Its certainly an option. Chickens can live 7-12 years so that's a lot of feed for a chicken to not produce eggs. More economical to make soup. Their livestock, not pets.
In the UK, a big sack of feed for chickens costs around £12, and that will feed 15 chickens for a week (roughly). So I could be wasting 80p/week per unproductive chicken.
Lots of people think animals are dumb beasts. My neighbor threw a party with a bunch of people in his PhD program. Our dogs hang out and we left the gate open between our properties so the dogs could go back and forth.
One of the PhD students was amazed that if you threw a ball over the fence the dog knew how to go around the fence and through the gate to get the ball.
A friend of mine had a dog (Rover) that was half dingo. Dang, was he smart. But if he was on a rope attached to a tree, and wound around the tree, he could not figure out that he needed to run the other direction to unwind the rope.
When he went on vacation, he asked if I could walk Rover once a day, I said sure. Rover reveled in being the top dog in the neighborhood. One of his favorite methods to assert dominance was hilarious. We'd pass one yard that had a fence made from vertical planks butted against each other. The yard contained one of the beta dogs.
Rover found a knothole at just the right height, put his butt against it, and emptied through the hole into the beta dog's territory.
The beta dog went berserk. Rover literally pranced as we continued his walkies.
When our dog’s toy rolled under the couch he went and retrieved a flyswatter we keep in the cleaning closet and brought it to me. He had seen me use this only one other time when his toy rolled under there.
They can certainly learn things like using gates, however they don't seem to have a concept of object permanence. If they go to the other side of the fence and do not find the ball, they will tend to begin a spiraling search for it, rather than concentrate on where the ball logically should be if you tracked the trajectory of it and formed a concept of where it went even after it left your sight.
Dogs obviously have a concept of object permanence, since they know to go around the fence to look for a ball in the first place. They wouldn't look for it once it's left their sight around a fence otherwise. That they're confused if they cannot immediately find the ball only shows that they struggle to calculate arcs, which many humans also do.
And for anyone with a particularly intelligent but ball obsessed breed of dog you can ask them to get the ball so you can play and they’ll go from the front of the house around the back to pick it up off the top shelf in the shed where you placed it (but forgot yourself, but they remembered) and bring it to you.
I absolutely assure you: My border collie knows at all times where the ball is. There’s zero question of object permanance.
I swear people who talk about object permanence have never tested it.
The Wikipedia article about babies even talks about it not starting until month 8 [1]! At least, under "Contradicting evidence" they talk about other studies that showed as early as 3 months ...
I think people just want to feel special and just can't accept that other animals have the same abilities that we do.
Likely because their brain is optimized to find live prey, which tends to move around and take evasive actions. Intuitively understanding parabolic motion physics is probably not that useful in the wild.
I was "fortunate" to live through the dot com crash early in my career.
When the times were good, the messaging was we were all one big family. When the crash came, there were weekly layoffs. Co-workers that thought they were friends turned on each other to keep their jobs.
I learned to keep a fat emergency fund. I learned to work as a mercenary. I get in, I get out, I get paid. Then I live my life, which is not work. I keep no personal effects, and can be out the door in a second. Coworkers are acquaintances, not friends.
That's likely quoted from Red Green, a 90s TV show where the titular character always says that phrase while making absurd contraptions out of duct tape. (For example, converting a car to use gull wing doors, using only duct tape.)
Although I like the quote I do not think it is good advice for the younger generations. No early 20s to early 30s girl is going to settle for a guy just because he is "handy". It takes much more than that. It is also not fun being with someone who is not into you physically.
I actually disagree. If you are only a moderately attractive girl, and want children especially in this economy, a handy guy is the only way that's going to happen regardless of his perceived handsomeness. As long as he's not a stereotypical Reddit neckbeard, he'll probably be fine.
> It is also not fun being with someone who is not into you physically.
I don't actually believe this. Our prime of physical attraction only lasts 20 years give or take; but is then followed by another ~40 years of very limited attraction no matter who you are. Even for the healthiest and most attractive, it is completely inevitable that there will be a time without physical attraction.
>If you are only a moderately attractive girl, and want children especially in this economy, a handy guy is the only way that's going to happen regardless of his perceived handsomeness.
My sweet summer child, young women often have kids with guys who are handsome losers. I don't just mean accidents either. They do it on purpose because the guy looks good or they just really want a kid quick.
Bingo. Dating apps were my biggest nightmare. I don't think I've ever landed a good date out of them over the years. Meeting someone at a friend's BBQ? Easy as.
I still get PTSD seeing my friends swipe Tinder. So cruel.
HTTP was not designed for apps, it was designed for serving HTML. We had a decent solution in Java applets and the tech giants could play nice so we couldn't have nice things.
The work around has been a huge kludge of crap frameworks of the day trying to reinvent the OS and associated API in the browser. It sucks all the way down.
