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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2025

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  • https://www.foodandwine.com/are-vital-farms-eggs-ethical-8723788 They got sued for false advertisement and a rundown on food and wine tells the details but tldr: they didnt lose the lawsuit and the settlement with PETA was about conduct by the lawyers not the farmers. That said almost all egg farming cannot be particularly humane since it starts with putting all male chicks into a shredder alive.

    Edit: they are “certified humane, pasture raised” which enforces minimum outside time and addresses a lot of the concerns that turned me off back when I stopped.

    Old text that isn’t true for vital farms here:

    !This brand is at minimum “certified humane”, which carries some actual requirements they must meet, which includes at least X square feet of outdoor space available to each chicken, which is a measurable thing. However, as the article points out, there’s no required amount of time the chickens spend there, so that space could be “available” to them in the same way that the grand canyon is “available” to all people in America. It might not be feasible to get there, and there’s no required minimum indoor space so it could be 100million chickens in a shed with a single doggy door that connects via tunnel to a cattle ranch next door. Technically available but designed to minimize use.

    I used to pay the premium for these and… pete gerties(? I think) but learning how little was enforcably being done for how much extra i was paying made me jaded and i slowly phased eggs out of my home diet. Decide for yourself. Certified humane is better than not Certified humane, and almost all the rest of the labels mean nothing and are not checked or enforced by any third party.!<






  • Wow really leaning on that “mildly” interesting. The setup was long, lots of background which was great, but then just two examples and both were about external things (fantasy league and a book) that left it pretty unsatisfying. I’m sure the author tells a lot more white lies than that. And they either kept doing those lies without thinking about it, or missed an opportunity to talk about how the smallest lies add up. The “I’m good, you?”, “wow that sounds so cool”, “dinner was great” that sort of thing. The line between not saying and lying by omission could be explored. Lots of potential here






  • It’s always some designer behance thing for these air moisture harvesters. Here’s the material they talk about https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/smll.202304562. Which shows a harvesting efficiency of about 0.2 g/g so you need 5x as much MOF as you want water in the end, so a liter of water per cycle requires 5 kg of MOF (not sure how the efficiency scales with increasing amounts, might be less efficient). The other issue is that if you want a liter of water, you need a LOT of air in that little chamber. 50%humidity at 30 C holds 15 grams of water per cubic meter, so 1 liter of water requires 66 cubic meters of air, or about the size of a 5mx5m room.

    Additionally, to be fully passive, this machine can only be cycled once per day. So the most realistic version of this looks more like: a large, heavy container of MOF, multiple kilograms, spread out like hvac filter to maximize airflow, sits out all night when the humidity spikes, loads up on water. Then in the morning the mof is sealed into a box with a solar collector to heat the box, and water leaves the mof and condenses somewhere cooler.

    Maybe a better version is lightly powered by a solar panel, and has like 4+ smaller mofs that it rotates into the sun to extract for an hour, then into the shade to absorb more, and there’s always one absorbing in the shade, and one sweating in the sun, but that will cut the efficiency of the MOF significantly since the temperature and humidity are not as good for absorption during the day.

    All in all, I wish people would stop posting water harvesters. Water insecurity is not really a problem of “no water exists in this environment so I have to take it from the air” but rather a water management and infrastructure problem. And there are quite few places that experiences regular extremely high humidity, but no standing or running water.




  • The video in the link has some really good shots from the side, it looks pretty thick, but this will be my first, so I’m not sure how thick is too thick.

    He also says that they’re gonna email all the pre-orderers before with the finalized design and let you swap to the smaller one without losing your place in line, if that’s an alternative that might interest you.