I've noticed a fun split among people I know—those who grew up on a farm will move heaven and earth never to deal with chickens again, while people who grew up in cities or suburbs are really into the idea.
Not an industrial farmer, but we had chickens, horses and goats growing up.
Chickens suck because they poop on everything, and it dries into a glue-like substance caked onto things. The straw ends up caked in poop, the walls get caked in poop, the floor gets caked in poop, the chickens poop on each other. Getting it off requires a paint scraper, and getting way closer to it than you want. It's also liquid-y. It's a lot like bird poop on your car, but bigger because the bird is bigger.
The horses were less bad. Their poop was fairly "clean" as far as things go. They stayed pretty structurally intact (it's basically a ball of half digested fiber, kind of like a hairball) so it wasn't a big deal to get them with a pitchfork, and they were almost exclusively on the ground. It's not a job I wanted to do, but it wasn't awful. The heat in the non air conditioned barn was honestly worse than the work.
Our coop is off the ground. All I do is bring my wheelbarrow up to the door, open it up, rake it in, and then go dump. From my POV it's one of the easier chores.
I'm married to someone who grew up on a chicken farm, have never so much as threatened to own a chicken, and still hear the litany of how awful chickens are at least a couple times a year. They're apparently really, really nasty animals.
Didn't grow up with chickens, but have had them for 8 years now. Easiest pet I've ever owned, and they provide eggs. Haven't seen a weed in the yard in years. They'll decimate a garden bed, though.
Grew up on a farm. Dealt with cows, horses, chickens. Chickens are by far the worst. Maybe bats would be worse. Happy to leave that as an exercise for someone else’s imagination
Because to certain people, when a company lowers prices to compete because of an increase in supply, it's the competitive free market doing its things (not generosity), but when they increase prices because of a decrease in supply, it's greed.
It's always greed. Companies will charge as much as they possibly can while maximizing their profits. It doesn't matter if the price of something goes up or down this week, in either case the change only happens because the company thinks they'll make more money by offering the product at that new price.
it doesn't. The largest egg producer in the nation had no infected birds. There was no shortage. The companies just conspired to restrict supply so that they could gouge consumers and stuff their pockets. They were ordered to pay millions in fines because of it (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/egg-suppliers-ordered-to-pay-17...)
They successfully tricked you into thinking that their prices are set by supply and demand. They're probably not the only company fooling you either. For just one other example, literal tons of unsold/unworn, perfectly wearable and desirable clothing gets shipped overseas, burned, or thrown into the ocean or landfills. The excess supply of clothing is so vast that it's now a form of pollution (https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/chile...). If clothing prices were set by supply and demand they'd be paying us to take the clothes off the rack. Supply and demand are a good explanation of economics for grade schoolers, but it doesn't explain the world we live in.
You can just pull this up in FRED and match the spikes to HPAI outbreaks. People aren't making this up. If it's a spurious correlation, it's a really weird and powerful one.
It's not a coincidence. Companies know that if they suddenly raised the cost of their products 100% consumers would protest. At a certain point people will notice that they're being cheated and change their shopping habits accordingly.
Companies use opportunities like bird flu outbreaks to rip off consumers while deflecting blame. When the nation's largest supplier of eggs didn't have a single bird infected they still jacked up their prices and colluded with other farms to keep prices high and supply low because the news was constantly telling consumers about bird flu and setting an expectation that prices would be higher.
When the pandemic came, there were legitimate supply chain issues and many companies took the opportunity to appeal directly to their customers saying "We hate to increase prices at a time when every household is suffering, but we have no choice because of the supply chain! We're all in this together!" and because consumers knew we were in an unprecedented situation, while they still weren't happy about the price increases, they didn't blame the corporations for it.