Are less able to be customized, reverse-engineered, and controlled by the user
Are subject to arbitrary, vague, constantly shifting, opaque app store approval rules
Require constant updates just to continue existing, since the platforms they target don't care for backwards compatibility, and are constantly releasing updates
Are hostile to open source projects that have limited resources, as those represent a drain on the system, since they generate no revenue
No, it's a test case for whether people understand exponential growth. The very first chapter of the book goes into this.
The inputs don't matter that much when you are growing exponentially. By the time you get pricing signals, you are already cooked.
Its like bacteria in a petri dish, one day you are at 12% full, then, 25%, then 50%, then 100%, then you die off.
We are already seeing the early signs of the system collapse with climate change and we have more and more people pumping more and more carbon into the atmosphere.
The keystone of modern society is agriculture, which was only possible because the climate stabilize 20k years ago. We are destabilizing that climate and are in uncharted territory. We had the opportunity to do a course correction when the book was published but people like you down played the ramifications. In the last 50 years we have done nothing and are now cooked.
Bacteria in a petri dish aren't a useful analogue for the real world. It's a fully artificial environment.
Bluntly, "you don't understand exponential growth" is the sort of thing said by people who don't understand it themselves. I'm really sick of this meme. COVID was full of nonsense being talked about exponential growth, and I was calling it out from the start (e.g. here on HN [1]). A huge number of people are confused about this topic, probably because so many of the self-proclaimed experts presented by media and government are also confused.
Limits To Growth and similar socialist/green arguments have several problems with the concept:
1. An implicit assumption that populations naturally grow exponentially until they run out of resources. They don't. There are many periods in human history where populations were stable for thousands or even tens of thousands of years, or where they actively shrunk despite not fully exploiting their resources. Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire, the history of the Australian Aboriginals and the whole modern developed world are examples of this.
2. An assumption that GDP cannot grow forever, even though it can. GDP isn't a natural resource, it's a number on a ledger. Nothing stops GDP growing exponentially because it's basically a multiplier of population and productivity (broadly defined as "technology"), and there's no known limit on technological progress.
3. To try and make (2) seem more plausible they ignore the possibility of technological progress reducing resource requirements. This is the problem Malthus had. But technology fundamentally changes the relationship between man and his environment, eliminating some constraints whilst creating others. Before fission was harnessed, nobody cared about uranium extraction. The resource was ignored by all arguments about limits to human growth. After reactors were invented uranium limits suddenly became relevant and coal limits became much less relevant, but uranium is abundant and power plants need hardly any, so this basically eliminated electricity generation as a meaningful constraint on human growth. For the societies that choose to use it, at least.
I learned these lessons the hard way early on in life. It was 2004 and there was one of the semi-regularly occurring peak oil scares happening at that time, which a friend turned me on to. The argument for peak oil at first seems irrefutable: oil is a finite resource, fields run dry, we're using lots of it and in many use cases there's no known replacement. On top of that, in 2004 world production wasn't increasing despite prices growing to never before seen levels, which gave the appearance of unsolvable supply constraints, and there were signs that the secretive Saudis could not pump more. The scare ended thanks to a few things: the 2008 recession (killed some demand for a while), the Bush Iraq troop surge, and fracking. The latter was known about in peak oil circles but at the time the technology was not yet proven, and many dismissed it as delusional "cornucopianism", meaning the belief that the needs of humanity can be solved through technology. Others said it can't work because of a pseudo-economic concept called EROEI (energy returned on energy invested). Of course we know what happened next: the US made fracking work and the US oil industry went from long term decline to the world's top producer of oil again. That broke the back of OPEC and prices fell again, albeit not to the low level they were at pre-2004.
I agree that we have a wealth of capabilities available. The modern Cortex M7 cores are fantastically powerful.
Still, cramming everything into a main core had tradeoffs. It's a big core to wake up & run, with significant power draw. If you start running a bunch of stuff, it can be hard to meet realtime constraints, to provide reliable processing where needed.
The blanket statement that more cores is more complicated feels too broad. There's times when io cores are much simpler cinceptually, such as when you have realtime needs such as drones might. Subdivision of responsibility & dedicated cores is a powerful way to de-complect concerns. And it can bring huge energy savings.
Multi-core is also the chip making strategy that actually makes sense. We can cram so many transistors onto a tiny tiny chip, but what do we use the transistors for? We can keep trying to build bigger faster single cores, but there's only so much instruction level parallelism and caching we can actually effectively utilize. Having tiny io cores dedicated to specific tasks can use an incredibly tiny amount of extra die space, while providing incredibly low power dedicated processing for specific subsystems. Seems like a win.
Let's resist making broad statements like "you don't need". What's "needed" might not be what's best. We should have open minds to consider advantages & disadvantages. I for one think tiny io cores can later in amazing possibilities, have seen the rp2040 as a huge leap in capabilities (throwback to the Parallax Propeller with wide SMT like behavior) that's enabled a ton of interesting flexibility & novel low power embedded creations to get off the ground.
