Questions About Food and Climate Change, Answered - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/30/dining/climate-change-food-eating-habits.html <comment><USER3> This is a great article. _Do I have to go vegan?_ No. But it would have the biggest impact if you did. _Is organic farming the answer?_ No. It tends to use more land for less output (although maybe the health-foodies could get off the No-GMO bandwagon). I also appreciate that the authors recognize that for some people living in certain cultures and climates _have_ to eat meat and there's no shame in that.

The bulk of the reduction can definitely come from rich, affluent nations and have the biggest impact.

Articles like this seem important. Hiding the fact that meat/dairy production is such a huge factor in climate change hurts people more than it helps. When we all start to wonder why it isn't getting any better we need to know that there are ways we can do our part. Even if they're small things!

<comment><USER4> This is an awful article because it doesn't put numbers on the various alternatives. Without hard numbers, the discussion of alternatives is meaningless. Even going from an average diet to fully vegan will only reduce your food-related emissions by 40%, which only accounts for about 12.5% of your carbon emissions to begin with (in the US): [http://www.greeneatz.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/01/foods-ca...](http://www.greeneatz.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/01/foods-carbon-footprint-7.gif). Cutting your CO2 footprint 5% is not going to do anything. Cutting it even less than that is utterly pointless.

"Doing your part" and "doing small things" will not have any impact on climate change. It ignores the enormous gap between where our emissions need to be and where they are now. If you could convince everyone in America to become a vegan tomorrow, that would cut global CO2 emissions by about a gigaton. That is how much CO2 emissions went up last year alone, mostly due to China and India. Think about that: the effect of every American undertaking an unprecedented lifestyle change all at the same time would be totally wiped out by a single year's growth globally.

<comment><USER5> I agree with both you and agentultra. I'm struggling to understand why. You're correct on the comparative impact. But I've long believed psychology is important too.

We lefties are frequently criticized, for better or worse, for hypocrisy. Maybe personal pro forma efforts will remove that rhetorical angle of attack.

Also, there's got to be some priming benefits, an opportunity to educate about the larger issues. However, my faith in this strategy has been rocked by failures (betrayal) of the whole recycling charade, which has served to alienate people and likely reduced future engagement.

I wish I knew what is best. Right now, I don't even have an opinion, just more questions.

<comment><USER3> The psychological factor of feeling empowered to take control of your part of the world, however insignificant, is important I think.

"No silver bullet," is something I've said elsewhere. I don't think this article nor I have implied that if everyone went vegan then the climate crisis could be averted. I think it's a good article because it doesn't try to frame our dietary choices as a solution. It informs us of the impact of our choices and makes sure people realize that eating some meat is okay. But if you want to do more, you can, and it will have an impact -- however small -- and that's a good thing in my books.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I know this isnt going to be a popular opinion here, but I'm going to say it anyways -- we are simply not going eat our away out of this climate change problem, and we shouldnt even try, we should focus the efforts in other places

Here is the current breakdown of the world's emissions as of 2018:

1\. heavy industry (29 percent)

2\. buildings (18 percent)

3\. transport (15 percent)

4\. land-use change (15 percent)

5\. the energy needed to supply energy (13 percent).

Livestock is responsible for 5.5 percent, mostly methane rather than CO2, and aviation for 1.5 percent.

Here is the estimated sacrifice needed to bring carbon emissions down by half and then to zero:

It would require forgoing electricity, heating, cement, steel, paper, travel, and affordable food and clothing.

Both of these are taken from Enlightenment Now by Pinker, and I have not seen the numbers or his conclusions refuted. I'm open to someone trying to change my mind, but with these numbers, I do not see how that is possible.

<comment><USER7> Most estimates put it at around 15%, not 5. Stopping climate change is going to require action on all these vectors, and diet is one of the easiest to change. It also has knock on effects like clear cutting rainforest to plant crops to feed to cows.

On top of that it's just cruel and unnecessary to go on eating so much meat.

<comment><USER8> The main argument in favor changing diet, to me, is the potential psychological and social effects. When something you do multiple times a day is different from what you used to do, and what many others around you do, it stays active in your thoughts and might trigger other, more meaningful activity.

I don't know if this is actually true, but anecdotally at least it seems to be. The people around me who seem to be most active when it comes to the topic of climate change also tend to be vegetarians or vegans. And many of them started down this path by changing their diets, sometimes even for reasons that weren't ideological.

<comment><USER4> > The people around me who seem to be most active when it comes to the topic > of climate change also tend to be vegetarians or vegans.

What do these people do? Unless they're working on renewables technology or carbon-capture technology, they're not doing anything useful. That's just how the math shakes out. The climate problem is so huge that only engineers and scientists can help us now. Everything else is just putting on one of those "raising awareness of breast cancer" ribbons.

<comment><USER8> Oh yeah, quite possible.

I imagine some of them _could_ be working on the things you mention, but most of them don't. But that's particular to my current network.

But some of them do have strong relationships with people who play some meaningful role in the whole climate issue. At least two of these 'people around me' have siblings that occupy high-level engineering/management roles in some of the most impactful (and worst) companies.

It's not much, maybe, but perhaps it's not meaningless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I switched to a plant based diet last year after reading similar articles on climate change and was surprised to see an additional set of benefits. I feel a lot healthier, my skin is clearer (struggled with frequent untamable breakouts), I save money, etc. Diet is a very individualized thing, so don't dramatically overhaul your entire lifestyle based off what a random stranger says on the Internet but if you haven't tried a plant-based diet you may be pleasantly surprised like I was. I'll still eat meat if it's served to me but when I am eating out and cooking I go veggie.

<comment><USER10> I first tried eating vegetarian to deal with some digestion issues. It made it worse. Especially spinach, broccoli and other high fiber foods. I switched to a 90% carnivore diet and everything cleared up digestion wise, and I also felt much better, healthier, and my skin cleared up. As you say, diet is very individualized.

<comment><USER11> What was your diet before? Anecdotally, most people I know who felt better after going keto-ish had horrible diets to begin with. Dramatic reduction in processed foods, beer, HFCS, etc.

Simply preparing food at home with fresher ingredients and being conscious of what you're taking in can account for much of the gains they experienced.

The vast majority of people on the planet don't eat 90% meat diets, but if we did it would be a disaster! I'm not saying it isn't the case with you, but anyone who experienced amazing gains shifting their diet to mostly meat should consider survivorship bias, and that the benefits are from cutting other things out, not adding tons of animal protein in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have turned pescatarian a while ago for no other reason because I don't find it very natural to eat large amounts of meat. In the last five years or so I've been strongly of the belief that meat, especially meat like beef, should get taxed so highly that it essentially becomes a luxurious good which families can only enjoy once every so often and not 3-5 times a day. First people will be extremely upset and call it classist, but later (especially new generations) will just get used to the fact and quickly adapt to the new normal where farming beef and eating cows every day is just not a normal way of life.

Ultimately there is no birthright to eating meat every day, there are no health benefits or other benefits of doing so, contrary it;s actually bad for health and our planet and therefore there is nothing classist about taxing beef so high that the average person shouldn't be able to afford it more than a handful of times per month.

We need bold politicians in this world to look at the cost of these things and implement a tax system which incentivise a more balanced lifestyle and also account for the cost/damage that a high consumption of meat causes to society.

</comment><comment><USER13> I know there will be comments saying that individual action is not enough to combat climate change, or that it's too late for that, but when governments are so slow to act and corporations will only change when their bottom line is at stake, it is left to individuals to take action. Going vegan is simply the right thing to do at this point.

<comment><USER14> > _Going vegan is simply the right thing to do at this point._

I'm sorry but no. Your diet is a personal choice and no amount of shaming is going to change that.

Do you travel internationally? Own a car? Do any other of a million things that have an impact on the climate but also constitute living your life?

It's great to put this information out there but telling people that your choices are "simply the right thing to do at this point" is incredibly condescending and will likely have the opposite impact you want it to have since no one likes to be preached at.

<comment><USER15> Isn't there a level of condescension and or proselytizing that always goes on around environmental conversations?

Reduce, reuse, recycle - if you do it, good! If you don't, bad! Travel less, don't own anything.

How can we frame these sorts of ideals so that people don't feel attacked?

There _is_ a climate crisis. At least some level of that crisis is driven by consumer demands. We should be able to advocate a change without people feeling like they're being shamed.

<comment><USER16> I think it's their problem and not ours. No one ever wants to change and no matter how nicely you put things they'll always feel attacked. It's just how it work, ultimately no one really wants to change so they need to be pushed.

<comment><USER17> > No one ever wants to change and no matter how nicely you put things they'll > always feel attacked.

Precisely. As another example, when people claim that progress pics are "fatshaming", it's pretty obvious that the problem isn't with the information or how it's presented, it's with the person feeling ashamed, which they rightfully are. These people should self-reflect upon why they feel ashamed instead of throwing a tantrum and playing the victim.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> A very thought-provoking article, but one that still leaves me with questions.

