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Submission + - Crop nutrition down 3.2% in under 4 decades due to rising CO2 levels

Submitted by GameboyRMH
GameboyRMH writes: It's a well-understood phenomenon that rising CO2 levels decrease crop nutrition, but now Futurism reports that Dutch researchers have tallied the recent damage: in a survey of 43 different crops, nutrients were found to have fallen an average of 3.2% since the late '80s. Higher CO2 levels cause crops to gain biomass faster without absorbing nutrients at an accelerated rate and with decreased water consumption, resulting in lower nutrient concentration. “The plant is becoming more efficient, but it’s occurring at a price, from a human perspective,” Lewis Ziska, a plant biologist at Columbia University who studied the phenomenon for more than two decades, told WaPo. Previous studies have estimated that by 2050, this effect could cause zinc deficiency to affect an additional 175 million people, protein deficiency to affect an additional 122 million, and could decrease iron uptake by 4% while 1.4 billion women of childbearing age and children under 5 already live in countries with anemia rates of over 20%.

Comment Re:I never tire ... (Score 1) 96

by GameboyRMH (#66111506) Attached to: Maine Governor Vetoes Data Center Moratorium Bill

The only way a discussion board comment will ever end up in an AI data center is after it's ripped from the Internet for training data. They're nothing like a traditional general-purpose data center, you're making an apples-and-hand grenades comparison between two things that are kinda round, handheld-sized and will hurt if they bonk you on the head. If every AI data center burned to the ground tomorrow, only AI services would be lost, and every discussion board could drop these PITA Cloudflare checks needed to keep the AI scrapers from bogging them down.

Comment Re:Feminism - it's about getting even, never equal (Score 2) 279

by Samantha Wright (#66088236) Attached to: US Fertility Rate Falls To All-Time Low

Thank you for taking the time to read all that! You are right, of course. It is something of an unsolved problem with the design. The question of "exactly what work are these draftees contributing?" is something I'm still working on; it may not literally be core parenting or teaching work, but actually more like e.g. hanging out with your cool uncle on the weekend who helps you learn life lessons. Maybe said uncle isn't exactly teaching or parenting material, but he still has something to contribute to building a child's character, and is assisting the parents just by being around to lighten the load. The Big Brothers Big Sisters charity seems to indicate that this is a sound principle with incredible ROI.

There would also be mandatory training to teach people the skills needed to do this work (critical to figure out what goes in there.) Also I'd like to hope that the system would "even out" over a few generations; if we assume the root cause of dangerous personalities like BPD or NPD is being trapped (or in an echo chamber) with a toxic parent figure, the practice of this "socialized parenting" is essentially guaranteeing kids have alternative support networks that can soak some of those traumas. Efficiency would never reach 100%, of course (does it ever?) and there would always be some difficult people for whom alternative credit would need to be devised, but in any substantial system there's always other work to do—maybe a truly broken person contributes by grading homework or something.

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