• 0 Posts
  • 27 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

help-circle

  • I disagree. Just following your source to its conclusion, I think it’s safe to say OA (organic agriculture) is better all around:

    7.1 Pros • Lower emissions of CO 2 , N 2 O, and CH4 • Enhanced soil and water quality • Lower energy use per land area • Higher energy efficiency per land area 7.2 Cons • Lower soil profile SOC stocks [i.e. how much carbon is in the soil] • Lower crop yields • Higher land requirement • Lower energy production per land area

    Your conclusion that we’d have to clear more land for agriculture use if we all switched to OA seems flawed; e.g. here in Germany we use about 60% of agricultural land to raise livestock feed like corn etc (https://www.landwirtschaft.de/tier-und-pflanze/pflanze/was-waechst-auf-deutschlands-feldern). Seems to me like eating less meat and growing idk lentils or beans would not immediately lead to food insecurity.

    This is also what the FAO says: yes, OA leads to yield reduction when compared to conventional methods, but not to food scarcity and instead to healthier ecosystems (https://www.fao.org/organicag/oa-faq/oa-faq6/en/).

    (sry gotta go, more.later)





  • Wikipedia in Video Form is a great line! I feel much the same way, but I think that’s not the entire picture. Wikipedia is a lot of declarative knowledge (i.e. what things are and Al’s maybe why they are), but YouTube is a lot of procedural knowledge for me. That is how to X. My GF and I finally found an apartment. I don’t know how to replace broken light switches, but in five minutes YouTube taught me how.

    I didn’t know how to replace a faucet - now I do. I did not know how to insert a metal screw fitting into the furniture I was constructing - now I do. I wanted to measure our energy consumption, figuring there had to be a way to it it smart/connected and Open Source. YT content creators showed me how.

    The list goes oooonnnnnn





  • Very much this. I was an exchange student in the US in 2005 and my US history teacher (yes, their history classes are commonly split between us and “rest of the world”) exclusively worked with excerpts from Zinn.

    I understood once I leafed through the official textbook. It was about as bad as you can imagine.

    So yes, Zinn is far from “objective” or “neutral”. It’s a deliberate choice because

    a) it’s supposed to counterbalance the terribly whitewashed school books and b) there’s a case to be made that no text, not even scientific ones, is ever truly objective or neutral because reality is a construct.

    The latter is a more philosophical debate, but nonetheless an important one. Since there is no single objective truth, you’ll usually dare better by considering varying interpretations of “truth” before making your mind up.

    In other words: you’ll never get the full picture, but if you assemble enough puzzle pieces you increase your chances of understanding the bigger picture, and, more importantly, you’ll gain a sense for when somebody is just off their rocker.








  • Counterpoint: I think this gets a bad rep because people overdo it. Personally, I think #000000 black text on white to be… Glaring? Like the stark contrast is hurting my eyes. Going for e. G. #444444 solves this while not sacrificing legibility. But then you get fancy #999999 super thin script on white and I’m right there with you.