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arjie 23 hours ago [-]
The numbers in question are quite wild[0]
> The NOAA assessment estimated the Pacific sardine biomass will be at 27,547 metric tons by the summer – significantly less than the 150,000 metric tons needed to reopen the fishery to commercial fishing. Any fishery at less than 50,000 metric tons is considered to be overfished. The assessment estimates the sardine biomass was around 1.8 million metric tons in 2006.
Haha, damn. Fishermen must have visibly noticed such a decline. 1,800,000 metric tons to 27,000 metric tons. Two orders of magnitude. Wow.
When a fishery crashes, it is dramatic and takes a long time to recover if ever. There's been plenty of fisheries like cod that one could not conceive being depleted but it has been now for decades.
Estimates of catches, mortality, existing stock are prone to error because we don't really know much about how fish live and their overall population. But once that crash happens it is known and too late. Cod crashed in 1992 and still hasn't recovered
rukuu001 19 hours ago [-]
Yes, seen this happen in Tasmania, Australia with crayfish, scallops and orange roughy. Each went from free-for-all to highly managed quotas within a few years. Roughy fishing stopped completely back then, don't know what the status is now.
> we don't really know much about how fish live and their overall population
Absolutely yes. Orange roughy is a good example - it was caught by trawlers when they were massed in huge balls near the surface. Easy to get a big catch quickly. Turns out this was when they were spawning, so breeding cycle was being interrupted, which led to catastrophic declines very quickly.
2b3a51 16 hours ago [-]
My understanding is that the cod fishery decline in Atlantic waters has had limited recovery because the ecological niche that the cod fish occupied has been taken over to some extent by a small shark species. The wikipedia page mentions 'trophic cascade' so larger populations of prey species but does not mention the shark takeover. Either way cutting the harvesting won't bring the fish back.
Frieren 14 hours ago [-]
> because the ecological niche that the cod fish occupied has been taken over to some extent by a small shark species.
That is very interesting, I wish this kind of things were taught in school. Too many people think that animals just exists in the current state for ever. When in reality it is a dynamic system that once changed cannot be brought back.
TeMPOraL 12 hours ago [-]
There are two sides to it. The other side is: what people consider current "balance of nature" is just a transient state. Species die off all the time, ecosystems last millenia and then suddenly collapse, then rebound and look completely different. Protecting the habitability of our planet is paramount, but overindexing on how any particular aspect of it looks at any moment is a fool's game.
rurp 6 hours ago [-]
Scale matters and modern humans drive species to extinction faster than the historical average by several orders of magnitude. Even if you value non-human intelligent life at zero, which I think is morally reprehensible but know plenty of others disagree, this kind of destruction has significant hard to predict impacts.
Frieren 9 hours ago [-]
> Species die off all the time,
This species didn't just die, it was exterminated by humans. It is the difference between someone dying fro a sickness and from a bulled to the head.
> overindexing
How can be stop fishing species to extinction "too much"? How can you justify that way of thinking in this concrete case?
CGMthrowaway 4 hours ago [-]
>This species didn't just die, it was exterminated by humans.
Which species? The (non-extinct, not exterminated) cod fish whose ecological niche has been taken over to some extent by a small shark species?
xyzzy_plugh 11 hours ago [-]
This is true of trees even. People think forests have looked the same for all time but trees are frequently pushing each other out of areas. Disease and pests play a huge role as well.
There's some amount of introduced pressure due to invasive species of both trees and pests but it's always been this way. Everything is in flux all the time.
Stable pockets exist but they're relatively rare.
expedition32 10 hours ago [-]
The planet will literally survive anything. Life finds a way. There were supervolcanoes that blanketed the skies for millions of years.
But human civilization as we know it is fragile.
Schlagbohrer 14 hours ago [-]
Too many people think food grows on a grocery store shelf. If they've never grown a plant from seed and eaten the result, it is hard to internalize the reality of the supply chain.
RobotToaster 9 hours ago [-]
So we need to start hunting shark?
M95D 7 hours ago [-]
Start a viral trend and they'll be gone too in 5 years.
IAmBroom 4 hours ago [-]
To be fair, we used to catch decades-old (and probably centuries-old) gigantic cod. There hasn't been enough time to rebuild those giant predators back into the system, which has broad effects.
It's like clear-cutting an old-growth forest, and then replanting acorns. The forest simply won't return to anything like its original state for many decades - if ever.
dghughes 11 hours ago [-]
And that's with management. Here on the east coast of Canada cod was a big industry and was managed by Dept of Fisheries and Oceans aka DFO. The problem was foreign fishing freezer ships just over the maritime border. They took whatever they wanted to and were no restricted even by their own countries. Canada almost went to war with Spain and Portugal we even sent warships to the area.
BrtByte 17 hours ago [-]
That's the scary part. By the time the data is unambiguous enough for everyone to agree the stock has collapsed, you're already dealing with the collapse rather than preventing it
karmakurtisaani 15 hours ago [-]
Seems like a pattern with environmental problems.
dredmorbius 29 minutes ago [-]
Unclear signals and long lag times make systems management a real bear.
karmakurtisaani 15 minutes ago [-]
Also it doesn't help there are people whose income depend on the system collapsing
dredmorbius 6 minutes ago [-]
Quite.
Perverse incentives, generalising.
atoav 14 hours ago [-]
Turns out, it is hard to understand a potential future problem if your salary or comfort in the present depends on you not understanding it.
Climate change is pretty much the same.
CGMthrowaway 4 hours ago [-]
Not all fishery crashes are the same. Alaskan sockeye had a huge crash in 2014 which was immediately followed by huge gluts in 2015-2017. Same thing happened last year after a terribly weak run in 2024. Important to look at specific facts and context
trevithick 9 hours ago [-]
The overfishing situation seems dire across many species. I read that Mitsubishi is deep-freezing tuna in anticipation of its extinction. I don't know if that's actually their motivation, but they are definitely involved in tuna procurement.
I don't know about the future, but it used to be that sardines were a fish that was not over fished because they weren't that popular. Of course that could change.
Anecdote, not data: I picked up the habit of eating sardines from my Dad who is 97 years young. It's not that he doesn't eat bad stuff, its just that in my lifetime I see evidence that many of the things he ate were healthier than we thought.
dredmorbius 34 minutes ago [-]
"Cannery Row" in Monterey, CA, famous from John Steinbeck's stories set there (including an eponymous book), was initially a sardine fishery opened in 1902, peaked in 1946 at 142,282 tons, falling one year later to 26,818 tons. Most canning factories closed in the late 1940s and early 1950s. By 1973 the last cannery closed, and was no longer packing sardines but a mix of tunay, anchovy, and mackerel.
Portugal almost made some fisheries extinct, we had to severely curtain fishing and still sardines would show up in the markets. I think fishermen notice, but they’re also incentivised to continue fishing because the price starts going up?
BrtByte 17 hours ago [-]
I can imagine fishermen noticing the change long before it showed up as an empty shelf at a supermarket
amelius 15 hours ago [-]
I'm an IT professional and noticed that memory went scarce from looking at the shelves.
tga 15 hours ago [-]
You don't catch memory for a living.
tosti 14 hours ago [-]
Download more fish!
oniony 14 hours ago [-]
I only download cars.
octocop 8 hours ago [-]
goldfish memory
vkou 18 hours ago [-]
That's what happened to the Atlantic cod fishery. The biologists kept warning of collapse, the relevant regulators didn't want to piss off the fishermen, and didn't institute necessary restrictions, and then the fishery collapsed.
The fishermen, of course, blamed the dab gum gubmbent for getting in their business. Anything but taking responsibility for their actions.
ra 23 hours ago [-]
It's a terrible picture almost everywhere you look.
The Antarctic krill population is facing a similar decline due to influencer marketing (promoting Krill as a superior omega 3 supplement). Sardines and Krill are the foundation of the entire oceanic food ecosystems. This is not good.
flohofwoe 15 hours ago [-]
> ...decline due to influencer marketing...
As terrible as the influencer scourge is for society, I somehow doubt that it was a 3 day social media fad a couple of weeks or months ago caused the collapse of ocean wildlife.
thrance 11 hours ago [-]
Sure, a bunch of influencers have been responsible for the past century of overfishing and destruction of marine ecosystems.
20 hours ago [-]
damnesian 28 minutes ago [-]
oh well, data centers are far more important than the world's food supply. now get off the internet and back to making more gigantic diesel generators.
timcobb 8 hours ago [-]
This is pretty horrible... looks like we'll be eating rabbits and insects in no time.
zorobo 6 hours ago [-]
I used to eat rabbit often until the 2000’s. Most butcher shops in France had rabbit, presented skinned, gutted and whole. Pretty good meat!
A colleague was even including rabbit in the «poultry» category …
anon84873628 5 hours ago [-]
Well, it is very lean meat, most similar to chicken IMO :-D
They do have the best livers.
Unfortunately in the US I can only find them from fancy suppliers that are way overpriced. But if I were going to raise something in the backyard, it would be cuy...
giardini 4 hours ago [-]
Learn to hunt. Anyone who farms will be glad to let you hunt on their land, especially if you give them a few rabbits.
euroderf 3 hours ago [-]
If not vice-versa.
inigyou 20 hours ago [-]
Some enterprising entrepreneur will realise there are still 27,547 metric tons left to sell, and capitalism will be saved!
thrance 11 hours ago [-]
In fact, as offer collapses, demand explodes! This could be the opportunity of a lifetime!
red-iron-pine 9 hours ago [-]
this is why we can't have nice things
card_zero 19 hours ago [-]
You might consider how hunter-gatherers (probably) ate all the mammoths, and other elephant-alikes, and the giant kangaroos. I mean capitalism isn't crucial to making humans immoderate although I suppose it gets them better boats.
riffraff 16 hours ago [-]
The book "not the end of the world" by Hanna Ritchie makes a neat point that humans have never lived in what we would call a sustainable way, but it's possible for this generation to be the first one that does.
pjc50 12 hours ago [-]
Either there is a first sustainable generation, or one day there will be a last unsustainable generation.
gonzalohm 10 hours ago [-]
How is that possible? At some point there were a small amount of humans and they probably were not able to consume resources faster than nature can replenish them
expedition32 10 hours ago [-]
Nomadic tribes have to be constantly on the move because they stripped the land around them.
nickserv 10 hours ago [-]
Nomads typically live in areas very poor in resources (like Touaregs in deserts) or with high seasonal variation (like Sioux in plains).
There is nothing inherently destructive with the lifestyle, and in fact many other animals are nomadic or have seasonal migrations.
vkou 5 hours ago [-]
Nomads also live in those areas because agrarians pushes them out of more productive land. Prior to the development of agriculture, there wasn't such a distinction.
inigyou 7 hours ago [-]
That's sustainable if the average area per tribe that exists is much greater than the tribe actually needs in total.
M95D 7 hours ago [-]
That was sustainable as long as they killed each other at the same rate as they reproduced, so they didn't fill all the available area. Civilized societies and medicine destroyed any chance of sustainability until contraception was invented. Now, only the pension funds propaganda keeps us from reaching a sustainable population again.
annzabelle 18 hours ago [-]
The Māori ate all the Moa before Europeans showed up, and they had some pretty damn good boats before capitalism.
Not disagreeing or anything, just thought it was a funny anecdote.
card_zero 17 hours ago [-]
There's some kind of tacit ideological downvote gunfight going on in this thread. Run for cover!
red-iron-pine 8 hours ago [-]
its a startup incubator, capitalism is why they here
pasquinelli 10 hours ago [-]
so capitalism gets the credit for technological advancement but not the blame for environmental degradation?
bluGill 8 hours ago [-]
Correct. Capitalism is one of many different systems that degraded the environment. By contrast nothing else has really advanced humans.
Arguably capitalism is the first system to see environmental problems and try to solve them.
