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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 3rd, 2023

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  • No biggie. Even though it is satire, the analysis is sound. Given the amount of fatty acids that are stored in tissues in the body or expelled as “solid” waste, paired with the offset of dairy cows, so long as the waste is managed properly and not just left to aerobic decomposition, there should be able to be well in excess of 80x the volume if CO2 removed from the atmosphere as there is methane/CO2 released post-consumption. As long as whatever mega food conglomerate who starts making it uses atmospheric CO2 and doesn’t burn limestone to obtain concentrated quantities quickly.




  • Luckily methane, while a potent greenhouse gas, breaks down in the atmosphere quickly. It does break down into CO2 and water, so the question quickly becomes: “are the farts of Midwesterners more potent than the amount of CO2 taken out of the atmosphere by making butter?”

    My quick guess is luckily, no, they are not. Some amount of the butter will be stored in fatty tissues which will be sequestered 6 feet underground in a cement box eventually. Most will be shat in liquid or semi-solid form into a toilet to be processed by waste management. As long as they are responsible and compost it into nitrate rich fertilizer we should stay very comfortably ahead of the FBI (Fart to Butter Index).






  • Oh, I get that. I actually have a BS in Applied Mathematics and specialize in Statistics, Probability Theory, and Data Science professionally. I am well aware of how unstable thses numbers are, which is why I made the jab at the “soft sciences” and their acceptable sigma analysis points.

    What I was more noting was the linguistic tic of OP saying that they ‘exaggerated’. I freely admit that I did not actually read the article and do not know what the author did in it, but the click-bait title was accurate given the data shared. So what was done is to ‘sensationalize’ the results. If we are ever going to get better and teach society how to understand when statistics are being used to manipulate, we need to be sure to describe it in a way that people can recognize one manipulation from another.

    I would see an example of manipulation through exaggeration being “cops kill more white people per year than black people”. Yes, this is true, but it is inflating one piece of the statistics that ignores a lot of relevant factors, like the per capita rate, the proportion of stops and actions by police which result in violence, etc.

    Sensationalizing is what we have here. Intentionally choosing words that fell the full picture of the statistic in a way which causes knee jerk reactions. There isn’t anything left out per se, the time frame is described, the change in the statistic is mentioned, and a potential causal relationship is proffered. Would "The overturning of Roe has caused a statistically significant increase in the number of voluntary sterilizations among young US Citizens’ haave been more genuine, yes. Is it catchy or emotional, no.