I was using modern in a semi-disparaging sense, where ideas from intellectual movements such as brutalism (a branch of modernism) have been incorrectly applied to agriculture.
Look how big the industrial cow (bovoid according to international labeling standards) has become. Bow before it until your heart explodes!
By that definition, places like Europe and New Zealand don't produce modern beef.
I really miss the days of $2/lb grass-fed New Zealand ground beef.
Hopefully most people here getting ribeyes aren’t getting them from the same factory farms that supply McDonald’s and sell other cheap kinds of beef. A ribeye is an occasional luxury and best bought from the farmer.
The industry has mostly consolidated packing and distribution. McDonald's is mostly selling trimmings from cows that also produce high-end steaks.
Surprisingly enough, they hold most beef processing plants to higher standards than the rest of the industry (they're still buying cheap trimmings, don't get me wrong), because they do so much volume, basic probability tells us that most food poisoning outbreaks would hit them otherwise.
Sure, you could find a farmer that raises cows and butchers them on site, but that's rare, and the easiest way to actually achieve that is to buy a whole or half cow at a time.
Most small farms don't bother with that: they raise it from calf to adult on grazing land, then send it to a feed lot where the miracles of modern science significantly increase the cow's weight before slaughter. Cows that are still producing calves get retained to grow the herd next year.
If you want to pay extra for this, look for "grass-fed, grain-finished" beef. Most unlabeled stuff in the US goes through that funnel though.
Back when McDonalds was first rolling out their standardized restaurants and menu, it was pretty common for restaurants to buy fresh ground beef from local sources, some of whom were less clean and less careful about temperatures and selling old meat. It was also common for them to mix in old meat with fresher meat to try to "hide" it. Since it's all ground up, it's hard to tell.
So they developed standards and demanded that all their hamburgers be formed, frozen, and packaged by the processor and kept frozen until cooking. It's really the safest way to handle that volume of ground beef through the distribution chain.
Apparently their 1/4 lb burgers now use fresh beef, not frozen. Not sure how that's handled but it sounds more risky.
Too bad. I get mine from the small town butcher/locker when I’m in the Midwest in summer, and the neighborhood farmer’s market on the east coast the rest of the year. A couple of ribeyes a year and I’m good, so I see them as an affordable luxury where I can pay for good prime meat from a short supply chain.
I'm not trying to read your comment as whataboutism, but it did get me wondering: From a moral or ethical standpoint, if there is a gradient route from "very immoral to moral", but it involves first going from "very immoral" to just plain old regular immoral - do we view it as an improvement or a deficiency? Is there a route that involves going from very immoral to moral in one direct step?
For example, exploitation is bad, but child exploitation is worse. So moving from just child exploitation to adult exploitation is a positive move that still results in an abhorrent status quo. On the other hand I can't think of an example where we went from child exploitation --> no exploitation of any kind...
I think that the key could be that getting rid of child labor is meant to trick people into thinking that they were not immoral to purchase. However, that doesn't work if they just switched to a different kind of slavery.
You need to read 2.5 sentences into your link to see that it matches the headline of this thread:
De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB) has improved the tradability of its gold reserves by transferring part of the gold holdings from New York and Ottawa to London. This ensures that DNB is better prepared for severe crises.
In view of increasing geopolitical unrest, DNB is strengthening…
Right. But it doesn't say what kind of geopolitical unrest, and it draws a stark contrast to an article that is filled with all sorts of unproven guesses about it (guesses that are quoted as being "inherent").
California alone grows about half of the US's nuts, fruits, and vegetables. Both the West Coast and rest of the country could reconfigure production to serve themselves if desired.
We can do more than hope: Move the wall from the southern border to the eastern border (and probably embargo whatever oil rigs and space launch platforms are planned for places like Monterey Bay)
That way, we can get to keep our beaches, and continue to hire migrant labor from the rest of America to help during harvest season.
Streaming is getting worse fast. I basically just pay for curation, and AI slop is creating cracks in that model. Some of the musicians I like are getting crushed by sybil style attacks, where there are 10 new albums in their artist page, but only one is theirs.
Fortunately, sending a screenshot to Claude tells me what to push in a minute or so, but, unfortunately, I can’t just hand it an API endpoint and have it scrub all this crap weekly.
(No idea why the streaming service can’t just do that themselves, of course…)
Of course, for movies, it’s gotten to the point where I just drive to the used DVD store. $1-5 per movie used (including blurays); $20-30 new. I usually walk out with a dozen or so films for $100. This is easier than tpb.
I use firefox and sometimes safari. I had to install chrome recently, and I don’t understand how people stand it. It’s a half-assed attempt to reimplement windows 95 era preload spam. (Or non-decrapified win11).
I don’t understand how it has any market share. It’s like finding out that 80% of people voluntarily install browser toolbars that force penis pill ads down your throat, and then there are a bunch of HN fanboys saying that all other alternatives are worse.
Any news on what happened to the statewide “bury high risk lines” project? I get the impression it was very expensive, since PG&E was touting it, but the last time I heard (a year or so in), they had not yet buried 10 miles of line, statewide. This was a few years ago.
For reference, we have buried about 1000ft of line on our property (pg&e actively prevented us from burying an additional 200ft of their line that runs through trees and has been taken out by limbs since then).
So, we’re over 1% the statewide first year burying project. (Our lines do not count towards their total).
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