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I am well aware of what you are talking about. I am just trying to create a general understanding without resorting to ideology.

Why are you assuming that hunger has ideologically neutral solutions?

I already assumed we had enough technological capability

We do

that humanity as a whole shares the interest to solve this problem

It most certainly does not

What else remains?

The fact that some very powerful and very rich people stay powerful and rich by keeping other, less powerful and less rich people hungry

The inability to translate those capabilities into achieving the desired goals

We have the ability. The cost of addressing global hunger is in the billions. We could do it tomorrow with the stroke of a pen. The calories are there, the funds exist.

How else would you be able to make sense of the results without resorting to specifics of human history?

I don’t understand the question. How do you make sense of the results without resorting to the specifics of human history? Everything is the way it is now because of things that happened then.

But if you manage to work this general model, whatever answer you get albeit general would apply to every context.

There isn’t a model here. There’s a very facile understanding of the problem that leaves out its major driver. Researchers have already progressed well beyond this level of thinking and have proposed solutions. The reasons the solutions are still not being implemented is obvious, and people have pointed that out as well. This whole train of thought is like walking into a dark room and trying to figure out why it’s dark without looking at the switch. “Gosh, we’ve changed the bulb, we replaced the fixture, we’ve checked all the wiring, we’ve ensured the house has power, we’ve done everything! Why won’t the light turn on?” If you insist on leaving ideology out of it you’re never going to get to the answer because ideology is the answer.

How do you reconcile that with the fact that before the slave trade and colonialism, famine and malnourishment in Africa were comparatively rare? Why, despite the increase in technology and food production capability do these problems exist now when they didn’t then?

Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out

Blood Libel refers to the belief that Judaism incorporates the murder and consumption of (mainly) Christian children. Conflating this idea with what this meme is clearly referring to (what happening in Palestine) reinforces the Zionist propaganda that Zionism (and therefore the actual ethnic cleansing that Zionists are currently doing) is intrinsic to Judaism and should be immune from criticism on religious grounds.

But I suspect you are aware of that and are here in bad faith, so in short: no u

Short answer: No, because people in in industrialized societies aren’t taught how to dream properly.

Loooooong answer: Anybody here read The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho? If you haven’t, don’t. It’s bad. But it was hugely popular in the early aughts when The Secret was also kicking around and it has a similar vibe. A boy dreams of gold buried near the pyramids and a fortune-teller says it’s real and he should go looking for it. He sets out and along the way meets people who have Given Up and settle for mediocrity, and he turns their lives around with The Power of Entrepreneurship because anything is possible when you are chasing your dream.

He meets the titular alchemist, who gives him some gold for his journey and reaches the pyramids at long last. But he finds no treasure and gets beaten up by thieves who also steal his alchemist gold. Defeated, he goes home and meets someone who listens to his story, scoffs, and says that dreams are stupid; he keeps dreaming of treasure buried in the protagonist’s back yard, would you believe it? Our hero goes home and finds the treasure right where the man said it would be.

The explicit moral of the story is that you’re never supposed to give up even when chasing your dream and that if you are sincere in your pursuit and dogged enough things will find a way and the universe will manifest a bounty for you.

The implicit moral is that we’re all just being jerked sround for the amusement of the demiurge who rewards and punishes us arbitrarily.

The actual moral is that it’s always someone else’s dream. The protagonist’s dream didn’t come true, some random dude’s did; he just stole it. And what was there? Wealth, big whoop. Yeah, it’s actually a metaphor for whatever you desire most in the world, but, and let’s be real with ourselves here, for the majority of Oprah’s book club that desire is wealth.

The fact is that people are bad at predicting what will make them happy, both because things are always better in our imaginations and second because the hedonic treadmill is baked into our brains and always makes what we don’t have feel superior to what we do. And capitalism swoops in and hijacks all that machinery so spectacularly well that the world’s wealthiest countries are also it’s most miserable (also some if its happiest, paradoxically, but I’d argue Nordic social democracies do well at meeting the basic material needs of their citizens, at least).

The way off the hedonic treadmill is to actively practice gratitude, but that’s predicated on having your basic material needs met (no one should be made to. Feel grateful for an empty stomach).

I feel like this is mostly preaching to the choir because folks here are empathetic and understand that, however appealing, the lifestyles of the wealthy are wasteful and unsustainable, but I think it’s worth pointing out that dreaming in the developed world is so ruthlessly constrained by society and culture that it’s no longer useful, if ever it was.

Hoo boy wait til you see what Zelenskyy was up to.

It also provides a very thorough and detailed explanation for why trans athletes should be able to participate in the division that matches their gender. I just edited in some quotes for you.

