Ehh, you can still do stuff when it is dark and there are plenty of crafts and tasks you can do in extreme low light on top of just socialization. Its not like northern people slept hours longer than southern people, or that people sleep way longer during the winter. The moon creates plenty of light outdoors for things, and if you don't have fires going and it is a clear sky even the stars are bright enough to walk around through open outdoor spaces. Not to mention nearly everybody had some sort of fire pit at home that they used daily for warming or cooking food and drink.
Personally I think this misconception only exists because people alive today have never had to or tried to do things in the dark or extreme low light conditions. You can't do everything, but there is a lot you can do, especially if you aren't constantly blinding yourself for 20 minutes at a time by looking at bright modern light sources. We even have the notion of a harvest moon, because you can work easily outside during a full moon, and fishing by moonlight is a thing and has been since before electricity.
Also candles may be expensive, but they are far from the only lighting option and certainly nowhere near the cheapest. Candles were prized for how nice and consistent and hands-off they were along with not smelling nearly so much or being as smoky or sooty. Rush plants, or others, dipped in any kind of oil or fat or resin make portable candle-like light, and also simple oil lanterns themselves you can place on a floor or table which date back to atleast 10,000BC. You can also use fatwood sticks, the wood of a tree like a pine that is sometimes soaked with pine resin and would be split into thin sticks that burn really nice and bright and long.
Smokers already pay far more in sin taxes than the average persons entire lifetime medical costs, and also smokers cost less than the average person in medical costs because smoking disqualifies them from many procedures and they don't live until they are 90 when they need expensive hip replacements and 30 medications a day.
Medical costs? Okay, how about paying for the smog and stench?
$200 per pack, increasing yearly. That'd probably be about right. You should have quit years ago. If you started smoking anytime in the past 50 or so years, after being taught in taxpayer funded schools not to smoke, then you should receive an additional one-time fee of a hundred thousand dollars, because genuinely fuck you.
To bad lowering smoking doesn't reduce costs. It is just a straight up regressive tax. Smokers mostly die around retirement age which means they skip the most expensive healthcare costs, age related care, and smoking itself disqualifies people from having many procedures that are common otherwise.
Starting with quotes with JD Vance and talking about listening to him on Joe Rogen is... a choice. Also I fail to see how the iPhone did anything or is relevant at all. Banking apps were made by third parties years after the iPhone came out and everybody had dozens of smart phones to choose from. The reason why they mentioned the iPhone specifically, touch screen and app store, already existed in the form of PDAs long before the iPhone came out.
Ive heard that same criticism from working archeologists and anthropologists, especially relooking over old finds but still often used in current unexplained finds. Stick with weird holes drilled in it? Religious scepter. Stone dildo? Religious fertility symbol. Weird hermit hut foundation? Religious monk retreat.
But I think ancient peoples were far more practical and far less concerned over religion and gods than we like to pretend. Sure they might believe lightning are the gods being angry or meteors are the gods taking a dump above the earth or that it is just the nature of existence, they got no real way to explain such things. But that doesn't mean everyone spent all their extra time worrying about such things and furiously producing endless amounts of religious offerings and symbols.
Archeologists consider the ancients to be a game of Dwarf Fortress - once food and security is provided for, you turn everything else into religious trade goods for the caravan.
I mean it can certainly help, but this is still well within an average human's range of adaptability. Building up new muscle "easily" (and also atrophying muscle when it isn't used) is one of human kind's super powers in the animal kingdom.
You aren't going to run into any real significant physical limits from your genes until you are pushing beyond what the top 1% of other humans can do, and being able to run up and down mountains all day isn't something only a portion of the locals could hope to achieve, native to the area or not, they just gotta do it for long enough.
If possible that would seem ideal, however we don't exactly have tons of excess fossil fuel free methane just sitting around waiting to be used, atleast compared to the absolutely massive amount of fertilizer we need to produce to feed farmland. And if you are eliminating the fossil fuel from production, you might as well eliminate the methane component too and produce hydrogen on-site from water.
The main problem is just the energy cost because ammonia and urea both contain an ass ton of energy, 90% of which is coming from the the fossil fuel sourced methane. 1% of total world electrical production already goes into fertilizer production, and eliminating the fossil fuel component increases energy requirements near 10x over.
I had understood that e.g. landfill methane capture was this promising new (and cheap) idea that people just aren't executing because of a lack of political will. Is it not so straightforward?
We have known how to do it for a long time, the problem is the energy cost. It takes 10x as much electrical power to produce fertilizer without fossil fuels as an input, and fertilizer production already consumes 1% of total world energy output. So to decarbonize it we need to increase worldwide electrical output by atleast 10% to cover the energy requirements, and it has to be all done with clean energy. Because otherwise you lose 70% of that energy in the fuel-electricity conversion, while the direct fossil fuel to fertilizer conversion is much more efficient.
It does need to be done, but to me it seems like it should be a second priority after not just cleaning up electrical production but increasing electrical production overall.
There are probably some efficiency gains to be made in synthesizing fertilizer from the air, but as far as I can tell there is limited room for improvements because creating nitrogen from air is basically the same thing as creating fuel from the air and that energy has to come from somewhere.
I don't know if I agree with their conclusion on #3, beef is fed 90% alfalfa grass which is literally cheaper than dirt and fixates its own nitrogen. Yeah they eat more feed per pound of meat, but alfalfa is literally the cheapest and easiest crop to grow. Sow it, mow it, bail it, now you have good ground to plant grains in without artificial fertilizer next year. You only feed cows grains during their last month to finish them to increase marbling/fat content.
If you produce less beef, you grow less alfalfa, and you end up using more artificial fertilizer which might even raise grain prices.
Yeah nobody was prevented from buying and using it if they wanted, it was always available at my local tractor supply. Most people around here just weren't dumb enough to take dewormer as some magic cure all to a virus.
Personally I think this misconception only exists because people alive today have never had to or tried to do things in the dark or extreme low light conditions. You can't do everything, but there is a lot you can do, especially if you aren't constantly blinding yourself for 20 minutes at a time by looking at bright modern light sources. We even have the notion of a harvest moon, because you can work easily outside during a full moon, and fishing by moonlight is a thing and has been since before electricity.
Also candles may be expensive, but they are far from the only lighting option and certainly nowhere near the cheapest. Candles were prized for how nice and consistent and hands-off they were along with not smelling nearly so much or being as smoky or sooty. Rush plants, or others, dipped in any kind of oil or fat or resin make portable candle-like light, and also simple oil lanterns themselves you can place on a floor or table which date back to atleast 10,000BC. You can also use fatwood sticks, the wood of a tree like a pine that is sometimes soaked with pine resin and would be split into thin sticks that burn really nice and bright and long.
reply