* The vast agricultural monocultures of the US have changed our climate on their own. Our fields of soy, wheat, and corn have decimated local ecosystems, led to high nitrate levels in the water, changed air temperature and humidity on their own, and encouraged a US diet that is high in processed food, leading to its own set of health problems.

* Yes, these vast monocultures are in a feedback loop with raising animals for meat. Corn-fed cattle and pigs and chickens are part of the reason Iowa is what it is today.

* If we all switch to tofu and tortillas with a side of Coke made with corn syrup, we overall preserve the agricultural status quo in the US. Is that really that big a win? Curious.

* Vegetables seem to be lacking in the standard American diet, and they're not subsidized by the federal government the way grains/corn/soybeans are, and they're also something a lot of us buy from far away. How can we change all that?

* Many people will still want meat products, some for health reasons -- it can be hard for some folks to be vegetarian or vegan healthfully (I had trouble with fatigue and anemia for instance, and yes I understand that maybe I could have tried harder/eaten more supplements/etc). How can we encourage the shift to animal production on 'waste' land, and decrease the incentives to ship beef from Brazil and Bolivia? Can we make goat meat cool again, for instance? or rabbit?

The alternatives I'm personally more interested in: shifting transportation patterns for US adults (biking and transit). Increasing green space. Re- encouraging locally grown food, where by local I mean the back yard. Rediscovering the foods you never knew you could eat but your great- grandparents did: nettles, dandelions, Virginia waterleaf, garlic mustard, purslane, daylilies, hostas. Many of you could get a whole week's worth of greens, even in May in colder climes, by walking outside -- and how many of us know it? Right now I'm motivated to rediscover these local foods for myself for health reasons, but it helps that they're $0 to grow and $0 to transport, and thus add 0 to my carbon emissions.

(edit for formatting)

<comment><USER19> > If we all switch to tofu and tortillas with a side of Coke made with corn > syrup, we overall preserve the agricultural status quo in the US.

It takes a lot less corn and soy to feed people directly than it does to feed a bunch of cattle. You get a lot of efficiency by skipping the intermediary trophic level.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> this is a great article, both in content and in form.

keep in mind though managing your carbon budget is like managing any other budget, which in turn is like optimizing any other queue. meaning: don't over- optimize the 5th most important thing when you're ignoring the top 2 - 3 most important things.

by which I mean: #1 flying, #2 driving, #3 heating and #4 cooling.

just to put a sortof min-max on it: if you eat vegan but fly to a conference once a quarter and drive to work every day your emissions will be greater than if you eat cheeseburgers for lunch every day but take the subway to work and rarely fly.

which is why imho you should go for the 50 - 80% win (80+% reduction in red meat) in this category (food) instead of going all the way to vegetarian/vegan.

or put another way, being pro video-conference has a better GHG reduction return than being vegan :)

<comment><USER21> > #1 flying, #2 driving, #3 heating and #4 cooling.

At least in the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change's Global Calculator[1] the food lever appears to have the greatest impact on greenhouse gas emissions, even more than heating or transport.

[1] [http://tool.globalcalculator.org](http://tool.globalcalculator.org)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> For those that would like to hear a mind blowing discussion about climate (and the earth in general), watch all of the podcasts with Joe Rogan, Randall Carlson and Graham Hancock.

They are three hours each and I promise you will learn many things that give perspective on the repeat arguments and confusion about the climate. There are many other podcasts with these gentlemen, but here are three to start with.

Joe Rogan and Randall Carlson #606 (3 hours) [1]

Joe Rogan, Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson #725 [2]

Joe Rogan, Randall Carlson #1284 [3]

[1] - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0Cp7DrvNLQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0Cp7DrvNLQ)

[2] - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDejwCGdUV8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDejwCGdUV8)

[3] - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFlAFo78xoQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFlAFo78xoQ)

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm curious how the stated article jives with the following research by the USDA [0] into it's current resource and greenhouse emissions and the work done by Bjorn Lomberg and team that showed a modest 2% reduction in total CI globally [1] if the entire population switched to a vegetarian diet.

[0][https://content.govdelivery.com/accounts/USDAARS/bulletins/2...](https://content.govdelivery.com/accounts/USDAARS/bulletins/235c254)

[1][https://twitter.com/BjornLomborg/status/1058333491623067648](https://twitter.com/BjornLomborg/status/1058333491623067648)

<comment><USER24> Bjorn Lomborg's analyses are well known for being highly motivated to push contrarian agendas, and shouldn't be taken as evidence of any sort of honest analysis. His thoughts are only useful to drive out of the box thinking, and should not be taken earnestly in any way.

This would be like asking "but how does all this new molecular biology work showing how smoking causes mutations that drive lung cancer square with Ronald Fisher's analysis showing that smoking is just correlated with lung cancer?" It just doesn't matter, because we need to realize when people are using statistics and analysis to push particular agendas, rather than using it to answer questions about the world.

<comment><USER23> Would you kindly provide evidence to the contrary and not just to what Bjorn has done but also the USDA?

And no, it is nothing like Fisher's contrarianism to the smoking issue. Both links acknowledged that the current global diet has an impact on CI, but tries to find the most likely size of the effect.

I ask because the science and evidence behind this stuff is complicated, and much of what is being said has a huge element of alarmism. I don't doubt that our current diets have impacts on CI, but I would like to see thoughtful analysis determining the effects. I'm sincerely asking this in good faith

<comment><USER24> > much of what is being said has a huge element of alarmism.

Could you kindly provide any evidence for this sort of claim?

And could you provide any sort of evidence that we should even use effort to examine Lomborg's claims, much less try to use it as what we compare the USDA to? He has a history of being wrong, and ignoring that history in order to "stop alarmism" seems like an equal sin to any potential alarmism.

Outlier analyses that have a history of producing incorrect analyses should not be taken as a gold standard of anything.

<comment><USER23> I provided links to the USDA report and it's findings. I provided the link to Lomborgs tweet and in it the referenced links to the findings. In it, he addresses the 10% reduction in emissions argument and show that it is cherry picking the available data. That to me has an element of alarmism in it.

"He has a history of being wrong" \- if he does, I have not seen it. and I am open to changing my mind if there is evidence to the contrary - which I have asked you in good faith to provide.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> while the world's economy is fueled by adding more people to the mix forever, we're not going to solve any problems. people have to imagine and accept a world where the market might not grow without limit and where outputs decrease from one year to the next without it being a disaster. grey pyramids have to be accepted without righteous outcry to open borders more fully. the population and its demands are the ultimate multiplier for all climate impacting activities.

</comment><comment><USER26> it's about time this information goes mainstream

</comment><comment><USER27> When talking about the potency of methane as a greenhouse gas, lifespan of about 20 years. CO2, on the other hand, has a lifespan of around 100 years.

Interestingly, rice agriculture generates about as much methane as livestock, and burning biomass (wood) and landfills each generate about half as much methane as livestock.

<comment><USER28> No one change is going to solve this problem, we are going to have to look at everything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Although this is not made clear in the article, the highest amount of greenhouse gasses are released by energy production and industry, which, combined, account for about half of all emissions [1].

So what this article is saying is that I should consider going vegan or reducing the (already meager) amount of meat in my diet so that fossil fuel companies can keep burning fossil fuels and don't have to get off their butt to develop greener alternatives, and so that industry can continue producing useless capitalist crap that nobody needs.

To take it even further, this article is suggesting I restrict my options so that others can continue profiting from the destruction of the environment.

Personally I don't drive and I don't fly. I don't even own a car. I go everywhere by train or bus and on foot. I contribute to greenhouse gasses much less than many vegans. And I'm very tired of hearing people saying I should reduce the amount of meat I eat because it's destroying the environment. Food is necessary- driving cars is not.

___________

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas#/media/File:Gre...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas#/media/File:Greenhouse_Gas_by_Sector.png)

</comment><comment><USER30> This reminds me of propaganda from the environmentalism movement of the 70s, which sought to shift the blame for litter (increased use of disposable packaging) from corporations onto consumers. Yes individuals can take responsibility for their own actions by "voting with their wallet" etc. - <USER2> denying that. But in a democracy, if you'd rather fight for greater regulations on Big Ag than give up meat in your diet, that should be your choice and don't feel ashamed about it.

<comment><USER31> > propaganda from the environmentalism movement of the 70s, which sought to > shift the blame for litter

Oh really? Keep America Beautiful was conceived, paid for and started by: Philip Morris, Anheuser-Busch, Pepsi, and Coca-Cola and others. _Then_ they started shifting blame onto the individual.

That was in reaction to Vermont proposing to require deposit and return bottles for drinks, after a surge in single-use packaging litter.

<comment><USER30> Yes that's what I mean.

Phillip Morris and the beverage makers you mention were fighting against the threat of regulations that would prevent them from continuing to pump out non- biodegradable filter cigarettes and single-serve drink containers.

We could have had filterless cigarettes and returnable glass-bottle Coke. Instead, Keep America Beautiful was their brilliant idea to redirect the focus onto consumers, away from manufacturers.

Did you misunderstand me?

