Powderhorn @ Powderhorn @beehaw.org

Unemployed journalist, burner, raver, graphic artist and vandweller.

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The carbon footprint is of course dependent on the emissions of the power source. Heating is incredibly energy intensive, and electricity isn't going to be the best bang for the buck (there's a reason I have a diesel heater in the van) on account of just how much solar (especially in England) would be needed. It would still take up less land than a cattle ranch, which reduces the CO₂ emissions to the chemical precursors.

A few things about that.

Heat pumps would be an option, with significantly improved efficiency. Heat pump water heaters are also a thing, so likely more suited for vats.

Colocation is an option; i.e., setting up shop in an industrial area and hooking up to waste heat from an existing facility. To me, that counts as carbon neutral. District heating is another option. No waste heat available? Locate next to geothermal.

I think we're going to see more and more bespoke microgrids going forward. Data centers are already signing contracts for this, and an entirely indoor operation doesn't really care about the climate the way cattle do, so siting is far more flexible.

The issue more than some abstract estimate of carbon emissions is how much capital they're willing to put in up front to go net zero. In the modern world of line-go-up, it's unlikely to be as much as a company that intends to be in it for the long haul to realize significant savings.

The use of chemicals often means petroleum is involved, but as this is a proprietary blend, there's no way to say for certain. Biofuels could be a replacement for long-chain hydrocarbons if they're used. I doubt they'd want that level of chemistry from scratch brought in house, but it's an option. Still, it's the only other place in the chain where phantom CO₂ can go unreported even if the operation itself is net zero.

As someone who reported on the energy sector for the better part of a year, there are a lot of technologies, some more mature than others, that simply aren't in mainstream consciousness. This article's emissions estimates seem to take a more conventional view, and during proof-of-concept and ramp-up, I'm sure the figures are reasonable, but by the time we hit industrial scale, even more energy tech will be mature.

Talking about what the economics would look like in, say, five years (which is on the low end for industrial scale) is a fool's errand. Case in point: Model anything you like out by five years from December 2019 and see how accurate those predictions go.

That's the energy side.

As to the ethical concerns, as far as I'm aware, reducing animal suffering is a big portion of the impetus behind lab-grown meat. My ex and I had a rabbitry for a couple of years (pets to start, but when you have two males and two females, you end up with a shitton of bunnies in short order), so I've gotten to witness skinning and butchering (I couldn't bring myself to be in the washroom as she performed the actual slaughter). It's horrific, and I had a very hard time eating something I'd fed and cared for.

Land use is not only about the grazing land; the land used for feedstock in traditional beef production isn't insignificant, either, nor is the agricultural water use from growing said crops. So we're talking a lot of land that can be repurposed in aggregate should cultivated meat scale.

On balance, I see zero downside. The lower bound of 1.2kg of carbon per 1kg of meat may well be trumped simply by transportation emissions for the finished product, but in total, there's no way it's not a significant improvement in terms of greenhouse gases. It's 100% more humane, and land- and water-use considerations are a slam dunk.

Once they've nailed flavour, there's lots of reason for optimism. I'm not paying five times as much for something that gets 90% of the way to the real thing, and in many such scenarios, that last 10% is by far the most difficult. Parity on price, taste, texture and Malliard reactions will be what ahem brings me to the table.

The parent company is Restaurant Brands International, but no. Franchisees get fucked, employees get fucked and corporate basically says, "Hey did anyone else hear something?"

in unison: "Nope."

"OK, then. Back to the business of figuring out how to charge more for worse food. Baby needs a new pair of yachts."

Art imitates art ...

And several cities have decided not to renew or expand their contracts with Flock. The City of Austin let its contract with Flock lapse, in part because of concerns around ICE access to the data. The City of San Marcos decided to not place additional cameras in the city. The San Marcos Police Department also changed their policy to require outside law enforcement agencies to file a request concerning a specific crime in order to receive Flock data, Spectrum News 1 reported.

I'm surprised the Legislature wasn't convened to pass a state law prohibiting cities from opting out of Flock.

Gotta make money while the world burns.

It's not feasible unless Dems take the House in the midterms. Still zero chance of conviction.

Maybe it's just having a more refined palette as I age, but back in the 99-cent Whopper days, they seemed way better. Not that I've at this point had one in years given the (lack of) value proposition, but in general, microwaved, desiccated meat isn't something I seek out.

Even on immigration and deportations, two weeks of consistency is a big ask.

It's abundantly clear there's nothing so egregious Trump can do that congressional Republicans will turn on him and vote to impeach and convict. A battle that can't be won is not a battle worth fighting.

I'm miles away from AI, so this may be me talking out of my ass, but shouldn't a smaller database (thousands) be more accurate than anything orders of magnitude larger?

Took me a moment to realize the text in the art. Really cool!

Can I call it a Zamboni? I don't hear that word enough.

