There's a handful of reasons to keep even beef in the equation, albeit at way, way lower levels than we produce it now.
One is co-production of other materials -- wool is another desirable material.
Another is optimizing land use. Some land isn't suitable for row crop agriculture, but can sustain grazing. There's also land we're irrigating for row crop agriculture right now from aquifers we really shouldn't be; converting it back to grassland and grazing on it would let us recapture some of the lost calories.
Then there's un-optimizing the food chain. From a food-per-acre standpoint we should be primarily subsisting on soy and whichever of corn, potatoes or rice grows best in the local soy & climate. Even if we are going all in on minimizing land usage, however, we don't want to produce exactly as much food as we need, because crops fail and famines are bad. You can aim to overproduce a little year to year and maintain a surplus of storage to cover the bad years, but you can't just cover the average bad year. You need to cover the worst years possible happening several years in a row, you need to be covering once-in-millennia bad luck. So you need to overproduce enough that you don't expect some of it to ever be consumed by humans.
So you need something to do with the extra corn you produce, besides feed it to people, that you can rapidly cut back on in case if crop failures to return food back to the supply. One option is ethanol, and another is livestock -- feed your surplus grains to livestock, and then eat them instead. If you have crop failures, you cull the herds, which frees up their feed stocks for human consumption, as well as adding the extra meat calories to the supply. (And this even happens somewhat automatically with market forces -- farmers are always arbitraging grain prices against meat prices, and a spike in grain prices will lead them to sell off livestock as they become less profitable, which will in turn depress meat prices further.)
Be aware you're repeating some outdated takes on land use.
Invasive cattle grazing on "worthless" land is a trope that's not true. Especially in the US west, we have seen massive ecological destruction at the hooves of cattle. They are not bison. They do not graze the same. The plants they consume do not regrow the same. They introduce a ton of issues.
Jon Muir called cattle, and other livestock, "Hooved Locusts", because of how they destroy the land.
The latest research is that we should absolutely be removing cattle from these "worthless" lands. We are still discovering how these lands work and we are finding so many benefits we had no idea existed.
We gimped nature and now we call that gimped version "how it's supposed to be". We use culture and heritage, "the western way of life", to perpetuate the systemic destruction.
But this trope of "white people decide the land is worthless" has a long history of being used to exploit the land/people for short term gain. Cattle grazing is a form of land theft. Destroying the land/ecosystem so people can't use it they way they have was, and still is, a form of land theft.
Also, the US west is getting so dry that cattle can't find enough grass so we do what? We pull water to grow grass in the desert so we can feed those cattle that are on "worthless land". Thereby making the issue worse. But are cattle ranchers and alfalfa farmers gonna give up their water? Ha! That's an affront to the Cowboy Way Of Life! We need cheap beef and stetson hats cuz this is Murica!
My iPhone 14 Pro 1TB finally broke down too much to remain usable a couple of weeks ago.
The screen shattered when the phone hit the floor. White and green lines on one side, making reading things more difficult and also straining on the eyes to look at at night. Since then, cracks in the screen cut my fingers ever ever so slightly on each touch. Not enough to make wounds, but enough to be discomfortable. I tried to use it still but over the next couple of days I dropped the phone on accident multiple times and now the touchscreen is not reacting as it should either. Some parts of the screen do not respond to touch at all, other parts still work, and others yet misregister where the touch is.
I investigated replacing the screen at third party phone shops. But it doesn’t make sense to pay to repair the screen. I was already living with a battery that was due to be replaced. And beyond that some hardware issue is preventing NFC from working since a year ago, so I can’t scan my passport NFC to renew my national bank id on it anyway either. Apple Pay doesn’t work, probably also because of the broken NFC. Finally, for whatever reason whenever I try to update iOS it fails saying it can’t verify the update after having downloaded it. Paying ~$200+ to replace the screen and battery and still having these other issues (NFC broken, and stuck on an older iOS version than it should) just wouldn’t be worth it.
I’ve been thinking long and hard about what phone to buy next for quite a while. And now that the screen broke and I was forced to make a decision I decided to not buy the latest greatest iPhone 18 Pro.
Because I am not as happy with Apple the company and their actions as I used to be.
I don’t want Android either however.
I ended up buying an iPhone 15 Pro 1TB second hand with good battery health. It gets me USB-C so that’s a plus compared to the 14 Pro I had.
All that is to say, no it’s not a given that we will keep buying new hardware from Apple directly anymore even if we did in the past used to buy our stuff new from them when time came to replace our old Apple devices. Of course even buying second hand is still supporting Apple indirectly to some degree. Because the people that do buy new from them know that a couple years later the amount they can sell that device for second hand to someone else is still pretty ok, relatively speaking.
Doesn't this just prove his point ? People will buy Apple product anyway, direct or indirectly. You are still using Apple service and Apple still can extract data from you.
It may have been limited, but the Axis forces were busy repeating Napoleon's classic blunder of freezing to death because Russia was too big to Blitzkrieg.
That's a good thing for the world: at least some sanctions are working.
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