M95D 6 hours ago [-]
Arguably? Capitalism will crash and burn before it will solve any env problem. May I remind you that without NASA (not a private entity) and without gov regulations (not industry self-regulation) we wouldn't have an ozone layer today.
cindyllm 6 hours ago [-]
[dead]
anon84873628 5 hours ago [-]
Right, no advancement prior to ~1800.
inigyou 4 hours ago [-]
Modern capitalism was invented in 2020 with the abolition of bank reserve requirements. The previous incarnation was invented in 2008 with the start of QE Infinity. There were probably a few between that and the one that started in 1971 with the abolition of the gold standard, and so on.
inigyou 7 hours ago [-]
Who invented the internet and for what ideology?
vintermann 15 hours ago [-]
Capitalism is just one form of "let people with power use that power freely to accumulate more power", which never ends well.
But the alternative "overthrow power" is costly enough that we usually procrastinate.
philipallstar 13 hours ago [-]
Capitalism explicitly wants to separate power decisions, e.g. "throw that man in jail" from money decisions, e.g. "consumer demand shows we should build more of widget X and less of widget Y".
Things like Communism, Fascism, monarchy want to combine them, so the government/leader has the power and the money decisions.
vintermann 12 hours ago [-]
Capitalism only means unconditional private property rights in the means of production. It doesn't require separation of powers or anything else, it can and has historically worked great with fascism.
"Money decisions" are also absolutely power decisions. The power concentration isn't even mainly in the decisions of the rich, but simply in that they are rich. You need to work building yachts rather than bake bread because the yacht buyers have so fabulously much more money to spare than the bread buyers. And the money they don't spend is even more powerful since it controls society's investments. Our society orbits around wealth, that's what capitalism is in practice.
okr 11 hours ago [-]
It has not worked well with fascism. You know that you basically had a gun pointed at your head, if you did not comply with the regime? To be able to keep your stuff, you had to collude with the system. And you had to be not jewish as well.
inigyou 11 hours ago [-]
But they didn't have guns pointed to their heads. Every single time in history, they gleefully collaborated and even helped the fascists come to power in the first place.
ihumanable 8 hours ago [-]
And there are many examples of them being happy to join in. I think the best one right now is Alex Karp, Palantir CEO, who is actively rooting for and building the tools of fascism because it's so profitable.
> Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world and, when it’s necessary, to scare enemies and on occasion kill them.
> We’re going to partner with the world’s best people and we’re going to dominate. You can be along for the ride or you don’t have to be.
> Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.
> Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime. Many politicians across the United States have essentially shrugged when it comes to violent crime, abandoning any serious efforts to address the problem or take on any risk with their constituencies or donors in coming up with solutions and experiments in what should be a desperate bid to save lives.
> The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted. The elite’s intolerance of religious belief is perhaps one of the most telling signs that its political project constitutes a less open intellectual movement than many within it would claim.
> We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?
> The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service.
This capitalist doesn't have a gun pointed to his, he instead feels a moral obligation to provide the state with a comprehensive surveillance apparatus and ability to kill enemies of the state while also decrying holding public figures accountable.
roenxi 12 hours ago [-]
There are famously capitalist countries that are monarchies (like the UK), so as written that has to be wrong. There isn't really a definition of what "capitalism" means, although we can be fairly confident it involves people owning capital. Arguably it means that the people who own the capital should control the lion's share of political power (which, coincidentally, is how the US works).
The thing that makes communism (and fascism to a lesser extent) anti-capitalist are that it rejects the idea people should be allowed to own and control capital. So there is a clear incompatibility with communism even if the exact nature of capitalism isn't clear.
vintermann 12 hours ago [-]
> Arguably it means that the people who own the capital should control the lion's share of political power
The ideology, such as it is, doesn't have to explicitly say that capital should have political power. It merely says that it's a moral outrage to prevent the rich from spending their money however they choose.
But the ideology is secondary to capital anyway. If we let the rich get rich enough, that's strong incentive for inventing ideological justifications for it; after all to be friends with the powerful gives an easy life, and to be their enemy give a hard one.
inigyou 11 hours ago [-]
> The ideology, such as it is, doesn't have to explicitly say that capital should have political power. It merely says that it's a moral outrage to prevent the rich from spending their money however they choose.
But that's the same thing. Because having so much money to spend is (one type of) political power.
pasquinelli 9 hours ago [-]
that seems a bit naive. you can think of it like that, but then you'll find actual practicing capitalists (not capitalism, the generalized concept) will always cozy up to centers of coercive power, until they're the ones weilding those coercive powers. you've basically reinvented the medieval distinction between the church and the secular authority. the church would never burn people alive, they just determine if a person is spreading heresy and the secular authority will do what it will.
in reality it's all one system and it exists in reality. the system that exists in theory is just a model to carry around in your head.
soco 12 hours ago [-]
The main difference being the scale we can (and we do) bring species to extinction nowadays, even collaterally. Also nowadays we know exactly what we are doing, yet we press the gas pedal even harder to maximize shareholder value. So no, the comparison doesn't hold.
And that is what remains of the Pacific sardine fishery. It used to be that sardines were plentiful all around Monterey, but during WWII fishermen used improved sensors to track down and remove all schools of sardines until they were gone. Since then attempts to reintroduce sardines to that stretch of California coast have all failed. This is a really huge loss to the whole ecosystem there.
chicken-stew 9 hours ago [-]
Another item on the Soylent Green checklist.
euroderf 3 hours ago [-]
You think that's algae you're eating ?
ydat 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
darth_avocado 23 hours ago [-]
The oceans are depleted. And some countries with shadow fleets are to blame more than the others. But somehow it’s not even a small priority for most countries. Whales are dying because they are malnourished and that is an indicator that there’s barely anything left. The idea that international waters are available for anyone and everyone to exploit is just wild.
I never saw this term used for fishing boats. Do you have any countries in mind? And what exactly is "shadow"?
> Whales are dying because they are malnourished and that is an indicator that there’s barely anything left.
I assume you are talking about the recent deaths of Pacific Gray whales.[1] They are dying because climate change has depleted their primary food source in the Arctic. They are not dying due to overfishing by humans.
As long as they are 200 nautical miles offshore, then it is fair game. That Reuters article reads like: "China did something; it must be bad."
darth_avocado 4 hours ago [-]
First of all, just because something is legal, doesn’t mean it’s good.
But more importantly, specifically Chinese fishing vessels aren’t exactly innocent either. They go dark to go and fish in waters where fishing isn’t allowed including eco sensitive zones. Part of the problem with the dark fleet is “how much they fish”. Claiming 200 vessels are fishing while allowing 1000 vessels will obviously lead to overfishing.
Then there is the whole “illegal fishing” including but not limited to hunting sharks and other endangered species, using banned fishing practices, threatening local fishermen across the coast of Africa to corner parts of the fishing grounds etc.
All of this is well documented. So it’s not about China bad, it’s about them skirting the rules.
throwaway2037 3 hours ago [-]
> But more importantly, specifically Chinese fishing vessels aren’t exactly innocent either. They go dark to go and fish in waters where fishing isn’t allowed including eco sensitive zones.
Do you think that Japan, Korea, Taiwan does not do exactly the same? I believe they do. However, they are part of the "Free World", so we give them a free pass.
darth_avocado 2 hours ago [-]
They are wrong too. But my comment was specifically addressing your argument that criticism only exists because it’s China and not because they are wrong. Whataboutism isn’t a great defense here. Everyone doing it needs to not do it. My parent comment that started this thread talks about everyone and not just one country:
> The idea that international waters are available for anyone and everyone to exploit is just wild.
Edit: Order of magnitude also matters here. Chinese fishing fleet is much larger than all the nations you mentioned combined. Any nation taking that much from the oceans which are a globally shared resource and a lifeline for the planet should receive scrutiny and pushback, regardless of who they are.
gadders 7 hours ago [-]
They're normally called a shadow fleet because they turn off their transponders when they head into territorial waters.
cryptonector 4 hours ago [-]
If they are dying of hunger then the most likely cause is overfishing, far far ahead of climate change.
jazzyjackson 10 hours ago [-]
Shadow fleet is anyone without a transponder reporting their location
BrtByte 17 hours ago [-]
Yeah, the enforcement problem seems almost absurd compared to the scale of the ocean
Lio 16 hours ago [-]
Which countries are using shadow fleets?
JimmyBiscuit 15 hours ago [-]
China, North Korea, Russia
crvdgc 13 hours ago [-]
In Morocco?
0123456789ABCDE 12 hours ago [-]
you're hung up on "The problem is especially severe in Morocco[…]" but the thread has moved on since the root comment where the author starts with: "The oceans are depleted."
jimbob45 20 hours ago [-]
There’s really no cause to raise a panic with lab-grown meat right around the corner. AI, FSD, electric cars, nuclear energy, and drones are eating up most of the VC money right now but lab-grown meat is waiting in the wings to take over in the next few decades.
edoceo 20 hours ago [-]
Why lab meat? Plants are right here now, require very little electricity, the sun is free, they can't run away, many can be eaten with very little preparation. It's both cheap and easy.
energy123 18 hours ago [-]
Because not everyone shares your preference and/or discipline for plants. Lab grown meat doesn't require a planetary scale realignment of moral values and habits.
account42 13 hours ago [-]
> Lab grown meat doesn't require a planetary scale realignment of moral values and habits.
It absolutely does until it's actually something normal people call "meat" which is still a long long way off.
soulofmischief 16 hours ago [-]
Some might argue that ignorance or apathy doesn't reduce someone's participation as a consumer in a very inhumane and climate-wrecking meat industry down to simply "preference". I do agree it's unrealistic to expect 8 billion people to change their habits overnight, but we are going to see a massive prisoner's dilemma as resources dwindle until that 8 billion number starts falling.
energy123 14 hours ago [-]
That's a moral judgement about what words to use that has no bearing on causality. Incentives are never a valid justification but they are almost always an explanation. We should care about explanations when trying to solve problems.
soulofmischief 12 hours ago [-]
I agree, designing institutions around incentives is key. But the discussion around factory farms can shaped around ethics and not morals, and I had taken the opportunity to point out that "preference" reads as unwarranted euphemism in the face of the brutality of modern factory farming, and downplays the agency of the individual as a participant. Past that, we are in full agreement that it's more fruitful to solve the problem rather than sit around making judgements.
williamdclt 9 hours ago [-]
habits, no. But difficult argument to make that lab-grown meat requires _less_ of a "moral value realignment" than plant-based food?
16 hours ago [-]
toshinoriyagi 18 hours ago [-]
Various plants (dark leafy greens/cruciferous vegetables) do make up the foundation of a healthy diet, but do not provide significant protein or fats. Meat is very useful from a dietary perspective. You can make a quality vegan/vegetarian diet, but hitting high protein goals for those who are active can be difficult. The majority of vegetarian+ protein options are also high in carbs.
Plus, meat is tasty. It makes perfect sense people look forward to lab-grown variants that are ethically sourced and have no adverse health effects.
officeplant 1 hours ago [-]
> but hitting high protein goals for those who are active can be difficult.
Sure, but a seed oil is not a plant. The oil is extracted from a plant. You can eat all the plants you want, but unless you directly consume the processed extract, you won't be getting much fat. Avocados are a source of healthy fats. However, this still leaves you deficient in EPA. Conversion from ALA is trash, so the only option to my knowledge is seaweed/algae and you would massively over-consume other nutrients trying to hit the DRI for EPA. Your only option is supplementing with algae pills I think. From a quick glance, this is 2-3x as expensive as fish/fish oil.
Tofu, seitan, and tempeh all have protein, but they differ from animal protein in that they are "cut" with lots of carbs and fat. I am on a protein-sparing modified fast (PSMF) for bodybuilding goals right now, and there are no viable non-animal whole sources of protein (so, excluding pea protein isolate etc.) I can have. Even seitan is only ~81% protein by calories, which is too low. I am targeting 90% calories from protein right now.
They are definitely good options, along with lentils (which have a similar problem of having more carbs than protein), for vegetarianism+. But they are not a perfect substitute as you cannot get nearly pure protein from them. They also tend to lack the BCAAs that make up a large portion of muscle.
So, you can fulfill most dietary goals purely vegan, but it is harder and more expensive due to limited options.
aziaziazi 5 hours ago [-]
> 2-3x as expensive
That seems a small difference in contrast with the industries scales and the price comparaison will probably be the opposite in case of expended demand. Also most plant diet are already cheaper and that little supplement wouldn't make a difference.
