With temperature, light and humidity controlled across 12 growing ‘rooms,’ pollination of plants has also been engineered to be more efficient than bees.

I need more details on this “more efficient than bees” claim. I grow a couple of hydroponic strawberry plants for fun, and every strawberry is a result of my swirling a toothbrush around a flower. I am having a hard time imagining scaling that up without bees.

Co2 reaction is highly, highly concentration-dependent. Rodent euthanasia ideally starts around 20% which makes them cranky and sleepy, they go to sleep, then concentration is upped to around 80% and they die very quickly. Yes, they feel bad when they go to sleep, but it is a mild bad and it’s all over quickly. Rodent euthanasia horror stories are about getting the concentration wrong, not the co2 itself.

Nitrogen - as long as the flow is strong enough to remove exhaled co2 - won’t make anyone cranky, but it takes longer, and the longer it takes the higher the risk of something going wrong with the setup. So, tradeoffs.

There will always be some level of unemployment (a percentage of people who want job a won’t have found one), but if automation made the unemployment rate permanently go up, all the people who used to hand knit socks who lost jobs to powered looms, all the people who used to drive plows with oxen who lost jobs to combines, all the blacksmiths who lost jobs to powered forges, and equivalent percentage of the population for subsequent generations forever would remain unemployed. And yet, somehow, subsequent generations have managed to mostly find jobs.

Jobs are not a finite resource. If there is a pool of people who want to work, someone will find stuff to pay them to do.

I seriously would love for my entire current set of job responsibilities to be automated. There are a couple of value-adding full-time jobs’ worth of work I could be doing for my employer that are just being left on the table right now.

I think it’s likely really surprising to learn/experience that feces of a breastfed baby (and to a lesser extent formula fed babies) don’t smell like shit. It’s natural to want to share a surprising learning. Might also be good to be forewarned the milky smell ends once normal food is introduced.

The photo setup leaning in to the kitten looking like a dragon (eating dragonfruit) is awesome.

Some departments at my plant have 12-hr shifts, two teams consistently days and two teams consistently nights. Two days on, two days off, two on, two off, three on, three off, repeat. Long days, but also lots of days off.

Other departments work 8-hr shifts, one team days, one team afternoon/ evening, one team nights, and one team to cover every other team’s days off. Rotating shift is two or three days one set of hours, 24 hours off then two or three days the next set of hours. All new people in these departments start on rotating shift.

Management has resisted spreading the 12-hour schedule to more departments, even though more workers prefer it, because it costs more in overtime pay.

It reduces bone density. Not to unhealthy levels in teens, but there are concerns the lower baseline will increase osteoporosis risk when the patients get to old age.

They can also only be used for a couple of years. Some non-binary people want to be on them permanently, but doctors won’t prescribe that. Some kids want more time to decide, and unfortunately there isn’t anything safe to use through the full teenage years.

To an extent, this is already happening. I work in manufacturing, and the last couple of years there was more demand for our product than our factories were physically capable of producing, and prices were raised to weed out the number of customer orders to what we could handle. Projections for this year are for softened demand, and sales expects to have to offer significant price cuts to keep enough orders for our manufacturing lines to stay busy.

Collective “we have enough stuff and will buy less” at work.

Library services are more accessible than ever due to increased internet connectivity. As a child, I checked out my limit of books at the library every week and always finished before the week was up. Now I can sit on my couch at home and return books as I finish and immediately check out new ones.

My understanding was fuel is the main thing Hamas wants imported, with unconfirmed reports they have taken fuel from some hospital stocks that were being used to run generators for medical equipment. Other estimates say Hamas already has enough fuel stockpiled to keep tunnel ventilation fans and their internal phone network going for months without resupply, so I don’t know what to believe.

That food, water, and medical supplies are going to general use aid isn’t surprising. But the continued embargo on fuel, and resulting increasing electricity blackout, is an ongoing major contributor to the humanitarian tragedies.

Israel was asking every place that had civilians in the north, including this hospital, to evacuate them south. Which itself is highly problematic, but the warnings were not specific to this hospital.

What a heartless attitude to value their aesthetic preferences over the safety of your pets. (Adorable pets as we can tell from the cat tax!) And good on you and your neighbor to go through all that research, and inquiries, and installation work (not to mention navigating the negative social interactions with that board) to provide your cats with the best environment. I can understand how with all that investment in the current setup why the neighbor would get attached to it.

They could have avoided all this by just doing their own research and offering some safe alternative to cat safety, working with you guys, instead of going power hungry and heartless. Thanks for sharing your successful ‘compliance’!