This is gonna be the thread where we talk about stuff

I live about an hour out from the excuse of a city we call Brisbane, and it's pretty bloody miserable in the suburbs, I can attest straight up. Then again, I don't know how relevant this is, since Brisbane's transport network is to normal functioning transport as Aeroflot is to, say, Cathay.

Living in or closer to the big (read: not big) city definitely has advantages in my experience is what I'm saying.

I'm about 7km from the Auckland CBD.
It's okay I guess? [/MyHalfCent]

Supes the obvious solution here is clearly to come live in Auckland

That depends entirely on the method of transportation!

11: Turn right onto Quay street (50m)
12: Swim to Rangitoto Island (10500m)
13: Slight left at Motutapu Island (5000m)
14: Swim to Honolulu, HI (2000000m)
15: Turn right at Kaneohe (10000m)
16: Swim to Great Highway, Outer Sunset, San Francisco

SouthSanFransiscoTheIndustrialCityLand?

I live in a small village (it's basically one long, winding road that has various properties on it) 15 minutes from a moderately large town with a pop. of ~40,000.

In the village public transport is basically non-existent except for school buses, and the road is not pedestrian-friendly (although a lot of people seem to try anyway).

So basically your only option to get into town--unless you want to wake up to catch a bus at 7 am and get back at around 4pm--is to drive there.

So, uh. I guess it's just a toss-up over whether you want easy accessibility to things in the city, or the atmosphere of a small town.

Now that I think about it I guess light pollution would also be a factor.

There're no street lights here so I'm used to things being pitch-black.
When I went to Brisbane for supanova this year I had trouble sleeping because I could see light from street lamps and distant high-rises through my hotel window.

If pollutant levels are a factor in your housing decision, check out the trees in your prospective area first: organisms like lichens are very sensitive to airborne contagions, and their health and abundance can serve as an easily-accessible relative gauge of such.

This sounds like something out of my science fiction novels.

The video completely misses the real advantage of invitro meat.

By circumventing the ethical consequences behind the slaughter of an animal, we thereby open up an entirely new realm of potential meats to sample. No meat would be too exquisite or endangered to eat. Simply take a few stem cells from the creature in question, and you then have the seeds for an endless smorgasbord of new possibilities.

Lions, Seals, Pandas, Koalas literally any animal who was once thought too precious to put on your dinner plate can now be cooked and served guilt-free!

Oh and don't forget about the new varieties of sashimi this could offer! Any of the potential meats could be sliced into thin, sterile, edible strips, seasoned to your liking and ingested raw without a care in the world for stray bacteria.

This development will be a boon to dinners everywhere. I know I'm excited.

The video completely misses the real advantage of invitro meat.

By circumventing the ethical consequences behind the slaughter of an animal, we thereby open up an entirely new realm of potential meats to sample. No meat would be too exquisite or endangered to eat. Simply take a few stem cells from the creature in question, and you then have the seeds for an endless smorgasbord of new possibilities.

Lions, Seals, Pandas, Koalas literally any animal who was once thought too precious to put on your dinner plate can now be cooked and served guilt-free!

Oh and don't forget about the new varieties of sashimi this could offer! Any of the potential meats could be sliced into thin, sterile, edible strips, seasoned to your liking and ingested raw without a care in the world for stray bacteria.

This development will be a boon to dinners everywhere. I know I'm excited.

And of course don't forget that most elusive flavour of all!

MAN

You do notice that they say this'd be perfect for hamburgers or sausages, though - they're not offering this as the solution to your steak guilt just yet.

In vitro meat certainly has the technology - problem is, the meat ends up with a texture similar to tofu. Real meat consists of muscle, where the cells have a particular shape and alignment and divide in a certain way, and the distribution of fat and capillaries and such throughout any given hunk of meat change the texture. Real meat has blood in it; 's why red meat's one of the best sources for dietary iron.

Unless you feed your undifferentiated flesh mass with a specially-built set of haemoglobin-carting capillaries (which'd raise the cost overall of producing the meat), it'll only be meat-components reconstituted in a homogenised form.

I'm personally looking forward to Noah's Ark-themed sausages. Two of every animal for breakfast!

I feel like texture is probably pretty important even as an ingredient, I certainly wouldn't eat meat flavoured jelly and there are many foods I dislike as much for the way they feel in my mouth as for how they taste.

Is the only reason you're not eating a Koala now is because you'd feel guilty?

Koala guilt is a huge motivator for the majority of my moral decisions. I just ask myself, could I look a poor eucalyptus-hungry koala bear in its teary eyes if I do this?

Many times the answer is no.

SpoilerShow

Some giant monsters eat societies.

I think the problem with eating koalas is that they're becoming endangered.
Also that they would maul you to death trying to catch them.

The ironic part is that in vitro meat will probably just cause a massive drop in the population of most livestock animals since most of them can't even survive in the wild on their own anymore and who's really going to want to spend huge amounts of money keeping all these useless animals around anyway?

I really want to know what insects taste like but oddly enough they don't sell any in Sainsburys
They pass things like candied scorpions around on TV and everyone has the token disgusted reaction but what do they taste like???

The ironic part is that in vitro meat will probably just cause a massive drop in the population of most livestock animals since most of them can't even survive in the wild on their own anymore and who's really going to want to spend huge amounts of money keeping all these useless animals around anyway?

True 'nuff, but that's sorta the point in why it makes things more sustainable. Also, I'm sure "Real" Meat will live on in a niche market as the new Luxury Food That Doesn't Actually Taste Different But People Buy It As A Status Symbol Or Whatever

"Organic" meat
GM meat will turn your fingernails green and cause your children to turn into freakish, half cow hybrids, didn't you know?

"Organic" meat
GM meat will turn your fingernails green and cause your children to turn into freakish, half cow hybrids, didn't you know?

i heard that genetically modified organisms actually have dna made up of hatred and nuclear radiation!!!!!1!!

The ironic part is that in vitro meat will probably just cause a massive drop in the population of most livestock animals since most of them can't even survive in the wild on their own anymore and who's really going to want to spend huge amounts of money keeping all these useless animals around anyway?

Unless they discover a way to make a 100% perfect, no drawbacks whatsoever meat substitute tomorrow, even then livestock numbers wouldn't crash. Any new technique for meat-making would have start up costs, and moreover a practical limit to how much meat they can manufacture at once.

What we'd be likelier to see if they made Real Facon™ is a decline over a decade or so of how many animals are being recruited (born) and turned into burger. There would likely still be a market for Actual Flesh, albeit a rapidly-declining one. New Zealand's lamb industry has been on the decline for decades now already; dairy's considered a more profitable use of the land if it's cattle-able.

The trouble with that transition is bigger animals, subsequent greater expenditure of fertilisers and other chemicals for pasture health, which leads to more runoff and pollution of waterways than with sheep, and more cows means more green house gas emissions (from bigger smellier animals).

I know the state of the beef industry in the States, but I don't know what your dairy's like. Either way, you might be able to eat a steak guilt-free but not the cheese sauce on it.

Also if anyone unironically says grossly misinformed things about genetic modification I will choke you with an Arabidopsis. I might even explain a few things because that is one bit of blind stupidity I'm not gonna tolerate on these forums.

No joke.

psst.
hey.
Schazer.
Corngate