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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: November 19th, 2023

  • 1970 was during the cultural revolution. In that year, the world population was 3.68 billion, and the population if China was just shy of 830 million - China had 22% of the world’s population, so if they held (only) 20% of the world’s prisoners, they’d have a lower than average incarceration rate.

    The same is not true for the US today, we have less than 5% of the world’s population today.






  • Only about 10% of the working population in the US is in manufacturing, so 20% more people that would want to work in manufacturing is quite a lot. It’s impossible to undo the automation that has happened to date, though. Worse, if more people work in manufacturing, the pressure on wages and the pressure to automate can both increase.

    Even if we stop all imports and make every finished good purchased in the US here, it’s far from enough to bring us back to the historic levels of employment in manufacturing.









  • They don’t do the math for this in the article. A recipe I found says it takes 2.5 cups of almonds to make a gallon of almond milk. Another source says there are 92 almonds average in a cup. With the figure given in the article, 3.2 gallons of water to grow one almond, that means each gallon of California grown almond milk requires use of 736 gallons of water.

    They mention it takes 30-50 gallons of water to sustain a cow, but don’t mention that much of that is water required by growing grass, which is water that cannot readily be put to other uses. They also fail to mention the average milk production of a cow: 7.5 gallons per day in the US, so that’s only (roughly) 7 gallons of water per gallon of cow’s milk produced.

    I’m under the impression other plant based milks are radically more water efficient, but aren’t as profitable as almonds.

    A very long sidenote: I was curious about the water consumption of almond trees. I found that a typical tree will produce roughly a ton of almonds over a 30 year lifespan. They will also produce about 7 times that much mass of shells around the almonds. The tree will weigh between half and a full ton by the end of that 30 years. I couldn’t find a number I trust for how much leaf matter is discarded by a typical orchard tree in 30 years of growing, but I expect that to be substantial also. Overall, it seems that a typical orchard almond tree needs 20-25 thousand gallons of water per year, versus 6-8 thousand for other trees of a similar size.







  • I’m fortunate to work at a place that offers some leave for paternity, but with the option of being “flexible” about it. I’ve seen most of my coworkers take off for 2-4 weeks (out of 6), then return to work half time or so once things start settling. Two have taken all 6 weeks, one for medical reasons (baby needed follow up), and one purely to spend more time with baby/wife.

    I haven’t needed paternity leave, so I don’t know how much more money you get for returning to work early, but I think I’m inclined towards taking 3 weeks, then coming back to work unless there’s something wrong. There’s a bunch to admire about prioritizing your time bonding over money, and I don’t want to take anything away from that - it’s just not me.