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Some startups are trying to synthesize edible fats from non-biological feedstocks, using just energy, water, carbon monoxide, and hydrogen, through the Fischer Tropsch process.
Personally I'm more interested in seeing whether that can expand into just manufacturing hydrocarbons with excess solar energy, rather than synthetic food, but it's still cool to see that people can do it.
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I can do that. I'll keep track of everyone's food, you know, in exchange for food.
One thing to think about is that all birds are descended from a common ancestor that is carnivorous. Every omnivorous or herbivorous bird evolved that diet from ancestors that primarily ate animal products.
Just goes to show that with enough time, life finds a way to make use of biomass all around it, even if it means evolving away from an ancestor's dietary limits.
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What does looking "healthy" mean in this context?
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Dull Men's Club is a fantastic fediverse community where this kind of stuff tends to be discussed.
According to this analysis (probably a biased/motivated source but not one worth lying about actual output for its members to make economic planning around), each bushel produces 2.9 gallons of ethanol, 14.5 lbs of distillers' grain, and 0.9 lbs of corn oil.
Distillers grain is a pretty useful animal feed, with about the same amount of calories, and a higher protein content, than regular corn per pound.
So if a 54 lb bushel of corn that has been used for ethanol production still has about 14-20 lbs of grain equivalent (depending on how important that higher protein content is for the animals being fed), then some percentage of that corn being used for ethanol should still be counted towards animal feed. Depending on how you want to account for the oil, too, there's probably some feed value there, too.
Weight of human beings, weights at the gym, etc.: pounds
Height of people: feet and inches
Height of buildings: mostly feet, but occasionally meters.
Depth of water in scuba: meters
Kitchen weight: grams
Kitchen volume: fluid ounces only between 0-128 oz, then gallons after that. Decimal places, not fractions. So for example, cocktail recipes should all be in ounces, no tablespoons or teaspoons.
Distances in wilderness: meters/km
Distances on a football field: yards
Distances on a basketball court: feet
Distances on roads or in cities: miles
All temps in Fahrenheit.
Energy in calories for food and heat, watt hours for electricity, joules for everything else.
Those percentages don't really add up to 100, though.
Something like 40% of American corn is used as a feedstock into ethanol fuel production. But that just strips out most of the starches and carbohydrates for fermentation into alcohol. The remaining proteins and fats are used mostly for animal feed. And somewhat surprisingly, the captured CO2 is sold as an industrial CO2 product, such as dry ice. So for that 40% of corn, we could say it's used for ethanol production. Or we could say it's used for animal feed. Or other processes. But it's really all of the above.
Modern American corn and soybean farming is just basically efficiently producing a bunch of bio feedstock into whatever processes can make use of those products, whether for human food, animal feed, industrial processes, etc.
The horse self driving mode is pretty good though, with its built-in hazard avoidance and lane keeping.
Ozempic works by making you not want to eat the pizzas. It'll never be a performance enhancing drug for sports because the top levels already have nutrition habits indistinguishable from eating disorders.
Why should I change—he's the one who sucks!
So it's not commonly reported, but all cause mortality is lowest in the "overweight" category of between 25-30 BMI. There's reason to believe that "overweight" but not "obese" is healthier than "normal."
Wikipedia says some categorize avocadoes as drupes:
I only really know the U.S. market, but our top two selling new vehicles (Ford F-150 and Chevy Silverado) have a full EV options that are similarly priced as their gasoline counterparts. They start at $10k more than the entry level gasoline trim levels, but also have options/features included that are comparable to similarly priced gasoline trim levels. And these trucks are a bit unusual in that options and features can literally more than double the price while still carrying the same model name (cheapest F-150 is $40,000 and the most expensive is about $90,000 with full options).
Our third most popular vehicle is the Toyota RAV4, which is available as a plug in hybrid, but the plug in model doesn't sell that well. But Toyota has been slow at actually wanting to build and sell EVs. The fourth most popular, the Honda CR-V, is primarily a traditional hybrid.
Skimming past some more pickup trucks, the seventh most popular selling car is the Tesla Y, and the most popular pure EV that isn't available as any gasoline powered variant.
Looking at the actual EV platforms available in the US, most of the big plays from non-Tesla companies have happened in the last 5 years.
Volkswagen was a bit earlier than most, with a few specialized models launching in 2019-2021, but they didn't really move that many units.
The Korean manufacturers Kia and Hyundai and their shared EV platform had a bit more success with sales volume, and started with 2021 models, so that their used EVs are becoming available on the used market.
GM's big EV platform, the BEV3 (which also powers Honda's EVs) launched with the 2023 model year, and most models started with the 2024 model year.
Ford has their Mustang Mach-E (beginning in 2021) and F-150 Lightning (beginning in 2022), but both of those are one-off platforms while they work to develop a modular platform for building multiple models with shared electric parts.
Skimming through the offerings by other traditional automakers, there's BMW's i series, which led to electric options for several of their models beginning in 2022, and Stellantis with a bunch of European models and a handful of American models hitting the market beginning in 2024 or so.
