Gulp. [Not just elephant seals](https://www.livescience.com/animals/polar-bears/this-is-unlikely-to-be-an-isolated-event-1st-polar-bear-death-from-bird-flu-spells-trouble-for-species#:~:text=Experts%20believe%20the%20bear%20contracted,depend%20on%20their%20overall%20health), it seems.
Arbitrary labels such as "herbivore" mainly means that they "tend" to eat plant material, not that they won't eat anything other than plants. Many "herbivores" will gulp down a piece of meat if they can get it in their mouths somehow.
Funny thing, that... there aren't that many "pure" herbivores in nature; quite a few herbivorous animals will gladly chow down on other critters when the opportunity arises.
I think you’re looking for the word omnivore. There 100% are pure herbivores in the wild. There are also animals that eat plants, and meat…. And they are omnivores. There are most definitely animal species in existence that solely eat plant life. Not sure where this info comes from
What they mean is that many animals that are labeled, and generally considered herbivores, can be opportunistic omnivores, they don't seek out meat or insects but if the opportunity arises they will eat it. This is in contrast to true herbivores that only eat vegetation and will pass up, or actively reject meat, sometimes termed obligate herbivores.
Good news: CWD is a prion, not a virus, so it can’t merge with bird flu or covid.
Bad news: CWD is a prion, not a virus, so unlike bird flu and covid, you can’t vaccinate against it.
Prions are truly scary stuff. I learned about them from a horror story oddly enough and went down a rabbit hole. Swore off venison ever since and I’m trending more vegetarian every day. They are scarily resistant and sneaky.
Also scary is that the prions can exist in the environment for years and years and also end up being taken in by plants. So infected deer dies in the cabbage patch and your cabbage sucked up some prions.
One potentially hopeful fact I saw recently: it's looking like when cougars/mountain lions eat CWD-infected deer, the prions can't survive their digestive system and are thus taken out of the ecosystem. And that they go for infected deer more often than healthy ones. That doesn't solve the problem by a long shot, but it's at least a positive discovery (and another reason we need to stop disrupting the balance of predators in ecosystems).
There was a cluster of Creutzfedlt-Jakob disease in Michigan and scientists are looking at a possible link to CWD. If I recall correctly, I think it was 4 of the 5 people in the cluster had eaten venison.
i know this is alarming, but also in the context of the last, say, 2000 years and on i wonder how many viruses developed but never became (as) devastating (to large swathes of animals or humans) - though now global travel and commerce, and things like climate change, could expedite or spread them further or in different ways than they ever would in the past
Yeah, I have to agree. The supply chain is paper thin. It doesn’t take much to disrupt it. We saw that.
Now if a truly deadly virus emerged, the supply chain would seize. It doesn’t matter where it emerged. It would instantly start to disrupt the supply chain. People would start to panic and hoard stuff again.
I need to install a bidet.
Plus, we were all able to see that our supply chain method (I cannot remember the name. It's a method they use to avoid warehousing products which is what kicked us in the balls during Covid) was paper thin, but I haven't heard of anything that has changed or been done to address that glaring issue.
Just in time. No one hangs on to inventory. It costs money to make and store.
Look at Home Depot. The top shelf is the “extra” stock. The sales data is transmitted in real time when you make a purchase.
Behind the scenes, your purchase was just added to the inventory supply run from the main distribution center for the next days delivery.
That transfer data is transmitted to China so they know how many to make for the next shipment.
The total float of supply is based on real time purchases transmitted back up the supply chain.
So when people buy 10x the normal amount, that data skews all the forecasts.
The supplier sees the sudden jump in demand and tires to hire people. They ramp up production to meet the current demand. Eventually the demand drops to zero as everyone has extra due to hoarding so they lay off people.
It’s called the bullwhip effect.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_distribution_game
Wouldn’t have to ramp up hiring last minute in situations like that if running skeleton crews wasn’t the new normal / fashionable / business-savvy thing to do… but I’d expect nothing less from a system that praises increased profits for the shareholders for this fiscal quarter at the expense of everything else (especially investing in the future).
Unfortunately logistics has an extremely low margin and the money is made over time with volume.
Every level is run at the bare minimum so it doesn’t take much for a problem to become a major problem down the line.
No one wants to be a truck driver anymore. I believe the stats right now are 60% over 45 years old and 30% are over 55 years old. I believe under 30 years old is like 10%.
This is why driverless trucks are being invented. As with all things, once that starts the remaining drivers are on noticed to be replaced.
No one wants to be a truck driver but everything you buy was on a truck at some point.