<comment><USER31> Clearly, yet "propaganda from the environmentalism movement" implies, to me, propaganda from actual environmentalists.

I'd call what happened _corporate_ propaganda, "propaganda from the multinationals", or perhaps the first example of greenwashing. I suspect that may explain why you picked up a few downvotes. It certainly distracted me from the real message you were trying to convey.

From your second comment, it's clear we are of similar mindset, and your point very valid. The current popular "theme of the moment" around veganism in the media _does_ seem to have the same smell of someone trying to move the gaze away from the places that would move the dial fastest. Which in this case, of course, is constraining the global food players.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Excerpt from a book I'm writing:

\---

Life is experiencing an abrupt, widespread global species extinction event. Humans are destroying intricate webs of animals, plants, and microorganisms. These networks supply our food chain and sustain life on Earth; their annihilation from rapid deforestation and climate change is causing grave consequences: droughts, increased heat waves and wildfires, more frequent severe weather events, coastal flooding, food shortages, and water wars.

Earth's atmosphere was once mostly carbon dioxide. Once life took hold, simple organisms (such as bacteria, algae, and plants) converted atmospheric carbon dioxide into oxygen by way of photosynthesis. When those organisms died, natural processes spanning eons changed their remains into carbon-bearing fossil fuels: coal, petroleum, and natural gas.

Burning fossil fuels recombines carbon with oxygen to make carbon dioxide (CO2). Since the mid-1800s humans have released a stupendous amount of CO2 into the atmosphere. In the following graph, average annual atmospheric CO2 measurements in parts per million (PPM) are plotted alongside averaged global ocean and surface temperature readings in degrees Celsius (°C), relative to 1881-1910:

[https://i.imgur.com/zNuwtnP.png](https://i.imgur.com/zNuwtnP.png)

Both atmospheric CO2 and temperature are increasing at an exponential rate, in lock-step.

Bubbles in ice cores drilled from polar glaciers trap historic atmospheric gas ratios. Long-term observations reveal an increasing average warming trend that is distinct from natural short-term fluctuations. Temperatures are climbing in proportion to the total amount of atmospheric CO2 added since the Industrial Revolution.

 _Choices_

Our past choices have put life on Earth in peril; our children face an immense CO2 cleanup, devastating climate changes, or both. We can curtail the most severe catastrophic outcomes, though time to do so grows alarmingly thin.

If we choose air conditioner and refrigerator coolants based on hydrocarbon refrigerants; if we urge politicians to invest in on-shore wind turbines; if we reduce food waste; if we eat less meat; and if we support restoration of tropical forests. If we choose these, there is hope.

\---

See also:

* [https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2019/04/specials/climate-cha...](https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2019/04/specials/climate-change-solutions-quiz/index.html)

* [https://www.drawdown.org/about](https://www.drawdown.org/about)

* [https://igg.me/at/impacts](https://igg.me/at/impacts) (plug, plug; scroll down for previews)

<comment><USER33> For clarity: your hard scifi novel will include images in its prose?

<comment><USER32> The hard sci-fi novel (from my profile) is on hold until the Impacts layflat coffee table book (quoted above) that links astronomy, the environment, and Earth's history is finished.

The hard sci-fi novel currently includes some diagrams and illustrations, too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There's a bunch of good reasons you should reduce or eliminate meat from your diet, including environmental effects but also including your health and mistreating and killing intelligent creatures. If your diet requires people to do things to thinking, feeling animals that would be criminal to do to a dog, maybe having some bacon on your breakfast plate really isn't that important after all.

<comment><USER29> I don't eat bacon.

I also don't share your view on the ethics of eating other intelligent beings (from different species). Many other animals eat other animals, and for this they have to kill them and cause them pain. The pain comes from the fact that animals do not easily die, and our death is almost always painful and horrifying.

But- why shoud humans be any different than other animals, when it comes to the ethics of killing other animals and causing them pain in order to feed on their meat? Other animals don't have any compunctions about doing the same to humans. Why are humans so special that it is immoral for us to eat meat?

<comment><USER7> We are special in that we have evolved to be utterly dominant, which gives us privileges and responsibilities other animals don't share.

Also, other animals kill out of necessity. We don't _need_ to kill to survive at all so why are we justified to do so?

<comment><USER29> I don't see what dominance has to do with privileges and responsibilities. Besides, humans "dominate" only in a very narrow sense. Most of the biomass on the planet is not human. There are many species of insects and microorganisms that are much more "dominant" than we are.

Other animals don't necessarily kill out of necessity. For example, many animals perform surplus killing [1] - I personally know of two dogs who, together, entered a coop and killed about 40 chiken without eating any. In the same farm, dogs have often killed chickens and goats, which they just eviscerate without eating them.

Then of course there's the killing of young animals by older males- like male cats sometimes kill kittens, etc.

Besides, why is "need" to kill the only justification to kill? For example, if it's very difficult to survive without killing an animal, say because you're putting your health and that of your children at risk with a diet poor in animal protein- then why are you not justified to do it?

______________

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surplus_killing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surplus_killing)

<comment><USER7> First of all it's not at all difficult to get plenty of protein from plant sources. You are most likely putting your children at much greater risk by feeding them factory farmed meat than not feeding them meat at all.

I guess for me it just comes from a desire to respect and value all life. It's in our power to create a world full of unnecessary death and cruelty or without it. Why would we choose the former? I found I became a much kinder and more empathic person when I stopped eating animals. I don't think it's a coincidence.

<comment><USER29> >> I guess for me it just comes from a desire to respect and value all life.

 _All_ life? I think you mean all _animal_ life.

<comment><USER7> No all life. When we treat animal life as worthless we also come to value human life less. It's a connection that's hard to see while you're still eating meat IMO.

At least in more "primitive" societies they would often acknowledge that the animal had given its life and thank it and treat the act of eating an animal with some solemnity. We instead do our best to forget that what we are eating was ever alive.

<comment><USER29> What I mean is that plants are also alive. Do you not respect and value plant life?

<comment><USER7> It takes as much as 10 kilos of plants to produce a kilo of meat, so if you respect plant life the best thing you can do is stop wasting it feeding it to animals you intend to eat.

And yeah I do notice and appreciate plants a lot more since I became vegan.

This talk does a good job of addressing the common objections to veganism, including all those you have raised:

[https://youtu.be/byTxzzztRBU](https://youtu.be/byTxzzztRBU)

<comment><USER29> >> It takes as much as 10 kilos of plants to produce a kilo of meat, so if you respect plant life the best thing you can do is stop wasting it feeding it to animals you intend to eat.

I do value and respect all life, but I don't think that means I shouldn't eat it. Your comment was the one that made that point.

Rather than watching a video I can't converse with I would prefer it if you explained to me yourself why it's OK to eat one kind of life one respects and values, i.e. plants, but not another, i.e. animals.

I mean, I would welcome an explanation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Food production has zero to do with climate change! Cow farts have zero to do with climate change!

If you think otherwise you are an idiot. There is zero scientific evidence that shows a link between farm animals and climate change. Zero!!!

All this reminds me of a great Winston Churchhill quote...

"The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is."

</comment><comment><USER35> There is no mention of using insects like crickets? They have a VERY low impact on the environment. Lower than nearly all vegetables.

</comment><comment><USER36> The very first line in this article is just silly:

"Does what I eat have an effect on climate change? Yes. The world's food system is responsible for about one-quarter of the planet-warming"

What you personally eat will make a tiny percentage of a fraction of 7 billionth difference.

Let's not just wash our hands of the issue and say "it's not my fault" \- let's focus on encouraging action at the national and global level.

</comment><comment><USER37> It is not as simply to reduce climate impact based on what you eat. The data this article use is based on averages, and as in every industry the lowest standard it drastically different from the top and carry more quantity.

On the very top you got meat produced that actively helps the environment. Highland cattle that keeps national reservations open comes to mind. There is also overpopulated and invasive species. At the bottom you got cattle who live their whole life inside a barn and get feed from deforested jungle farms, using unimaginable amount of pesticide and antibiotics.

It is also important to remember that diet is far from the most effective personal choice to make when it come to climate change ([https://phys.org/news/2017-07-effective-individual-tackle- cl...](https://phys.org/news/2017-07-effective-individual-tackle-climate- discussed.html)). It is ranked 6th. Driving to buy produce at a farmer several miles out of town is likely to produce more C02 than biking down to eat a burger. An electric car might help, through it depend if the electricity is made from coal or wind.

The article gives some averages and for people who don't want to think about the climate and want a simple guide the article provides. However if you care about the topic and can spend the energy to go deeper and consider all facets then it is much better to make informed decision by digging deeper.

<comment><USER38> Meat is almost perfectly substitutable. So going out of your way to ensure that the beef you eat has low carbon impact isn't really doing much good. All you're doing is ensuring that somebody else won't eat the beef you bought and will eat something with higher carbon impact instead.

