The original point is that billionaires, as I interpret it, is that billionaires are worse than animals. Or at least that if we look at billionaires as if they were animals we would still diagnose them as ill. My point is that that’s not true. Animals can be just as psychotic. Most have absolutely no morals and a subset of them regularly do things that are way worse than what the billionaires are doing, hence my examples.

However animals are not humans. Billionaires are humans. If we say billionaires are like animals that’s already a really bad grade. We humans are supposed to be much better than that. I’m not defending billionaires at all. I’m saying one should compare them to something else. There are much better and more effective ways to criticize them than this.

They don’t do that because they physically can’t. If they could they would. If you have two starving bears and throw them one carcass. Only one will eat because they will fight and scream away the weaker one.

Hey I’m no big supporter of billionaires but “that behavior in any other species we would classify it as some kind of divergent behavior” is extremely wrong. Altruism is extremely rare outside humans. Most animals would absolutely love to get every single piece of food in the forest all to themselves. They steal food from each other constantly. Whole species are based on the very concept of stealing as their main or sole life strategy. There are fish out there whose main food is the juveniles of the exact same fish species. Literal baby-eating as their main strategy.

We humans are supposed to be better than animals. Comparing someone to an animal is comparing them to something bad.

There are many different kinds of farms and they all need different inputs. Most impacted would be the corn and soy farms who produce a low value good for a lot of inputs in the form of fertilizer, seeds, sprays, fuel for heavy machinery etc. Least impacted would be beef producers who use wild grazing. Almost no inputs as the land produced the grazing by itself, at the same time they produce a high value good.

Of course there are lots of intermediates but those would be the extremes.

4 most important parts of artificial fertiliser are nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium and sulfur.

Nitrogen is Infinite. It’s made from the air which is 78% nitrogen. Energy is needed to fix it. Usually its natural gas but it doesn’t have to be. Electricity can also be used. There are real world plants who use hydro or wild energy to make it, even if they are few today.

Phosphorus is plentiful on Earth, both in soil, rock and sea water. However in most natural sources the concentration is too low to actually refine today. Phosphate rock which is the main source today is limited. 70% of the current Reserves are in one single country, Morocco. All world reserves combined should last for a our 300 years. After that we will either have to extract phosphorus from less phosphorus dense sources or we have to recycle it better from human excrete. Nevertheless we have plenty of time to come up with that technology. Main problem right now is not it running out but the risk of how concentrated it is. What if Morocco doesn’t want to share?

Potassium is extremely plentiful around the world. It’s 2,6% of the Earth’s mass and even the potassium rich minerals we currently use are expected to last hundreds if not thousands of years. Mined all over the world but mostly in Canada, china and Russia and Belarus. Not really a problem. Also plentiful in seawater.

Sulfur has many different sources and in most it’s a byproduct. Main source is as a biproduct of refining fossil fuels but it’s also created as a byproduct of mining for other minerals. The amount needed for agriculture is also comparably small. There is so much sulfur out there it’s even mixed into concrete just to get rid of it. I don’t see sulfur as a main concern.

So to summarize I’m really not concerned about any of them except for phosphorus and for that one it’s mostly the question of how willing Morocco is to share it. Long term when sulfate rock runs out 300 years I’m quite secure we have found out how to commercially extract it from a less dense mineral. Either that or we have finally started seriously recycling it from human excrete. Phosphorus is very easily recycled. The technology is already here. More sewage plants would just have to do it. And if we are starting to slowly reach peak phosphorus the pure financial incentives will make sewage plants start recovering it. Now it doesn’t happen because the mineral phosphorus is just too cheap and convenient.

How is this news? They are in the same war together on the same side. I would be more shocked if they didn’t communicate with each other regularly.

You would think Catholics would be absolutely outraged by this but the pope, who before was totally taboo to ever criticize, has been getting lots of criticism from Catholics for a long time now, ever since pope Francis was elected and but especially now with pope Leo. Ironically the absolutely fiercest critics of the pope are the so called “tradcaths” or ultra conservative catholic zoomers. If you look at their social media bubble it’s shit thrown at whatever the pope is saying every single week.

I don’t think US conservative Catholics care at all what Trump is saying about the pope. They hate the pope themselves. Maybe they will even cheer on.

Many german dialects are as you say, sometimes unintelligible with each other. However they are of the type where if you spend 1-2 weeks immersed in it you will very quickly start to understand it. Same thing happens in English. I heard an anecdote of someone who watched the Scottish series “Lemmy’s show” for the first time and could barely understand anything they were saying. But as they reached the end of the first season they had very little trouble. Intrigued I did the same and had the same experience (great show btw).

I’m not native speaker of German but I had such an experience. I learnt standard German in school as a foreign language. Last year I visited the Austrian family of my partner. The first day I could barely understand anything they were saying but after 2 weeks I could comprehend most of it. So where do we really draw the lines of a language? If you can comprehend it with less than one week of training is it really a language? I would say no. If yes then I would say some English dialects ought to be classified as languages (as I know some do, calling it the scots language).

Before this the only ships let through were the ones that were OKed by iran. You could be OKed by iran either if you were going there to buy and transport Iranian oil or if you paid Iran a huge fee. Either way Iran was making huge amounts of money on this especially since the oil prices were so high and they were the only ones able to export oil from the region.