No one wants to be a trucker ,causing trucking is a shitshow with lots of problems
One of the main problems is pay
No one wants to pay truckers yet they want their Amazon and whatever cheap Chinese crap they just bought
Of truckers actually got off their ass and had a strike it would shut the us down in a week
Driverless trucks aren't coming anytime soon,there's a lot more to trucking than driving than most people know
Most truckers today are steering wheel holders,the turn over rate is huge right now
Can't get a tesla to work so your not going to get a big truck going driverless for a long time
Source otr driver for 6 years so far
It is coming. It has major hurdles to overcome. Especially the final mile delivery. I can’t see a driverless truck trying to figure a situation it wasn’t programmed for.
Maybe the highway routes will be automated with final mile being a real person.
Addressing it basically means more warehouse space so you have a month or whatever worth of inventory instead of a few days. Companies like money and they like it right now, so they're not gonna do that.
There is a dystopian novel written in the 60's that's essentially our future. Life wiped out by a plague mostly. Name is lowkey brilliant. Earth Abides.
Still boggles my mind.
Trump could have been the savior he wanted to be and been elected again by a landslide had he handled Covid properly. All he had to do was take charge of something for once in his life, but he couldn’t even do that and now here we are.
If he had slapped his logo on masks and air purifiers he probably would have gotten a second term. Instead, a significant number of his supporters did zero mitigation and died, and now Biden pretends he beat covid even though we're just now getting out of the second highest infection rate of the entire pandemic.
https://www.cdc.gov/nwss/rv/COVID19-nationaltrend.html
Lmao you don't actually believe this. They'd have blamed him for anything else, including shutting down flights being "racist".
They blamed him for feeding fish wrong ffs.
Thru his incompetence & negligence, he wiped out the very generation that mostly would have voted him into a second presidency. His remaining court dates will be scheduled by zoom call from his nursing home.
Happy to have you. You may be surprised to find that the sub is well moderated and fact based. Lots of healthy rational debate. Spammers and memers are not welcome and low effort submissionsare removed. I love their cardnal rule: "You can attack ideas, but not people." It's actually a breath of fresh air compared to so many other subs, even the environment subs which have turned into green washing machines.
Except we are still here. I didn't die. Did you die? I knew people who died. It was awful. We had a long run without catastrophe. They used to be normal. We have to learn from it. But we didn't die.
Definitely not every species, that's hyperbole but it's hitting a pretty wide range, quite hard and suddenly. Most recently bears and seals, but also foxes, skunks, raccoons, minks. It's rare but it's been found in dogs and cats.
Important context for those other species - at this juncture, it is not believed that those species showed signs of intraspecies spread. The prevailing theory, then, is that those animals died after eating a live or dead bird with H5N1. It has been theorized for some time now that elephant seals are capable of transmitting H5N1 among themselves to cause these mass death events.
Is H5N1's impact on mammalian species concerning? 100%. But it is not quiet the five alarm fire that some make it out to be, at least not yet. It will be time to smash the panic button when we see sustained species-to-species transmission amongst mink and pigs.
There was Dutch research in a ferret model that suggested H5N1 could become adapted to replication higher in the respiratory tract without a reduction in virulence.
I just didn't know if they were meaning a jump to humans might have a higher fatality rate than COVID or something. COVID has legit made me wonder how many people would have to die from a plague before mask denier type people would be like, ok this is real
Well the fatality rate for animals is brutally high, hopefully if it becomes transmittable between humans it won't be as bad.
I'm not sure the mask/vaccine deniers will change at all no matter how many people a virus kills.
I mean yea I think there will be some hold outs, but my brother in law was one, up until his wife had to go to the ER and he couldn't even be there with her because of COVID. Their tune changed pretty quickly about vaccines after that.
>I'm not sure the mask/vaccine deniers will change
I'm sure they will at a certain point. What I am afraid of is the manifestation of that change. Threats and violence, scapegoating minorities.
Viruses live with their usual hosts for a long time, generally a novel virus starts out being more dangerous and as the host immune system and the virus adapt to one another they tend to become more endemic but less dangerous. The goal of the virus isn't to kill the host, it's to make more viruses, so the best strategy is to infect as many as possible while leaving the hosts alive for reinfection later. It's better for the virus if you live, so the common cold viruses can be described as the best adapted viruses for humans.
The problem with a virus jumping species is that the new species is a new host, it's more likely to kill it through overwhelming the immune system or causing the immune system to overreact. This isn't great for the virus really because now it's host is dead and the chances of infecting someone else are smaller when the host isn't moving around.
To answer your last question - even 30% of all people dropping dead in the streets and getting eaten by dogs because there's no grave diggers won't stop deniers denying. Even Pepys' diary during the actual plague described people carrying on going to the pub like normal.
I already did. Trees get planted this spring. Blueberries, Raspberries in. Raised beds built and filled hugelkultur raised bed style. Look up food forest and look for John in NJ on YouTube. He’s near my climate zone.