The corporations however took advantage of the situation and continued increasing prices far higher than they needed to and for much longer than they needed to. Consumers didn't start to catch on until much much later when the news began reporting that all these companies were making record breaking profits the entire time. Meat packers for example had their profit margins increase 300%. Unfortunately by then they'd already been working hard to plant the idea that their high prices were caused by the disaster relief checks that went out to households during lockdowns. Then they blamed the "inflation" their own greed was feeding to justify raising their prices even higher. The more the news talked about inflation the more companies could rip you off because the expectation of higher prices was set.
The truth usually comes out eventually. Mostly when we finally see what the profit margins look like. They can hide some of it with clever investments and hollywood accounting, but it's harder to hide the money they make for shareholders and while they're doing everything they can to trick the public into thinking that we should feel sorry for them and sacrifice more for them, they're also busy telling investors that they're pulling in record profits and their pockets are overflowing with our cash.
Why wouldn't you pick the time when the public would be convinced a price rise is justifiable in order to raise prices (on a fairly inelastic good?) That isn't what you need a conspiracy for; the biggest would just press release that they were doing it, and the rest would follow. You might need a conspiracy to keep smaller producers from defecting from the price the biggest are setting, but the defectors wouldn't actually have the capacity to replace the price fixers, so they'd just be setting money on fire by not following.
I think it's pretty clear that they do explicitly discuss fixing prices with each other, but there's no actual need to do that.
Notice how that's not a story about price-fixing of a commodity but of a (delicious) intermediate industrial product destined for ultra-sophisticated buyers. There's no story about people price-fixing potatoes.
Also notice how the prices don't move up and down with incidents of potato blight or whatever.
Further: for this to be explanatory, you have to show why, after HPAI outbreaks subside... prices come back down.
When companies work together to set prices they can lower them a little sometimes (while still increasing their profits) and ruthlessly gouge the hell of out consumers the rest of the time hopefully without raising too much suspicion.
You've got this great opportunity to outcompete Aritzia and you're not doing it? They have no hold over you. When they conspire, just don't play along, like Zuck rejected Apple. Pick 50% their margin. You'll be a billionaire in a year.
Zuckerberg has no ethics and is just mad that apple's lack of ethics isn't working in his favor. A businessman with ethics has very little chance of dethroning an entrenched cartel within a corrupt industry. The hypothetical ethical business looking to outcompete their rivals may be the only one willing to set fair prices, but they also won't be able/willing to do what their competitors do. They won't exploit slaves/children/workers to make their products. They won't bribe governments to pass laws and regulations to keep out competition. They won't cut corners by using poisons in their products and manufacturing knowing it will harm their workers and consumers. They won't dump their waste into the ocean and pollute the environment. They won't collude to set prices, limit supply, or shut out anyone who doesn't play along.
The idea that you can defeat greedy corporations just by treating customers better is a fiction. There's always more money to be made by screwing over everyone at every opportunity, and there's no shortage of greedy people willing to do exactly that. It's why we need the kinds of laws, regulations, and enforcement that even the playing field and allow ethical companies to thrive.
You can't jump into the middle of a rigged game where the referees have been bought off and expect to win by following all of the rules. You have to stop the cheaters and the cheating first to even have a chance.
I've never owned a t-shirt that wasn't made by an unethical clothing industry which uses child slaves and abuses workers in sweatshops to produce hundreds of tons of clothing filled with plastics and poison every single year most of which will be burned or left to rot in a desert on the other side of the world from the retail shop that overpriced it when they sold it to me.
I have no idea what the fair market price of a t-shirt would be in a world where no one had to compete with the practices of the current industry. I do know that it'd be worth every penny. The price being paid now in environmental harm, inequality, and human suffering is way too high.
It’s not particularly hard to find clothes that are made ethically. I do it for most clothes I own. It’s even easier if (and more expensive) if you wear more traditional clothes (wool suits, coats, dress shoes, etc). You can avoid a lot of the abuses by buying things made in more developed countries (though obviously workers still won’t be paid terribly well, and the garment industry in the United States has some unpleasant corners). This tends to make clothes more expensive, especially as higher quality, more expensive inputs tend to be used too, but you can probably find a tee that isn’t particularly pricey.
