Yes, this is a good idea. Farmed salmon in the USA was fed in such a way that they had much diminished Omega-6 content versus wild-caught. However, I am not sure if practices have changed since I first looked into it, which was in the later 2000s. It is harder to track down suppliers to verify in the USA because of the supermarket phenomenon here.

I downvoted because the poster didn't back up any of its claims and these kind of hit and run, insulting posts are getting more and more common. I am starting to suspect there's a concerted effort by green energy shills to infiltrate these message boards and spread nonsense. We know there are organized efforts by bad actors to spam sites and spread discord and misinformation, and these kind of attacks have become so frequent that one really becomes suspicious. Green energy has big, institutional money behind it and a vested interest in lying to the public who subsidizes it about its viability, so there's plenty of motive to misuse sites both large and small for this purpose.

Ouch. I certainly got that impression from reading Consciousness of Sheep though. Watkins is one of the few who doesn't sugarcoat the UK's condition. Unfortunately there are few journalists here in the USA of whom the same could be said. Progress ideology is nowhere stronger than here.

Probably belongs in the "local observations" thread but all of the employers in my area (Midwestern USA) are doing at least partial RTO -- it started midway through 2022 and picked up momentum since. Obviously SWE can easily be done from home with digital meetings, and so it's just a lot of time and energy wasted commuting. I could see 1x/2 weeks for a sprint meeting or something but the way they are doing this is just absurd. It's all to shore up control and their CRE which will collapse anyway.

All of which goes to clarify the fact that, pay aside, corporations are really just not the place to be when it comes to innovation or forward thinking.

Sigh, they probably will turn to that option before all of this is over.

The piece is generally good, although I'd take issue with the statement that there's no historical precedent for decline such as we are about to see. The main difference is in the global scale and population numbers in civilization now as versus previous known collapses, e.g. the Roman Empire, the Lowland Mayans, the "Bronze Age Collapse" and so on. But in all those cases, very high population densities were achieved that pushed the limits of their carrying capacity as much as ours do now. And other trends not unlike our context, cultural decadence, mass migration, falling birth rates, etc all made their appearance as well.

Also the "life expectancy not exceeding thirty" claim is commonly repeated but is mistaken. The number was obtained because they did not omit infant mortality from the statistics, whether out of an intention to mislead or simple error I'm not sure, which was much higher in premodern times. Once that is accounted for, Europeans of the so-called "Dark Ages" lived to between their 40s-50s and occasionally 60s. It did represent a falloff of life span but not quite so drastic as is claimed here.

In America I see complacency continuing, because I've learned from experience that as long as an oil boom is in progress, you cannot get Americans to accept energy descent as a concept. It will take another Great American Oil Bust like in 2015-20 to wake them up a bit. Even then I don't know whether Americans can accept the reality of limits, because they have a natural optimism that is hard to pierce.

I used to live in MN and there was a while there when the insect population had dropped critically low. Certain species like the native ladybirds appeared to disappear completely, replaced by the Eurasian invasive ones. And the monarch butterflies almost disappeared as well, but the practice of leaving prairie buffers on the edges of farms in the western part of the state seems to have helped their numbers recover. By the time I left, you would see monarchs in the summertime again. I still have grave concerns about biota in America though, as I suspect there will be major abuse of wild habitat as energy descent takes hold.

In the Upper Midwestern USA, we have had an unprecedented warm spell this winter, with almost no snow in December, and the mildest winter on record thus far. The only blip was a minor cold snap of below-zero wind chills for just over a week, and that just ended in the past couple of days. Now we are in a January thaw that looks to cause an entire melting off of the snow cover, which I don't recall ever happening before during January in my life. This pattern is the result of a combination of overall warming and a "Super El Nino" pattern in the Pacific this year.

Sorry to practice thread necromancy to respond, but what the internet is really good for at this point is aggregating the previous output of culture. Social media has gotten way past the point of "too much noise" but sites like archive dot org are gems, and there are a bunch of private curated libraries like that as well. So in other words, the internet is good for learning if you are a self-directed person. But that's about it, and so that's what I use it for at this point.

It's also an interesting question to ask what will happen to the web in a declining net energy world, over the next 1-2 decades. Probably a slower, text-only internet could be preserved well into the future. But the question is will it be? The corporate stewardship of the internet has been very poor.

I'm not surprised. An instance of this would be the monarch butterfly which was abundant when I was a child. Then there were years where no one saw them and they even were presumed extinct in our area. Finally in 2016 I saw them again in a different part of the same state I was living at the time, and slowly they returned. But the overall volume of insect life in general is down. I would guess a large part of it is owing to both destruction of habitat and excessive use of pesticides. Suburbanization in my region has accelerated this process.

I think it represents people being fed up with both institutions in the real world and the decline of the quality of the internet since the last couple of decades. As for them tuning in to something else, I have seen much more interest in DIY, hard skills, personal projects and such of late, but nothing societal beyond that which would really bring people together. I think that's the best we can hope for at this time -- at least people learning useful skills or not sacrificing their whole lives to corporate ambition is a plus.

I have been using Linux Mint in recent years, however the most recent version is quite buggy. It has regressed to 2014 levels of usability and I'm thinking about switching. The last LTS version worked great, best ever in fact. Not sure what explains the difference.