If we are to feed 10 billion humans, we will need factory farms. Full stop. Agriculture has impacted the environment for far longer than we have been recording.
“Scientists have used ice cores and ancient pollen samples to show that preindustrial farming and the deforestation that made room for it also changed the climate, likely emitting enough carbon to avert another ice age. Indigenous people deforested so much of the Americas to grow crops that when they mostly died out after European contact, forests on their abandoned farmland grew back so quickly and reabsorbed so much carbon that it created measurable global cooling. Their disappearance helped nature reclaim some territory, however briefly.”
The pastoral farm can return if we are willing to either starve or reduce our population by the billions. From the NY Times, Sorry, but This Is the Future of Food
Perhaps I am too old or ignorant of economics, but I do not understand the value of cryptocurrency for anything other than untraceable spending. I am not alone in that regard, as Paul Krugman, a Nobel Laureate, has the same problem.
“The hypocrisy here is thick enough to cut with a knife. If you go back to the 2008 white paper by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto that gave rise to Bitcoin, its main argument was that we needed to replace checking accounts with blockchain-based payments because you can’t trust banks; crypto promoters also tend to preach libertarianism, touting crypto as a way to escape government tyranny. Now we have crypto boosters demanding that the evil government force the evil banks to let them have conventional checking accounts.
What’s going on here? Elon Musk, Marc Andreesen and others claim that there’s a deep-state conspiracy to undermine crypto, because of course they do. But the real reason banks don’t want to be financially connected to crypto is that they believe, with good reason, that to the extent that cryptocurrencies are used for anything besides speculation, much of that activity is criminal — and they don’t want to be accused of acting as accessories.”
From Krugman’s new substack, Crypto is for Criming
Plants are “light-eaters,” freely transforming light into energy they can use. We, too, are light-eaters.
“It was once thought that rods and cones were the only photoreceptive cells in our eyes. But at the turn of the millennium, researchers identified a different type of cell in the retina whose existence had been suspected since 1923, when geneticist Clyde Keeler noticed that the pupils of blind mice still dilated when exposed to light. These cells—named intrinsically photoreceptive retinal ganglion cells—have nothing to do with the formation of images.”
It is about our internal clocks. From Nautil.us, We Are Light-Eaters
I would like to think that what I write each week is a form of research, best described as follows:
“Research as leisure activity is directed by passions and instincts. It’s fundamentally very personal: What are you interested in now? It’s fine, and maybe even better, if the topic isn’t explicitly intellectual or academic in nature. And if one topic leads you to another topic that seems totally unrelated, that’s something to get excited about—not fearful of. It’s a style of research that is well-suited for people okay with being dilettantes, who are comfortable with an idiosyncratic, non-comprehensive education in a particular domain.”
I try to share what interests me with a broader audience; sometimes, I hit the mark, and other times, it seems the audience is not there. However, if you read broadly, perhaps you are a researcher too. From Personal Canon, Research as leisure activity
Chuck Dinerstein, MD, MBA
Director of Medicine
Dr. Charles Dinerstein, M.D., MBA, FACS is Director of Medicine at the American Council on Science and Health. He has over 25 years of experience as a vascular surgeon.