I’m kinda surprised you never tried to do this considering how easy it is and how much your comments seem to suggest that you care. Possibly we’re talking past one another and you wouldn’t find any clothing companies that meet your ethical standards.
Isn't it the software which is tracking you? You can switch off the cellular connection whenever you need to not be tracked by the towers (if you trust your software, or with a hardware switch on some phones).
See, again: this is how message board logic turns these kinds of guides into LARPs. "Turn off your cellular connection whenever you need to not be tracked. Also use ProtonVPN."
The best writing advice I ever got was from a college professor—"everybody's got 100 bad essays in them. You just have to get them out."
I feel like this is what blogging is especially good for. You can clear out the awful stuff and then try to incrementally improve.
I would diametrically disagree with point #7—if you want to write well, you need to revise the hell out of it. I guess pick whose writing you like better, between me and the author, and take the corresponding advice.
My technique is Da Vinci method just collect / discover lot of shiny pieces. Then stitch them together later. Develop these pieces separately like colored glass pieces in a mosaic, sort of inversion of divide and conquer, collect and assemble.
I was doing this, and then it is confusing for people to follow. Nowadays I do this, too. But when I am ready, I write up everything once, then add in the details.
Yeah, I've been collecting many bits on my obsidian notes but I'm still in the stage of mostly dreaming of putting them together. But it is very interesting to see what thoughts i deem worthy of recording and which i don't. It's helped me significantly to form a coherent understanding of the world and politics, and i suspect one day it'll help me with finding novel research for my PhD
While I agree, I know it can be hard to start writing as well, because you are so worried about the quality. One of my professors from college brought up a great point that "No one will read your shitty first draft except you."
I find that phrase very helpful, because usually when I write, the first draft is always a giant mess. But you're able to craft it and edit it the best way that you can. So you can push out what you think is good work, and continue to improve as you write more.
It is very scary. Oddly that makes blogs kind of a good place to start, since almost no one will find them or read them. It's public writing, but a lot less nerve-wracking than putting yourself out there in other formats (like forum posts).
I don't consider myself a writer, but it sounds like you do.
I find forum posts far, far less nerve-wracking than a blog post. For me, a forum post is almost like how the original article describes a chat: it feels closer to realtime, and feels easier, because it's just like playing a normal role in a conversation. It's normally a response to something, expecting a response.
A blog post feels closer to a formal publication, and I feel like they're more expected to stand on their own, without the justification and context helpfully provided by others' posts.
It’s better to get those bad essays out in the form of comments, you get instant feedback and you’ll know what works and what doesn’t work when you go to write a real blog.
This is what I tend to use HN/Reddit comments for... I know I would probably be better off writing a blog, but I'm too busy procrastinating to make that happen.
In high school I did a report on a local poet and author.
What struck me back then was he said in an interview that you need to go through at least a thousand sheets of paper before you start producing anything good.
As a high schooler dreading to write a 4 page report on the guy, a thousand pages sounded ludicrous.
A different stab at this is to ask what it would take to build a telescope that could image some of these Earth-like planets, a project that turns out to be easier (in a very loose sense of that word) than sending cameras there.
The idea is you send a camera very, very far out in the Solar System (hundreds of AU) and then use the Sun's gravity well as your lens. Neat stuff and, unlike the interstellar probes, potentially doable in our lifetime.
Normally, diffraction and the effective aperture are what limit optical resolution. How does that work with gravitational lensing? Does the effective aperture become the diameter of the sun?
I'm too ignorant to answer that, but the technical paper here [https://arxiv.org/pdf/2002.11871] goes into a wealth of detail, and includes an image of Earth as it would appear to such a telescope (before and after post-processing) from 30 parsecs away. The optical properties of the solar gravitational lens are pretty astonishing.
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