> PSMF for bodybuilding
You may have not found a plant alternative for your needs but it seems you are on a quite unusual diet. "do not provide significant protein or fats" apply essentially to the group of people that are bodybuilding AND on a similar nutrient diet AND eating "whole sources" only. For anyone else, it's fine:
- sedentary: most plant protein will do fine, they are packed with fibers that helps transit the carbs/fat and regulate insulin
- sedentary with cardio/active life (commuting by foot/bike, running, swimming...): same as sedentary, as you noted you got all the carbs needed with the meal.
- bodybuilding not on a "whole sources" diet (milk, whey, chicken without skin...): Plant shakers are similar to their animal alternative, and protein isolate can be prepared of cooked the way one want.
You seems quite informed so it may not be that hard for someone as much informed as you, but I concede plant diets are not the norm and most people just don't know how because they learned to eat differently instead. As an athlete you probably know that it seems hard to change habits.
Regarding the price we don't share the same experience: proteins are cheaper, restaurants meals are cheaper and societal cost (subsidies) is cheaper. Some specific supplements may be more expensive but that's marginal.
voidUpdate 9 hours ago [-]
If your lab meat is running away, something has gone very wrong
ChoGGi 9 hours ago [-]
Nah, I like the taste of fear and adrenaline; give it brains and a source of horror.
mock-possum 15 hours ago [-]
They don’t taste the same though
Barbing 15 hours ago [-]
can't run away, fantastic
efskap 19 hours ago [-]
"Lab" grown meat of the aquatic variety has been around for eons in the form of mussels and other bivalves. No central nervous system to suffer, similar nutritional profile that fills in plant-based gaps, extracts nutrients from the water instead of polluting it, and grown on ropes.
However the concern here is not just finding something tasty for humans to eat.
doy3n 20 hours ago [-]
I had to make an account to tell you to look again; lab-grown meat isn't at all a given or even a good alternative. 98% reduction in biomass in twenty years isn't a cause for alarm?
pjc50 12 hours ago [-]
People aren't going to stop catching and eating fish until it is legislated against, globally.
throw0101a 23 hours ago [-]
Recent episode of the Odd Lots podcast, "How a Sardine Gets From the Ocean to a Can":
> Just a decade ago, tinned fish was hardly a premium product. Most Americans likely associated cans of tuna with thrift. But that has changed a lot in recent years. The category took off during Covid and now shoppers are shelling out for high end brands like Fishwife. Today's guest Becca Millstein started the company in 2020, positioning it as a distinct, artisanal product, more akin to one might find in European grocery stores. In addition to the sheer challenges of scaling, the nature of the business itself has changed, influenced by climate change and geopolitics (shortages have led Morocco to suspend frozen sardine exports for instance). We discuss the tinned fish supply chain and how a new brand positions itself in today's media market.
I'd been noticing very spotty availability of sardines (a long-time fav of mine) going back to last October/November.
Some stores are out entirely, others will alternate through available brands over time, but often have slim pickings. I'd suspected an issue with fisheries, and am very sorry to see this confirmed.
BugsJustFindMe 24 hours ago [-]
Where can't you find them?
All of my local supermarkets in the US have a million cans of sardines from a dozen different brands each, ranging from like $1.50/can for e.g. Goya in soybean oil[0] to like $7/can for very fancy ones, with the average around $4.50/can for ones in olive oil. They're not gone, just more expensive than last year for nice ones.
[0] - sardines come packed in your choice of water, soybean oil, olive oil, extra virgin olive oil, tomato sauce, or louisiana-style hot sauce with additional selection choices of containing herbs or hot peppers or olives, and olive oil ones always cost more than water or soybean oil ones for obvious reasons
ssl-3 17 hours ago [-]
I can't find what I want for sardines in Ohio.
What I want is non-premium-brand, not-Chinese sardines -- in mustard sauce. These brands can vary: Chicken of the Sea, Beach Cliff, and whatever the house brands of stores like Wal-Mart and Aldi are come to mind immediately. I adore these as a relatively inexpensive, healthy, and tasty shelf-stable snack -- not as luxury items. I will pay what I must, but I do not wish to spend very much money on them.
What I find instead are sardines in water, oil, and only rarely in tepid hot sauce. The more expensive or plainly-flavored they are, the more likely they are to be present.
The spots for all of the inexpensive sardines on the shelves are lacking, and the spots for every brand of mustard sardines are resolutely empty at every store I visit. The Kroger near my house has dozens of cans of reasonably-inexpensive sardines, but they're all in oil. The rest is picked clean like a covid-era toilet paper aisle.
It has been this way for months. It is not a hallucination, and I am not holding it wrong. I've been an avid consumer of mustard sardines for many decades. I am not vision-impaired. :)
Things are such that I take time to visit far-flung grocery stores when I travel regionally for work and also troll on Instacart looking for hits that will help me in the search of mustard sardines. It's been a nearly-complete non-starter; I've found only a couple of tins in the past few months.
[*]: As an unreferenced footnote, I'd like to preemptively note that I'm very particularly disinterested in hearing suggestions for other varieties of foods to eat instead. I am not in need of assistance, and this report of my own observations is not a request for help. There is nothing that can be added here that will change my proclivities on this matter, and there are no words that can magically restore mustard sardines to store shelves near me. I'd like to thank everyone in advance for understanding that neither my tastes for foods nor my regional market for sardines are things that can be controlled or adjusted by a comment on HN.
AstroNutt 1 hours ago [-]
I've been eating sardines for years. My grandfather used to eat them and I somehow acquired a taste for them.
Instead of looking for sardines with sauces, just buy them in water and put your own sauce on them.
A good brown mustard or just plain ol Tabasco are great on them. I even use quality olive oil sometimes. They actually taste way better doing it this way.
tigereyeTO 9 hours ago [-]
Do you think it could be possible to open a can of plain sardines and put mustard on them?
ssl-3 7 hours ago [-]
Of course.
This does not produce the same results as fish that have been cooked/canned in mustard sauce and left together for months (or years).
This difference is important to me. The old, fish-flavored mustard goop at the bottom of the tin is one of my favorite aspects.
giardini 3 hours ago [-]
Sounds like your true concern is a mustard shortage rather than a sardine shortage.
You can find mustards in the "Condiments" section of your local market.
If that is a problem then perhaps you are living in the wrong place. Move to Texas where you will find canned mustard sardines aplenty on store shelves.
ssl-3 1 hours ago [-]
If moving to Texas would make me be just as smart, witty, and observant as you think that you are yourself, then: I think that I would rather stay where I'm at, thanks.
Other than their profoundly myopic nature, the notions you present are somewhat compelling.
throwaway2037 13 hours ago [-]
> not-Chinese sardines
What is better about Morrocan vs Chinese packed sardines? Also when prices are so low you are eating European sprats (Sprattus sprattus) or herring (Clupea harengus), not true sardines.
ssl-3 11 hours ago [-]
I don't understand this question.
Most of the sardines I get come from Poland. I very seldom see Morroco listed on the tins that I get. I do not understand how an unstated price can infer origin, or species, or the presence of only binary choice.
My preference is learned: Of the mustard sardines I've had from China, all of them have been fucked up somehow. They're fucking gross. They wind up binned. They do not deserve another cent of my money.
Your unwarranted questioning of my food preference has been noted.
(Please note that I have not placed any pressure upon you to defend your own preferences.)
cucumber3732842 11 hours ago [-]
A couple days ago I received a case of filters (automotive oil filters basically) for a piece of manufacturing equipment. As I read the words "made in China" on the box one of those Pakistani manufacturing videos where they happened to be making automotive oil filters played through my mind and I thought to myself that perhaps made in China is fine.
armchairhacker 8 hours ago [-]
Can you get them shipped from Amazon?
https://a.co/d/0gsXqe9w (I don’t know your town, but this ships to Brunswick)
ssl-3 7 hours ago [-]
I have had bad results receiving canned goods from Amazon. They have tended to show up mangled in ways that can compromise the integrity of the seal.
5 hours ago [-]
johnnyApplePRNG 24 hours ago [-]
Yea this article is trash. I can find canned sardines anywhere in Canada here right now. They're in stock on Amazon.ca for goodness sake.
embwbam 24 hours ago [-]
Where are you? I am in BC and can’t find them in grocery stores
Hugsbox 6 hours ago [-]
I'm in Nova Scotia, and tinned fish is still absolutely everywhere, and still dirt cheap.
johnnyApplePRNG 23 hours ago [-]
You don't have Amazon in BC?
markdown 18 hours ago [-]
No, there aren't any Amazon grocery stores in BC.
AstroNutt 1 hours ago [-]
I went to my local grocery store (small West Texas town)last week and bought the last 6 remaining cans.
I've never once seen the sardine shelf empty until last week.
tomjakubowski 3 hours ago [-]
Shelf-stable foodstuffs like canned sardines can be ordered for delivery from the regular Amazon, the same side of their site you might order a book or a laptop from, outside of their newer grocery retail channels.
justin66 8 hours ago [-]
> They're in stock on Amazon.ca for goodness sake.
I'd expect extremely high prices buying them this way.
tomjakubowski 3 hours ago [-]
Here in the US, on the regular retail side of Amazon, I see a twelve pack of 3.75oz canned sardines in water, Beach Cliff brand, for $18.96, or $0.42/oz. I don't buy sardines but this seems not terribly out of line with prices I see at Walmart and Target, maybe a 20-25% premium. A local fancy grocery store has sardines in water from Chicken of the Sea at $0.58/oz.
infamouscow 24 hours ago [-]
TFA explains why sardines sourced from around USA, Spain, Portugal, and Morocco are harder to come by.
Where are your sardines be sourced?
BugsJustFindMe 23 hours ago [-]
Looking in my cupboard right now:
Goya: Spain
Bela: Portugal
Crown Prince: Morocco
Bar Harbor: Latvia
Brunswick: Latvia
King Oscar: Norway
throwaway2037 13 hours ago [-]
This is a cool reply. Are you a sardine fanatic? Do you many different brands for the different flavours?
BugsJustFindMe 9 hours ago [-]
I enjoy them and see that they come in many variations. I'm not sure whether that makes me a fanatic or just discerning.
ljf 8 hours ago [-]
Intrigued, I checked my cupboard for the brands we have:
* Alva (from Sainsburys) - 75p - Sardina pilchardus - Packed in Morocco, caught in Eastern Atlantic Ocean
* 'The Fishmonger' (from Lidl) - 59p - Sardina pilchardus - Packed in Morocco, caught in Eastern Central Atlantic
* Kingfisher (from Lidl) - 49p - Sardina pilchardus - Packed in Morocco, caught in Central Eastern Atlantic
markdown 18 hours ago [-]
This is bizarre to me. Do you always shop this way? Personally I find a favourite brand and stick with it. There isn't a single product I can think of where I'll buy the same thing from multiple brands.
BugsJustFindMe 18 hours ago [-]
> "Personally I find a favourite brand and stick with it."
Two responses:
1) And by what process exactly do you find a favorite? Clairvoyance?
2) If you can have a favorite, then the different brands must have different qualities. And if different brands have different qualities, then they will be differently good for different uses.
> "There isn't a single product I can think of where I'll buy the same thing from multiple brands."
They aren't the same thing. They're differently-prepared multi-ingredient products. They're often not even the same species of fish, because "sardine" is a general category not a species.
nickserv 10 hours ago [-]
> There isn't a single product I can think of where I'll buy the same thing from multiple brands.
Weird, I'm the complete opposite. There's no product I can think of where I didn't buy different brands, if anything just to compare.
vel0city 9 hours ago [-]
So once you've decided on a particular brand and variety of chips you only ever buy that single brand and variety of chips, never branching out to try different things? Never get an urge for wavy chips instead of traditional, or maybe tortilla chips the next time, maybe even every now and then cheese curls?
I don't even like Sardines but I definitely understand there's a ton of variety in flavors and packing styles and even the species of fish can be a little different.
Hugsbox 6 hours ago [-]
Some people would happily eat the same thing for breakfast, dinner, and supper every single day for the rest of their lives. I don't necessarily understand it, but I've met plenty of people like that.
cwnyth 23 hours ago [-]
I didn't know that Amazon.ca was a supermarket with shelves. TIL.
hackshack 18 hours ago [-]
Canned fish are tiny now compared to 5 years ago. They shrank to bait size.