46. The legislative findings for H.B. 500 contend that even after receiving gender-affirming hormone therapy, women and girls who are transgender have “an absolute advantage” over non-transgender girls. This assertion is based on speculation and inferences that have not been borne out by any evidence.
47. First, these arguments overlook the population of transgender girls and women who, as a result of puberty blockers at the start of puberty and gender affirming hormone therapy afterward, never go through a typical male puberty at all. These girls never experience the effects of high levels of testosterone and accompanying physiological changes. They go through puberty with the same levels of hormones as other girls and develop typically female physiological characteristics, including muscle and bone structure. Idaho’s law would bar them from participation in female athletics with absolutely no medical or scientific basis even based on the standards set forth in the legislative findings. …
48. The legislative findings also state that “benefits that natural testosterone provides to male athletes is not diminished through the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.” This is not true. As noted above, puberty blocking treatment completely blocks the production of testosterone and someone who has undergone both puberty blocking treatment and then gender affirming hormone therapy to initiate puberty consistent with gender identity would have none of the impacts of testosterone on the body that would be typical for a non- transgender male. It is also not true that gender-affirming therapy – even for those who have not undergone puberty blocking treatment – does nothing to minimize the impact of testosterone on the body. In fact, consistent use of testosterone blockers and estrogen has a significant impact on the body.
49. The legislative findings also note that “Men generally have ‘denser, stronger bones, tendons, and ligaments’ and ‘larger hearts, greater lung volume per body mass, a higher red blood cell count, and higher hemoglobin” and suggest that such characteristics lead to athletic advantage and cannot be altered by sustained gender-affirming hormone therapy. However, the noted higher red blood cell count and higher hemoglobin are both testosterone dependent. They are both reduced as part of sustained gender-affirming hormone therapy. And there is currently no evidence that the remaining noted physiological characteristics actually are advantages when not accompanied by high levels of testosterone and corresponding skeletal muscle.

Edit to the edit: More

For example, the fact that transgender women who go through typically male puberty will tend to have larger bones than non-transgender women may actually be a disadvantage. Having larger bones without corresponding levels of testosterone and muscle mass would mean that a runner has a bigger body to propel with less power to propel it.
54. Similarly, in a sport where athletes compete in different weight classes (e.g. weight lifting), the fact that a transgender woman has bigger bones may be a disadvantage because her ratio of muscle-to-bone will be much lower than the ratio for other women in her weight class who have smaller bones

Edit to the edit to the edit: I see what happened, I got to the comment after it had been edited and OP put in the expert testimony. Removing snark but leaving in quotes. Good on you for changing your mind.

Unless you believe that people will change their genders expressly for an advantage in sports, the differences aren’t salient. And you shouldn’t believe that.

[Bongo’s] cousin, Gen. Brice Clotaire Oligui Nguema, was declared the transitional president by the army. Formerly a bodyguard for Bongo’s father, the late President Omar Bongo, Oligui was also previously head of the Secret Service and the Republican Guard.

Evidently so - guess it’s an open question about whether this represents a genuine transition to something better or just a dude trying to score a promotion.

Archive link to bypass paywall

Unfortunately, though, mink farms in Poland have become wrapped up in the country’s culture wars. A previous attempt to ban mink farms in 2020 almost brought down the government, despite widespread support for the ban. The far right especially mobilized against it. One member of the family that controls the vast majority of the mink farms in Poland said the proposed ban was supported by the same people “who promote L.G.B.T., same-sex marriage, abortion, euthanasia and so on.” The conservative government backed off.
Such shortsightedness isn’t the monopoly of the far right. In the United States, a provision banning mink farming made it out of the House last year, only to be killed in the Senate in a bipartisan effort — with many Democratic senators joining Republican Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, where many mink farms still operate, to strip the ban from the legislation.

Thanks; sounds like they’ve already got all the Langleybucks they can handle.

Having worked in wetland restoration I can say with confidence that section 404 of the CWA was always only a fig leaf that slowed but did not substantially reduce destruction of wetlands - typically what would happen is a project would get approved and then follow up was shifted to the localities who would have an incentive to ignore projects that failed. There was more enforcement if the area was an important to endangered species or migratory birds and the EPA would occasionally pursue enforcement on unauthorized alterations, but the statistics demonstrate that wetland area in the States has been in continuous decline going back to the colonial period.

The really funny-ish irony in all this is that the reasons for protecting wetlands in the first place were mainly economic - wetlands serve as important buffers for floods and capture storm runoff. You typically don’t want to build in low-lying frequently flooded areas because that’ll cost you in the long run. All this decision does is ensure that the consequences of climate change will be even harsher in areas that experience increased rainfall. But the dudes must rock.

with every incentive to keep prices low

I don’t know about that - regulatory capture is a problem. Public services commissions that are responsible for regulating private energy companies tend to have a strong reputation of rubber stamping rate hikes.

What in the name of the Brimstone Scented One is a Christdem?

Not sure what this is supposed to demonstrate. It (correctly) points out that drinking the water is just a stunt and that the underlying failures that created the extremely justified mistrust weren’t addressed.

Men never outgrow their “Hey, I’ll give you 5 bucks to eat this bug” days, they just keep raising the stakes.

Is this them trying to fast track the AutoReiv development program? _{looking forward to the three upbears this reference is going to get me.}