Where it does matter is when you choose not to eat meat. Less demand for beef means less beef raised, but which cattle are they going to stop raising -- the low carbon or the high carbon ones? My guess is that the high carbon beef is the marginal beef. When you stop eating beef you cause the price to drop, so the ranchers with the highest costs are going to be the first to go out of business. And carbon is one of the main costs of ranching, so I would predict that stopping eating beef would have a greater than average impact on carbon emissions.

<comment><USER37> Low carbon production has higher marginal costs and tend to be small farmers which is the group that suffer first when prices drops.

The high carbon beef is basically all import here in Sweden, and there is no deforestation issue from farming. From a environmental perspective we actually need more open fields to maintain bio diversity.

When climate aware people stop buying beef the ratio of imported beef increase. In last few years we have actually seen an decrease in imported beef, which has been attributed to more awareness of low carbon beef vs high carbon beef. People buy more local and significant less imported. Locally produced beef cost between 2-4 times as much as imported, which naturally impact how much people buy.

<comment><USER38> Swedish beef has to be sheltered inside and fed over winter, doesn't it? That's a fairly carbon intense activity.

<comment><USER37> Since we are talking about climate change, it happens that the last couple of winters has been the mildest in ages and reduced the number of months that farmers need to keep cattle inside to between one and two months.

But it is more complex than that. We don't have deforestation issue from farming. Fields, even those that is just for hay are important for bio diversity and it is generally soils where other crops won't grow. We don't burn down old jungle forest to grow corn in order to feed cows that then get transported through half the globe. It is fields that if they get overgrown would remove the biotope that many species here depend on.

Highland cattle is the extreme end where they can basically live outside the whole year, and they do the job that people and motorized machines otherwise would need to do in order to maintain national reservations. I would be much interested in reading a study that compared the environmental effect of using forest machines vs letting cows keeping overgrowth down.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How We Hit $912 Million in Sales - <AUTHOR> http://www.inc.com/magazine/201307/christine-lagorio/jack-dangermond-how-he-started-esri.html <comment><USER2> He started with $1000 and grew to $912 Million over 43 years. That's compounding annually at 38% percent. I was surprised that after 43 years it is still under a billion. Just goes to show how big a billion dollars is :-).

He must also really really love his space and company, nowadays when companies are flipped in 43 weeks, he is going on for 43 years. Wow, that's some dedication and calls for a very difficult temperament and set of skills.

<comment><USER3> 900+ million with 9000 employees means around 100,000 per employee. That sounds a bit low for revenue per employee.

<comment><USER4> I currently know of software engineers that have been working there for 1 and 2 years. Individually they are each making between 50k and 60k a year.

Don't need quite as much revenue when employees are cheaper.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ive met Jack and had conversations with him a few times. He is in the DC area often since an office is out there as well as the government.

He is a humble go getter just like you would imagine Steve Wozniak. He doesn't seem to talk about his money nor does he really care. What I have taken away from our few talks is that he actually does care about the customer and thats why I believe he keeps winning.

The software at version 1 was poorly written and sadly still poorly maintained. But since 2005 or so, its been improving ever since.

Ps. They are hiring folks of all types in the DC area.

</comment><comment><USER6> This parallels Warren Buffet's strategy of residing in Omaha to completely avoid the influence of Wall Street hive-mind thinking.

There's something to be said for uninterrupted focus, whether its an individual coding solo, or a business focused on steady growth.

<comment><USER7> Sure... but again, consider their bread and butter client. While the Valley has a large share of government clients (case in point, Palantir), they still have to compete for sophisticated customers (basically, those that can code).

Esri caters to university, state & federal agencies (and military).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've done a lot with both ESRI and the open source alternatives. I created zigGIS. With that said, the side you dont read about is that Mr. Dangermond - outside the ESRI compound - is generally considered a very cutthroat personality. Often his success is more attributed to this than most anything else.

</comment><comment><USER9> I was watching an architecture show yesterday where a rich artist couple were re-purposing a barn as a house. It was a strange building for living in. Unconventional and contrary. The show follows people through the build and visits them after they've moved in.

At various point they seemed to be obsessed with concepts like _rooms_ and how important they are for dividing up a house or walls and how useful they are for putting furniture against, directional lighting in the kitchen, etc. All these obvious things that come standard with a standard house and most people don't think about were discoveries to them. They started by rejecting everything until they begrudgingly let some of the things in or found workarounds. The result was pretty cool.

We end up with big lists of rules about things, whether we are aware of them or not. You can call them rules of thumbs or call them cargo cults. Either way, there is value to be had from rejecting standards and then rediscovering for yourself the ones that demand to be discovered. It's like a cleanup process.

<comment><USER10> Generative languages. See Pattern Language and Nature of Order by Christopher Alexander.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I had to learn ArcGIS for a class. Ugh. That application brings new meaning to "feature creep".

They make their money off people who can't "afford" open source (ie. institutions & gov).

<comment><USER7> When I worked for a billion dollar hedge fund, we used open source code and hired great open source developers.

When I left and returned to academia, all I deal with is ArcGIS, Microsoft, and Matlab. These are the tools you use when money is tight. Open source is a luxury.

<comment><USER11> That actually is very insightful. We developers love open sources because of the deep customization and the breeding edge they offer. Ordinary people can't use them since they don't have the know-how. ArcGIS, Microsoft, and folks make a killing catering to these people's needs.

<comment><USER12> I would say no in the case of geography. Qgis is a UI disaster as much as Arcgis. Where you are right, is that they sell people to install it for you, teach you, and very often, actually use the software for you (I have seen more than once).

<comment><USER7> I do most GIS viz through the browser (client-side scripting + PostGIS + ad hoc servers). Took a while to get up to speed, but it feels so good being able to scale projects quickly and not rely on Esri.

As for math, I generally keep it on the command-line.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This article does not mention much about how they hit $912 million in sales. However, the title made me furiously click on the article. So they've done their job.

<comment><USER12> expensive, licences sold to the armies around the world. It's like Oracle for geography: overbloated, expensive, you need loads of DVDs to install it, when at last the guy you hired to install it is done, you can't do anything with the GUI (assuming to clicked a .exe at random), because you need weeks of training for a "hello world" equivalent.

<comment><USER14> Welcome to "Best in Class" enterprise software. :-) It sounds like SAP without a competitor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't follow it. He seems folksy, but if "Not taking outside money, and serving customers based out of a low cost area" were the path to $912 million in Sales, wouldn't a lot more people be doing that?

<comment><USER15> If you saw a $100 bill on a busy sidewalk would you pick it up?

<comment><USER14> Yes, but I'm not sure what the connection to this is. My point is that what he attributes his success to is also true of most companies that never grow.

<comment><USER15> You suggested (paraphrasing) that if it was such a good model, surely others would be doing the same thing and making a killing doing it. What you effectively said there, is that you believe that the market for company management is an efficient market.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient- market_hypothesis](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient-market_hypothesis)

There is a joke that says an efficient market economist is walking down the street, sees a $100 bill on the sidewalk and doesn't stoop to pick it up. If it were real, he says to himself, someone would have picked it up already.

I don't believe that there is necessarily an efficient market in management. Nor do I believe that VCs, press coverage, parties, etc have no effect on many company's strategies. The VC business model relies entirely on their ability to purchase a certain distribution of company outcomes, what some might call a "go big or go home" type of management. That's fine, I have no problem with it.

But that doesn't mean it's the only way to run a company successfully. And the author is trying to point that out.

<comment><USER14> I was taking a statistics approach actually, rather than the efficient market hypothesis.

For example: 20 people have a choice between X & Y. \- 10 people choose X, 1 succeed. \- 10 people choose Y, 1 succeed. The first person who succeeds says, "It's because I chose X" Based on the data, you can't say that this choice is what mattered, because many others made the same choice and it didn't help them.

Perhaps I'm being pedantic about the title, but this is where I'm coming from.

And when I heard the joke it was $20, but perhaps it's the monetary phenomenon called inflation. :-)

<comment><USER15> That makes a lot more sense!

I wonder what the numbers are between "tried not to take money" and "tried to take money" are. On the one hand trying to take money gives you a lot of focus and a short-term goal; getting enough traction to get investment. VC money probably makes a lot of companies succeed short-term that might not otherwise. Then on the other side of investment, VC money encourages a "go big" approach where you need to grow gangbusters which most people interpret as hire, spend, etc. Seems like that might actually kill some companies that might otherwise be viable as they get over-extended and don't pare back fast enough, then go broke.

<comment><USER14> My intuition is that money is better when: \- There is some competitive advantage to being first. \- That the advantage is enduring. \- There are lots of competitors. \- It is important to fail faster.

For example, if you're trying to scale Google or a SaaS, and there is some kind of "Winner take all" then you need funding.

Funding makes less sense when: \- You're selling a service directly linked to people's time. (Consulting firms) \- You have other sources of money to carry you through. \- The market is less competitive. \- People will take significantly less money to get equity.

I kind of view funding like, "Do you need it bad enough to justify letting someone expect 30+% returns?" If it's the only way to get great growth for that individual company, great. If it's not needed, that's ok too.

