In addition to the drawn cartoon precedent, the idea that purely written fictional literature can fall into the Constitutional obscenity exception as CSAM was tested in US courts in US v Fletcher and US v McCoy, and the authors lost their cases.
Half a million Harry|Malfoy authors on AO3 are theoretically felonies.
I can find a "US v Fletcher" from 2008 that deals with obscenity law, though the only "US v McCoy" I can find was itself about charges for CSAM. The latter does seem to reference a previous case where the same person was charged for "transporting obscene material" though I can't find it.
That being said, I'm not sure I've seen a single obscenity case since Handly which wasn't against someone with a prior record, piled on charges, or otherwise simply the most expedient way for the government to prosecute someone.
As you've indicated in your own comment here, there's been many, many things over the last few decades that fall afoul the letter of the law yet which the government doesn't concern itself with. That itself seems to tell us something.
Your buffer here is meat. Cattle are tremendously inefficient consumers of grain. Eat your burgers in the bountiful years, then slaughter 75% of the herd in a hardship year, eat well for six months, then spend the next three, four, five years eating more grains while the herds recover.
Ethanol is another one.
That's the sensible way to do it.
Somehow I doubt that it's the way we do it... But maybe the variability is coming from world trade and developing nations.
Cattle are inefficient consumers of grain, but highly efficient consumers of grass. Most land used for pasture can't effectively be used for anything else.
This argument might sound good, but those cattle are fed crops, not just sunshine and the grass they walk on.
Most crops grown in the US are used as animal feed. They are dependent on arable land that could be used to grow food for humans directly and much more efficiently. We just like the taste, so we accept the inefficiency.
Eh. The "inefficent calorie conversion" take is sort of lazy and misses the nuances. I just looked it uo, and it seems that only about 55% of yields are for feed, and there is definitely some more nuance there, since a lot of feed meal comes from stalks and parts if the plants humans would not consume. This notion of calorie inefficiency also misses the mark on what would be planted and harvested instead to contain the same bioavailable nutrient profile thay comes from meat. In otber words, using land for feed to convert grains to another type of food is probably more necessary than just "taste".
I don't care to research it further, but I own a small 5 acre farm and can attest that some crops grow in some areas and some don't. So even if you did map it all out on a piece of paper where you'd get all your beans and lentils and whatnots I doubt it would work in real life. Cattle can handle a couple hard freezes. My tomatoes can't.
You’re right that a lot of livestock feed is crop residues/byproducts humans don’t eat—but that doesn’t make beef “necessary” or erase the land/opportunity-cost problem. Globally, ~36% of crop calories go to animal feed and only ~12% of those feed calories come back as animal-product calories (Cassidy et al.). Livestock still consume ~1/3 of global cereal production (Mottet et al.). And in full-system LCAs that include grazing + feed land, meat/dairy provide ~18% of calories and ~37% of protein but use ~83% of farmland; cutting them can reduce farmland >75% while still feeding the world (Poore & Nemecek / Oxford). Plus, even if pasture isn’t croppable, it can be restored—land used for animal foods has a big carbon opportunity cost (Hayek et al.). Nutritionally, major dietetic bodies say well-planned vegetarian/vegan diets can be nutritionally adequate, with attention to nutrients like B12.
There is, as you say a lot of nuance here. Making cattle go away doesn't suddenly make say 55% more wheat suddenly appear on market shelves.
Indeed the argument to remove beef production has always struck me as an interesting starting point to a longer conversation.
So ok, cattle are gone, and there's now say 30% more grain on the market. Presumably this lowers prices to humans? Do people suddenly eat 30% more bread?
Health, and weight, issues aside (not sure an increase in carbs at the expense of protein is a win), do people just shift to other protein (like chicken). Does this mean a huge oversupply of grain, and a consequent drop in prices?
Let me put it another way. Does removing a market currently consuming 30-50% of the crop make things better or worse for farmers?
IMO Having livestock feed as a market keeps prices up, and as this article points out they're still too low. Killing off the cattle market kills off grain farmers too. I'm not sure that's the win people think it is.
Or geographical situations. The UK serves dramatically better in that capacity than the US does at present.
Thing is, though... even the parts of Western history that aren't remembered as atrocities by modern standards were pretty thick with them. For example, thousands of homeless London orphans were enslaved and sent to the early American colonies for the crime of being homeless orphans, and very few of their names are recorded in subsequent colonial documents, so the assumption is that almost all of them died before reaching adulthood. Adult convict slaves commanded very low prices relative to African slaves, and children that weren't as effective laborers, and with fewer rights, were likely seen as burdens.
This is a thousand times as concerning in the context of London than in the context of Baltimore. It addresses a concern that doesn't exist for the UK public, in a way that appears intended to oppress from the start, against a backdrop of arresting thousands of pensioners for disagreeing about a genocide.
The only people being arrested in the Uk are for supporting a proscribed group.
A group that broke a police officers back with sledge hammers, committed multiple acts of vandalism against our military, and have tons of links to Hamas
They can oppose Israel action in Palestine, they just can’t support terrorists
De facto, arresting 80 year old women for holding signs is always going to look authoritarian. They're not exactly the type to strap on a vest but we have to pretend we dont know what a terrorist looks like.
