Sadly the key to avoiding becoming a victim of these tactics is to spend a significant portion of your time shopping around for everything. No retailer can be trusted. I preferentially order stuff from manufacturers webpages or compare multiple distributors before I buy anything.

I also utilize VPN services and a secondary browser if I think they are playing games. You can avoid this shit but it’s not easy.

I also try to completely avoid known companies who’s business model relies on these tactics.

Trade takes time and effort to develop. There is infrastructure to build, relationships to form, cultural conflicts to overcome, and systems to develop and optimize.

Trump has tossed his big old poopy diaper into the middle of a century of effort. Its not a system that will collapse overnight, the 5-10 year plan of all trading partners today is “How to fuck over the U.S. without fucking over ourselves”.

The U.S. is heading towards decades of economic depression and stagnation.

The studies are repeating stuff that we’ve known for 50 years. Higher CO2 levels = plants grow faster due to more efficient photosynthesis. They are able to produce more carbohydrates in the same amount of time. CO2 burners/generators are standard in many high tech greenhouses because of this. We’ve been artificially increasing the CO2 levels in production greenhouses for decades.

The conclusion that the higher CO2 is going to decrease food nutrition overall is complete bullshit. It shows a complete lack of understanding by the researchers of agricultural practices and the market requirements they sell into.

So the question these researchers are not asking is “What else affects the nutritional quality of food?” The answer is pretty close to everything: genetics, nutrient availability, pest pressure, disease pressure, relative humidity, temperature, light intensity, soil type, soil pH, soil salt levels, soil microbiome, fruit load, plant architecture, storage conditions, storage time, storage temperature, and a shit ton more.

Due to all of these variables, quality standards have been developed to facilitate equitable trade. Every crop has quality standards enforced by government regulation, international treaty, or industry standards in most regions of the planet. Although most of these standards were created without nutrition being a primary concern, they do enforce a surprising amount of regulation by accident.

Rising CO2 levels is one more variable that the growers will have to adapt to maintain their quality standards.

I left out the hosting part for just that reason. The company has to activately do something to gain the liability. Right now the big social media companies are deliberately prioritizing harmful information to maximize engagement and generate money.

As for enforcement hosters have had to develop protocols for removal of illegal content since the very beginning. Its still out there and can be found, but laws and mostly due diligence from hosters, makes it more difficult to find. Its the reason Lemmy is not full of illegal pics etc. The hosters are actively removing it and banning accounts that publish it.

Those protocols could be modified to include obvious misinformation bots etc. Think about the number of studies that have shown that just a few accounts are the source of the majority of harmful misinformation on social media.

Of course any reporting system needs to be protected from abuse. The DMCA takedown abusers are a great example of why this is needed.

Its a very simple fix with a few law changes.

1. The act of promoting or curating user submitted data makes the company strictly liable for any damages done by the content.

2. The deliberate spreading of harmful false information makes the hosting company liable for damages.

This would bankrupt Facebook, Twitter, etc within 6 months.

Missed a big one.

The U.S. is mostly a net importer of beef. The herd size normally does not satisfy the market and it requires significant imports to make up the difference.

The U.S. herd size is cyclical and historically relatively easy to predict. So producers/exporters/importers had a good guess roughly a year or more in advanced when prices would climb or fall.

https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/animal-products/cattle-beef/sector-at-a-glance

Toss in some dumbass who fucks up trade with tariffs and the exporting counties can no longer predict the market. Then TACO happens or doesn’t happen at random. Uncertainty in the market trend means that producers are unwilling to increase their herd size to adapt, anywhere.

The safest bet is to sell down their herd size at the high prices to capture the margin now. Then maintain a smaller herd for the duration of the uncertainty.

Dairy farmers are pretty much the only ones that are doing quite well right now. Feed inputs are low, butcher prices for their cows is high and sexed semen means they can cross 1/2 their herd with beef breeds to maximize their profit. Day old 1/2 bred calf’s are selling for astronomical prices right now. Selling off their herd and retiring early is a viable option right now as well.

China’s foreign policy is basically “play whatever side makes the most sense for China”.

