This is the kind of alarmist media that cripples people with anxiety and leads to learned helplessness. We want to be giving people hope for change, not taking it away.

I wish I could just up and buy a farm, that sounds like the life to me.

What it seems to me that you’re suggesting is essentially crowd sourcing a mix of investigative journalism and data analysis, which is not a skill I think that just anybody can pick up and do properly. To be fair I’ve never tried my hand at investigative journalism, but I have done a few units of data analysis and trust me there’s a hundred different ways to do it wrong. Even among the experts, there’s a lot of disagreements to what the best approaches are. I had a teacher even say that if you give a set of data to 10 data analysts, you’ll get back 12 different ways of interpreting it.

That is all to say that I’m not sure how much you’d be solving by providing another forum for people to post their takes on public policy issues, but then again if you manage to attract the right crowd of critical thinkers, who also happen to be open minded enough not to insert their own agendas into matters, perhaps people might hold each other accountable?

BTW have you checked that something similar doesn’t already exist? Insert obligatory xkcd comic:

Do the numbers themselves have any specific origin or meaning?

Wood is mostly cellulose and lignin, which holds no nutritional value to us humans. Another comment said that termites have certain enzymes which digest it, but it’s actually the bacteria in their guts which break down the woody fibres so they can turn it into glucose. So, theoretically, maybe we could isolate those bacteria and somehow incorporate them into our guts too? I mean it probably wouldn’t work, but you never know until you try right?

iphones aren’t that common in Australia where I am so it’s never come up as a problem here. I usually give people shit when I find out they’re using one cos imo they’re a waste of money lol

Sadly I fear you’re right. It is nice while it lasts though, it takes me back to the early days of reddit