toyot posted:

ok, back to work, goodbye again!

sounds like an intruiging project, actually it reminds me once again of this book i read by the ukkk's #1 pol potist malcolm caldwell "the wealth of some nations". a major part of the book is about food systems and their resource inputs, he also introduces a cool concept called protein imperialism where there is a sort of warped exchange taking place where rich nations sell protein incomplete calories like grain in exchange for high quality protein rich food (such as fish meal) from poorer nations. he shows that in industrial agriculture for western consumers energy returns are actually far lower than one, i.e. much more energy is put in than is taken out and also showing that a significant amount of fossil energy at the time the book was written gets burnt in the context of food production, which also poses an entropic issue. All this to say that a truly sustainable (from the energy and resource pov) machine to make macro and micro nutrients is probably some contemporary version of something that will quite look like a pre-industrial agricultural practice.
anyway, regarding your idea, i have the objection that converting sun energy into a macro and micro nutritionally complete mixture is chemically very hard, and if not using and ensemble of plants, or at least some kind of organism, is probably not viable at all. For example, synthesizing all 20 amino acids from the ground up using small building blocks is hard and not possible to do with significant work, byproducts and energy inputs. Actually if you would find a simple way to do that you could probably publish it as an alt-Miller-Urey type origin of life candidate system. however, i agree it would be cool if people could photosynthesize with less middlemen than having to eat plants.

anyway, i really recommend to skim the pdf of that book because some of the question posed in there are close to the one you are trying to address.

Constantignoble posted:

is the longer-term prognosis good? full recoveries all around, i hope!

multiple broken bones need to heal so we'll see, but ideally there will be minimal long term complications. thanks folks, the whole thing really took me off guard.

karphead posted:

well, that was quick, i got a goddam job today

goongrats

liceo posted:

what else is it? the combination of every university in North Amerika combining to form a singular YouTube University wherein every graduate gets to choose between a rare NFT artwork or a VR headset to watch virtual sunrises after the world melts instead of a diploma?

i think its a good question actually and my immediate suspicion would be that this kind of general transition to broadening the market ('democratizing education') is the most logical explanation, but more in the sense that there were already many compelling practical reasons to document lectures and have them available online (higher education becoming increasingly non-commital and being something you do 'on the side' for one), and it lowered the threshhold for making things available in a sense.

this still isn't really a satisfying explanation, in part because the textbook market and the attitude universities have towards other instances of maintaining proprietary rights to intellectual property make it obvious that they are a) not interested in even the propagandistic veneer of free information, and b) still actively and brutally committed to restricting the availability of information. maybe it just reveals how indifferent universities are to the actual education aspect of their operation, since they're happy to let students sit in on classes but will have some wannabe cop threaten to taze you if you sneak into a football game.

the most banal and plausible explanation might just be the combination of this lowered bar with the pressure to maintain a 'social media presence', with the transition from guest lectures videos to regular lecture videos just being natural enough to be arrived at by multiple institutions, but it definitely seems incomplete