Their pattern of behavior shows an end goal of economically dominating the planet. Fully replacing the United States and Europe.

https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/chinas-massive-belt-and-road-initiative

China is also obviously looking at ways to create a military that can compete against the U.S./NATO dominance. They need some teeth to back up their economic pushes.

Mexican immigration rules from what I am seeing are very reasonable with clear processes and do not require a lawyer for most people. So you rarely hear about immigrants having issues. The entire process is relatively inexpensive as well.

To legally immigrate to the U.S. almost always requires a lawyer, the process is deliberately convoluted, and costs thousands of dollars in fees.

Applying for political asylum outside of the U.S., good luck. The burden of proof is quite high and costly. Most people will not qualify, yet…

https://www.relocate.world/articles/us-citizens-seeking-asylum

If only the dumbfucks with the stupid slogans like “love it or leave it” knew just how difficult and costly it is to legally move to another country. Unless you have money, work in a high demand job or have family connections it’s fucking difficult or close to impossible to do.

Most of the dumbfucks have no way to legally move to any other country legally.

Inflation caused by corporate greed kills people’s ability to take vacations for some reason.

I know several people with dual citizenship Canadian/U.S. who have moved from the U.S. to Canada in the past several months.

I just figured out a path for me to gain Mexican permanent resident and eventually Mexican citizenship if needed. It will take some time but with how this country is going, My wife and I need an escape route.

What’s even better, they got his deputy as well. Normally the deputy either gets a promotion, serves as the interim head or transitions the new incoming replacement.

Getting them both means the new replacements are coming in blind. Mistakes can be made due to lack of knowledge for the next year or so.

Plagues are constantly happening as pathogens & pest continuously mutate. It’s a constant risk to ourselves and everything we eat.

Russia has a long history of open storage at these sites. They also lost a ton of bunkers a few months ago at other sites. So they likely did not have much of an option, and they chose open store it at their “best defended” base.

I personally would bet that site was overstocked as it was likely the primary ammo dump by default. All of the newly manufactured missiles and shells going there directly from the factories.

There is a very strong cultural expectation of younger generations providing care for their related elderly. I suspect the stories of why they end up abandoned and desperate are more complex than reported.

Not really. Although the genetic diversity across the entire continent is higher, limits to mate selection is common. Location, culture, economics, language, etc, all limit the genetic pool that people have to choose a mate from. So in-group inbreeding is relatively common.

Humans have lived in smaller groups with limited mate choice for most of our evolutionary history. A lower level of inbreeding improves fecundity (around 4th cousins). Once the inbreeding coefficient gets to around 2nd cousins, that’s when problems arise. This happens often in small tribes.

Smaller polygamous groups quickly develop issues with inbreeding. The entire group often has an inbreeding coefficient around 1st cousins or even siblings (example - polygamous Mormons).

Now Uganda is a bit different because the polygamous group is large. This limits inbreeding effects.

has not been peer reviewed.

Then I read their methods … It should not pass peer review. Their variable control is shit.

But… we don’t have unlimited hectares of suitable land for people to fuck up. That’s the point… A food forest concept would require every last bit of ariable land on the planet and still not provide enough food for everyone.

The entire idea shows a complete lack of understanding what it takes to feed people at the scale of billions.

Agriculture is water intensive. The more land we use, the more water we need. Whether from the sky or from a irrigation canal, it’s still water used to grow crops not native environments. Reducing our land footprint reduces our total water usage. That’s what matters, not the per hectare usage.

Corn and wheat - just irrigating itincreases the average yield by 2x to 10x depending on the region.

If you’ve never been in a 50 hectare greenhouse it’s hard to imagine (they are 12-15m tall). These greenhouses are all in soil as well. The larger a greenhouse is the more efficient it is as maintaining temperature. You can get 2-3 cycles per year in them depending on light levels. So the yields are irrigated + 50% per cycle and 2-3 cycles per year instead of 1 cycle. Supplemental lighting can push it to a solid 3 cycles.

We need food for billions not a small community.

Food forest = lower environmental impact per acre but a higher environmental cost per kg of production. It’s also highly environmentally irresponsible to add in invasive species, disease, and pests into and established ecosystem. These are all spread by seed, soil, and plant tissue of the crops we grow.