Spaces weren't always used. If you look at old greek/roman engravings everything is jammed together without spaces. I think you could eventually become quite good at reading spaceless text, even though spaces definitely aid in comprehension.
There are still several languages that don't use spaces. Like Thai and Cambodian. Both of these languages are very analytic - they use short words, which makes it easier.
The actual problem without using spaces is not that humans can't read it, it's that computers can't read it (without at least complete dictionary and maybe some AI help). GNU aspell for instance does not support languages that don't use spaces.
Yeah, context is essential. We've seen plenty of examples of website names where the spaces being squashed out gives alternative meanings. Two come to mind where the last word was "exchange" and it followed a plural. No simple-minded spel chequer is going to be able to figure that out.
It's legible (ish) due to the limited ways that English characters can group up - e.g. there's only one valid way to split up "writeslikethis". In JP many common words are only 1-2 characters long, so in general even a very short string of kana can be split up multiple valid ways.
Yeah, no problem here. I've been learning japanese for a while and have encountered the phenomenon though. Still if you look at e.g. the front page of JP wikipedia: https://ja.wikipedia.org/ there's plenty of kana there, be it words that are habitually written entirely in katakana or hiragana, or even kanji words that still have some attached kana to disambiguate readings.
After more practice I've found myself starting to pick up on common dividers, like particles, verb endings, adjective endings, etc. I assume native speakers do this instinctually, much like native English readers aren't really reading letter by letter (wichh is why txet lkie tihs is rbleadae at ntiave seepd for most)
Believe me, the organic transition had nothing to do with agricultural practices and all to do with economics, with the logic being that fertilizer was an expensive import, and by banning fertilizer they could hemorrhage foreign exchange reserves a little less. Of course, they also earned a lot less because the bone-headed transition lead to a marked reduction in yield, only worsening the forex problem the ban of agricultural chemicals was meant to solve.
Organic fertilizer requires that the N, P, and K actually came from somewhere. Often, that's from something else that used non-organic fertilizer. So if a country goes all organic not only are yields down on the fields using organic fertilizer, the supply of organic fertilizer itself could dry up.
Nitrogen can come from the air by using nitrogen fixing crops in a rotation, so it can never run out (N2 is the most abundant gas on the atmosphere). The problem is that growing nitrogen fixers take a lot of land time that could otherwise be growing crops. Also not as nitrogen rich as fossil fertilizers (gas N2 is quite stable, difficult to fixers to extract in high quantities).
A phrase to remember: "Exports are made out of imports". Almost every export industry depends on an import in its production chain somewhere, which is why trade wars and sanctions are so destructive. Import-substitution planned economies have to be very clever about how they approach this to get it to work.
Very honestly, it might have worked out fine - organic produce fetches a much higher price overseas. If its already a somewhat niche product like tea, organic produce might go even higher and make up for the loss in yield.
For Sri Lanka, it was the perfect storm of covid decimating tourism AND overseas demand for their produce.
Without Covid, they might have been able to stay afloat on tourism dollars until the organic farming thing started showing results.
Sri Lanka is the second largest tea exporter in the world -- if you converted all of that to organic, then odds are good that the organic tea market just collapses.
Beyond that, it's easy to get rid of modern fertilizers, but the tradeoff is significantly lower yield. To make up for the loss of yield, you need more space. Sri Lanka is a small island that is densely populated, so space is at a premium. Yielding less crop for the same money might have worked out if not for the pandemic, except for the fact that they domestically consumed most of their domestic staple goods, exporting the surplus. Now they've resorted to importing.
> It's not plausible to move the entire agricultural sector towards luxury exports by government fiat.
.. overnight.
Some countries have managed to pivot towards luxury exports, and indeed this is one of the standard things that the IMF tries to make failing countries do, but it's a multi-decade process.
Organic farming is strictly self-regulated. Usually it takes something like five years for a field that was used for traditional farming to be considered organic. The field has to flush the insecticide. With a decision to prevent forex issues by banning fertilizer, Sri Lanka could not afford to wait years for its organic products to be recognized internationally. The plan was foolish.
I guess that makes sense, initially, on paper. I would guess some organic farming fanatic put put the numbers that fertilizers import can be reduced XX%, and the dollar signs in the eyes of the ruling family lit up (All those dollars not spent on imports can be embezzled)
This is posturing, 100%. The OAS is a useless hindrance to the project of American integration, but AMLO doesn't really care about that, he's just following the populist playbook of making ever more absurd public statements as a façade for policy failures at home.
What do you mean by "political failures"? All polls show him as the most popular Mexican president of the last decades, even facing strong opposition from the 1% and the mainstream media. I am sure he is not perfect and has made mistakes, but much less than the others.
Can you provide an example of one of these counties and why you consider they are undergoing "degrowth"? Degrowth is usually conceptualized as an intentional process, rather than economic decline.
Half of global GDP growth is simply population growth.
You could be in place like Japan where you have lower population, but still productivity growth such that incomes don't decline.
You could also be a place like pretty much everywhere in the world before the Industrial Revolution when the Malthusian Trap was a popular thought - and your population grows but productivity declines. GDP goes up, but you get more miserable. Not great.
I don't think anyone imagines falling incomes as awesome.
Additionally, even if productivity and population decline - the Fed can always devalue money such that your income goes up - even if your situation is getting materially worse.
I don't know why people obsess over population growth. We already don't want to invest in the people we have.
Productivity growth should be the thing we all want. There's not a lot of people that are like: Damn those tractors that stole all the agricultural jobs!
For the most part - we're happy 90% of the population doesn't have to work in agriculture.