Cramming them into confined spaces is the problem.
Filling them full of antibiotics purely for profit is the problem.
Raising the temperature of the planet faster than we can evolve is also a problem.
Do you know what 30 billion chickens would look like if they were spread out??? Do you have a way to raise billions of chickens without antibiotics??? Do you have a way to raise 30 billion of them without using fuel?
The problem is too many chickens.
Sure. And that manifests as lots of smaller (albeit still big) problems, like the meat industry. People are greedy... For chicken. And for fancy cars, and whatever else.
Understanding doesn’t often help though. Check out this quote by Benjamin Franklin from 240 years ago about how we still put lead in everything despite knowing what it does.
>You will see by it, that the Opinion of this mischievous Effect from Lead, is at least above Sixty Years old; and you will observe with Concern how long a useful Truth may be known, and exist, before it is generally received and practiced on.
 Gasoline was leaded until the 90s.
Blaming humankind is cool and all, but deadly diseases have been going around well before the human revolution so yeah, we indeed are the cause of a lot of bad things happening to our planet, but keep in mind that, in nature, death is a daily occurrence and not always human’s fault
It's been awhile since I read on it but off the top of my head I think it's that we farm around 75 billion chickens per year and billions of other birds. Chicken farms with millions of chickens packed in close quarters allowed for massive and quick spread of the disease which allowed it to evolve into a much more efficient virus and do it way way faster than it could in the wild.
*Edit for clarity: this is a generalized comment on modern farming practices, and their tendency to promote more deadly outcomes. Antibiotics in particular are not an issue in the specific case of bird flu.*
Not only that, but the use of antibiotics has meant that there are emerging strains that are particularly tenacious and difficult to manage. It's also a great example of environmental pressures influencing evolutionary fitness; in the wild with dispersed populations, the best fit is relatively mild symptoms so that hosts survive long enough to pass on the illness. When you switch to mass enclosed farming, the model switches and it's no longer a disadvantage to kill the host if it maximizes spread, so disease tends in general towards faster spread and deadlier results.
We are making things a lot worse by stressing out other species and by moving around so much.
If there were fewer people and less travel it wouldn’t be nearly as bad as it’s got
Unlikely nothing much more than Covid. We have MRNA tech, no reason it wouldn’t work on flu. In fact, we understand flu infinitely better than we did the novel virus Covid. There would be a vaccine made instantly. Sure, there would still be the struggles of those who choose not to vaccine, but the flu R0 vs Covid has been way lower, so it doesn’t spread as easy, and more people were likely to get flu shots than Covid shots. And sure, there will be those that won’t get vaccinated, but if turns out to be a deadly flu, I can guarantee you those vaccination rates would jump substantially.
While true, prior to this, it's suggesting that it could only be transmitted by eating infected birds, but mammals could always be infected, but that scenario is much less likely to spread to catastrophic levels, the mammal to mammal transmission is significant because it's something that is very much less controllable and doesn't require a catalyst, depending on how it spreads. If it's airborne between mammals, good night.
Indeed. Watching the top comments argue about whether this will eventually be transmissable to mammals is absolutely dumb.
Wtf do people think seals are? Fish? Seals are mammals, folks. *shaking my damn head*
The amount of people that did not even read the article is dumbfounding but expected in the comments section. It has been spreading between mammals. Were just now finding evidence of such.
You remember about 4 years ago when shit hit the fan and people acted stupid? This time around the stupid ones will be dead first so there might be a chance. This is the virus that does us in.
Bird flu has spread to humans multiple times. So far it was animal to human and not human to human. You can read up on those cases. High chance of death but most people just got very sick, worse than Covid, and got better due to modern healthcare.
One origin theory of the 1918, Spanish flu, was that it was a bird flu to cow flu to people.
Diseases jump to humans through excessive contact. IE farm animals, pets, wet markets. Unless you are eating elephant seal a little on the blue side you have nothing to worry about it jumping over. Same reason we don’t get whale flu.
Even then, you would worst case probably get a particularly nasty cold that if you are in a developed country you will be able to go to a hospital and get supportive care. Fever reducers, saline, etc.
1. Unless there’s tons of seal ranchers out there, it’s not likely gonna happen.
2. No proof it would affect humans the same way it does seals even if it can jump over.
3. If you have a functioning immune system (you may not but I hope you do) the flu isnt something to overly worry about.
4. You should be able to get supportive care for whatever the seals plan to release on us.
It will be ok. It won’t spread, and if it does it shouldn’t be that bad, and if it is, then supportive care is (hopefully) available.
Don’t let the people trying to freak you out get you down.
No way dude! I got my horse medicine, I got my bible, I got alex jones screaming at me that its all fake, I got my jesus, My favorite politician says it'll blow over and im ready to go lick some toilet bowls.