BugsJustFindMe 17 hours ago [-]
I don't think they're any smaller now than they were before. You may be comparing different species of fish that are all called "sardines".
BrtByte 17 hours ago [-]
Which makes me wonder how geographically uneven this "shortage" actually is
giardini 3 hours ago [-]
Perhaps the Ukrainian conflict affects this? After all, who wants to be fishing all alone in the ocean when a half-dozen drones show up?
ajsnigrutin 24 hours ago [-]
Same here in slovenia, from fancy one to cheap store brand ones. No fads here
leoc 23 hours ago [-]
Plenty in Ireland as well. The craze certainly seems to be more subdued here, though some of the posh delis in Dublin, in particular, seem to be riding the wave. ( https://www.reddit.com/r/CannedSardines/comments/1o9dhlg/any... , for any Dublin tin-hunters.)
carabiner 24 hours ago [-]
In US I haven't seen them for months at Trader Joe's. Usually they stock 3 different kinds.
rootusrootus 24 hours ago [-]
Could be regional, or something specific to TJs. My local Fred Meyer in Oregon has plenty of availability right now. Though the prices are a little bit inflated.
pimlottc 23 hours ago [-]
I literally just left a Trader Joe’s and I couldn’t find a single tin
giardini 3 hours ago [-]
Of course: they're all sold out to froufrou boogies!
Go to Aldi's, or better yet, Walmart, Kroger or a local large independent grocer.
pimlottc 2 hours ago [-]
> they're all sold out to froufrou boogies!
That's specious, Trader Joe's is cheaper than other stores for plenty of items
thomasben 15 hours ago [-]
What a sad world we live in :(
Social medias have such a significant impact all over the planet, from overcrowded tourist spots dedicated to taking instagram pictures, to canned sardines diets.
Why do people fall for this kind of thing ? I still can't understand it. Is it all just an ego war ? That worries me
Hugsbox 5 hours ago [-]
I'm not positive anybody is "falling for" anything, just a younger generation is discovering that tinned fish isn't just a snack that their grandfather likes and is actually an incredibly healthy, delicious, and inexpensive thing to keep in the pantry. Given the increasing cost of living, it makes sense that something like tinned fish would catch on. Sucks that some places are having difficulty stocking them, they're still abundant and cheap in my neck of the woods.
flakeoil 13 hours ago [-]
It has always existed (that we do what others say or do), the difference now is that it is at a much larger scale. It's global and spread to millions and millions in seconds. Earlier it was a news paper or magazine or a TV show. It was national or regional and local. And it was slower. It took days and weeks to spread using magazines and TV and word of mouth. Today with social media it is global and it takes seconds.
Eisenstein 13 hours ago [-]
Newspapers, magazines and TV shows had editors to curate content, reputations to uphold, and were liable for things they published. Social media has none of those things.
account42 13 hours ago [-]
I think we should first ask what proportion of people actually does fall for this. It doesn't take a large percentage of the world population to crowd a few popular spots or buy out what was previously a low-volume market.
Steve16384 13 hours ago [-]
Back in the day, adverts used to be obviously just adverts. Nowadays it's very difficult to determine what actually is an advert/influencer, or someone with some genuine facts.
octocop 8 hours ago [-]
people need to be better at gatekeeping
bjelkeman-again 24 hours ago [-]
Destroying ecosystems beyond a tipping point. And the politicians just care about being re-elected. Focusing on short term gain.
” The decision taken by the Council of Ministers earlier this week on the 2024 fishing quotas in the Baltic Sea is in many ways unique. It shows a remarkable historical short-sightedness, ignorance of the fish and fishing in the inland sea, inability to understand the scientific advice of the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) and - perhaps most of all: the ministers are bending the laws that regulate fishing, ecosystems and the marine environment to the limit.”
The world reached peak fish catch in the mid-90s. [1] And we now eat more grown fish than caught fish. The problem is that with increased acidity in the oceans, as part of the ocean absorbing mor CO2, we get less algae and eventually less fish. [2] But, yeah, let’s keep fishing until the stocks collapse. [3] They take a very very long time to recover.
What makes it even more ridiculous is that one could think grown fish are a fine solution over-fishing.
But it turns out, many fish farms use caught fish for (part of) the fishmeal and fish oil used to feed the fish they grow. Because many fish we eat turn out to be pescetarian.
ra 23 hours ago [-]
Yes. And that foodstock is often either processed bycatch from unmanaged fisheries somewhere in the world - or industrial scale processed sardines.
EA-3167 23 hours ago [-]
Ocean acidification is much more complex than "less algae and less fish." In fact some algae and bacteria will have giant blooms partly as a result of that, warming, and Nitrogenous runoff. Giant blooms consume oxygen in the primary marine trophic levels, causing die-offs that liberate more nutrients, leading to hypoxic and even large anoxic zones. You also have the concern that acifification can lead to (at first) worse outcomes for organisms depending on carbonates, and eventually (potentially) their extinction.
All of this assumes that we have a pretty solid understanding of what this system looks like as we wrench it from one feedback loop into another, but it's the best we've got.
pjc50 12 hours ago [-]
Fishermen are weirdly powerful in the EU for an industry that employs few people and doesn't make a lot of money. I'm not clear how that works, I'm guessing because it's a job the public understand and has macho overtones. Fishing was a major part of the advocacy for Brexit despite being a smaller source of revenue than Warhammer.
balderdash 9 hours ago [-]
I don’t know about the aggregate - but people make big money in fishing (check out Salmmar). I think the bigger thing is that fishing tends to be big business in rural coastal communities - which means that an outsize number of politicians are closely aligned with their interests (in the way farming, ranching, timber, etc is near and dear to many rural politicians).
epolanski 24 hours ago [-]
Nobody is going to be elected telling people the harsh truth: that we consume far too much than the planet can sustain.
Farmers and fishers on top of that will always get cross partizan sympathy.
People just don't want to hear that the way they eat impacts and stresses the planet beyond its limits and that the producers of food get in any way penalized.
Truth is that we desperately need carbon taxes asap, to at least slow down the planet destruction. But it will never be popular.
18 hours ago [-]
cortesoft 23 hours ago [-]
The problem is we have no way to pass a global carbon tax, and the way the global economy works now any attempts at a national level will only succeed in moving the carbon generation to other countries.
AFAICT Germany actually came fairly close to assembling a club but failed because they wanted a club that would include the US but excluded China but couldn't find a reasonable mechanism to include the US. We should try again -- most countries would have no qualms about assembling a club that would exclude the US.
inigyou 20 hours ago [-]
You just have to tax on import and un-tax on export.
Or directly tax the things that cause it: Tax all non-biofuel petrol a certain amount instead of trying to calculate how much CO2 was emitted in its production.
singleshot_ 23 hours ago [-]
Given that the politicians are making a billion dollars on crypto scams, being gifted multimillion-dollar airplanes, and recipients of gold crowns, I’ll eat whatever I want regardless of who is elected.
The truth is that if we weren’t burdened with multi billionaires, we would have plenty of everything.
Computer0 23 hours ago [-]
Then perhaps it would be prudent to act to remove them and seize their capital.
epolanski 15 hours ago [-]
Even if you removed all the billionaires this is unsustainable.
OroPla 23 hours ago [-]
I find it unlikely that increased taxation should improve the situation.
epolanski 15 hours ago [-]
If your burgers and steaks cost considerably more you may consider more poultry or cheese.
mitthrowaway2 19 hours ago [-]
You don't think that taxes reduce consumption?
nemomarx 20 hours ago [-]
increase food prices substantially - people eat less - food production should become less profitable and shrink. Pretty easy taxation effect?
Now, keeping the taxes suitably high as citizens go hungry, that's an exercise for the reader.
ASalazarMX 23 hours ago [-]
The problem is multifaceted, because we not only aren't told the truth, we are told lies that make things even worse, and people seem to like those.
For example, overpopulation has been a concern for many decades, yet politicians that ignore the problem, or actually advocate for more population, somehow keep getting elected. Either democracy has broken beyond repair, or humanity averages to dumb. I'm inclined to the latter, because I believe that every individual, even if they can do smart things, is very dumb in other things.
gruez 23 hours ago [-]
>For example, overpopulation has been a concern for many decades, yet politicians that ignore the problem, or actually advocate for more population, somehow keep getting elected.
Are you from the 1800s? Malthusianism has been discredited for decades, thanks to the green revolution and falling fertility rates. Not to mention all politicians that tried to do something (ie. didn't "ignore the problem") have a sorry track record - eugenics, one child policy, or forced sterilizations.
ASalazarMX 23 hours ago [-]
I don't care about doctrines, I'm only in favor that politicians let birth rates naturally decline as people try to give better lives to fewer kids, and themselves. My grandparents had a dozen kids, my parents had three, I had zero. That's good for the planet, and the economy can take it with proper preparation.
Infinite growth, in any form, is a fairy tale for economists.
somenameforme 16 hours ago [-]
I don't really follow this logic on two accounts. First is that when you remove yourself from the gene pool what you're effectively doing is simply ensuring that a larger percent of the children of the next generation come from families whose values you'd probably find quite distasteful. And their children will also end up holding those values at a high rate. This means that in the future 'your' values will have less influence and 'their' values will have more. This effect is going to be much greater than any sort of resource consumption reduction on what happens to the planet in the future.
The second is that the status quo on Earth is never sustainable. For but one example among many on this note, Earth has gone through multiple mass extinctions - long before humans arrived on the scene - and it will continue to do so; in fact we're rather overdue for one. So the idea of living in perpetual harmony with the planet sounds like a nice goal, but is itself also a fairy tale. This certainly isn't an argument to just YOLO away the Earth, but rather that doing things that are relatively self destructive for the sake of trying to achieve a perpetual harmony is unwise, because that goal is impossible to achieve.
amanaplanacanal 23 hours ago [-]
I don't believe they are talking about malthusianism. That's a straw man. The arguement is that the sheer number of people is causing damage to the natural environment, not that we can't grow enough food to feed people.
imtringued 9 hours ago [-]
The problem is that the problem is not the sheer number of people, it's the ratio between people and resources.
inigyou 13 hours ago [-]
The opposite of Malthusianism - the earth having a finite carrying capacity for humans - is the earth having an infinity carrying capacity for humans. So that is what you believe?
inigyou 20 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
alephnerd 23 hours ago [-]
> overpopulation has been a concern for many decades, yet politicians that ignore the problem, or actually advocate for more population, somehow keep getting elected
Most societies have reached a point where fertility rates have declined to below replacement.
jhbadger 18 hours ago [-]
Most developed societies. When you live by subsistence agriculture, having lots of kids is a benefit as they are free labor. When a culture urbanizes and industrializes, they are less of a benefit.
somenameforme 15 hours ago [-]
It's most societies, period. Of the 237 nations and territories recognized by UN, only 42% had a sustainable fertility rate. [1]
It seems reasonable to assume kids having more positive economic power in the past played a significant role, but there's counter-examples abounds in modern times. Nigeria is heavily urbanized yet has one of the highest fertility rates in the world. Or on the other end of the spectrum, Thailand has a very large chunk of people living off farming, yet has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world.
What's a "sustainable" fertility rate to you? Given that the current human biomass is completely unprecedented in all of history and is only made possible by artificial energy inputs (fossil fuels and ammonia/fertilizer), I posit that the only sustainable fertility rate is well below 2.0
nickserv 9 hours ago [-]
When discussing fertility rates "sustainable" usually means "ratio of births to deaths in order to have a stable population". In developed economies that's around 2.1 children per woman. Anything under that and the population declines without immigration.
somenameforme 8 hours ago [-]
Not only does it decline, but it declines exponentially. This is why fertility changes will have a far bigger impact on societies than most people appreciate. If a country has a fertility rate of 1 (and places like South Korea are now well below that even) then that means each successive generation is 50% smaller. And this change is compounding. So after 5 generations, for instance, your generational size will be 97% smaller (1 - 0.5^5).
And all the while this is happening your economy is getting wrecked not only because suddenly you have far fewer people, but because your society turns into a giant retirement home, as fertility also determines the age ratios within a society. You can see this by working backwards. Again taking a fertility rate of 1 as an example, if we have 1 newborn then we have 2 20-40 year olds, 4 40-60 year olds, 8 60-80 year olds, and so on. So you have a shrinking economy paired alongside an even smaller ratio of workers, and much greater social strains on that economy as well.
