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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: November 19th, 2023

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  • You should get hyped for my upcoming light novel:

    I Wrote a Light Novel on my Smart Phone About an OP Protagonist, and I Teleported Into the World of my Novel, but Because I was Someone Other Than the Protagonist, I Died Immediately.

    I’m done writing all two chapters, now I just need to find a publisher that recognizes genius when I stare them in the face.







  • I can’t tell whether you’re agreeing or disagreeing with the comment you’re responding to. This appears to be a bale with a 4 foot width, and a 4 foot diameter, based on the cybertruck’s bed dimensions. That’s probably under half a ton. Still “heavy” (I can’t pick one up), but even the cybertruck is capable of hauling far more weight than that.


  • Only about 10% of the working population in the US is in manufacturing, so 20% more people that would want to work in manufacturing is quite a lot. It’s impossible to undo the automation that has happened to date, though. Worse, if more people work in manufacturing, the pressure on wages and the pressure to automate can both increase.

    Even if we stop all imports and make every finished good purchased in the US here, it’s far from enough to bring us back to the historic levels of employment in manufacturing.



  • We used to have good, strong open source tools made out of C (which is a lot like steel - it can only be worked by blue collar computer nerds with muscly brains). Now that steel core is corroding because of the influence of hackers and other white collar computer sorts with their creative problem solving, and unintended uses of memory.

    That new corrosion is called rust, and it eventually appears on every C project that’s left outside, unless someone comes along to brush it off occasionally.









  • They don’t do the math for this in the article. A recipe I found says it takes 2.5 cups of almonds to make a gallon of almond milk. Another source says there are 92 almonds average in a cup. With the figure given in the article, 3.2 gallons of water to grow one almond, that means each gallon of California grown almond milk requires use of 736 gallons of water.

    They mention it takes 30-50 gallons of water to sustain a cow, but don’t mention that much of that is water required by growing grass, which is water that cannot readily be put to other uses. They also fail to mention the average milk production of a cow: 7.5 gallons per day in the US, so that’s only (roughly) 7 gallons of water per gallon of cow’s milk produced.

    I’m under the impression other plant based milks are radically more water efficient, but aren’t as profitable as almonds.

    A very long sidenote: I was curious about the water consumption of almond trees. I found that a typical tree will produce roughly a ton of almonds over a 30 year lifespan. They will also produce about 7 times that much mass of shells around the almonds. The tree will weigh between half and a full ton by the end of that 30 years. I couldn’t find a number I trust for how much leaf matter is discarded by a typical orchard tree in 30 years of growing, but I expect that to be substantial also. Overall, it seems that a typical orchard almond tree needs 20-25 thousand gallons of water per year, versus 6-8 thousand for other trees of a similar size.