Reddit very much depends on the subreddits you subscribe to.

Browsing /r/askhistorians or /r/programming isn’t really the same experience as r/memes or whatever. Not logging in to reddit makes it way worse since you only see the popular low-effort threads instead of better niche content.

If you knead bread by hand, it’ll have some human DNA in it from e.g your skin cells. It’s almost impossible to cook or process food while preventing it from getting literally any human cells into it, because humans are shedding cells and DNA literally all the time. You can wear gloves, hairnets, and frequently mop up, but eliminating the problem entirely is hard.

Both a vegetarian burger and a beef burger are probably going to have more human DNA in it than either a steak or a pot of black beans would.

Pigs and chickens don’t eat air, you know.

70% of US soy becomes animal feed. Some of the rest is used industrially, or becomes biodisel. Relatively little US soy becomes soy sauce, tofu, etc.

Soy subsidies, in practice, mostly function as a chicken and pork subsidy.

You’ll notice that we heavily subsidize animal feed crops like corn and soy, and spend much less money subsidizing fruits and veggies, nuts, and other legumes like black beans or lentils.

No.

Honey bees are dying because of parasites and pests, pathogens, poor nutrition, and sublethal exposure to pesticides.

It’s not just one thing. Most of those things on their own won’t even kill them. For example, Varroa mites will kill an already weakened hive, but not a healthy one.

Lawns absolutely contribute to poor nutrition, due to habitat loss. Same with all the mowed grass we have everywhere in suburbia. Monocropped agriculture does as well, because bees do best with a variety of flowers.

I’ve let the back part of my property grow wild the past couple years, and it’s currently filled with a ton of goldenrod, chicory, and a bunch of other random flowers. You would not beleive the number of honeybees I’ve seen back there at once, or how loud the buzz was.

Similarly, there’s a reason I see a ton of fireflys in my yard, but I see almost none in my neighbors yards. It’s because they’re well- manicured green wastelands

But I guess non-action and bootlicking while we wait for our thoroughly bribed politicians to do nothing is better.

Nation-wide action, of course, is best. Something like the green new deal or even a market-based solution like cap-and-trade or a carbon tax.

On a local level, though, there’s a lot of action that can be done.

Nation-wide, the biggest category of carbon emissions is transportation, at 28% of all emissions. Over half of all transportation-related emissions are from cars and trucks.

The amount people drive is closely tied to local urban design, which comes down largely to local zoning regulations and infrastructure design. Those are primarily impacted by the people who show up at town meetings and vote.

Advocate for walkable, mixed-use zoning, improved bike infrastructure, etc. Most people aren’t “drivers”, “cyclists” or “public transit riders”, they’re people who want to get from point A to point B as easily as possible and will take whatever is best.

The problem with gas stations isn’t their LCD screens.

A large number of gas stations are franchises. Breaking the LCD screens hurts the local franchise owner, not whichever fossil fuel company they’re working with.

More to the point, breaking LCD screens accomplishes absolutely nothing. Most people don’t drive because they love driving, they drive because of zoning, sprawl and a lack of reasonable alternatives. If you get rid of fossil fuel infrastructure without fixing the underlying car dependency, they’ll be stuck at home.

Efficiency in economics has a particular technical definition.

Pareto efficiency or Pareto optimality is a situation where no action or allocation is available that makes one individual better off without making another worse off

Free markets are great at producing outcomes that are efficient in a particular technical sense, but not especially equitable.

There’s assorted companies that sell parasitic wasps as pest control.

Spalding sells theirs as “fly predators”; they basically look like tiny gnats but lay their eggs in fly pupa. They work great.

There’s a huge number of different species of wasp, which vary greatly in size. The smallest wasps are the smallest known insects; they’re literally smaller than a millimeter. With many of them, you wouldn’t know they were wasps if you didn’t have a microscope.

In addition to pollinating, many wasps either eat or parasitize other insects. Yellowjackets will hunt horse flies, and there’s assorted wasps that are sold to farmers to control various pests…

Right - that would require enough battery and processing power to make it obvious that it’s doing something like that.

Your devices recording you is something that doesn’t happen.

That requires a lot of bandwidth, or a lot of battery and a little bandwidth. There’s no evidence of that happening.

Honestly, the creepier thing is that they don’t have to to get creepily accurate ads.

Geolocation data means they know who you spend time with. They also know their search history. They know your interests. They can look at what people who seem similar to you search for.

Plus, they serve you a lot of ads so they can afford to have a lot of misses.

Economies of agglomeration, similar to Amazon. Having one app to order everything from is very convenient and the average person prefers that.

Hell, in a car, is other drivers.

Fahrenheit has a fairly sensible 0 - just as Celsius is the temp of ice water, Fahrenheit is the temp of salty ice water.

The US doesn’t use imperial, it uses US customary.

There’s no US customary Roman mile, ell or skeine, for example.

Chains and links are basically standard surveyors chains. They’re distinct units in their own right in the sense that a metric chain or metric link is. Should your metric chart have a metric chain on it? What about light years or parsecs?

Hands are used in measuring horses, and that’s basically it. They’re used in commonwealth countries, the US and South Africa.

I dunno, capitalist social democracies seem quite nice compared to socialist counties.

The most popular hot sauces in America are mild ones like Tabasco, Frank’s red hot, and Sriracha.

Habanero and ghost pepper based sauces aren’t very popular.

Do you really think that the average American has the same heat tolerance as the average person from Hyderabad or Chengdu?

Or that the average American restaurant will make food as spicy as the average restaurant in India?