Sure, you can eat uncooked grain and get by... but how long will your teeth last?

Most fruits and vegetables are largely or almost entirely water. Grain has to be cooked to be edible, so the edible product is either largely water, or has been cooked in water then dried. So it's not like water isn't a component, and often moreso than in meat.

Don't forget that the meat:feed ratio largely includes plant materials that humans can't digest, such as range grass that grows where it's not practical to grow crops (due to lack of water or lack of good soil). Feedlot finishing is a minor part of the calories that go into producing beef.

As to insects, nothing against 'em (I eat ants and aphids occasionally) but what are the relative processing costs? Say, for whole grasshopper. That chitinous exoskeleton is not digestible; indeed, it may be hazardous in sufficient quantity (I've had a cat kill itself by overindulging a taste for grasshoppers -- blocked intestine).

And remember, insects eat an appalling amount relative to their size. They are not free food that falls from the sky. So say we harvest 'em, but -- what do we feed 'em first? ever seen an area stripped by locusts? I have; they eat everything down to scoured wood and bare dirt.

That's an interesting point about contamination from plant matter being more likely to be toxic. How many common weeds contain some toxic compound? what is the relative damage from, say, moldy grain?

The worst I can see from animal contaminants would be parasite eggs/larva (those that can survive dehydration or cooking and are not species-specific), and protein-specific allergies (someone upstream mentioned his crustacean allergy apparently extended to insects). Admittedly not zero risk, but you could bite down on a rock in your bread and break a tooth, too.

I recall a study on coyotes, which concluded that they originated in the southwestern U.S., and their spread across the continent *followed the spread of human civilization*. (Which should surprise no one aware of how well coyotes get on in Los Angeles.) One wonders what other adaptable critters follow the same patern... rats, anyone??

And I particularly like certain types of ants. Fried or raw. :)

I remember a study that concluded Asian-style vegetarianism actually consumed about 20% animal-sourced protein, mainly from feces and insects.

Interesting about the FDA generally-acceptable contaminants levels... and that most are merely "asthetic" defects (well, of course, being essentially protein of varying digestibity). And now I'm wondering what our natural mycotoxin tolerance might be, since it's not exactly rare either.

Crap, and here I was expecting that video to be two Aries going at it head-on, just like their namesake.

Considering how many couch-and-therapy shrinks are really looking for validation and enablement themselves, it doesn't really surprise me that they'd reject biochemical evidence -- after all that means there's something wrong with themselves and their patients, not something that was inflicted upon 'em.

And give the prevalence of hypothyroid-associated depression and that hypothyroidism functionally starves the body and brain, one wonders if it's literally the "spoonful of sugar", the brief lift from the energy input.

Incidentally depression with rage-events has some association with inadequate T4-to-t# conversion; per one doctor's private studies, about 90% of such patients benefited from supplementation with either T3 or NDT, even if they were not classically hypothyroid (low TSH).

Legislation need not be logical. It only need be seen as "doing something about [problem]" come election time. Legislators get re-elected largely for having been SEEN to be "doing something", such as "being tough on crime" by passing innumerable bills that criminalize ordinary behavior and/or property.

[Me, I try to find one to vote for who has sponsored and voted for the FEWEST new laws.]

If the gun is undetectable, how do you tell when someone owns one??

Now that you mention it -- where are the templates to 3D-print ammunition that matches the 3D-printed gun??

Yeah, the challenge was to get the damned thing to the point where you COULD twiddle it at all!! I'd barely gotten it installed and moments later it proceeded to take half an hour (no shit) to crash. One piece at a time. I'd never seen the like. But someone had just handed me 98Lite so I thought what the hell, can't break it worse, and then I noticed that it tended to hang during heavy disk activity during startup... and that was when SysRestore's files were timestamped. Applied the one, killed the other, end of problems.

I don't blame folks for hating it, cuz you don't expect to have to bang on it right out of the box just to get it to finish booting up!

My old WinME machine (which was my testing and media box, so it worked fairly hard) ran for two YEARS without a crash, and it regularly ran months at a time without so much as a reboot. My secret? Apply 98Lite in default mode, and turn off System Restore (which at that point was dreadfully buggy). It went from being unable to even crash properly, to 100% stable, just like that. -- It did have good stable hardware and drivers, which of course helps a lot.

[The same box subsequently dual-booted WinXP, and was rebooted 3 times in 8 years -- once to twiddle the hardware, twice for power outages beyond the UPS's capacity.]

WinME did something I've not seen any other OS do: when presented with a driver disk that didn't include WinME drivers, it would root thru 'em til it found one it deemed correct, and it would *work*.

I will say WinME had shitty memory management compared to other Windows, and I wonder how much was the poor DOS foundation (it prohibited any sort of high memory management). It could be run out of resources at about the same level of "hard work" as Win3.1x. Wouldn't crash, but things like fonts stopped working, indicating an exhausted resource heap.

This is so weird to be reading today... yesterday I was writing along on my SF epic, and decided to throw a side character into a vat of skunky beer. So I had to go research exactly what it was. Had an interesting hour or so reading about the qualities of different containers and hops.