I'm not saying "let's stop calling free range meat 'free range' and start applying that label to plants." If you seriously thought I was then your reading comprehension skills need a lot of work.

Most people who buy "free range" or "organic" food feel a moral passion about it because they think they're doing something positive for the environment, animal welfare, or both. They are dead wrong. The organic and free range food craze is not an environmental benefit but an environmental menace. That's what I was saying.

If your purchases of free range or organic food are only motivated by taste, then my earlier post doesn't really address you at all. But "tastes more like I think it's supposed to" is a lousy gluttonous excuse for taking actions that lead to ecological disaster.

You don't need to. Livestock require 8-20x more land per gram of protein produced than plant based protein sources. Switching entirely to plant based foods would allow returning >90% of that land to its natural state and growing crops only on the most suitable 10%.

(Of course, the shift in land use need not be entirely restricted to those lands; if livestock were abandoned the protein crops needed to replace them could be grown anywhere, not just on land formerly used for livestock. And your 80% figure is wrong anyways- it could be close to the total percent of that used for grazing, but most certainly not for the portion of that which is "unsuitable for growing anything except grass.")

Diabetes is actually less common in vegetarians than the general population, and diabetes has a strong positive correlation with overall meat intake.

The insistence that the type of carbohydrate doesn't matter to diabetes risk is absolutely false. Plenty of plant based foods contain sufficient calories without causing problems with blood sugar.

Protein intake in many first world countries, especially the US, is hugely higher than it has been in any other era of the world. People subsisted just fine off grains and beans for millennia, without the high incidence of diabetes that exists in today's age of high meat intake and high refined sugar intake.

"more distributed" means more land use. The studies on this have already been done: moving from battery farms to free range requires 20% more feed per gram of protein (largely due to the lack of precisely temperature-regulated environments) and on the order of 10x more land use.

10x the land use=huge habitat destruction and increased global warming. We already use 1/3 of the earth's total land area for livestock.

c.f. this or this.

The extra food those chickens have to consume is not "free" in any environmental sense no matter where the chickens are. It costs a lot of energy and land. And human labor is an astoundingly costly input, even just from an environmental perspective.

Your views of the labor market and modern food production are totally disconnected from reality. Your conclusion basically is "the only reason we quit all being hunter-gatherers is because of The Man. Take out a handful of shadowy puppet masters and we'd all go back to happy neolithic paradise." Modernization of food production is the central thing that has raised the standard of living from the stone age to the present day, and economic efficiency is not some kind of bogeyman.

Raising enough eggs to meet present demand for them in "free range" ways that meet with your moral approval would require tremendous habitat destruction, accelerate global warming, and increase poverty and death across the world. How is that any more humane than the present situation?

The interview says

Also, most eggs don't come from very good places. Yes, some come from nice, free range farms. But the reality is that most come from dirty, filthy, factory farmed facilities, that are bad for the environment

but the reality is that though "nice free range farms" may make people feel warm and fuzzy they are MUCH WORSE for the environment than battery farms. Feed inputs are ~20% higher per gram of protein, and land use is obviously tremendously higher. We already use an entire third of the planet's land surface to support livestock; trying to raise all that livestock in "organic, free range" ways just because people have an aversion to modern food production methods would actually require tremendous habitat destruction and accelerate global warming.

The same thing is true of other trendy organic etc methods. They are less efficient in ways that matter not only economically but environmentally. There are reasons people moved away from the "old ways" to be able to feed the planet.

Moving almost entirely to plant-based food is the only way to substantially improve the environmental impact of our food production, and it's urgent for us to do.

Hampton Creek's mission is an important part of that. It's just unfortunate that they seem to some extent to have bought into the anti-science, environmentally counterproductive attitudes of the Whole Foods crowds.

But frequentist analyses aren't any more "objective," they just hide biases from view and include inductive biases that aren't even rationally compatible with any consistent state of belief.

With Bayesian analysis your starting point is out in the open and must be justifiable and defensible; analysts are accountable for their priors.

You can also, of course, examine what would follow from several different priors. This is much more straightforward than trying to shake the hidden biases in a frequentist model.

that'd be this link

that'll teach me to use preview esp. when I've been spending too much time on sites where the article discussions use bbcode

Any "nerd" who posited that bandwidth and storage concerns would be so totally irrelevant that we'd happily waste 10-20x as much of them for practically zero benefit was not so much a "nerd" as a total idiot. Having more bandwidth means you want to do more with it, not waste it for no reason.

Real "nerds" worth the cred understand that not only does lossy compression provide great results at small fractions of the sizes of the best lossless representations, but research into lossy compression also helps us understand the structure of real-world information, intelligence, and human perception in new ways.

A future where we have lossy formats which achieve results equal to today's formats in a quarter the bandwidth because we've come to better understand the structure present in real-world signals and the ways humans perceive and interpret information is a cooler and more exciting future than one in which we [url=http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2012/01/19/the-hidden-expense-of-energy-costs-print-is-costly-online-isnt-free/]waste exajoules of energy and help destroy the planet[/url] by sending each other millions of terabyte-sized high resolution lossless cat videos.

Oh, by the way, one of my pet peeves is seeing vector animations from Homestar Runner, AtomFilms, etc uploaded to raster streaming video sites. The original vector animations had bitrates low enough for dial-up, ran smoothly on a Pentium III, and scaled flawlessly to any resolution. The raster (usu. H264) versions frequently look much much worse despite 20x the bitrate and dedicated processing hardware.

Vector animations like Homestar Runner are the original purpose of Flash- the one thing it is actually quite good at, and has been quite good at since Macromedia released Flash 3 in 1998. That's part of how it became ubiquitous- it did one thing and did it well. Even now there isn't really a better alternative- there's nothing that has the capabilities, the cross-environment rendering consistency, the install base, and the tool support Flash vector animations have.

It's just really unfortunate that after the Adobe acquisition Flash became a way of shoehorning a subpar and insecure "rich content platform" into that ubiquitous install base. For quite a while now streaming raster video has been a dominant use of flash, where it's been inferior to other solutions and only used because of its large install base and its support for DRM.

+4 for somebody who thinks the internet was created using "the html"?

What about ARPANET, CSNET, etc? TCP/IP? Email? FTP? NNTP? Gopher? (all US inventions by the by)

They may not have started calling it the internet until 1982 but it'd been around for ~19 years before CERN hooked up to it, over 21 years before TBL's Christmas 1990 invention of the WWW, and over 24 years before the WWW really started picking up in late 1993 as the later-but-more-popular Gopher (U of Minnesota) dwindled due to shortsighted license problems and Mosaic (U of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) gave people a new vision of what was possible.

I'm under 30 and I remember using Gopher, Mosaic, and Netscape 1.0. GET OFF MY LAWN.

Absolutely not.

The main advantage of a SSD for most users is not the 5x faster sequential performance, it's the >100x faster access times. RAID does improve throughput but it does very little to improve access times and random IOPS.

How about not recklessly endangering others' lives and not showing contempt for democracy and the rule of law?

If you want to spend a few trillion dollars of your own money to build your own private road network where you can drive at whatever speed you darn well please, go right ahead. But if you want to use the road infrastructure paid for by your fellow citizens, you need to live with the rules your fellow citizens have put in place.

Protecting the rest of us from numbskulls like you is not just honest work, it's a great benefit to society. You could do the rest of us a benefit too by not touching a steering wheel or gas pedal ever again.

It's their future (and their past thirty years), not mine. Just tossing in a reference to one of the longstanding repeating acts on everybody's favorite radio variety show.