In terms of measurement, there are two measures. "What % succeeded with and without?" and "What was the median and mean with and without?" The funders are more likely to be stacked in the huge winners and huge losers, because funding (to use financial terms) increases the volatility.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm more interested in how companies hit $10,000 or $100,000 in sales, and in profits, on their way to become a "real company".

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm all for bootstrapping and avoiding VC, but I get annoyed with these proclamations that make all businesses sound the same. (I suspect it is the writing at fault here as Mr. Dangermond probably doesn't think about business so simply. Maybe he just means software businesses when he refers to "young entrepreneurs".)

There are plenty of business models that aren't viable without lots of capital early on. Tesla and SpaceX are good examples of companies that could not be bootstrapped as they need lots of capital to actually build things and to build the factories that build those things.

</comment><comment><USER18> I read this and still don't know how to make $912m. What a rip off.

</comment><comment><USER19> The difference is that he built a lifestyle company, and not just one to flip for $$$.

<comment><USER20> what makes it a lifestyle company with almost a billion in sales annually. Facebook makes just about 4times over that annually at the moment.

Would you call Instagram, Yammer and Youtube that were all acquired for a little over a billion dollars, lifestyle businesses?

Or except you raise venture capital, you a lifestyle business?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> He's a little behind the times on the "going public" part, but I think it's good to hear these things every once in a while.

</comment><comment><USER22> for a while, I remember when ESRI was constantly hiring new people. The problem is, it's in redlands, and redlands in way the heck out side of L.A.C. or O.C.

<comment><USER23> While Esri HQ is in Redlands, there are an increasing number of R&D Centers around the world. Portland, OR, DC, Scotland, Zurich and China all hire front end and back end devs, UX and visual designers. While it was uncommon to work outside of Redlands only a few years ago, there are more possibilities for that now. This is a pretty recent development, though.</comment></comment>


Stanford Biologist and Computer Scientist Discover the 'Anternet' - <AUTHOR> http://engineering.stanford.edu/news/stanford-biologist-computer-scientist-discover-anternet

<comment><USER2> > "Ants have discovered an algorithm that we know well, and they've been doing > it for millions of years," Prabhakar said.

Isn't it more like _we_ discovered an algorithm that _they_ know well, considering that they came up with it first?

<comment><USER3> He complements afterwards:

 _Prabhakar said that had this discovery been made in the 1970s, before TCP was written, harvester ants very well could have influenced the design of the Internet._

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The original paper, which is quite informative and easy to read: [http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fj...](http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.1002670)

</comment><comment><USER5> Fun result. It reminds me of the stories Dr. Feynman would tell about what he learned by watching ants.

<comment><USER6> Could you please elaborate? Were you referring to the stories told in his book, or were you actually one of Feynman's students?

Here's the written story of Feynman's experimentation with ants if anyone is interested: [http://books.google.com/books?id=7papZR4oVssC&pg=PA94...](http://books.google.com/books?id=7papZR4oVssC&pg=PA94&lpg=PA94&dq=feynman+ants&source=bl&ots=esR_gekP_0&sig=f1vmF- eG6OUR78uEwvHc_rHvNqs&hl=en#v=onepage&q=feynman%20ants&f=false)

<comment><USER5> Those are the ones. He came to USC and as a guest lecturer for my quantum mechanics class and recounted this story. I really like it because it crystallized in me the understanding that this is how you figure out systems for which there is no manual or documentation. Observe the working system, inject change in various ways, measure the effects of that change. Rinse and repeat and learn.

Once at NetApp there was a question about whether or not we were wasting all of our time randomly seeking the drives (drive seeks being of course the worst if you're looking to improve performance). But the code paths were very complex, asynchronous, and difficult to model. We figured it out by injecting random seeks which was pretty easy to do. You could flood the disk driver with random seeks and get the 'floor' of performance, then you could back off on the random seek injection to see where performance started to pick up. That told us that counter to our thinking we weren't actually being plagued by seeks, the performance issue was elsewhere in the system.

That the ants had, through natural selection, derived a congestion control system that is very close to the TCP one is a fun result because it suggests that the TCP one is probably close to optimal. (Ants have been working on it a lot longer)

<comment><USER7> Does a long period of evolution actually imply it is "probably close to optimal"? I don't know a huge amount about evolution, but my two lines of logic would be:

First, given the huge diversity of life on Earth, how can we argue that any species is "optimal".

Secondly, the same argument could be made of life 500 million years ago, that it had been evolving for so long that it must be optimal, no?

<comment><USER8> It's actually a common misunderstanding of evolution to assume that it is optimising anything other than suitability to a particular environment (see [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objections_to_evolution#Definin...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objections_to_evolution#Defining_evolution)). So no, it doesn't make sense to use evolution as evidence that suitability in one domain implies suitability in another domain, especially when the domains have almost nothing in common except a shared requirement for management of scarce resources in a very abstract sense.

<comment><USER9> I don't think you are seeing the parallels here. When you look closer you'll see that the domains are different but the problems are very similar and not so abstract, which explains the high degree of simularity and effectiveness of the congestion control algorithm.

I would also take issue with what you see as a common misunderstanding. Evolution is, by it's very definition a process which adapts to a specific environment. Nothing more, no design, but optimal for any given environmental condition. When the environment changes rapidly, the pace of evolution increases, and vice versa. I don't think this is commonly misunderstood at all. Some people will always have no clue and of course there are those that think the fossils were planted by god, but aside from the out of band idiots, evolution is commonly correctly understood.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It has been known for a while that ants have algorithms - although the similarity to TCP is a new interpretation. From an article in Edge [1]:

 _Ants have algorithms. If you think about an ant colony, it's a computing device; there's some wonderful work by Jean-Louis Deneubourg in Brussels and his collaborators that really started this field in a way with Ilya Prigogine and later on Jean Louis Deneubourg looking at the ways in which social insect colonies can interact. One example would be—it sounds trivial, but if you think about it, it is quite difficult—how can a colony decide between two food sources, one of which is slightly closer than the other? Do they have to measure this? Do they have to perform these computations?_ [1] : <http://edge.org/3rd_culture/couzin08/couzin08_index.html>

</comment><comment><USER11> I think the real amazing thing is that the protocols for the internet took brilliant people years to figure out. Ants do it as one self-organizing body, anarchically.

I've always been fascinated by the collective intelligence of an ant colony. This drives it home even more.

<comment><USER12> Ants had millions of years to evolve the algorithms. And I don't think it qualifies as a collective intelligence, I prefer to view "hive mind" systems as multiple instances of the same object, so the beauty of the ant isn't that it has a massive collective intelligence, or self organizes, but rather that it has a protocol small enough to fit into their tiny brain, but elegant enough to make ants one of the largest bio-mass of all species.

It is a very similar situation to the inside of any organism. You have a bunch of cells, none of which has significant intelligence, but which follow a set of protocols that allows them to work together and form an organism capable of duplication. Or you can look at how a single cell is composed of molecules that follow a set of even simpler protocols that still causes self duplication. Or you can look at how a bunch of atoms came together in such a way that allowed self duplication, and error propagation, until the 'arms race' between these molecules led to the creation of a group of entities who cannot even comprehend how such a system can occur without thinking of the single molecules as being alive.

Personally, I appreciate the mathematical elegance that flowers use to optimize their leaf coverage. (They start with an even arrangement of growth hormone, and then the region that is over crowded has less hormone then the region that is under-crowded, so new leaves grow where they are most needed, resulting in Fibonacci spirals).

Sorry if this post came across as condescending, but I feel that blind awe at the intelligence of nature tends to diminish the mathematical elegance it exploits; I much prefer to view ants as an example of an extremely simple and elegant algorithm that can make use of many stupid entities, as apposed to a massive hive-mind, with access to the brain power of thousands of ants, that still can't do better then the simple algorithm.

<comment><USER13> You're describing emergence

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence>

<comment><USER9> That's like saying things fall because if gravity, all you've done is given something a label, it doesn't help anything.

Read Richard Feynman for more details, he explains it well.

<comment><USER12> If I had been talking about how objects of mass attracted each other (or some similar system), him saying 'gravity' would also serve to provide me with textbooks of information and research that might be relevant to what I was talking about. As it so happens, I was aware of the term 'emergence', but if I was not, then his mentioning it makes it far easier for me to do further research on that thing I described in my first post.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Dr. Anteater and Aunt Hillary [0] probably knew this all along.

[0]: [http://themindi.blogspot.co.uk/2007/02/chapter-11-prelude- an...](http://themindi.blogspot.co.uk/2007/02/chapter-11-prelude-ant- fugue.html)

</comment><comment><USER15> OT: that headline is a really interesting sentence. There are two people, the biologist and the computer scientist, and the word discover is singular. Note that if it were one person who was both a biologist and computer scientist, we'd say "biologist and computer scientist discovers", with the plural form of discover.

I'm a native English speaker, and have no trouble understand the sentence. However, I kind of slacked off in elementary school and high school English classes so I can't actually explain WHY we use the singular 'discover' when the discovery is made by two people, and we use the plural 'discovers' when the discovery is made by one person.