Doubling someone’s commute diverts more of their money into commuting expenses, which removes that exact amount of money from some other category of spending.
If diverted from savings, this grows current GDP. If diverted from some other category of spending, it’s likely neutral. (If diverted from higher velocity domestic spending into the importation of energy [and exporting of cash], it could even shrink GDP.)
I think of it more like "what if all the effort resources put in to things like making funkopops and microtransaction heavy child addiction simulations for mobile phones were used for good things. What if we weren't all forced to drive into the officeif it wasn't truly necessary."
The neoliberal version is basically "cost of living goes up, manufacturing of instant waste goes up, the common man gets nothing."
I really appreciate HN for providing a refreshingly healthy, intellectually stimulating forum for discussion. In fact, as someone who is decidedly outside the tech-space, I mainly come here for the articles and discussions that have nothing to do with technology. At the same time, I think HN prides itself on being different from the myopic hivemind typical of other social media outlets - anecdotally, this something that I haven't found to be entirely accurate. (See anything about STEM vs. non-STEM education, medicine or biotechnology for an example of what I'm talking about).
I think the subjects HN broadly has blindspots in is actually really wide but maybe being aware of them is specific to one's field. For a long time until recently I was similarly outside the tech space and the misconceptions about my former field that are asserted here with absolute confidence are staggering. Conversely, surely there are plenty of us here from all kinds of fields, so I even feel silly talking about HN as any kind of monolith. It's sticky!
Not at all. While animals can be pastured, most of the livestock in developed countries is reared in grain-fed CAFOs. These are, in most cases, grain that is suitable for human consumption or could be made so. Moreover, almond milk is still ecologically preferable to cows milk.
Life is already hard enough for people with nut allergies (which is apparently more common than I thought), so let's just make that oat milk and call it a day. A lot better for the environment too :)
"most of the livestock in developed countries is reared in grain-fed CAFOs"
That simply isn't true. It is very, very common in the US. I've not seen a trace of it in Norway: Farmers here seem a bit appalled. From what I understand, at least some aspects of this sort of farming have been outlawed in much of Europe, and Europe is full of so-called "developed countries".
I'm gay and I don't find it obvious or convincing that it's about societal homophobia. Moreover, that wouldn't explain the gap between straight and lesbian women, either.
Neither poster makes convincing arguments; you can find anecdotal reports of nearly any diet producing seemingly miraculous results, but any consideration of one's eating patterns should be based off peer-reviewed research.
Even the peer-reviewed research is mostly junk observational studies that are distorted by the healthy subject effect and other uncontrolled variables. That is not a sound basis for making personal dietary decisions.
A better approach for most people is to conduct personal n=1 experiments and just see empirically what works best for you in terms of subjective feelings and objective performance metrics.
This is unfortunately the status quo of nutrition research; A long-term RCT is the "gold standard", but it is exceedingly difficult to recruit subjects and ensure their compliance over meaningful periods of time. Which is part of why constant flip-flopping about whether something is healthy or not is almost a trope in journalism. Nonetheless, a few principles have been well established: vegetables are good, fruit is (mostly) good, refined grains and free sugars are bad.
The issue with personal experiments is often that they are just as biased and cannot be conducted over meaningful time-scales. As an anecdote to illustrate this, I am significantly more productive and energetic when consuming a single sugary, chocolately coffee, but it would be foolish to conclude over such a short period of time that my personally ideal diet should include sugary coffee. I'm not deluded that this is a healthy practice, however; free sugars, fructose in particular, are demonstrably a major factor in the pathogenesis of lifestyle-related diseases.
> vegetables are good, fruit is (mostly) good, refined grains and free sugars are bad
Even those are not really absolutes, because a diet with only those "good" elements will still be worse than a mix including animal proteins. Also, some vegetables are simply bad in excessive quantities (mushrooms, potatoes, etc).
The problem we typically have is just over-abundance of everything in our diets. Too much meat is bad, too much vegetables are bad, too much fruit is bad, too much fish is bad, too much dairy is bad. And that's because our bodies evolved to make the most of anything they could digest, since the normal state was scarcity and every little bit helped with survival. Now these finely-tuned "recycling systems" are routinely oversupplied in ways they were not meant to be, and they can't help themselves but overproduce nutrients of all sorts, with all sorts of unpredictable results.
We are like ports where ships continue to unload containers at excessive rates. Some of those containers will end up polluting the area, some will just accumulate into horrible mountains, the motorways will be clogged by a continuous stream of lorries, etc etc etc. Some of those boxes will contain life-saving medicines and some will contain pointless junk, but that's not the actual problem - if you reduce the rate of shipping, then all containers will happily go where they have to go and be dealt with as they "deserve".
We were probably not built to have three meals every day.
Yes it should. And there is a lot of it linking a range of chronic disorders with nutrition. However not everyone has the time and perhaps the background to sift through and see what is significant. On the numerous diets on offer, my impression is that only the Mediterrean Diet has received solid backing from evidence-based peer-reviewed studies.
Part of the issue is that the so-called "Standard American Diet" is so bad in the first place that any deviation from it can produce encouraging results.
I tend to agree, however, that a Mediterrean-patterned diet is definitely in the right direction based upon the weight of nutrition literature.
I agree, but find it hard to balance a medium-to-high amount of seafood in the diet with the prevalence of dangerous levels of heavy metals found in fish
In general smaller fish that are harvested at younger ages have lower heavy metal levels. They haven't had as much time to accumulate toxins. Sardines are usually a good option.
This is very legible for a native english speaker