Detect

dude it's "ground beef"

https://www.beefmagazine.com/beef-quality/dude-it-s-ground-b... https://newfoodeconomy.org/bpi-pink-slime-ground-beef-usda-r...

Do you mean 1,500 kWh/mo? Generating 15 MWh/mo would be a very large residential system. $150 for 15,000 kWh of electricity saved/returned would only be $0.01/kWh.

Animal ag can both be a carbon sink and a carbon source depending on management. Ruminant animals play an important role in grassland ecosystems for nutrient cycling, which can affect the carbon cycle and potentially sequester carbon in soil. Whether we eat the animals is another question. Check out Carbon Farming or Holistic Management for more details.

Carbon farmer. Figure out ways to sequester carbon in soils while providing nutrient dense food to the local community and making a profit doing it.

Farmers are sunlight harvesters. Figuring out how to turn sunlight + carbon dioxide (renewables) into profitable products for sale can be achieved through good management in addition to appropriate technology.

Soil's water holding capacity can be increased through techniques like green mature and cover cropping. The permaculture approach to water is to slow it, spread it, and sink it.

I am in favor of synthetic meats and other protein sources like bugs. We just need to be mindful of the culture part of agriculture, where animal protein has been a large factor in many people's lives for a very long time.

There are also parts of the world where crop production doesn't make sense due to poor soil, erosion, water, climate, etc. Animal husbandry with good management practices is important and can help improve the functioning of these ecosystems. Now, whether we decide to eat these animals is another question.

Too much water can also be just as devastating as too little water. As our climate warms, more energy will be stored in atmospheric and oceanic waters, creating more powerful hurricanes and storms. On top of that, sea level rise will cause storm surges to be more destructive and costal erosion will gradually sink major costal cities. Climate change is water change.

Elemental Machines | Boston, MA / Cambridge, MA | ONSITE | Full-Time

http://elementalmachines.io/

Our mission is to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery by collecting data from the real world to tackle the reproducibility problem. We do this by building sensors and using machine learning to help scientists understand their own data better so they can work faster and more reliably.

Openings:

- Full Stack Software Engineer

- Android Developer

- QA and Support Engineer

http://elementalmachines.io/company/join-us/

Our software stack includes Ruby on Rails (RoR), JavaScript (some ES6), Sass, Slim, AWS, Postgres, and more. Feel free to ping me (software engineer) directly hao@elementalmachines.io.

Adjusting our meat consumption has a huge effect on agricultural water usage as well.

Making clean water extremely abundant and cheap is also part of the problem. When it's cheap and abundant, instead of valuing it, we tend to waste and pollute it. In many places, we're not paying the true cost of clean water. In other places, some bioregions just can't support as many people as it does today without expensive technology and its unintended consequences. It's not technology that needs to change; it's our worldview about our relationship with water.

Elemental Machines | Boston / Cambridge, MA | ONSITE | Full-Time

http://elementalmachines.io/

Our mission is to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery by collecting data from the real world to tackle the reproducibility problem. We do this by building sensors and using machine learning to help scientists understand their own data better so they can work faster and more reliably.

Openings:

- Full Stack Software Engineer

- Android Developer

- QA and Support Engineer

- Mechanical Design Engineer

- Application Engineer

- Sales Director

- Operations Manager

http://elementalmachines.io/company/join-us/

Our software stack includes Ruby on Rails (RoR), JavaScript (some ES6), Sass, Slim, AWS, Postgres, and more.

Feel free to ping me (software engineer) directly hao@elementalmachines.io.

Some Postgres RDS reserved instances (1yr no upfront) are more expensive than on demand. Is this correct? m4.large, m3.large

Raise panels up a bit and can graze animals underneath them too.

I agree with you that it's mostly feedlot grains that we could redirect to humans, and that feedlot grains is a surprising amount of what we produce in total.

"More than half the U.S. grain and nearly 40 percent of world grain is being fed to livestock rather than being consumed directly by humans"

http://news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-800-mi...

Feed Conversion Ratio (FCR) for cattle is about 10, pig 3, sheep 5, and chicken 2. That means we could feed about 10 times more people per hectacre on grains than using that grain as feed for beef. Ruminants are important for nutrient cycling and other ecosystem services, but far from efficient as a food source for humans. They are best utilized on marginal land where agriculture isn't ideal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_conversion_ratio

Seems unlikely there will be a silver bullet solution, especially one that's considered future technology. We have many low-tech solutions available today like soil carbon sequestration through better land management that can be part of a wide array of solutions.

Although the trend is global warming, each individual month/year can be more variable. In some places, at some times, it may even get colder. Regional/seasonal variables like El Nino, La Nina, and ocean currents can all come into play.

How do you get reliable data?

Use a trusted third party API like Good Guide or Environmental Working Group (EWG), which contains data on about a combined 300,000 products.

How will you make money?

Allow users to optionally tip (defaulted to 10%) an additional portion of their donation to TrueCost.

Do people actually care about the environmental impact of their purchases, or is it just social signaling? Could you capitalize on signaling with social media sharing of "I just offset the environmental impact of [my purchase] with TrueCost!".

70% of US consumers are concerned about environmental impact of their purchases sometimes, regularly, or every time they shop. Source: Cone Communications

There is definitely an opportunity to leverage social behavior to drive awareness and referral.

Problem: All products have some environmental impact, like carbon emissions, water use, energy use, etc. It's hard for consumers to know what environmental impact a product had to make good buying decisions.

Solution: With a browser extension, display product impact collected from trusted partner on eCommerce product pages and allow user to donation a portion of the priced externalities to help counteract environmental impact.

Built a prototype at a hackathon last weekend. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tInzzamB-A

gone

This is great info if there ever is a zombie apocalypse. Eight heads each people.

Hao Chen here. Great to see others move the project forward.

done

<3 Lighthouse! http://lighthouseapp.com/ Also, Open Atrium looks pretty sweet (but bulkier) if you have your own server. http://openatrium.com/

Can we make saving easier? Maybe Share/Email This?

Kodu Teaches Your Kids to Visually Program Their Own Video Games http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1796189

Avoid further relationship with your "friend." Make sure you have good documentation/proof of the amount of work you've put in and what you've done in case anything goes wrong.

Where's the RSS feed button? :)

This is more for infants/toddlers and using technology FOR their kids, but Amazon Mom (http://www.amazon.com/mom) looks like it would make my life easier.

Sounds like you already know what to do. PS. A good boss would want to help you grow in your career.