I really should learn my native language sometime!

<comment><USER16> The 's' on the end of verbs has no relation to the plural 's'. It's simply how regular English verbs are inflected in the third-person singular.

The link provided by jacobolus should tell you all you need to know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Ant behavior has also served as the model for solving traditionally "hard" optimization problems....

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_colony_optimization_algorit...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_colony_optimization_algorithms)

</comment><comment><USER18> Very cool. Does anybody here know how the forager traffic is actually regulated? Is it centrally managed by the queen, or is there some sort of chemical signal that individual ants can produce to spread the word?

<comment><USER4> AFAIK, it's completely decentralized. When a scout ant finds food, it returns back to the nest leaving a strong trail of pheromone. Ants tend to follow a pheromone trail and reinforce it on their return if they find food, so when a good source of food is found, a strong pathway is quickly established by a growing number of ants following the same route.

An ant may randomly leave a pheromone trail, which ensures that other, perhaps more attractive food sources are not missed. In general, the stronger the signal, the faster ants move with the less probability of diverging from the path.

This strategy ensures optimal area exploitation under varying conditions. For instance, if the food is concentrated in one or a few locations, you'll see a single column between the nest and the source, but when the food is scattered through the area, the ants would disperse too.

Source: an excellent book "Cells, Embryos and Evolution" where it was used as an example of how complex and seemingly organized and directed behavior could be achieved by a population of identical individuals acting under uniform rules.

<comment><USER12> Interesting, but as I understand the article, ants also use a TCP like protocol to make sure that make sure they don't send to many ants to a given food source. It sounds like the system you are describing would strengthen the trail until the food ran dry, regardless of if there are already more ants at the food than can take a piece at a given time.

Also, I remember learning about the pheromone trail years ago as established fact, so I'm pretty sure they are talking about a different system. It would be interesting to look at how the two interact (along with the other systems they use we have yet to discover).

<comment><USER4> You are right, now that I read the original article, it appears the particular ant genus they were studying does not use pheromone trails. Since this ant species gather seeds which are scattered by wind and could be brought back by a single ant, they don't need to build paths to the food source. Instead a returning ant interacts with other ants which are ready to leave and the rate at which ants leave the nest grows with the rate at which ants return back (so a leaving ant is a data packet, a returning ant is an ACK packet).

The paper: [http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fj...](http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.1002670)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> A great book on all of this stuff, if anyone is interested: [http://www.amazon.co.uk/Self-Organization-Biological- Systems...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Self-Organization-Biological-Systems- Princeton-Complexity/dp/0691116245/ref=tmm_pap_title_0)

</comment><comment><USER20> Cool photo by Steve Jurvetson of DFJ.

<comment><USER21> Looks like it was a photo of one of these tanks: [http://www.amazon.com/Fascinations-ANTW2-AntWorks- Illuminate...](http://www.amazon.com/Fascinations-ANTW2-AntWorks-Illuminated- Blue/dp/B000F6F8CY/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> each ant is a router?</comment>


The $150k Solution - <AUTHOR> http://www.garann.com/dev/2011/the-150k-solution/

<comment><USER3> "There's a popular theory that people are most productive when they all sit together in big echoey rooms at communal tables with no dividers between workspaces. I think that's horseshit. The only people who are "productive" in those settings, in my experience, are the type of management people who feel compelled to come over and interrupt you in person rather than send you a fucking email you can look at once you're done tracking down a bug six levels of callbacks deep. "

yes, a thousand times

I realize that we have large variance in both what people work on and how people work on things, but with my personality and most of the work I've done over the past several years, I need a quiet place with no disturbances to get my head wrapped deeply around what I'm working on.

It's amazing how management will spin any little thing to gain control over the workplace.

While I'm ranting, if any managers/other people designing spaces are listening, use soft/indirect lighting. Overhead fluorescent lights that I can't turn off are the devil.

<comment><USER4> In my experience, face time is very important in an organization and it's not just about productivity. It's very hard to effectively motivate people and align the company's vision if half of your employees aren't even there.

<comment><USER5> _It's very hard to effectively motivate people_

I hear this a lot and am starting to wonder if they teach that in business school?

You don't motivate people by "aligning them with the company vision". That only leads to these embarrassing company events where the 3 stakeholders gush over their "mission statement" for 45 minutes straight while 3/4 of the attendants really only wait for the free pizza to arrive...

You motivate people by treating them like adults, paying them well, and by minimizing the amount of bullshit in their workflow.

<comment><USER6> Fundamentally I don't think you _can_ motivate people. We may actually be saying similar things, but I think you can only really demotivate them by treating them in a psychotic, demeaning or inhumane ways. Motivation on the other hand is is an emergent, instrinsic human quality that can only be killed, not created. "Not killing it" as you say is largely a question of people actually contributing to work that they find worthwhile and having their contributions respected by the company. But there are some folks who would never be motivated, as they simply do not have that quality within themselves.

<comment><USER7> I think it's possible to motivate people by providing positive feedback. Suppose you work on a web app, and have 1k signups on the day you go live, and 2k on the next day. Wouldn't that increase motivitation? I surely enjoy watching the visitor stats of a new website, and feel more motivated when they are rising quickly.

Yes, you can't motivatve everybody for everything, but I do think it's possible to achieve something with positive feedback.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I normally wouldn't respond to a post like this but when it comes to career advice, many of you who have not been in the workforce long should hear the counterpoint.

The Austin businesspeople are right: folks who want to make a lifestyle choice of going to Austin from California should get paid less to do it. On average, they'll earn more than most people in Austin, but less than their counterparts in Silicon Valley.

I see no problem with this. It's fair. You usually only get to choose where you want to live or where you want to work. The other one is a compromise. That's life. Compromises. Why would a businessperson not take advantage of this when someone wants to live in Austin? Maybe the OP doesn't want to live there but a lot of people do.

Working remotely is a compromise further: you will get paid less, you'll get promoted less, and you will be one of the first laid off.

The OP can rant all she wants about "[companies lacking] the tools to communicate remotely, [probably] can't communicate at all", but the all of us who have done this can tell you that remote workers are almost never as productive. They only work for "guy who takes the app and ports it to Android because we don't care to do it here" type of projects. 1-3 person projects. Large projects are hard enough to manage with the people in the office, and going remote is a nightmare. I've even seen 10 year experts on the specific codebase try to work remotely and it be completely unproductive when they're remote.

There will be exceptions. The one guy who's amazing as a remote worker. Sales people are always an exception. And of course, all of this turns on its head when the company is not desirable. A crap company will pay you a lot to work remotely, then go out of business 6 months later. Generally though, what I've spelled out here is the way it is.

Here's a proposal, given that she's in Austin already, the OP should demand $150K from those companies or her current employer based on this blog post. Tell us what happens over the next 3 months, 6 months, 2 years.

<comment><USER9> I disagree. The original article is specifically about attracting good talent to Austin. Someone presently in the valley, who is worth attracting, generally has _no_ reason to leave. You need to come up with good reasons for them to leave which outweigh the massive black hole of attraction for tech talent which is the valley. Offering a significant salary cut is not going to help your cause -- you cannot be losing on hygiene factors when you are selling from a weak position.

Trying to sell the candidate on the cost of living being lower is actually bogus anyway. At high salary levels you cannot look at cost of living as a percentage difference, you need to look at absolutes. A thirty percent pay cut on a 150k salary works out to about 2500-3000 per month after taxes. This is a lot more than the absolute value cost of living difference.

Making it even worse, you are asking candidates to move from an environment where they have a couple hundred interesting alternate employment options, all at that 30% higher salary, if the current job does not work out. They are moving to a, at best, tertiary market -- meaning there is a very good chance that they will have to move again for their next job.

<comment><USER10> "Someone presently in the valley, who is worth attracting, generally has no reason to leave" - I get your point but many people once they have families feel pressure to get out of SV probably due to long hours, cost, etc. Not everyone leaves but I've seen many good engineers leave to the more affordable tech hubs (Austin, Portland, Seattle, etc.) I have to admit that once I started visiting these places I can now understand why many people move.

<comment><USER11> why would you move your family to an area with less opportunity for them? Is their partner going to be able to find a "propper" job will their kids get a good education and have a wide choice of "propper" carrears (or will they join the army as thats the best choice on offer)

<comment><USER12> Its probably worth saying that there is a big difference between moving from SV/SF to Seattle, Portland, or Austin, and moving to a small town of 1000 people in the middle of nowhere.

Opportunity for career growth isn't the only factor in where a family moves - there are a number of other concerns like safety, values, closeness to family, and fresh air and water.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I am having a guilty pleasure Schadenfreude moment.

I was looking for a new company 2-4 years ago because the company I was working for turned from being an engineering-centric company to being a paper- centric company. The companies I contacted and interviewed with professed to be interested in hiring me, but were unwilling to do so due to the uncertain economic climate.

Two years ago, one of the companies I targeted got over their fear of the unknown and hired me. Now all the companies that were unwilling to take a chance are lamenting the fact that they cannot hire engineers.

