Women have been responsible for most of the domestic labor throughout history. Over the last 100 years or so, economies have changed so that women were first able to work outside of the home, then expected to work outside the home, and now need to work outside of the home. (E.g., a single-income household can’t pay the minimum bills in most places in the US.)

But doing labor outside the home means that labor can’t be done inside the home, because time is a finite resource; if you’re working 40 hours a week (plus commuting time), that’s 40 hours you don’t have for raising a family. That makes raising a family significantly more difficult.

The solution is to change the structure of the economy so that it’s entirely reasonably possible to raise a family on a single income without living in grinding poverty.

The first WTC bombing was in 1993, and Oklahoma City was 1995.

I agree with all of this. At the same time, I think that, in most cases, people should allow their body to adapt to heat, if they are healthy enough to do so. Most people can learn to be comfortable in higher heat than they believe, although some people have medical conditions that will make them more susceptible to heat exhaustion and heat stroke. If you can get by without it, you should. If you’re at risk by not using it, don’t feel guilty.

(FWIW, my office only has a/c because I have a very, very large printer in here, and it tends to have head strikes and scrap prints out if there’s no climate control. But since I’m not printing at the moment, the current temp in here is 82F.)

On top of that, as we experience higher temperatures, many people also crank up their air conditioners—which emit more heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

This is not correct. Air conditioning units do not ‘emit more […] greenhouse gases’. Air conditioners use a refrigerant–usually R134a–which does have a high global warming potential (GWP) compared to methane or CO2, but that refrigerant is in a closed loop; it’s not going anywhere unless the system is damaged. Most a/c failures aren’t from refrigerant leaking out of the system, and the system no longer being able to effectively transfer heat, but from the compressor motor failing. When the compressor fails, in most cases you can evacuate the refrigerant, replace the broken part, and then recharge the system. (The fact that they can be repaired doesn’t mean that they usually are repaired. Which is shitty.)

What is true is that a/c units emit heat themselves. An air conditioner moves heat from inside a space to outside of that space; in the process of doing so, the a/c unit itself is creating an additional small amount of heat from the function of the compressor motor, electronics, etc.

Beyond that, most electricity that’s used to run a/c systems–and every other electrical device–is produced from burning fossil fuels. So if there’s more demand for electricity–such as from a heat dome that has everyone running their a/c full-time–then yes, more CO2 is going to get pumped out into the atmosphere. But if your electricity is coming from sources that are largely emissions-free, like solar, wind, or hydro, then air conditioning is a negligible source of heat.

tl;dr - don’t feel bad about using your a/c when heat rises to dangerous levels; agitate at a local, state, and national level for renewable, carbon-neutral ways of generating electricity, and for more efficient use of electricity.

there is no species barrier

There are a few things to unpack here.

First, most of the bacteria, et al. that we have to worry about right now from meat production and consumption are already well-adapted to human hosts. The solution, in most cases, is to adequately cook the meat, and to practice very basic food safety at home. Most food-borne illnesses are the result of inadequate cooking time and temperature. Other toxins–like botulism–are actually a biproduct of bacteria that colonize meat during putrefaction; you can kill the bacteria that produce the botulism toxin, but once it’s present, there’s not a lot you can do. (This is why you refrigerate meat. Clostridium botulinum reproduction is primarily room temperature, and anaerobic, so it’s mostly a problem with canned goods that weren’t sterilized properly during canning.)

The same solution to bacterial contamination in meat now would be the most effective solution for any lab-grown meat: cook your food correctly.

you’ll create a swamp of human meat factory farms that use huge amounts of antiviral, antifungal and antibiotic agents

I think that it’s unlikely that, aside from cleaning agents, that you would need antibacterial/antifungal/virucidal agents in producing lab-grown meat of any kind. Many of the most effective cleaning agents work because there’s no way to evolve protections against them. 70% isopropyl alcohol for instance; any resistance that bacteria evolved would also severely inhibit their ability to have any other functions. You can use radiation, or heat + steam (or even dry heat) to sterilize all of your equipment prior to introducing cells, and you have more control over the nutrient bath that it grows in. Depending on the nutrient bath, you can sterilize that by filtration; .22μm filtration is the standard for sterilizing IV and IM compounded medications. (.22μm is smaller than all bacteria, and many viruses. Molecules will still pass through that filter pore size though. You can also get filters down to .15μm if you need to remove more viruses.) Cows, chickens, etc. use so many antibacterials because they aren’t able to put them in ideal conditions and maintain the desired production levels.

I think that the lack of a species barrier is a far, far smaller risk than you might believe it to be.

BUT.

I think that there is one enormous risk: prions. Misfolded proteins are exceptionally hard to detect, and anything that denatures them will denature other proteins as well. The risk is likely very, very low, given how uncommon prion diseases are, but it’s definitely a risk when you can grow a culture indefinitely.

Let’s take this a step farther.

Would you eat human meat that was grown in a lab, if you could know for certain that the cells that were used to form the cultures were harvested from a consenting adult that was duly compensated? What if that person not only had consented, but wanted to be eaten, because they had a vore fetish, and enjoyed the thought of people eating pieces of them?

I wouldn’t take that article too seriously. It’s not citing any sources directly, and the sources regarding penile plesthysmography were not terribly solid studies, IIRC. Medium is a glorified blog site, much like Elephant Journal.

My god, even among DC movies, that was such a steaming pile of shit. And so what did they do? They made a sequel.

(Hey, I like DC movies. I really enjoyed The Flash, and I liked the Superman v. Batman, with Batfleck. So for me to say Aquaman was a turd in a punchbowl means something.)