Pure electric manufacturers like Rivian, Lucid, Polestar have also released some models in the U.S., mostly released in the last 5 years as well.
So it really seems like the higher volume sales of new non-Tesla EVs picked up in the last 2-3 years, and there will be plenty of used options in the next 5 years. To me, it looks like an inflection point that can sustain EV as the default pretty soon.
The economics are basically always shifting. Real world depreciation and maintenance don't always follow the model projections, and neither do actual fuel/energy price projections. Electricity service has skyrocketed in a lot of places in recent years, while gasoline prices have remained pretty low, which obviously affects the accuracy of the calculations and modeling that were done 5 years ago. Not to mention, both gasoline and electric energy pricing vary heavily between place.
And, of course, the ever changing regulatory landscape might affect pricing and resale value, as well.
Plus the thing with cars is that most people aren't buying the absolute bare minimum they can afford. People are willing to spend more on things: passenger and cargo space, performance, aesthetics, features/comfort, exterior dimensions that fit their own needs (for example, people who live in a city and want a car that can fit in tiny spaces), etc. For someone who is looking at total cost of ownership of something like mid tier or even luxury model, they should be comparing specific models they'd consider.
Ultimately, people need to do the calculation for their own specific situations. Someone in the market for a minivan in Detroit is gonna have different considerations than the person looking for a pickup truck in Dallas or a luxury sedan in Los Angeles or an economy car in Honolulu.
And as things shift, we'll likely see more people make the decisions that are right for themselves in that particular moment. Including people who want to pay more for something not directly financially beneficial to themselves, whether it's the driver who wants a manual transmission and the sounds of a revving internal combustion engine, or the person who would rather spend a little bit of extra money to do something more for climate change. Or the person who wants to boycott Elon Musk and will spend a bit more getting another non-Tesla EV.
At this point, my next car is almost certainly an EV, but I'm not going to prematurely sell my current car to make it happen.
Depreciation is a massive slice of the pie in all cars, but EVs are hit even harder.
I think that's a quirk of Tesla trying to preserve market share by aggressively cutting prices of their new models over the past 5 years, which naturally puts pressure on all used models on the road. I don't think that can last.
If EV manufacturers are racing to compete on price, then the new EVs will get cheaper faster to where EVs are cheaper than ICE vehicles new. And if the EV manufacturers stop cutting prices, then that will alleviate that depreciation pressure.
Maybe replace dead batteries with used but still somewhat working batteries?
Why not replace them with new batteries?
Also, you're not engaging with the fact that the typical ICE car lasts an average of 12 years. If there's a batch of survivors that lasts much longer than average and are accessible to the people of your country, what makes you think the same won't be true of EVs when they get old enough?
So if you're in a country where it's economically feasible to continue maintaining cars beyond 15 years, why wouldn't you think that the much cheaper electric cars wouldn't dominate the market even more?
Compared to the U.S.'s low adoption rates, EVs sell at higher rates in certain rich countries like Norway and Denmark, middle income countries like China and Turkiye, and poor countries like Estonia and Nepal. The cheapest EVs, globally, are cheaper than the cheapest ICE vehicles.
And that's a problem for ppl who buy 20 year old cars.
The cost of maintaining a car to last 20 years can be applied to EVs and ICE cars alike. I suspect that EVs will be easier to maintain to those ages. In the U.S., that doesn't really happen in large part because our labor and parts network is expensive enough that buying new is comparably cheaper than repairing, past the 15 year mark, for most vehicles. EVs don't actually change the equation any.
Batteries only last 5 to 10 years max,
Real world studies are showing they last about an average of 12-15 years on average, and every manufacturer has a warranty for at least 8 years, with many up to 10.
A gasoline car can be fueled in 30 seconds
The typical passenger gas station pump flows at 7.9 gallons per minute. For most passenger cars and trucks, with tanks between 15 and 35 gallons, that's about 2-5 minutes of pumping.
A typical level 3 charger will take a battery from 10% to 80% in about 25 minutes. And chargers can be in places where gasoline pumps can't be, like ordinary parking lots and garages. So the dual purpose parking where you can charge the car while you shop at the grocery store or work out at the gym or sleep overnight at home is just a completely different paradigm from what we're used to.
The average car lasts about 12 years, by the way. EVs last basically as long as ICE vehicles. Which also makes sense, because it doesn't have to mix the fluids that lubricate and cool with combustion residue and foul up the engine that way.
So your data is out of date, and those fears that were commonly cited in 2015 have pretty much proven to be false for the technology that was around in 2015. Now, in 2026, there's been even more advances in managing battery/charging health and chemistry, with more of an infrastructure for maintenance, repair, and charging.
Sarah's Scribbles is one of the better comics for drawing the author's self as pretty cute in most comics but knowing how to draw herself as an ugly goblin when the comic is making a point about insecurity or embarrassment around physical appearance.
That comic is basically the gold standard for how to convey those ideas in an otherwise cute art style.