a1tsca13

@a1tsca13@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨They got us by the balls⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  In academia, promotion, tenure, funding, and pretty much everything someone needs to keep their job is tied to publishing in peer-reviewed journals. If I self publish I won’t keep my job. If a university ran a website for publishing, they would have to reimplement the peer review process, and often there may be ~a dozen people worldwide qualified to review a particular paper so it’s not just that others from within the university could review work. If a university is implementing all that, they have basically become a publisher and likely have costs they’ll want to try and recoup and could foreseeably implement a fee to publish.

  Don’t get me wrong - the journals have a predatory and exclusive model that should be dismantled. But until we fix promotion, tenure, and funding pathways in academia that have enabled the publishers to become what they are there will always be these problems – any other system that pops up will not get widely used because academics will be disincentivized from using it (as discussed in some other comments here).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"Being vegan is unnatural"⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  We have vastly increased our ability to produce food.

  And it has been largely the (petro)chemical industry responsible for this. The Haber-Bosch process transformed agriculture, but accounts for percent-level quantities of global energy consumption and carbon emissions. And it requires raw materials that are typically produced from hydrocarbons (although admittedly there are renewable options). And other nutrients typically come from mining (even organic options) - which displaces many species of all sorts. And this does not account for pesticides, etc., that others have mentioned.

  Prior to the development of modern chemistry, our best sources of fertilizer were often animal manures - which require breeding, raising, and ultimately usually killing animals.

  Sure, there is a lot we can do to minimize harm, and generally we should, and I try to myself as much as possible. But I’m not fooling myself into thinking that eating vegan or growing my food organically means nothing or no one suffered. Until we all go back to pre-agrarian societies, we will continue to cause large-scale destruction in some way. But of course this in itself would cause massive population decline and resultant suffering in humans.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Crap, not again!⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You don’t need to do this. If properly pruned, crape myrtles will form a canopy over the sidewalk that doesn’t interfere with pedestrians and actually provides shade; if topped like the picture, they will form an unruly mass of growth right at head height.