So this recent move of blocking the straight completely is not a dumb move if one wants to weaken iran. There were headlines going around saying Iran was making more money during the war than before the war. Such a situation of course meant iran is in no hurry whatsoever to sign a peace deal with the US, especially not a disadvantageous one.

This new blockade will however highen oil prices even more now that not even Iranian oil can leave. But this will put pressure on Iran towards making peace deal. If a peace deal is met the strait can be completely open again and oil prices can start going down. That’s the thought behind it. We’ll see if it actually works. It doesn’t look like Iran is too desperate to sign a peace deal and why would they? They can probably handle not exporting oil for a longer time than Trump can politically survive constantly increasing fuel prices and inflation. And they know that fact. The Iranian leadership are crazy religious fanatics but they don’t strike me as stupid.

Since oil palms only grow in humid tropical environments it really comes down to which land we value the most. By using 3 hectares in Europe we could save 1 hectare of land in rainforests. What is worth more, 1 hectare rainforest in Indonesia or 3 hectares of native woodland in Europe? It’s not really clear cut. One could argue that 1 hectare of rainforest is more valuable because of the higher biodiversity. However there is not one natural answer to this question and ultimately subjective.

Oil palms only grow in humid tropical environments. Environments that when left undisturbed would be tropical rainforest. Decoupling palm oil from deforestation is therefore very hard. Certified sustainable palmoil is simply from farmland that the farmers have proved not to have been deforested recently but that same land still has the potential to return to tropical rainforest after restoration.

Regarding America specifically probably only Hawaii could support it. But land there is scarce and is used for much higher value crops like fruit crops. Harvesting palm oil is also quite labor intensive since the fruit bunches are harvested manually. It therefore does not make economic sense to grow it in countries with high wages.

There is not a pig breed out there that is all lard. However there is a huge difference between pig breeds regarding the procentage. Back in the day when palmoil was not available and lard was used the pigs we had were much fatter and fed a diet higher in cereal grains and lower in soy. When lard went out of fashion there was suddenly a huge oversupply of the stuff and we shifted their diets but more importantly shifted breeding efforts to ever leaner pigs.

This makes it harder to say exactly what environmental impact lard would have if we shifted back to using it as one of our main solid fats. I would argue that lard right now could be seen as a byproduct. In my country a lot of the lard is currently used as a feedstock for biodiesel which, when you think about it, is absolutely insane considering we at the same time import copious amounts of palm oil. You could even see it as us currently making biodiesel from palmoil by proxy. Which is not ideal.

But let’s say we could make the shift back to lard. We would get slightly less biodiesel but at the same time we could shift to a cereal grain heavy diet for the pigs and go back to those old breeds. Soy yields far less than say corn yields. Fatty pigs could therefore be less land demanding than lean pigs are to raise. I can’t exactly say if the demand for land would go up or down in the final equation but theoretically we could end up actually needing less land when also taking account the less land we would need for palm oil. But the main obstacle here is that people simply don’t want to eat lard anymore. It’s “icky” for the modern consumer. Which is ironic as we still consume it in sausages as one of the largest ingredients, but the consumers won’t accept it in baking products anymore.

In the end lard is just the carb in cereal grain converted to fat via a pig. And cereal grains are plentiful and very high yielding. Is using corn to produce fatter pigs, pigs that we would still raise anyway for the meat, really be worse than using the same corn for bio ethanol? It’s worth a thought. I would be very interested in seeing a full life cycle analysis of the land use and environmental impact such a shift would lead to.

Hi I made the original comment. After I posted I saw that the thread was a repost and that all the comments were on the original thread. Seeing as the original was already quite old and thinking the repost would not take off I just deleted my comment and moved on. So I was very surprised to see this replied to later. I would undelete it if I could.

Well I can reply back anyway. You gave a very detailed description on how wealth inequality appears and you explained a lot of basic economic theory. It’s a great comment but I don’t think we actually disagree. My point is not that wealth inequality is a non-issue. Of course it’s a huge issue. But these headlines which say that the top x% has as much wealth as the bottom x% are close to meaningless for two reasons. One is that a huge amount of people have 0 wealth without necessarily being poor or having a low standard of living. This can be because of having student loans or from voluntarily not saving. It can also be people who are too young to have meaningfully saved anything. How many of these people with zero or close to zero wealth are actually poor? I don’t know so these metrics don’t say anything to me. Say 20% of the world population has 0 or negative wealth. Then I can say that the homeless man with 1 dollar in his pocket has more wealth than the bottom 20% of the world population. Would be a true statement but ultimately meaningless.

As income inequality is the true source of wealth inequality I prefer discussions about that. But if wealth inequality specifically is to be discussed, which it has all right to be, then a metric like the “top x% wealthiest own x% of the world wealth” is much preferable. A metric like that is actually understandable immediately and says much more about how unequal the wealth distribution is. The metric in this headline I see as sensationalism.

Oh and by the way land can absolutely be both rented out and sold. In many countries renting land is the main way to expand your farm as owners seldom want to sell their land. I work in agriculture so I often give agricultural analogies. Sorry if it wasn’t easy to understand. Though I admit I don’t know the specifics in Laos.

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