This is also why immigration isn't anything more than a very short-term bandaid. When you're speaking of population declines near 100% over such small windows of time, you end up needing to basically replace the entire population of a region. Doing this with immigration, let alone as this is increasingly a global crisis, just isn't realistic. And this is completely ignoring the social consequences of such actions.
epolanski 15 hours ago [-]
Developing countries are no different actually.
It's only really sub Saharan Africa still growing.
cwnyth 23 hours ago [-]
This is a dubious use of "society", and it ignores the fact that the world population is growing at an extremely fast rate still.
somenameforme 15 hours ago [-]
Populations can grow, even rapidly, in the short run even with collapsed fertility. This is because in part it's a lagging metric, but more importantly (and less intuitively) because fertility also determines the age ratios within a society. Imagine a society has a common fertility rate of 1 then that means each successive generation is half as large as the one prior. So if there's 1 new born, then there's 2 20-40 year olds, 4 40-60 year olds, and so on. High fertility rates result in societies with far more younger than elderly populations, and vice versa for low fertility societies.
In the past most societies had high fertility rates, which means there are relatively few elderly, relative to younger people, today. So the global death rate is relatively low as the the number of people annually exiting the stage is relatively low. But when low fertility generations start to die off, this gets turned upside down. You'll have large numbers of elderly dying off, and they'll make up the majority of the population. But this only happens ~80 years after the birth of the low-fertility generation.
This is why Japan looks so catastrophic today even though their fertility rate is much higher than places like South Korea. They've had a mediocre fertility rate since the 60s which then went into collapse in the 70s. By contrast South Korea had a fertility rate of 6 in the 60s, and didn't fall below replacement until the 80s. So Japan has had a solid decade or two head start. The fact we still aren't at the life expectancy of the first below replacement generation in Japan also means today is still going to be seen as 'the good ole days' for them. And this is where most countries are headed.
imtringued 8 hours ago [-]
This something people don't understand. Fertility rate only affects the current generation. You cannot retroactively increase the fertility rate to fix the problem.
If the current generation has a 1.0 fertility rate, that means the next generation will be half as large. If said generation now doubles it's fertility rate to 2.0 it will only maintain the size of that generation, all the old people will age out and be gone all at once.
Now you might say, fine, let's fix it, 4.0 fertility rate, that will only double the size of the next generation, meaning it will only fix one generation of 1.0 fertility. You have stabilized the population, not increased it.
Even if you do this, you now run into a huge bottleneck: parents need to take care of their old parents and their large family all at once. You fixed the biological problem but you're now running into economic collapse.
irishcoffee 20 hours ago [-]
The world population will peak sometime between 2060 and 2100, and then start declining. 2060 is like… 34 years away.
Not close enough to avoid total ecosystem collapse.
tremon 10 hours ago [-]
That's ok, total ecosystem collapse will also reduce the human population.
irishcoffee 13 hours ago [-]
I didn’t realize you did a phd thesis on this topic and can say things like that so definitively, with no accompanying links or resources to back your claim up!
You convinced me!
xienze 23 hours ago [-]
> Most societies have reached a point where fertility rates have declined to below replacement.
And governments in those countries are importing as many people as they can to paper over their own population decline.
inigyou 20 hours ago [-]
What's the international market price of a person?
throw8384948 23 hours ago [-]
In Germany we tried that, politicians like that got very strong mandate to lower emissions.
First we tried diesel gate.
Then someone had amazing idea to import Russian gas.
Now we are catching and taxing cow farts! Maybe bio methane could generate electricity!!!
inigyou 20 hours ago [-]
Cow burps and farts are like 20% of global warming. The phraseology is used to make it sound silly but it's not silly.
expedition32 21 hours ago [-]
I once saw a fascinating TV program about fishing quatos that were first introduced for the North Sea in the 1970s. It led to a war between Dutch government inspectors and fishermen.
Thirty years later everyone involved agreed that it had saved the industry.
parineum 20 hours ago [-]
> And the politicians just care about being re-elected. Focusing on short term gain.
It's really convenient to blame the politicians instead of the people that vote for them.
If people had a long term vision, politicians would too.
adrianN 18 hours ago [-]
It is part of the politician's job to educate and form the opinions of the populace. Lately politicians have just figured out that instead of nurturing opinions that are good for society as a whole it is more effective to nurture opinions that increase their chances of reelection.
bigbadfeline 19 hours ago [-]
> It's really convenient to blame the politicians instead of the people that vote for them.
One of the major roles of elected officials is to take responsibility for what's happening, that's the major point of representative democracy. People would be responsible only if they had the right to enact and endorse laws directly. This is really basic stuff, should be understood by everyone older than 7.
Not to mention that in the real world, all candidates are equally disinterested in the lives of people or fish. It doesn't matter who people vote for.
> If people had a long term vision, politicians would too.
Talk about putting the cart before the horse. People don't have to have long term vision, that's politician's job, they all promise good things but never deliver and keep blaming the guy before them instead.
dragonwriter 19 hours ago [-]
> People would be responsible only if they had the right to enact and endorse laws directly. This is really basic stuff, should be understood by everyone older that 7.
Authority and responsibility inherently and unalterably lie with the people; that they either by explicit delegation or tacit toleration allow others to exercise power on their behalf does not relieve them of either. This is the basic thing that everyone ought to understand.
parineum 19 hours ago [-]
> People don't have to have long term vision, that's politician's job...
You don't have long term version?
inigyou 20 hours ago [-]
There's never been a government in the world whose majority wasn't influenced by taking bribes.
imtringued 9 hours ago [-]
This isn't on the politicians. If you look at it from the perspective of a politician, if you enact a strict fishing quota, you've personally decimated jobs in the industry. You've saved the industry, but said industry will never forgive you and will always hold the job loss against you. If overfishing causes job losses, that's on the fishermen, they're the ones to blame.
JsonDemWitOster 13 hours ago [-]
I'm sad for King Arthur[1] who genuinely loves his tinned fish and wants to share his passion with the world. He is a good boi and not part of this trend.
I don't really like fish. I watch his videos more for the vibes. I did buy a can or two to give it a chance but I still just can't stand it.
I must admit though I agree with you - the videos are kinda amusing !
linuxhansl 17 hours ago [-]
Darn, originally from northern Europe, I have always enjoyed sardines. I was wondering why they are suddenly harder to get.
I can't believe a weight-loss fad is going to take "my" sardines from the shelves.
Also, why only sardines? Any fatty fish will serve the same purpose. I guess a fad is a fad.
darksaints 24 hours ago [-]
Canned sardines have been a staple of my diet since I was in the womb. I can’t wait for this trend to die off, it has been so difficult to find them lately. I mean I understand all of the reasons for it, and I can at least appreciate that sardines are the most sustainable form of fishery we have, but goddamn it is super frustrating.
stevenwoo 23 hours ago [-]
I haven’t noticed this at my local Costco in Northern California (plenty in stock this week) but maybe I will next week with this making the news. I usually wait to stock up when it goes on sale but I only eat two cans a week.
CrimsonRain 23 hours ago [-]
Which type do you buy? In olive oil? Any specific brand?
tasty_freeze 9 hours ago [-]
I've experienced this recently. My wife has osteoporosis and her doctor told her to eat sardines with bones to get more calcium. She doesn't like eating them straight, so she makes hummus and blends in two cans of sardines. That batch lasts two days, so she eats a tin a day. But in the past year we have had stretches of weeks where we couldn't get them.
9 hours ago [-]
beached_whale 8 hours ago [-]
More and more I think we need to fix farmed fishing and stop cleaning the oceans of life. We don't, en mass, hunt for cows or chickens. We farm them. It has an impact but it doesn't take out the whole ecosystem either.
ljf 8 hours ago [-]
What will we feed the farmed fish (at the moment they are mainly fed wild caught fish and fish oil). Would be amazing if we can feed them something else, but currently wild caught is cheaper, and closer to their natural diet.
23 hours ago [-]
geysersam 12 hours ago [-]
Yes that's good, blame social media and not the absence of sufficient regulation or the unsustainable fishing industry.
bonoboTP 9 hours ago [-]
This is an AI generated article.
euroderf 3 hours ago [-]
It is a very emotionally loaded word to use. But I think it is fair and accurate to talk about the rape of the oceans.
OJFord 14 hours ago [-]
Tinned sardines are convenient for toast, but if you want to cook with them it's crazy how much more you get your money from the fish counter.
ljf 9 hours ago [-]
Really? I need to look into how much sardine I can get for a £1.
Here in the UK, for my lunch I've just had a 49p tin of sardines in tomato sauce from Aldi - I used to each smoked mackerel about 3 days a week for either breakfast or lunch, then some years ago turned to tinned. Then in the last year tinned mackerel moved to £1 a tin, from 50p before, so I gave sardines a go and I love them even more.
I usually have the ones tinned with tomato sauce, then 60g full fat Greek yoghurt, 100g carrots, 100g cucumber then cherry tomatoes and green salad. A really delicious and filling lunch, at less than 400 calories and with over 25g of protein. Plus costs less than a £1 a meal. Just not one to eat on my office days...
I had been feeling rather proud of this, especially avoiding meat for lunch, but maybe I need to find a different protein source.
OJFord 5 hours ago [-]
I'm also in the UK, and yes, around 4 whole where no one of them cut up would fit in the tin.
(49p is a cheap tin though, and I'm not sure Aldi has a fish counter? Observation conducted at Waitrose with £1 tins and 3 by weight for 80p.)
gwbas1c 8 hours ago [-]
"Stuff you should Know" recently did an episode on sardines. I tried a tin because it was cheap, and they're better than I anticipated.
steveBK123 11 hours ago [-]
If we can get TikTok addled zoomers to discover frozen dinners as well and reduce their burrito taxi usage.. we may just slay the inflation beast finally.
HardwareLust 9 hours ago [-]
I was just grocery shopping yesterday (Philly) and there seemed to be no lack of the low quality sardines I normally see on the shelves every week? There are no "empty shelves" that I have seen in the two stores I normally shop at.
wolvoleo 23 hours ago [-]
"Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area."
Sadly Agent Smith was not wrong there.
strken 20 hours ago [-]
He was wrong. Animals don't "instinctively" reach a natural equilibrium when they're introduced to a new environment. They eat all the available food, die off en masse, and repeat, until the food sources which were vulnerable have all gone extinct and the only things left are able to survive.
See mouse and grasshopper plagues, feral cats, etc.
teo_zero 15 hours ago [-]
Sometimes yes, sometimes an equilibrium is finally reached. The fact that we see more equilibrium than extinction is purely "survivor's bias".
M95D 6 hours ago [-]
And then Agent Smith realized that multiplying is good...
Ygg2 13 hours ago [-]
> Sadly Agent Smith was not wrong there.
Wachowskis just don't know any better. You think it's air your breathing now? Oxygen? More like plant waste product.
Also no ecosystem is in perfect harmony. It's basically jenga tower where you pull a piece on a long enough scale it looks eternal.
flyby25 8 hours ago [-]
Yes. Its really only the sea floor that sees any semblance of ecological stability
j1elo 14 hours ago [-]
Someone should use those same social networks to write en masse to those social influencers, the same message to them all:
> Look what you've done, dumbass
berlinbrowndev 23 hours ago [-]
I know this is about sardines, I like canned tuna, oysters and other things. Curious where social media is on the other canned items.
fshafique 19 hours ago [-]
Social media can f#%@ right off if it causes my tuna prices to go up!
ChoGGi 8 hours ago [-]
Worry not, that'll happen all on its own.
t1234s 9 hours ago [-]
I think they did this with cottage cheese a few months ago and avocados a few years ago.
BrtByte 17 hours ago [-]
We have apparently reached the stage of the attention economy where even sardines can experience a demand shock because someone branded eating only one food for three days as a "diet"
cma 16 hours ago [-]
>We have apparently reached the stage
There used to be only 3 TV channels or so. You had things like Johnny Carson jokes causing a toilet paper shortage.
