The biggest IP bubble now is AI, and the main bottleneck of AI is energy to power those datacenters. Doesn't google use as much energy as a few small countries now?
Biggest pharma IP now is Ozempic, which let's be honest here, is because westerners are addicted to processed corn and fried stuff. And hectares of monoculture corn sprayed with Roundup and sprinkled with just the right amount of laboratory-calibrated satiating salt is far easier to produce than a balanced diet. And what is needed to grow all that corn, soy, and alfafa feed? The tapped-out Colorado or the dwindling Ogallala...
I'm sure there are a couple of pure IP-value plays out there, but look deep enough and most everything is tied back to food, fuel, or the finite ability of the ecosystem to maintain infinitely-exponential growth.
>Biggest pharma IP now is Ozempic, which let's be honest here, is because westerners are addicted to processed corn and fried stuff. And hectares of monoculture corn sprayed with Roundup and sprinkled with just the right amount of laboratory-calibrated satiating salt is far easier to produce than a balanced diet. And what is needed to grow all that corn, soy, and alfafa feed? The tapped-out Colorado or the dwindling Ogallala...
Doesn't Ozempic make people eat less? If anything it's disproving your point. It's providing value, but at the same reducing the amount of "food and fuel" consumed.
To me it's more like slapping an expensive patch on an imperfect solution. Instead of encouraging healthier diets which have lots of follow-on nutritional and long-term medical benefits, we're paying pharma a huge monthly subscription price to keep doing something that's causing the problem in the first place. It's better than nothing, sure, but holistically it looks more like a rent-extraction trap to me.
It does work for a small minority of society. For the rest it does not.
Also, it's very hard to make something work which huge monied interests design products in a manner to ensure you fail. Are you just going to ask your grocery store to stop putting salt-fat-sugar in bright packages right by the checkout, packages and foods that are being developed by well paid groups to get you to consume as much as possible.
It's also very hard when your body is designed to do one thing. Consume as many calories as possible so you don't starve to death, because your genes are screaming at you "Starvation is coming, it always does".
So the only 'cool' statement is yours by completely not understanding the situation at all.
Junk food is convenient and more enjoyable, at least in the moment of eating. In the last 60 years there have been changes to the environment that reduce physical activity (more automobiles, less walking, less strenuous physical labor on the job) but I think that the most relevant change is the abundance of highly palatable calories. 60 years ago we largely didn't have "convenience foods" and the fastest snack you could make yourself (like a cold sandwich or a piece of fruit) didn't have the "craveability" of Doritos or microwaveable egg rolls. Back then the average American could afford to buy far more calories than needed, but those calories would take prep labor and/or not be highly palatable, so in practice many fewer Americans overate buttered popcorn the way that people overeat Doritos today.
America was on-average wealthier than most of the world and an early adopter of highly palatable convenience foods, so its obesity problem came on earlier. Global obesity rates are rising as more people globally can afford microwave ovens, frozen pizzas, drive-through restaurants serving french fries, and other such aids for high speed ingestion of delicious, calorie-dense foods.
Most people who need to lose weight cannot willfully maintain diet alterations in the long term. They go back to old habits. For 99.9% of human existence starvation was a much more common health threat than obesity and we're just not "wired" to experience excess food intake as a threat. The GLP-1 drugs like semaglutide reduce the desire to overeat, regardless of how palatable the food is, so people who could not lose weight before are able to eat less without having to consciously suppress desire every day.
Advice doesn't work that well in general, especially when it's vague and general advice like that. I would also guess that there are competing forces trying to make you eat their product and that they put a lot of money into that.
Because humans (like most animals) are optimized at a deep level to seek high-energy foods, and neither encouragement or shame are powerful enough to override that.
Yes, everything is ultimately dependent on physical resources, but the value creation is at a higher level, and you hopefully get more value out of less resource as things advance. I don't consider AI a positive example, it's a hype bubble for sure. But think how much computing power per watt you get compared to 30 years ago.
The Haber–Bosch process that powered the green revolution is merely a way of converting fuel into heat into fertilizer.
Calories per hectare is one way of measuring food systems, and a great way when we assume fuel inputs are infinite, inexhaustible, and cheap. Calories per unit of inputs is another way.
The green revolution was not only a result of the Haber-Bosch process, although that's an aspect I wasn't thinking about.
Hybridization of crop plants increased the calories per hectare per year produced. Again, I don't know if the plants were actually producing more edible nutrients per pound of fertilizer.
> And hectares of monoculture corn sprayed with Roundup and sprinkled with just the right amount of laboratory-calibrated satiating salt is far easier to produce than a balanced diet
Man, i wish Americans were just eating the corn with salt. Would be a lot healthier than corn starch+syrup whatever.
Is it, though?
The biggest IP bubble now is AI, and the main bottleneck of AI is energy to power those datacenters. Doesn't google use as much energy as a few small countries now?
Biggest pharma IP now is Ozempic, which let's be honest here, is because westerners are addicted to processed corn and fried stuff. And hectares of monoculture corn sprayed with Roundup and sprinkled with just the right amount of laboratory-calibrated satiating salt is far easier to produce than a balanced diet. And what is needed to grow all that corn, soy, and alfafa feed? The tapped-out Colorado or the dwindling Ogallala...
I'm sure there are a couple of pure IP-value plays out there, but look deep enough and most everything is tied back to food, fuel, or the finite ability of the ecosystem to maintain infinitely-exponential growth.