I have but one word for those companies: karma (is a bitch).

</comment><comment><USER14> There have been a metric ton of these articles, and there are going to be a metric ton more. And that's great, because it means that engineers are becoming increasingly aware of the market for their own service, which means that they're better prepared to get compensated properly.

In the end, any negotiation boils down into a pure tug-of-war, where both sides pull as hard as they possibly can, and the ribbon ends where it ends based off of the relative leverages of the two parties. To this point, engineers have been handicapped not just by not knowing their leverage, but not knowing they were even _playing the game_ in the first place. That seems to be changing.

<comment><USER15> I wish it were so but just look in this thread. It seems to actually be dominated by workers talking like CEO's (i.e. "engineers should be getting less because of the following 10 intangible nonsensical reasons...").

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> From the original article, hilarious cluelesness:

Austin's supply crunch for software developers was bad enough by September to prompt 25 Central _Texas tech executives to fly to California in search of new talent_.

They offered free beer and _pulled pork tacos_ at the Mighty, a warehouse bar in San Francisco, to attract a couple of dozen job candidates. The next night, they headed to Sunnyvale , in the heart of Silicon Valley, for a Tex-Mex happy hour that drew another 45 potential recruits.

[http://www.statesman.com/business/technology/austin- battles-...](http://www.statesman.com/business/technology/austin-battles- shortage-in-high-end-software-engineering-2024970.html?viewAsSinglePage=true)

</comment><comment><USER17> > If your company makes something entirely uninteresting, that's fine. We need > useful software to fill niches, or our whole industry suffers. If you make a > boring thing, there are two things you can do to still attract good talent. > First, if you don't need a senior dev, don't hire one. Hire a junior person, > give them the chance to architect small changes to the system, help them > grow as an engineer. If you do need a senior person, hire them, but carve > out 10% or 20% time for them to do open source stuff or personal projects or > whatever.

This is a really smart idea.

</comment><comment><USER18> Visit a job board of a SF based company and you'll find plenty of open positions. There is a supply and demand issue in cities around the world - <USER2> just Austin.

There are some great companies here who have no problem attracting talent. The companies that are struggling the most (and making the most noise, unfortunately) are the ones that simply don't get it. They throw money at numerous organizations in town asking them to "fix" this "problem" they have.

As a result, we've ended up with lots of articles like the one Garann refers to in the Statesman lately. I'm not denying that there is a problem here. I'm just stating that it really isn't specific to Austin.

</comment><comment><USER19> Austin is always on the top 10 best economies list, always on the top 10 tech hiring list, and Round Rock is one of the fastest growing cities in the US. This author is definitely in the minority in her feelings about the city.

If you know where to look and have the skills, the jobs in the $150k range can be found. If you're thinking of moving here, high end homes in the best schools are only $130/sq ft.

<comment><USER20> It's not about a dislike of Austin. This is a reply to the article about CEOs trying to lure bay area devs to the city with everything _but_ a proper salary and actually interesting work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's funny how people insist that companies should offer a gazillion dollars to persuade developers to relocate to their shitty town, when it makes much more sense for companies to avoid hiring people who think it's a shitty town in the first place. There's no point in importing people who hate living in Austin and will jump at the first opportunity to go back "home" to the Bay Area. If you think you're owed a premium for living anywhere but San Francisco, then economically speaking, that's where you ought to be.

Not to mention nobody in Austin wants to work with you if you're just going to badmouth the town and brag about how much you're paid to put up with it. Sorry to break it to you, darling, but getting stuck somewhere you hate because you're underwater on your house and have "wedding debt" is no reason for anybody to pay you more. If you're miserable here, that's your business. Austin companies are, quite sensibly, looking for people who will enjoy living and working in Austin.

<comment><USER20> > when it makes much more sense for companies to avoid hiring people who think > it's a shitty town in the first place

So your advice to tech businesses in Austin is to further reduce the pool of people they can hire from? Interesting, considering this wasn't an "I Hate Austin" post but rather a reply to a story about the fact that _Austin businesses currently can't find talent_.

Also, just because you don't want to up and move to Austin for half as much money doesn't mean you think it's a shit town. You can want to live here _and_ want to be paid well. For the time being the only way I've found to do both is to work remotely for bay area companies. That sucks for Austin.

<comment><USER21> Money isn't necessarily the reason why Austin businesses can't find talent, and if there is a reason, money won't necessarily fix it. If someone really dislikes a place, it's a bad idea to hire them at _any_ salary. They'll just leave at their first opportunity. The argument that developers are highly mobile is actually an argument against luring them to a place where they'll be unhappy, because they can and will leave.

The fundamental mistake behind the idea that Austin should pay a premium to attract talent is the assumption that money and happiness are fungible. The author lists a bunch of things she doesn't like about Austin and suggests that the solution is to pay developers more, that people who dislike Austin will come here for the right price. Some will, sure, but will they do good work for you when they're unhappy? Can you expect them to still be around in five years as a guru and leader if they dislike where they live? People don't work that way. They don't want to put down roots in a place they don't like. It's no fun to make friends and fall in love while in the back of your mind you're thinking, "Three more years of paying off my debt and I'm outta here." Not liking a place creates a sense of detachment about everyone and everything that you can't take with you, which is very chic, but not very healthy, and in a good job market, there's no reason for anyone to live that way.

Developers are motivated by a lot of things that aren't interchangeable, and employers should be very, very wary of trying to substitute one kind of satisfaction for another even when they have the upper hand. There's a limit to how much people can trade off respect for money, interesting work for status, or lifestyle for job security. That's why it makes sense for salaries to vary by cost of living. Money is 100% fungible with money, but not with much else. Austin companies have to hire employees who want to live in Austin, and paying them more won't make them like Austin more.

That isn't the end of the world. It's true that developers have more of a taste for ramen and public transit than the population as a whole, and it's true that a lot of developers prefer more urban places such as San Francisco and New York, but some people prefer Denver or Austin. When someone who loves San Francisco compares your city to "the damned Yukon" and "middle-of-nowhere fucking Montana all River Runs Through It," _money is not going to make that better,_ and that's okay, because she's not the only person in the world who can do her job. When someone says, "If I'd been single, more confident in my skills, and sans wedding debt I would have moved to San Francisco or New York," well, personal regrets are not fungible with money and anyone would be crazy to suggest otherwise.

As for her complaints, here are some comments for anyone considering a move to Austin:

 _commuting to some isolated office park that was cheaper to rent than something on a goddamned bus route_

There are actually a lot of tech companies located downtown, and they're hiring. When the folks on the Austin big data mailing list organized a new meetup a few weeks ago, it was felt that a downtown meeting location would be best since that's where most of the potential attendees work. Since developers have such the upper hand these days, there's no reason to work anywhere else, unless you prefer the suburbs. (And if you do, Austin is apparently pretty nice. All of my insanely smart coworkers who have kids also have yards and houses. Most of them believe in religions that terrify me. Austin is the kind of place where nobody is surprised that the creator of Linux and git wears polo shirts and blogs about his kids, because what does the one thing have to do with the other? Squares and non-squares have a pretty relaxed relationship around here, to the point that nobody bothers keeping track of the difference.)

 _don't believe that spending two hours on the freeway every day is a healthy lifestyle_

Again, there are tech companies downtown, right next to our hike and bike trail around Lady Bird Lake, on which you can run, walk, or bike less than a mile to a spring-fed three-acre swimming pool where you'll often see triathletes practicing in their wet suits.

 _Austin's lovely, but I like being able to get a decent bowl of ramen. And take public transit._

I can't help you with the ramen (and I'm very sad about that) but who needs to take public transit when you can live, work, shop, run, kayak, swim, and drink, all within a couple of miles? I won't lie: you'll need a car a few times a week, if only because everybody expects you to have one, and if you ride a bike, you'll need more courage (and have more white hairs) than you would in Portland. Plenty of people get around on bikes, though. Also, there's a Car2Go car-sharing service, even here in the middle of Texas, and some people rely on it quite happily.

 _tacos tacos tacos!_

The Mexican food here really is much better than in California ;-)

<comment><USER22> > The fundamental mistake behind the idea that Austin should pay a premium to > attract talent is the assumption that money and happiness are fungible. The > author lists a bunch of things she doesn't like about Austin and suggests > that the solution is to pay developers more, that people who dislike Austin > will come here for the right price.

THIS. Spot on. The title of the blog post itself tells you the error: paying people more money will get them to do stuff, but they won't be happy about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Question: If you were hiring a new developer and you did a Google "background check" and found this article. Would you hire her?

<comment><USER24> That's an excellent question. I hope you get some answers soon, because if there are companies who wouldn't hire someone on the basis of her belief that people in her industry shouldn't be treated as commodities, I want to avoid them.