A lot of that is more about lack of buffer in grocery supply chains rather than the scale of the induced demand.
WillAdams 24 hours ago [-]
My grandfather lived in a time when commercial hunting went from viable to being outlawed --- I was worried that my children might live in a time when commercial fishing ceases to be tenable, but now that seems a near certainty.
Consider that we now have more tons of ships in the sea than there are bony fish:
There ain't much future for a man who works the sea
But there ain't no island left for islanders like me.
TrackerFF 24 hours ago [-]
Just came from a 2 week vacation in Portugal, they even had their own fancy (and very colorful) shops where they only sold canned sardines. Never seen such a range of products.
alexaholic 14 hours ago [-]
I assume you're talking about O Mundo Fantástico da Sardinha Portuguesa (The Fantastic World of The Portuguese Sardine). It's obviously a tourist trap and, btw, contributing to the craze.
tayo42 23 hours ago [-]
Millions of people are doing 3 day sardine and coffee diets for weight loss?
People will believe anything.
amanaplanacanal 23 hours ago [-]
Another version of keto. Protein and fat are pretty satiating.
I will say any 3 day diet weight loss is going to be water weight, though
SoftTalker 19 hours ago [-]
Eggs are cheaper than fish, even with recent volatility.
Is it feasible to farm sardines?
kombookcha 16 hours ago [-]
I got curious about this and found a lot of people in older threads saying that farming sardines can't be done. Apparently small schooling fish are typically very difficult to farm because they're pretty fragile and easily stressed.
Whether that's a technical barrier imposed by the biology of sardines being unsuited for how we do fish farming today, or more of a barrier of "it will never make financial sense to do this because so many in each batch would die" I don't know.
globular-toast 16 hours ago [-]
People repeat this thing about satiation but it's not really true. In fact, the most highly satiating food is potatoes. Fish is quite high up there, but other "protein" foods like meat, eggs and cheese are nowhere near the top. Oats and many fruits like apples are higher.
The really stupid thing about fad diets like keto is you either just start craving carbs because food is miserable without them, or you develop an eating disorder. The only thing anyone should do is eat normal, delicious, home-cooked food made from mostly plants.
aucisson_masque 17 hours ago [-]
I got two dozen of canned sardines at home, selling for 100$ each.
jambalaya8 6 hours ago [-]
pity it can't be salmon mousse gone.
elorant 24 hours ago [-]
I can find them just fine in Greece. Imported from Portugal or Morocco, plus some local brands.
trentearl 13 hours ago [-]
Canned mackerel is pretty good too.
jmyeet 23 hours ago [-]
So I've been thinking about this. It's more general than social media and sardines.
There are now areas of the world with overtourism. Santorini, arguably Venice, Machu Pichu and maybe even Barcelona have more tourists than they can support. It's becoming a huge problem. Why is this the case? It's in part because people have disposable income to visit these places but I think there's a larger issue of why people want to visit these places. I think there's a FOMO element and the idea is pushed by social media in particular and media in general.
As another example, I blame at least in part the crazy NYC rent situation on Sex and the City, particularly on rents in the West Village. If you've lived in NYC you know there's so many SATC girlies living out their NYC dreams and not all of them have trust funds. You see this reflected in rents too. One side of 14th Street is Chelsea. The other side is the West Village. Rents on the Chelsea side are significantly lower than the other side because people want to be able to say they live in the West Village.
On a smaller scale you see this where people seem to view themselves as the main character in a movie or TV show and they're living out these scenes in their heads, typically to video and post online. They can be really inconsiderate about it too. Like just today I saw a video that someone in a public beach "dared" go in the water while someone was trying to get a photo of themselves and that other person got in frame. It really is main character syndrome [1].
I think what made a lot of things good in the past was lack of information (and the resultant FOMO). You've seen this in food trends too when Omega-3 became big and fish stocks suffered or when palm oil became big and that's a big problem.
Interestingly, China has a system to try and prevent everyone flocking to one or two cities ("hukou") and it's hard not to see the argument for this.
I have several triggers when I'm doomscrolling. One of the worst is when someone says "I'm trying the viral (restaurant, dish, bakery, bar, whatever)..." I've always hated this because whatever it is is never worth it. But the psychology of people wanting to show off this way is fascinating. It really feels like people's lives are that empty that they just want that external validation.
99% percent of times „I‘m trying the vital X“ is said it‘s an influencer getting paid to advertise X. Most of the times without saying it’s an ad. And this language accesses the most important good in today’s world: people’s attention.
netsharc 13 hours ago [-]
It's a bit^W a lot insane that advertising is now so prevalent that even individual people are doing it. It really is an "Attention Economy".
I remember walking down a street in Istanbul, there were many restaurateurs saying "My friend, look at menu" (I joked after the trip "How was Istanbul? I met many of my friends there!"). Now I want to see "influencers" touting their products in the style of these restaurant touts.
jryle70 17 hours ago [-]
That's why any attempt to ban advertising would only make it go more underground and harder to detect. No matter how strict the rules, people will find a way. Advertising is vital to competing businesses.
Theodores 9 hours ago [-]
It is conspicuous leisure and a game of status in a time-poor world.
Or, as we used to call it, 'keeping up with the Joneses'. The odd thing is that most people that go to the overly-touristy places have very little to say. Sure there are the pictures for social media, however, these are of what the food is like and what the beverages are like and these could be taken anywhere.
There is no adventure involved in tourism, and adventure satisfies in ways that tourism never will. With adventure there is no knowing what to expect, there are logistics problems to solve and there is purpose, namely to get from A to B, preferably in one piece, which is not a given.
With tourism there are no such problems, people have 'slaves' wait on them for the duration of the trip. There is no need to interact with the actual natives, just the hospitality workers, as in the 'slaves'.
In the past, a lot of work went into getting time off for the working man, with local-ish tourism to take people out of the smog filled cities and to the seaside (in the UK and elsewhere). A few generations on and this has been baked in, nobody takes their time to enjoy the house they pay to live in, there is this default action of going on some type of package holiday.
The typical package holiday is for the time poor, with so many big sights that have to be packed in, always the same tourism trail. For example, Brits visiting the USA might imagine this road trip, to hire a car in LA, to drive to Vegas, on to spend 20 minutes at the rim of the Grand Canyon and then on to Flagstaff, as if there is anything to see there.
They get back having seen nothing except car parks and the Interstate. The mad dashing around means they get the required photos but there is no adventure. So they have to go on another trip. How about Machu Pichu, next time round?
So, off they go. They come back to their normal life and have nothing to say, apart from what the hotel, flight and food was like.
It is an industry made possible by cheap flights and cheap rental cars, with none of them being that cheap if externalities are to be included. Given where the world is going regarding the 'war for oil', this tourism is going to vanish quite quickly.
TMWNN 23 hours ago [-]
> As another example, I blame at least in part the crazy NYC rent situation on Sex and the City, particularly on rents in the West Village. If you've lived in NYC you know there's so many SATC girlies living out their NYC dreams and not all of them have trust funds.
This is an important problem, and the response can go in starkly different ways. While many in the West wring hands and call for degrowth, China is scaling up aquaculture to create abundance without overfishing, and solving aquaculture's ecological problems with technology.
waffletower 6 hours ago [-]
I noticed the scarcity a bit in the last few months. I have been giving them to my dog for years for the low mercury omega 3s -- I even had a veterinarian stamp of approval.
mminer237 7 hours ago [-]
I'm the rare breed that's disappointed that every pizzeria around me no longer stocks sardines either. Used to be such a classic, if divisive topping.
leephillips 7 hours ago [-]
The article and many comments here suggest that a “sardine” is a specific species of fish. In fact, about a dozen species are canned and sold as “sardines”.
pelagicAustral 11 hours ago [-]
Man, I had some Latvian sardines a few days ago. The can looked like I was about to enjoy a trip to culinary heaven and I was absolutely slammed back to reality, the fish had massive bones that you can try and break but they were extremely offensive to the product. Latvia WTF!!?
locallost 15 hours ago [-]
This is only going to get worse with AI and not just for food recommendations. Think "where do I go for a vacation" and then the recommendation is pretty much the same for everyone, and you end up in overcrowded places because everyone else got the same advice.
alexk307 8 hours ago [-]
Not to say that climate change isn't affecting this in some way, but the Pacific Ocean is known to oscillate between Sardine and Anchovy regimes [0][1].
I've actually been wanting to try to raise my own. There is a freshwater member of the sardine/anchovy family native to Australia, Thryssa lackeyii. They're more towards the sardine size than anchovy, and they might (or might not) have an awful flavor. But they're not on the list of prohibited-for-import organisms, and I believe I'd just have to pay the fee for inspection on arrival.
2muchcoffeeman 9 hours ago [-]
Influencers are a real fucking scourge to our society.
chanux 9 hours ago [-]
I feel they are inadvertently bringing attention to overfishing.
ChoGGi 8 hours ago [-]
Influencers, or decades of overfishing?
IncreasePosts 19 hours ago [-]
If we're going to continue to eat sea food, isn't plankton some of the best to eat? It's basically as low on the trophic chain as you can go, unless people start developing a taste for krill I guess.
recursive-call 9 hours ago [-]
“Plankton” is a category including a lot of things, most of which are more important in their current role than they would be viable as a protein source for humans. A lot of plankton is microorganisms made entirely out of silica or calcium carbonate (probably not nutritious for humans). A lot more is the eggs and larvae of fish and crustaceans. If humans started eating this, it would cause ecological disaster even faster. I think at some point we’re going to have to normalize eating bugs, at least those can be farmed easily…
IncreasePosts 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah I totally messed that up. I meant to say sardines, and say unless people want to start eating krill and plankton.
It's just too hard to check my posts when I'm weaving between traffic on the highway
> The NOAA assessment estimated the Pacific sardine biomass will be at 27,547 metric tons by the summer – significantly less than the 150,000 metric tons needed to reopen the fishery to commercial fishing. Any fishery at less than 50,000 metric tons is considered to be overfished. The assessment estimates the sardine biomass was around 1.8 million metric tons in 2006.
Haha, damn. Fishermen must have visibly noticed such a decline. 1,800,000 metric tons to 27,000 metric tons. Two orders of magnitude. Wow.
0: https://www.seafoodsource.com/news/environment-sustainabilit...
Estimates of catches, mortality, existing stock are prone to error because we don't really know much about how fish live and their overall population. But once that crash happens it is known and too late. Cod crashed in 1992 and still hasn't recovered
> we don't really know much about how fish live and their overall population
Absolutely yes. Orange roughy is a good example - it was caught by trawlers when they were massed in huge balls near the surface. Easy to get a big catch quickly. Turns out this was when they were spawning, so breeding cycle was being interrupted, which led to catastrophic declines very quickly.
That is very interesting, I wish this kind of things were taught in school. Too many people think that animals just exists in the current state for ever. When in reality it is a dynamic system that once changed cannot be brought back.
This species didn't just die, it was exterminated by humans. It is the difference between someone dying fro a sickness and from a bulled to the head.
> overindexing
How can be stop fishing species to extinction "too much"? How can you justify that way of thinking in this concrete case?
Which species? The (non-extinct, not exterminated) cod fish whose ecological niche has been taken over to some extent by a small shark species?
There's some amount of introduced pressure due to invasive species of both trees and pests but it's always been this way. Everything is in flux all the time.
Stable pockets exist but they're relatively rare.
But human civilization as we know it is fragile.
It's like clear-cutting an old-growth forest, and then replanting acorns. The forest simply won't return to anything like its original state for many decades - if ever.
Perverse incentives, generalising.
Climate change is pretty much the same.
https://www.mitsubishicorp.com/jp/en/sustainability/social/s...
https://www.mitsubishicorp.com/jp/en/sustainability/social/s...
Anecdote, not data: I picked up the habit of eating sardines from my Dad who is 97 years young. It's not that he doesn't eat bad stuff, its just that in my lifetime I see evidence that many of the things he ate were healthier than we thought.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannery_Row>
https://repository.library.noaa.gov/view/noaa/24479
The fishermen, of course, blamed the dab gum gubmbent for getting in their business. Anything but taking responsibility for their actions.
