This is basically a press release for The Food Systems Economic Commission, a ghoulish think tank for greenwashed liberal policies. Its primary contributors draw from McKinsey, “green” capitalists, useless NGOs offering technocratic solutions that avoid challenging the key status quo, other liberal think tanks, and World Bank (bad things, not to be trusted). And various academics (they run the gamut). There’s a reason they all have headshots like every other soulless C-suite exec.

An easy way to tell whether an article on this topic is full of it is to see whether it highlights food sovereignty. Major functions of World Bank and the IMF are to undermine food sovereignty as a condition of receiving loans countries are forced to take on due to the global economic (and military) system. To make imports (usually from the US) cheaper than domestic production for large categories of foods, as richer countries maintain their own food production subsidies while the loans are conditioned on destroying recipients’ subsidies.

Neither this article nor its source have anything to say about food sovereignty or these international organs of capital that dictate agricultural policy across the global south, but they do talk about deforestation without describing its root causes and call for using more satellite data derived from African countries.

This is fundamentally a political question and not one that will be answered by a think tank such as this. To understand food sustainability, we have to materially ask how the food system works and why it is seemingly so strange. For example, why is slashing the Brazilian rainforest to grow soy for cattle to be killed and sold to Europeans and Americans (1) somehow cheaper than doing the same in America and Europe and (2) valued above indigenous land rights? What happened when policy changes are attempted (ex: what happened to Lula? To indigenous people?)?

Hell yeah that’s awesome

This is 100% true and a demonstration of the dominant power of capital under capitalism.

At the same time, don’t forget that even if minimum wage were pegged to inflation, there would still be expropriated surplus labor domestically as well as imperialism internationally. I’ve seen socialists get sucked into fights over the minimum wage and eventually lose their sense od priorities and messaging until they are indistinguishable from “progressive” liberals in both word and action.

Cite your sources!?

There has always been a simultaneous sexualization and attraction and unattractive assigned to black femmes by white supremacist culture.

Understandable! Since hair is something you prioritize you may also want to start researching hairpieces.

Glad you’re with us now! That’s quite a journey.

It gives up one form of control but exchanges it for another. The flock of middle managers don’t get to pop in and watch 20 people to make sure they’re at their desks and look at their screens and give pointless little instructions for everyone else to see and haggle about the coffee maker, sure. But remote workers can also barely communicate with one another without using official, recordable company resources. This is a boon to office job union busters, they can just search for “union” in their Slack instance’s private messages and channels and fire the troublemakers.

I’d like to toss an explanation on top of real estate interests and wanting control: CEOs are petty, megalomaniacal idiots that work against their own interests on a regular basis and are constantly rewarded for it by the bureaucratic structure of the company.

It isn’t, though, because vacancies have high rates in every locale.

Redditor ghouls: “if you wanted a place to live you shouldn’t have gotten pets or started smoking”.

To be clear, all of these people should be in reeducation camps to learn the basics of empathy and humanity.

Also Pizza Hut’s only selling point was their crust was basically deep-fried. Soooo oily.

Embrace a short cut / eventual baldness, friend. It shows confidence.

And their own measures are to say that Israel must comply with the genocide convention, something they didn’t rule they had violated.

It’s almost a finger-wagging.

The systems were set up such that a landowning and lawyer class would be the policymakers indefinitely. The “burden” of “democracy” was self-imposed by that class over the colonial period where they’d have town halls and shit to heir grievances to each other and the mayor or governor would tell them to fuck off or find some way to meet their needs.

Only those with means would have the time to do any of these things. It was a new gentry system, but one that depended more on wealth itself over heritage or a title from a monarch. Poor people, i.e. the vast majority of people, were too busy working or taking care of themselves or simply having no capacity to engage because they could not read or write or pay for education.

The system is still fundamentally the same, just with a few tweaks here and there. More people can vote but the policymaking power is still in the hands of the economic ruling class and still this is the people with the time to spend on this shit or to hire lobbyists and lawyers to do it for them. Poor people still can’t engage even though they can read and write because they have even less “free time” and must contend with a massive propaganda machine to try and figure out what is going on and what to do about it.

