, poverty wages, etc embodied in the production of a product, to provide a level playing field for countries with higher standards.

One would have to handle things relatively, of course - a poverty wage in southern California is not the same as a poverty wage in Nigeria, for example, and you don't want to make international sales prohibitive for poor countries simply because their per-capita GDP isn't sufficient. But I'd find it fair to add extra costs at the dock for products produced by factories with inhumane working and living conditions, etc, which keep workers trapped in such conditions by all sorts of means (threats of deportation, threats of violence, unpayable "company store"-type debts, etc). So a strawberry farm in Nigeria paying its workers $2,50 an hour wouldn't be seen as abusive (like one in California would) since that's over double the average national wage and easily meets local cost of living expenses - but a Nigerian farm that left its workers exposed to toxic doses of pesticides and threatened to seize everything their workers own if they try to quit would be seen as abusive even if the nominal salary was $2,50 an hour.

I don't know how to break it to you, but Mexico is not part of Spain anymore. How did you even get an internet connection back in 1809?

So the US has hit Peak Mexican? Is it possible to recover more of the remaining Mexican population by fracking their cities with high pressure steam?

I'm just waiting for someone with money to bring the situation to its obvious parodic conclusion and be carried up to the top on a gilded litter dressed like Xerces.

Thanks to Google's project Calico, I would like to be the first to wish Dan a speedy recovery.

Yep. It's wierd because the symptoms can correspond with many different causes. For example, the climate change thing makes sense because bees can be tricked into thinking it's spring and start foraging or even swarming in the middle of winter when they really should stay in the winter cluster. The occasional warm day is good for them to be able to get out and void themselves, but longer periods of significantly fluctuating weather can be bad.

But it also matches other problems. Diseased or dying hives often lead to "desperate" swarming where bees start abandoning the hive to try to establish a new, safe place. Most of these swarms, however, will die. The behavior could be seen as a general "exteme stress" behavior. It could also be seen as a neurological disorder from pesticide exposure.

In short, it could match almost any possible cause. And probably is a result of many of them.