My take is they're keeping their powder dry. This wasn't going to go anywhere, and if it ended up being party-line, they're handing Trump the "they're plotting a coup!" card. "THE ONLY THING THAT CAN SAVE AMERICA IS YOU BUYING MY CRYPTO!!!!"

We're only five months in; much worse can still happen. The U.S. told Iran hours ahead of time where it would strike, and the facilities were evacuated. Likewise, in Iran's counterattack, it told both Qatar and the U.S. where it was going to hit so they could evacuate.

This is a show of force on both sides, nothing more. It's not the end, by any means, but as war goes, this remains (what a terrible term in this context) civil. Iran and Israel were not so kind to each other.

That's why it's great for when you know what you're doing, with intent.

I mean, it certainly didn't hurt. Trump must be hell for Iran to deal with, since we don't even know what he's going to have done when we get up in the morning.

Alsup has consistently made reasoned, rational rulings through a tech lens when these sorts of things hit his docket. Digitizing purchased books for internal training if the originals are destroyed does feel like fair use, given the works are not made available for others. The First Sale Doctrine is in play.

The pirated shit? Well, that's another story.

I had to create a new Facebook profile in 2013 because at the time, no Facebook meant being roundfiled. So, sign up for a shitty data-mining account just to be fucking considered for a job. I got interviews after that, but they didn't go anywhere because I was already in my mid-30s, and everyone already wanted to pay entry-level wages for what had previously been mid-career positions.

Oh, and the ladder had already been pulled up. Entry-level for life was the goal for those making $80K-100K who just wanted to assert dominance.

At least the Facebook thing is in the past (entry-level applicants are far less likely to have ever joined Facebook than in 2013, when it was simply expected like it was a cellphone), but now we've moved on to breathless accomplishment posts on LinkedIn.

There's no humanity left in the process without already knowing someone on the inside. Already, way back in 2003, when I was poached, company policy was that they had to post the job. So, they knew they were hiring me, but corporate made them post a nonexistent job anyway.

It's admittedly better to be on that end of a ghost job, but AI didn't start the fire. The system had already been (likely for a while) replete with jobs with someone already selected.

The main difference? Those jobs actually existed; the only deception was that it was still open.

And you likely don't see the compensation you could. My last professional job hired me in 2015 as a "copyeditor" -- but they actually meant someone who moved rectangles around at a remote editor's direction on newspaper pages without reading copy.

Then there's the scheduling. Moving out of state with a guarantee that I'd be off by 11 p.m. so that my wife would still be awake when I got home turned into being immediately put on a team that worked until 2 a.m., as we were producing two papers I used to work for (one where I'd been managing editor from 2003-2006, and the other a temporary desk job in 2014) that were on Pacific Time.

With my marriage starting to fray, I walked into the executive director's office and said this schedule was not what I was assured when pulling up stakes from Oregon to Texas -- with a 20% pay cut and rent being triple what it was -- and that this needed to be fixed. Now.

As it turned out, the wheels were already turning on a new commercial department to bring in external clients. It wasn't full-time yet, but I got switched over to dayside design in the meantime ahead of being the team lead for the new department.

Going into detail on the automation I did to keep things humming smoothly is somewhat pointless, but I dusted off my coding skills and learned JS to create a workflow for my team in Google Sheets. It went swimmingly, and my team had a blast while almost everyone else was miserable.

So, now I was a threat. Causing -- hard as it is to believe being possible -- even further realization on other teams that we were all intentionally getting fucked by intentionally dysfunctional processes. But the directors needed bad data for disciplinary purposes, so I was causing too much of a stir and shunted to another department, where I learned the InDesign DOM and turned the work of a three-person team into 30 hours total via JS.

That's when IT got word that a designer was coding! We can't have that if it's not in your title -- even though IT knew fuck-all about the production workflow and couldn't have done what I did. After being forbidden from further automation, I was strung along for 18 months about transitioning to an IT role.

Never again will I work for an employer more interested in control than results.

So far as I'm concerned, the banks and adjacent vultures deserve a fucking haircut on commercial properties after what they did to homeowners during the Great Recession.

I don't think they've forgotten; they just don't care.

But I'm sure Trump is like "another day, another impeachment." He's now opened the door in public discourse to "they don't know what the fuck they're doing" (referring to Iran and Israel), so he's got that one ready to go for any anemic attempt to file articles that go nowhere.

So, a couple of things about this story ... first, the formatting is atrocious. Subheds and interstitial, irrelevant photos after every graf as the piece continues can't possibly be how anyone wants to read news.

Seriously, what does this art have to do with a story about self checkout?

That's just irritating. The larger issue is just how sympathetic this is toward Walmart. Straight news never includes the word "innovative," so that's a red flag we're reading marketing, and it's far from the only example.

The reporting overall isn't terrible when it's not fawning over the company, but that serves only to provide the illusion that this isn't spin but merely an angle. Unfortunately, fawn it does. Like, who the hell was ever going to Walmart for the human experience and personalized service?