They’re gonna try to press the fascism button harder. Who’s gonna take bets that the button doesn’t even really work because industrial capacity has been debilitated?

lol go canvass for Biden if you love Genocide Joe so much, libs. Put your feet to the street and show us how the importance you ascribe to this election translates into mobilization. See how well you can motivate people lol.

Oh, you’re just gonna whine in advance about your likely loss? Cool. Most important election ever?

PS commies don’t vote for libs for president, we’re not on your team and you can’t shame us into supporting capitalism or genocide. Go shame your racist peepaw, you’ll have better luck and you’re waaay closer to him ideologically.

BOOT HEAD HEAD

No we should meditate on it until we’re enlightened

Any time!

Photons are reflecting off the mirror. The image you see when you look at yourself in a mirror is actually light scattered from your face to the mirror and then reflected back into your eyes. Because the mirror is pretty flat and reflects well, it looks like you. A piece of cardboard, on the other hand, sucks at both, so when light from your face hits it a good amount is absorbed and most of the rest of scattered, so you don’t see your image.

An important element of this is how smooth the surface is, as this determines scattering. A mirror isn’t perfect at reflecting, it’s just good enough so that our eyes don’t notice, as the imperfections are smaller than the resolution of our eyes. If you scuff the surface of the mirror a little, you’ll see your image blur because more light is scattered by the new larger random angles on the surface that scatter the light. But the light still does scatter on a good mirror, just way less.

So, assuming light was traveling back and forth on a mirror, it will still scatter, and that scattering will add up. In addition, some of the light will be absorbed. So, over time, the light will all get absorbed (likely as heat) or will scatter off of the mirrors after going back and forth a bunch of times.

Getting the light to go between them in the first place is actually a bit of a challenge, though. For light to go back and forth for a long time between those mirrors, every time light hits one mirror, it needs to keep bouncing straight back at the other. Nearly all of the light hitting the mirror isn’t doing that, though. It’s coming from everywhere except the mirror, then maybe bouncing back and forth a couple times, and then off the mirrors, like a zigzag. If you made one of the mirrors a “two-way” mirror you can see through, you’ll only see as many “deep” as can travel on that zigzag, which is determined by the size of the mirrors and the distance between them. Let’s say they’re 2 meter by 2 meter squares 10 meters apart and we only care about thinking about this starting with light from a 1 cm frame. We say, “hey how many times am I gonna see that frame?” That number will be maximized by the angle between the far frame edge and the other mirror edge closest to it. Using trig (hooray) and assuming we need to see the centerline of the frame, that’s atan(0.005 m / 10 m), or about 0.029 degrees. Under ideal and slightly synthetic conditions, where we assume you look through the center of your mirror and only have one eye, it’ll bounce back and forth (2 / 2)/0.005 = 200 times at most before hitting your eye. You’ll see more instances of it at every angle that would evenly subdivides (with an odd number, a point I violated so the math was simpler) the horizontal distance from the center of the mirror to the centerline of the frame. For example, it can bounce 3 times at an angle of about 6.3 degrees. Anyways, if it can go 200 times to get to the center, then after 400 or so it’s off the mirror entirely.

So in perfect conditions at normal distances the number of times you’d directly reflect light from the environment is tens to thousands of times. Those framed infinite mirror things are basically the scenario I described and the two mirrors are something like a cm from one another and you only see about 10-30 LED dots before they hit the center.

Please note that mirrors are imperfect, so you will get light that may bounce even more times as it hits slightly random surface imperfections. But that is a very small amount of light, you’d be unable to perceive it.

Finally, consider that mirrors don’t emit light themselves, usually. There’s virtually no light just going back and forth between them on its own. Just reflected from outside. Also we haven’t talked about how light isn’t just a particle but can do wave things, but that doesn’t really matter for this question. Just wanted to acknowledge it since I keep using metaphors about bouncing back and forth.

This has been your overly long mirror physics adventure with a whole bunch of simplifying assumptions, lol.