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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • You couldn’t physically drink enough water. Math is not my strong suit but this seems pretty straightforward.

    It takes one calorie to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1 degree Celsius, by definition. Plugging in some numbers (a liter of water starting at a very frosty 1 C) takes almost 40 kilocalories or about 160 kiloJoules of energy. That’s like half of your “simply existing” calories per hour, so you’d need to consume 2 liters of ice-cold water every hour (and excrete every gram of it to 40, which you aren’t doing with your living body) just to break even.

    It gets more complicated when you factor in evaporative cooling and I already said I’m not a math-man but the environmental factor is simply too strong for biology.
















  • Had cheap goods. With the way our food costs have exploded in the last five years we almost certainly wouldn’t have leverage over local production.

    Ignoring that, the behavior that protectionist trade laws are avoiding is: Country A using tax subsidies to artifically deflate the cost of a good, flooding the market of Country B where it isn’t subsidized and eventually putting the producers there out of business so they become reliant on trade with Country A. Protectionism like this isn’t wrong, but people generally don’t like being told that they’re being barred from less expensive options so it gets dressed up in nationalism.