<comment><USER23> I'm not sure I would hire her... she makes some very valid points but in a very vulgar way. Based on a quick search she uses the word fuck 5 times and shit 9 times in one article. Overall the article seems pretty negative and I'm not saying all developers need to fart rainbows and whistle dixie all day long but I've seen a few jaded developers kill the productivity of an otherwise great team of developers in the past and I'm not sure it is worth the risk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I know I'll be downvoted for this, but the truth is, if these companies would offshore the jobs to Philippines or India, it easily becomes a $30K-50K/year solution. $50K is more than enough to attract senior devs who will run circles around their American counterparts.

<comment><USER26> Please, tell me, what senior engineers in the Phillipines or India have 15+ years of software development experience. They don't exist, because the software industry has only been there for the last 5-10 years.

So please, take this "our senior developers (with only 2-3 years of real experience) are just as good as your top US developers" idea and stick it where the sun don't shine. There is a huge benefit to hiring people that have been eating, sleeping, and breathing code since age 10. Our 15 year senior developers might only be 25 years old, but they can code circles around any of your 2-3 year experience engineers.

<comment><USER27> "Please, tell me, what senior engineers in the Phillipines or India have 15+ years of software development experience."

I do. Started _working_ as a software dev in 1994. Moved to Bangalore to take up another sw dev position at CyberCash India (an offshore office of a Virginia based ecommerce product company <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberCash,_Inc> . ) in 1998. C on VAX Unix. Those were the days. Lived and worked in the US for a while before returning to India (and have no plans of going back to the USA :) ).

" They don't exist, because the software industry has only been there for the last 5-10 years."

You have no idea what you are talking about. Infosys was founded in 1981, for example.

I never worked for Infosys or any of the large outsourced services dev companies, but the idea that there are no developers in India with 15+ years experience is rubbish. (Not getting into whether 'number of years of experience' is a valid metric for judging sw talent).

And as for "living and breathing code", I started programming when I was 10 years old, on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum in the Eighties, writing games in ZX-80 assembler. We even had a club for Spectrum devs - in a small town in South India, in the eighties. I have many classmates who still code every day (though they have fancy titles like "Senior Architect" these days).

Did most of my generation of coders move into management? Sure they did. Are the good developers swamped by tonnes of clueless people flocking to the "hot career"? Sure they are. But none of that is specific to India.

If you have to deal with dumb Indians off a boat who can't speak English but seem to take your jobs, I sympathize. There _are_ a lot of dumb Indian devs. But I've also had to deal with a lot of dumb American devs who think they are automatically superior to all Indian devs "just because". Plenty of those too.

(all this is just to counter your idea that people with 15 years of experience writing code don't exist here and "the software industry has only been there for the last 5-10 years" (roll eyes). Please educate yourself before making such emphatic (and false!) statements.

<comment><USER26> I stand somewhat corrected, but you must admit you are in a very small minority in your home country, and your salary probably reflects that.

What I've noticed from working first-hand with outsourcing companies is that they promise degrees and accreditations that don't exist. They promise the developers working on your project will have 5-10 years experience, but for the most part you will get developers with 2-3. They promise masters level CompSci but you are lucky to get associates or trade school level. They promise systems and network engineers with MCSE or RHCE or CCIE but you are lucky to get MCP or CCNA.

I apologize for making blanket statements, but there is a lot of job hopping for qualified candidates in Bangalore (as I'm sure you are aware), so the outsourcing companies are usually offering those candidates that are new to the industry and have not had the time to generate sufficient experience and get a better job somewhere else. That is just the reality of what I have seen in my career.

<comment><USER27> Hey no worries. I completely agree that outsourcing companies (Infosys, TCS etc) suck big time. The services outsourcing companies scrape the bottom of the barrel talentwise and lie through their teeth to their clients, are infested with scummy middle managers and so on. I am not arguing about any of that.

Just saying, don't dismiss a country of a billion people so easily - with so many people, there have to be _some_ smart ones.

Good engineers are a minority in every country. That said,the USA (and it is a great country) has the advantage of attracting smart people from all over the world to learn, work and settle there, so you have a constant influx of really smart people, an adavantage no other country has(these days, Canada and Australia maybe?). The US also has the finest universities in the world. So I am _not_ surprised that in general, the US has the best tech companies and the best engineers.

But that doesn't mean there aren't good engineers elsewhere. I was only _mildly_ pushing back against your somewhat sweeping generalizations. No insult or harm intended.

If the only Indian devs you've encountered are the lying incompetents exposed to you by the typical Bangalore bodyshop, I am not surprised if people draw conclusions that may not be very flattering.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Business Card Ray Tracer: Go vs C++ - <AUTHOR> https://kidoman.com/programming/go-getter.html?noreaally

<comment><USER2> Umm... talk about missing the point. The C++ version fits onto a business card. it's 35 lines by 37 characters wide. (1295 bytes)

The Go version is 229 lines (6.5x as long) and 4255 bytes long (3.2x as long). Fit that on a business card...

Your title should be "Go program optimized for speed faster than C++ program optimized for code size" and you should stop trying provoke people with false comparisons.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am happy to rerun the benchmarks (single threaded and multi threaded) with a optimized C++ version. Sadly, been a while since I last worked on C++

The base C++ version, for reference: [https://gist.github.com/kid0m4n/6680629](https://gist.github.com/kid0m4n/6680629)

But its never going to be apples-to-apples comparison. Given the different feature sets of either platform

But this definitely shows that Go performance is in the same ballpark though.

<comment><USER3> I'd need to use a profiler to be sure, but the first thing I'd try is to replace the printf call for each pixel with an fwrite.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am trying my hand at a few things... will keep this in mind</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How Berlin's Mietskaserne tenements became coveted urban housing - <AUTHOR> https://www.citylab.com/design/2020/01/berlin-architecture-history-home-design-rental-mietskasernen/604795/ <comment><AUTHOR> Since living in Berlin myself my personal favorite is the "Berliner Zimmer" (Berlin Room) which is quite common for buildings of a certain period due to building codes of the time. Due to its location in the building - it's a room connecting the front of the building with the back for L-shaped apartments - it usually is quite large but has only one window in the corner which makes it a rather dark place.

[https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berliner_Zimmer](https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berliner_Zimmer)

</comment><comment><USER2> Berlin needs to rethink waste management. We live in one of the described buildings and our bins are full 1 day after collection but only get collected every 2 weeks. We have to walk by them to get to our apartment. Needless to say it becomes very gross very quickly. Additionally the collectors do the bare minimum meaning that there is loads of trash including broken glass etc left over after every collection. As a parent of a toddler this is particularly nerve wracking.</comment>


Show HN: Responsive OSX geek bar with an extensive set of pluggable widgets - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ahmadassaf/gaudi-widgets <comment><USER2> This for sharing, this looks great! Layout was difficult when trying to manually create these

<comment><AUTHOR> I am glad you liked it. That indeed was the number 1 pain and reason behind this</comment></comment>


MediaGoblin 0.7.0: Time Traveler's Delight Released - <AUTHOR> http://mediagoblin.org/news/mediagoblin-0.7.0-time-travelers-delight.html <comment><USER2> Apparently the Sandstorm team [1] recently ported MediaGoblin over, so this is particularly exciting. It looks like the big addition is that they're paving the path for federation, so soon there could well be an _actually_ decentralized media sharing system...

[1] Sandstorm is an app sandboxing environment conceived by the designer of Protobuf/Cap'nProto; as an aside, the IndieGogo for Sandstorm is nearly funded, but ends in only 5 days... it was on HN recently, but otherwise, [http://sandstorm.io](http://sandstorm.io)

<comment><USER3> Speaking of Sandstorm, they have 13 percent of their campaign left unfunded, and only 5 days to go.

[https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/sandstorm-io-personal- clo...](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/sandstorm-io-personal-cloud- platform)

<comment><USER4> A considerable contribution raised the total percentage to 95% after your comment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Does anyone have experience with running a public mediagoblin? I am not too experienced with Django, but I did some minor, private stuff with it.

My problem are registrations of bots (not sure about the intention). There is a recaptcha plugin and I got it running, but it uses its own routes and also has some minor bugs (always showing the required registration data in red).

Of course I could have my web server always redirect the routes, but this seems like a hack and doesn't fix the issue. For now I had to turn registrations off.

Are there better ways?

Mentioned Plugin: [https://github.com/ayleph/mediagoblin- recaptcha](https://github.com/ayleph/mediagoblin-recaptcha)

</comment><comment><USER6> Great job MediaGoblin team!

As a side note, this looks like this project could use a little love from the community:

[https://github.com/vky/docker-mediagoblin](https://github.com/vky/docker- mediagoblin)

</comment><comment><USER7> MediaGoblin is my best bet for my so far open requirement: Have a digital version of the picture books our parents kept for us.

I need ACLs (share everything with tag 'kids' with my parents and in-laws for example), a decent presentation, and lots of ways to add metadata to content. MediaGoblin might be the solution, soon.

</comment><comment><USER8> Those interested in MediaGoblin might also find Trovebox interesting.

[https://github.com/photo](https://github.com/photo) [http://trovebox.com/](http://trovebox.com/)

I just hope they are talking to each other to share their federation. Would be dumb not to.</comment>