Then why did you say 80-year old women were "the type to sledgehammer police officers though apparently" and then immediate shift the goalposts? Further, the statement "The only people being arrested in the Uk are for supporting a proscribed group" is patently false; the UK government has not limited its arrests for social media posts to those expressing support for Hamas. You are not engaging in good faith discussion.
"The only people being arrested in the Uk are for supporting a proscribed group."
Why are you claiming that members of Palestine Action are the only people being arrested in the UK for speech? That is not true. Low-effort, bad-faith trolling contributes nothing to the discussion.
This is a jury trial in progress, there are rules against prejudicing such. Genuinely interested readers can read a trial report here: https://realmedia.press/the-filton-trial-4/
1) Mexican coke was cane sugar based (as was US coke at one point), but the huge excess of corn created by US ag policy has shifted much of their production to HFCS
2) As it turns out, a cane sugar (sucrose) base for a dilute acidic liquid will very quickly assume an equilibrium ratio of intact sucrose to sucrose that's been cleaved in half into glucose & fructose, dictated by molecular interactions. Testing these drinks will always find a good amount of fructose.
COVID and the supply chain crisis made apparent just how over-reliant we are on Shenzhen and Taiwan for the most basic components. There are several hundred ICs on dozens of circuitboards in every car now that are dumber, slower, and less efficient than a 1990s calculator, that we have lost the ability to produce domestically. These are now bottlenecks to manufacturing in any disruption to world trade.
It doesn't need to be cutting edge, if you have a few board assembly shops and some fabs pumping out small chips in 20-30 year old process nodes it helps the resilience of the economy and geopolitical situation a great deal.
I actually can't find any evidence that there ever existed a direct Anchorage-Belize trip. The parent comment implies that the company merely offered routes that extended to these destinations, but not necessarily as a single trip.
That is indeed what I was trying to imply. Although, as someone who grew up on the West Coast, I have to say that similarity in distance is still a bit surprising to me.
Across Eurasia. There might be some cultural/imagination thing going on. I have driven from British Columbia to Tijuana. I cannot even imagine how that would be across Eurasia.
Most of Anchorage to Belize would be within two or three countries: USA, Canada and Mexico, and two main official languages English and Spanish. (Obviously numerous indigenous minority languages.) London to Calcutta would have been much more diverse, but even within the Indian leg you would encountered more languages...
My prior understanding was that before the industrial revolution dramatically reduced the labor costs, clothing was expensive. Most people only owned two or three outfits, and replacing one would cost a month's wages sort of expensive.
How could one afford to throw away a perfectly good non-matching shoe?
I would just like the early American project of liberal democracy and Constitutional rights to outlive American capitalism and American militarism, even if it means it survives it in some other country. Because it's looking pretty bleak over here.
We ought to avoid repeating your mistakes, no? Maybe unlimited campaign donations and so on, all this wonderful "American free speech (money = speech)" is a fundamentally bad idea. Worked exceedingly well for ~225 years, now it has lead to the implosion of the empire by electing a sociopathic retard to the presidency. Yes to free speech, no to whatever fucked up shit the US, its billionaire "libertarians" and Christian nationalists are pushing for us to adopt here in Europe.
If the likes of JD Vance are pushing for us to adopt his idea of free speech, you can be sure it's a bad idea.
The American political system didn't implode until its system of capitalism had the conditions necessary to escape its popular control. That wasn't necessarily an eventuality. We had a semi-functional campaign finance system in living memory.
Without the protections the Americans tried to shove into the First Amendment (which did not include anything about corporations at the time, as they did not exist) being enshrined into law, I worry that your issues with capital-government overreach will arise even faster than ours.
I don’t disagree with you but I disagree on a point of history.
> Without the protections the Americans tried to shove into the First Amendment (which did not include anything about corporations at the time, as they did not exist) being enshrined into law
If I recall correctly, Britain had joint stock companies from the 1600s, and Adam Smith and all that. They also even before this had “trusts” and “trusts which own trusts” which had certain rights, and the court of chancery had established precedent around these.
The French also had a massive state stock company in this time, and it became a massive bubble which imploded in XXXX. This attracted a lot of attention and commentary and it’s impossible that the American Founders were ignorant.
The Brit’s never had a freedom of speech, but in English common law, companies had property rights, standing to sue, and so on. Most activities a business person could take, they could take on behalf of their company instead.
So in the American context, it seems that the founders were likely aware of corporations. Why they didn’t put explicit limits in the first amendment, who knows. Maybe it just didn’t seem important at the time.
It came very close in the 1930s, it is arguable that the New Deal headed off revolution
The USA should have been considered a pariah state since the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964, now it is rapidly becoming one
The USAnian system has been a corrupt oligarchy with only trappings of democracy since it's inception. Those "trappings" run deep, but are not allowed to unseat the true source of power: money
The Founding Fathers [sic] gave that a lot of thought and worked very hard to make it that way from the very beginning
Half a million Harry|Malfoy authors on AO3 are theoretically felonies.
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