The Antarctic krill population is facing a similar decline due to influencer marketing (promoting Krill as a superior omega 3 supplement). Sardines and Krill are the foundation of the entire oceanic food ecosystems. This is not good.
As terrible as the influencer scourge is for society, I somehow doubt that it was a 3 day social media fad a couple of weeks or months ago caused the collapse of ocean wildlife.
A colleague was even including rabbit in the «poultry» category …
They do have the best livers.
Unfortunately in the US I can only find them from fancy suppliers that are way overpriced. But if I were going to raise something in the backyard, it would be cuy...
There is nothing inherently destructive with the lifestyle, and in fact many other animals are nomadic or have seasonal migrations.
Not disagreeing or anything, just thought it was a funny anecdote.
But the alternative "overthrow power" is costly enough that we usually procrastinate.
Things like Communism, Fascism, monarchy want to combine them, so the government/leader has the power and the money decisions.
"Money decisions" are also absolutely power decisions. The power concentration isn't even mainly in the decisions of the rich, but simply in that they are rich. You need to work building yachts rather than bake bread because the yacht buyers have so fabulously much more money to spare than the bread buyers. And the money they don't spend is even more powerful since it controls society's investments. Our society orbits around wealth, that's what capitalism is in practice.
> Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world and, when it’s necessary, to scare enemies and on occasion kill them.
> We’re going to partner with the world’s best people and we’re going to dominate. You can be along for the ride or you don’t have to be.
> Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.
> Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime. Many politicians across the United States have essentially shrugged when it comes to violent crime, abandoning any serious efforts to address the problem or take on any risk with their constituencies or donors in coming up with solutions and experiments in what should be a desperate bid to save lives.
> The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted. The elite’s intolerance of religious belief is perhaps one of the most telling signs that its political project constitutes a less open intellectual movement than many within it would claim.
> We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?
> The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service.
This capitalist doesn't have a gun pointed to his, he instead feels a moral obligation to provide the state with a comprehensive surveillance apparatus and ability to kill enemies of the state while also decrying holding public figures accountable.
The thing that makes communism (and fascism to a lesser extent) anti-capitalist are that it rejects the idea people should be allowed to own and control capital. So there is a clear incompatibility with communism even if the exact nature of capitalism isn't clear.
The ideology, such as it is, doesn't have to explicitly say that capital should have political power. It merely says that it's a moral outrage to prevent the rich from spending their money however they choose.
But the ideology is secondary to capital anyway. If we let the rich get rich enough, that's strong incentive for inventing ideological justifications for it; after all to be friends with the powerful gives an easy life, and to be their enemy give a hard one.
But that's the same thing. Because having so much money to spend is (one type of) political power.
in reality it's all one system and it exists in reality. the system that exists in theory is just a model to carry around in your head.
<https://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles/art_tragedy_of...>
[1] https://insideclimatenews.org/news/24052026/pacific-gray-wha...
But more importantly, specifically Chinese fishing vessels aren’t exactly innocent either. They go dark to go and fish in waters where fishing isn’t allowed including eco sensitive zones. Part of the problem with the dark fleet is “how much they fish”. Claiming 200 vessels are fishing while allowing 1000 vessels will obviously lead to overfishing.
Then there is the whole “illegal fishing” including but not limited to hunting sharks and other endangered species, using banned fishing practices, threatening local fishermen across the coast of Africa to corner parts of the fishing grounds etc.
All of this is well documented. So it’s not about China bad, it’s about them skirting the rules.
> The idea that international waters are available for anyone and everyone to exploit is just wild.
Edit: Order of magnitude also matters here. Chinese fishing fleet is much larger than all the nations you mentioned combined. Any nation taking that much from the oceans which are a globally shared resource and a lifeline for the planet should receive scrutiny and pushback, regardless of who they are.
It absolutely does until it's actually something normal people call "meat" which is still a long long way off.
Plus, meat is tasty. It makes perfect sense people look forward to lab-grown variants that are ethically sourced and have no adverse health effects.
That's where eating bugs comes in to save us all
Tofu, seitan, and tempeh all have protein, but they differ from animal protein in that they are "cut" with lots of carbs and fat. I am on a protein-sparing modified fast (PSMF) for bodybuilding goals right now, and there are no viable non-animal whole sources of protein (so, excluding pea protein isolate etc.) I can have. Even seitan is only ~81% protein by calories, which is too low. I am targeting 90% calories from protein right now.
They are definitely good options, along with lentils (which have a similar problem of having more carbs than protein), for vegetarianism+. But they are not a perfect substitute as you cannot get nearly pure protein from them. They also tend to lack the BCAAs that make up a large portion of muscle.
So, you can fulfill most dietary goals purely vegan, but it is harder and more expensive due to limited options.
That seems a small difference in contrast with the industries scales and the price comparaison will probably be the opposite in case of expended demand. Also most plant diet are already cheaper and that little supplement wouldn't make a difference.
> PSMF for bodybuilding
You may have not found a plant alternative for your needs but it seems you are on a quite unusual diet. "do not provide significant protein or fats" apply essentially to the group of people that are bodybuilding AND on a similar nutrient diet AND eating "whole sources" only. For anyone else, it's fine:
- sedentary: most plant protein will do fine, they are packed with fibers that helps transit the carbs/fat and regulate insulin
- sedentary with cardio/active life (commuting by foot/bike, running, swimming...): same as sedentary, as you noted you got all the carbs needed with the meal.
- bodybuilding not on a "whole sources" diet (milk, whey, chicken without skin...): Plant shakers are similar to their animal alternative, and protein isolate can be prepared of cooked the way one want.
You seems quite informed so it may not be that hard for someone as much informed as you, but I concede plant diets are not the norm and most people just don't know how because they learned to eat differently instead. As an athlete you probably know that it seems hard to change habits.
Regarding the price we don't share the same experience: proteins are cheaper, restaurants meals are cheaper and societal cost (subsidies) is cheaper. Some specific supplements may be more expensive but that's marginal.
However the concern here is not just finding something tasty for humans to eat.
> Just a decade ago, tinned fish was hardly a premium product. Most Americans likely associated cans of tuna with thrift. But that has changed a lot in recent years. The category took off during Covid and now shoppers are shelling out for high end brands like Fishwife. Today's guest Becca Millstein started the company in 2020, positioning it as a distinct, artisanal product, more akin to one might find in European grocery stores. In addition to the sheer challenges of scaling, the nature of the business itself has changed, influenced by climate change and geopolitics (shortages have led Morocco to suspend frozen sardine exports for instance). We discuss the tinned fish supply chain and how a new brand positions itself in today's media market.
* https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-a-sardine-gets-fro...
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqP18fQi_CM
* https://omny.fm/shows/odd-lots/how-a-sardine-gets-from-the-o...
Some stores are out entirely, others will alternate through available brands over time, but often have slim pickings. I'd suspected an issue with fisheries, and am very sorry to see this confirmed.
All of my local supermarkets in the US have a million cans of sardines from a dozen different brands each, ranging from like $1.50/can for e.g. Goya in soybean oil[0] to like $7/can for very fancy ones, with the average around $4.50/can for ones in olive oil. They're not gone, just more expensive than last year for nice ones.
[0] - sardines come packed in your choice of water, soybean oil, olive oil, extra virgin olive oil, tomato sauce, or louisiana-style hot sauce with additional selection choices of containing herbs or hot peppers or olives, and olive oil ones always cost more than water or soybean oil ones for obvious reasons
What I want is non-premium-brand, not-Chinese sardines -- in mustard sauce. These brands can vary: Chicken of the Sea, Beach Cliff, and whatever the house brands of stores like Wal-Mart and Aldi are come to mind immediately. I adore these as a relatively inexpensive, healthy, and tasty shelf-stable snack -- not as luxury items. I will pay what I must, but I do not wish to spend very much money on them.
What I find instead are sardines in water, oil, and only rarely in tepid hot sauce. The more expensive or plainly-flavored they are, the more likely they are to be present.
The spots for all of the inexpensive sardines on the shelves are lacking, and the spots for every brand of mustard sardines are resolutely empty at every store I visit. The Kroger near my house has dozens of cans of reasonably-inexpensive sardines, but they're all in oil. The rest is picked clean like a covid-era toilet paper aisle.
It has been this way for months. It is not a hallucination, and I am not holding it wrong. I've been an avid consumer of mustard sardines for many decades. I am not vision-impaired. :)
Things are such that I take time to visit far-flung grocery stores when I travel regionally for work and also troll on Instacart looking for hits that will help me in the search of mustard sardines. It's been a nearly-complete non-starter; I've found only a couple of tins in the past few months.
[*]: As an unreferenced footnote, I'd like to preemptively note that I'm very particularly disinterested in hearing suggestions for other varieties of foods to eat instead. I am not in need of assistance, and this report of my own observations is not a request for help. There is nothing that can be added here that will change my proclivities on this matter, and there are no words that can magically restore mustard sardines to store shelves near me. I'd like to thank everyone in advance for understanding that neither my tastes for foods nor my regional market for sardines are things that can be controlled or adjusted by a comment on HN.
A good brown mustard or just plain ol Tabasco are great on them. I even use quality olive oil sometimes. They actually taste way better doing it this way.
This does not produce the same results as fish that have been cooked/canned in mustard sauce and left together for months (or years).
This difference is important to me. The old, fish-flavored mustard goop at the bottom of the tin is one of my favorite aspects.
You can find mustards in the "Condiments" section of your local market.
If that is a problem then perhaps you are living in the wrong place. Move to Texas where you will find canned mustard sardines aplenty on store shelves.
Other than their profoundly myopic nature, the notions you present are somewhat compelling.
Most of the sardines I get come from Poland. I very seldom see Morroco listed on the tins that I get. I do not understand how an unstated price can infer origin, or species, or the presence of only binary choice.
My preference is learned: Of the mustard sardines I've had from China, all of them have been fucked up somehow. They're fucking gross. They wind up binned. They do not deserve another cent of my money.
Your unwarranted questioning of my food preference has been noted.
(Please note that I have not placed any pressure upon you to defend your own preferences.)
I'd expect extremely high prices buying them this way.
Where are your sardines be sourced?
Goya: Spain
Bela: Portugal
Crown Prince: Morocco
Bar Harbor: Latvia
Brunswick: Latvia
King Oscar: Norway
* Alva (from Sainsburys) - 75p - Sardina pilchardus - Packed in Morocco, caught in Eastern Atlantic Ocean
* 'The Fishmonger' (from Lidl) - 59p - Sardina pilchardus - Packed in Morocco, caught in Eastern Central Atlantic
* Kingfisher (from Lidl) - 49p - Sardina pilchardus - Packed in Morocco, caught in Central Eastern Atlantic
Two responses:
1) And by what process exactly do you find a favorite? Clairvoyance?
2) If you can have a favorite, then the different brands must have different qualities. And if different brands have different qualities, then they will be differently good for different uses.
> "There isn't a single product I can think of where I'll buy the same thing from multiple brands."
They aren't the same thing. They're differently-prepared multi-ingredient products. They're often not even the same species of fish, because "sardine" is a general category not a species.
Weird, I'm the complete opposite. There's no product I can think of where I didn't buy different brands, if anything just to compare.
I don't even like Sardines but I definitely understand there's a ton of variety in flavors and packing styles and even the species of fish can be a little different.
Go to Aldi's, or better yet, Walmart, Kroger or a local large independent grocer.
That's specious, Trader Joe's is cheaper than other stores for plenty of items
” The decision taken by the Council of Ministers earlier this week on the 2024 fishing quotas in the Baltic Sea is in many ways unique. It shows a remarkable historical short-sightedness, ignorance of the fish and fishing in the inland sea, inability to understand the scientific advice of the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) and - perhaps most of all: the ministers are bending the laws that regulate fishing, ecosystems and the marine environment to the limit.”
https://balticwaters.org/en/baltic-sea-brief-60-the-final-he...
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/capture-fisheries-vs-aqua...
[2] https://www.ioc.unesco.org/en/articles/ocean-acidification-t...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_Atlantic_north...
But it turns out, many fish farms use caught fish for (part of) the fishmeal and fish oil used to feed the fish they grow. Because many fish we eat turn out to be pescetarian.
All of this assumes that we have a pretty solid understanding of what this system looks like as we wrench it from one feedback loop into another, but it's the best we've got.
