Idk it doesn’t look like we’ll run out of food and the population bomb turned out to be a dud. Maybe the food chain will collapse in the ecocrisis, but Capital will find a way to produce food more energy-intensively to compensate.

It’s a classic, but it reflects the anxieties of the time for sure.

I have a friend who looks like this. 6’5, Carhardt jacket, overalls, drinks Budweiser like it’s water. Hangs out with socialists. He says he got his septum piercing mainly so the alt right would leave him alone.

Marxism-Leninism explicitly calls on using technology to eliminate scarcity. That’s what collectivized agriculture and mass electrification were for. Along the development pathway the leadership sort of forgot this because they ran into a lot of problems (not the least of which was an incredible amount of hostility from the capitalist powers).

In my view Zeitgeist was just an update on The State and Revolution, but somehow without the armed overthrow of the government. Like technology will somehow allow us to surpass our class antagonisms and ingrained social structures (eapecially militarism) without toppling the ruling elite. I think it turned out to be a naive view unfortunately.

I recently saw a gorilla skull. Note how small the brain is and how much extra bone there is to protect it. Punching this would hurt you more than the gorilla.

Was it the poet who lives on the beach? That was the only one I’d have been threatened by

Thanks, I had to research to even notice anything was wrong.

So E471 is a whole class of hydrocarbons. I was using Wikipedia as a source too. Broadly speaking, catalysts containing heavy metals are often used for synthesizing organic molecules, regardless of the feedstock which can be deeived from plants or animals or whatever. Ideally, the catalyst does not get incorporated into the product, but generally quality control has to be enforced by regulations because corporations love cutting costs by glossing over safety standards.

The necessity of this substance is far from proven, and it uses a palladium as a catalyst which introduces potential heavy metal contamination. This is a venture capital-backed startup. We simply have stricter standards in the EU.