Farmers and fishers on top of that will always get cross partizan sympathy.
People just don't want to hear that the way they eat impacts and stresses the planet beyond its limits and that the producers of food get in any way penalized.
Truth is that we desperately need carbon taxes asap, to at least slow down the planet destruction. But it will never be popular.
AFAICT Germany actually came fairly close to assembling a club but failed because they wanted a club that would include the US but excluded China but couldn't find a reasonable mechanism to include the US. We should try again -- most countries would have no qualms about assembling a club that would exclude the US.
Or directly tax the things that cause it: Tax all non-biofuel petrol a certain amount instead of trying to calculate how much CO2 was emitted in its production.
The truth is that if we weren’t burdened with multi billionaires, we would have plenty of everything.
Now, keeping the taxes suitably high as citizens go hungry, that's an exercise for the reader.
For example, overpopulation has been a concern for many decades, yet politicians that ignore the problem, or actually advocate for more population, somehow keep getting elected. Either democracy has broken beyond repair, or humanity averages to dumb. I'm inclined to the latter, because I believe that every individual, even if they can do smart things, is very dumb in other things.
Are you from the 1800s? Malthusianism has been discredited for decades, thanks to the green revolution and falling fertility rates. Not to mention all politicians that tried to do something (ie. didn't "ignore the problem") have a sorry track record - eugenics, one child policy, or forced sterilizations.
Infinite growth, in any form, is a fairy tale for economists.
The second is that the status quo on Earth is never sustainable. For but one example among many on this note, Earth has gone through multiple mass extinctions - long before humans arrived on the scene - and it will continue to do so; in fact we're rather overdue for one. So the idea of living in perpetual harmony with the planet sounds like a nice goal, but is itself also a fairy tale. This certainly isn't an argument to just YOLO away the Earth, but rather that doing things that are relatively self destructive for the sake of trying to achieve a perpetual harmony is unwise, because that goal is impossible to achieve.
Most societies have reached a point where fertility rates have declined to below replacement.
It seems reasonable to assume kids having more positive economic power in the past played a significant role, but there's counter-examples abounds in modern times. Nigeria is heavily urbanized yet has one of the highest fertility rates in the world. Or on the other end of the spectrum, Thailand has a very large chunk of people living off farming, yet has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fer...
And all the while this is happening your economy is getting wrecked not only because suddenly you have far fewer people, but because your society turns into a giant retirement home, as fertility also determines the age ratios within a society. You can see this by working backwards. Again taking a fertility rate of 1 as an example, if we have 1 newborn then we have 2 20-40 year olds, 4 40-60 year olds, 8 60-80 year olds, and so on. So you have a shrinking economy paired alongside an even smaller ratio of workers, and much greater social strains on that economy as well.
This is also why immigration isn't anything more than a very short-term bandaid. When you're speaking of population declines near 100% over such small windows of time, you end up needing to basically replace the entire population of a region. Doing this with immigration, let alone as this is increasingly a global crisis, just isn't realistic. And this is completely ignoring the social consequences of such actions.
It's only really sub Saharan Africa still growing.
In the past most societies had high fertility rates, which means there are relatively few elderly, relative to younger people, today. So the global death rate is relatively low as the the number of people annually exiting the stage is relatively low. But when low fertility generations start to die off, this gets turned upside down. You'll have large numbers of elderly dying off, and they'll make up the majority of the population. But this only happens ~80 years after the birth of the low-fertility generation.
This is why Japan looks so catastrophic today even though their fertility rate is much higher than places like South Korea. They've had a mediocre fertility rate since the 60s which then went into collapse in the 70s. By contrast South Korea had a fertility rate of 6 in the 60s, and didn't fall below replacement until the 80s. So Japan has had a solid decade or two head start. The fact we still aren't at the life expectancy of the first below replacement generation in Japan also means today is still going to be seen as 'the good ole days' for them. And this is where most countries are headed.
If the current generation has a 1.0 fertility rate, that means the next generation will be half as large. If said generation now doubles it's fertility rate to 2.0 it will only maintain the size of that generation, all the old people will age out and be gone all at once.
Now you might say, fine, let's fix it, 4.0 fertility rate, that will only double the size of the next generation, meaning it will only fix one generation of 1.0 fertility. You have stabilized the population, not increased it.
Even if you do this, you now run into a huge bottleneck: parents need to take care of their old parents and their large family all at once. You fixed the biological problem but you're now running into economic collapse.
https://www.un.org/en/global-issues/population
You convinced me!
And governments in those countries are importing as many people as they can to paper over their own population decline.
First we tried diesel gate.
Then someone had amazing idea to import Russian gas.
Now we are catching and taxing cow farts! Maybe bio methane could generate electricity!!!
Thirty years later everyone involved agreed that it had saved the industry.
It's really convenient to blame the politicians instead of the people that vote for them.
If people had a long term vision, politicians would too.
One of the major roles of elected officials is to take responsibility for what's happening, that's the major point of representative democracy. People would be responsible only if they had the right to enact and endorse laws directly. This is really basic stuff, should be understood by everyone older than 7.
Not to mention that in the real world, all candidates are equally disinterested in the lives of people or fish. It doesn't matter who people vote for.
> If people had a long term vision, politicians would too.
Talk about putting the cart before the horse. People don't have to have long term vision, that's politician's job, they all promise good things but never deliver and keep blaming the guy before them instead.
Authority and responsibility inherently and unalterably lie with the people; that they either by explicit delegation or tacit toleration allow others to exercise power on their behalf does not relieve them of either. This is the basic thing that everyone ought to understand.
You don't have long term version?
I don't really like fish. I watch his videos more for the vibes. I did buy a can or two to give it a chance but I still just can't stand it.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/@KingArthurReviews
I must admit though I agree with you - the videos are kinda amusing !
I can't believe a weight-loss fad is going to take "my" sardines from the shelves.
Also, why only sardines? Any fatty fish will serve the same purpose. I guess a fad is a fad.
Here in the UK, for my lunch I've just had a 49p tin of sardines in tomato sauce from Aldi - I used to each smoked mackerel about 3 days a week for either breakfast or lunch, then some years ago turned to tinned. Then in the last year tinned mackerel moved to £1 a tin, from 50p before, so I gave sardines a go and I love them even more.
I usually have the ones tinned with tomato sauce, then 60g full fat Greek yoghurt, 100g carrots, 100g cucumber then cherry tomatoes and green salad. A really delicious and filling lunch, at less than 400 calories and with over 25g of protein. Plus costs less than a £1 a meal. Just not one to eat on my office days...
I had been feeling rather proud of this, especially avoiding meat for lunch, but maybe I need to find a different protein source.
(49p is a cheap tin though, and I'm not sure Aldi has a fish counter? Observation conducted at Waitrose with £1 tins and 3 by weight for 80p.)
Sadly Agent Smith was not wrong there.
See mouse and grasshopper plagues, feral cats, etc.
Wachowskis just don't know any better. You think it's air your breathing now? Oxygen? More like plant waste product.
Also no ecosystem is in perfect harmony. It's basically jenga tower where you pull a piece on a long enough scale it looks eternal.
> Look what you've done, dumbass
There used to be only 3 TV channels or so. You had things like Johnny Carson jokes causing a toilet paper shortage.
In Britain, Delia Smith's How to Cook caused 10% swings in egg sales, far more abundant and harder to affect than something like inventories of sardines. https://www.bbcamerica.com/blogs/british-icon-of-the-week-de...
Consider that we now have more tons of ships in the sea than there are bony fish:
https://what-if.xkcd.com/33/
More and more miles from shore every year
Since they told me I can't sell no stripers
And there's no luck in swordfishing here
I was a bayman like my father was before
Can't make a living as a bayman anymore
There ain't much future for a man who works the sea
But there ain't no island left for islanders like me.
People will believe anything.
I will say any 3 day diet weight loss is going to be water weight, though
Is it feasible to farm sardines?
Whether that's a technical barrier imposed by the biology of sardines being unsuited for how we do fish farming today, or more of a barrier of "it will never make financial sense to do this because so many in each batch would die" I don't know.
The really stupid thing about fad diets like keto is you either just start craving carbs because food is miserable without them, or you develop an eating disorder. The only thing anyone should do is eat normal, delicious, home-cooked food made from mostly plants.
There are now areas of the world with overtourism. Santorini, arguably Venice, Machu Pichu and maybe even Barcelona have more tourists than they can support. It's becoming a huge problem. Why is this the case? It's in part because people have disposable income to visit these places but I think there's a larger issue of why people want to visit these places. I think there's a FOMO element and the idea is pushed by social media in particular and media in general.
As another example, I blame at least in part the crazy NYC rent situation on Sex and the City, particularly on rents in the West Village. If you've lived in NYC you know there's so many SATC girlies living out their NYC dreams and not all of them have trust funds. You see this reflected in rents too. One side of 14th Street is Chelsea. The other side is the West Village. Rents on the Chelsea side are significantly lower than the other side because people want to be able to say they live in the West Village.
On a smaller scale you see this where people seem to view themselves as the main character in a movie or TV show and they're living out these scenes in their heads, typically to video and post online. They can be really inconsiderate about it too. Like just today I saw a video that someone in a public beach "dared" go in the water while someone was trying to get a photo of themselves and that other person got in frame. It really is main character syndrome [1].
I think what made a lot of things good in the past was lack of information (and the resultant FOMO). You've seen this in food trends too when Omega-3 became big and fish stocks suffered or when palm oil became big and that's a big problem.
Interestingly, China has a system to try and prevent everyone flocking to one or two cities ("hukou") and it's hard not to see the argument for this.
I have several triggers when I'm doomscrolling. One of the worst is when someone says "I'm trying the viral (restaurant, dish, bakery, bar, whatever)..." I've always hated this because whatever it is is never worth it. But the psychology of people wanting to show off this way is fascinating. It really feels like people's lives are that empty that they just want that external validation.
[1]: https://health.clevelandclinic.org/what-to-know-about-main-c...
I remember walking down a street in Istanbul, there were many restaurateurs saying "My friend, look at menu" (I joked after the trip "How was Istanbul? I met many of my friends there!"). Now I want to see "influencers" touting their products in the style of these restaurant touts.
Or, as we used to call it, 'keeping up with the Joneses'. The odd thing is that most people that go to the overly-touristy places have very little to say. Sure there are the pictures for social media, however, these are of what the food is like and what the beverages are like and these could be taken anywhere.
There is no adventure involved in tourism, and adventure satisfies in ways that tourism never will. With adventure there is no knowing what to expect, there are logistics problems to solve and there is purpose, namely to get from A to B, preferably in one piece, which is not a given.
With tourism there are no such problems, people have 'slaves' wait on them for the duration of the trip. There is no need to interact with the actual natives, just the hospitality workers, as in the 'slaves'.
In the past, a lot of work went into getting time off for the working man, with local-ish tourism to take people out of the smog filled cities and to the seaside (in the UK and elsewhere). A few generations on and this has been baked in, nobody takes their time to enjoy the house they pay to live in, there is this default action of going on some type of package holiday.
The typical package holiday is for the time poor, with so many big sights that have to be packed in, always the same tourism trail. For example, Brits visiting the USA might imagine this road trip, to hire a car in LA, to drive to Vegas, on to spend 20 minutes at the rim of the Grand Canyon and then on to Flagstaff, as if there is anything to see there.
They get back having seen nothing except car parks and the Interstate. The mad dashing around means they get the required photos but there is no adventure. So they have to go on another trip. How about Machu Pichu, next time round?
So, off they go. They come back to their normal life and have nothing to say, apart from what the hotel, flight and food was like.
It is an industry made possible by cheap flights and cheap rental cars, with none of them being that cheap if externalities are to be included. Given where the world is going regarding the 'war for oil', this tourism is going to vanish quite quickly.
Highly relevant: <https://www.thecut.com/article/nyc-west-village-neighborhood...>
[0] https://www.mbari.org/news/from-sardines-to-anchovies-and-ba...
[1] https://fishbio.com/collapse-pacific-sardine/
It's just too hard to check my posts when I'm weaving between traffic on the highway
https://youtube.com/@tinnedfishreviews
Kippered herring is in stock, though.