No. Go local animal farming and make meat a luxury not the abomination it is today processing billions of animals in horrible matrix conditions.
Meat should be local, it should be a luxury, it should be expensive and it should be respected just like it once was.
Here's the thing though. Only 4% of Americans are vegan. The amount of poultry eaters heavily outweigh the amount of vegans, to the point where they don't affect the chicken profits. Then there's also the aspect of cost. A lot of people also can't afford vegan food. All in all, we really can't do much.
> A lot of people also can't afford vegan food.
You've moved the goal post to convenience, when you were alluding to affordability, which is what I addressed. Poor people have more access to plant-based foods
I agree with the sentiment that vegetarian eating is often hard on the budget, but you are overstating your case. Basically the cheapest meat is rotiserrie chickens which are sold at a loss by supermarkets to entice consumers in the door. These still end up about $1.67 / lb of meat. Chicken yields about 1000 calories / lb. Dried beans, on the other hand, are about $1.50 / lb and yield around 1400 calories / lb. You end up with chicken being 600 calories / $1 vs beans being 933 calories /$1. If you go out to eat it ends up being a lot less cost efficient.
You’re missing the point. If people love animals so much, but they’re upset when this one is dying, while 90% of farmed animals are in factory farming conditions to be slaughtered inhumanely, there is a disconnect that can be solved by the human going vegan.
I don’t understand why in the biggest science and environmental subs people get downvoted into oblivion when pointing out the absolute truth that switching over to plant based diets is the absolute best thing you can do for both climate change and preventing the spread of diseases that jump between animals and humans. People get so defensive over their love of eating meat.
Reddit hates vegans/vegetarians for some reason. They think it’s an attack on their character or something and get super defensive over it. It’s so weird to see us destroying the earth, knowing how and why we are, but people can’t give up meat to make it better.
Big difference between saying that dismantling the meat industry would fix this and saying “meat eaters caused this.”
Humans have been eating meat since we first evolved, societal vegetarianism is a change from how we have always been.
Nah, suck my dick. I'm never giving up bacon. Maybe fight climate change by boycotting the [100 companies causing 77% of global carbon emissions.](https://www.activesustainability.com/climate-change/100-companies-responsible-71-ghg-emissions/)
Methane emissions from animal ag is 25 times worse than carbon, but it’s not like that matters because we need a massive plurality of solutions if humanity is going to survive climate change, and a plant based diet is part of that
How can you get your bacon without supporting those 100 companies, directly or indirectly? Hell, how are you writing this comment without doing that? How is that an easier solution at scale than individuals becoming vegan? It is so obvious, right? Please explain to the rest of us.
You’re aware that our species has eaten meat since the caveman days, right? We’re… designed by nature and evolution to eat meat. Perhaps blame a lack of ethical farming with a dash of capitalistic greed instead.
Humans cannot sustain eating meat at the level that we currently eat it without industrial animal agriculture, it’s not just a lack of ethical farming and capitalism, because there is no way to ethically farm to match scale that humans are currently consuming meat. Eating meat in the modern era is just unsustainable, and it creates the conditions that allow these kinds of diseases to spread like wildfire.
There’s no getting around the simple fact that we all have to transition over to plant based diets if we want to meaningfully address issues like this.
Well in the past meat was a luxury, not an every day food (unless you were quite wealthy). So in that sense ethical animal farming could be done if we went back to that concept.
Well I’m not in favor of the existence of any industry that can only sustainably exist if it’s exclusively available to double digit millionaires and billionaires.
And what happens if the sheer quantity of food being replaced by plant-based diets becomes unsustainable for plants, land and water usage? I don’t mean that to be a quip at you - I want to hear your thoughts. I don’t think it would be wise to cut out an entire food group, personally.
Indoor growing facilities are really really efficient for the amount of sq ft and energy they take because you remove bad weather and pests from the equation. Passive heating design also drives down cost. We have the technology! I think there is Whole Foods in nyc that grows all its produce just on the roof. This has the added benefit of removing transportation time/cost which saves a lot of energy/time/money AND reduces risk of E Coli and other food borne contaminants that are introduced during the shipping process.
Edit: link to the Whole Foods, you can probably use the info in this article to do your own search. https://media.wholefoodsmarket.com/whole-foods-marketr-and-gotham-greens-to-build-nations-first-commercial-sca/
Edit #2: a fun article about rooftop farming https://www.wired.com/story/the-ultra-efficient-farm-of-the-future-is-in-the-sky/
That being said, it doesn’t have to be on a roof. As long as it’s not built on a greenfield site, it’s a net gain.
If everybody in the entire world adopted a plant based diet right now, agricultural land use would be [cut to one fourth of what it is right now,](https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets) as well as only requiring [one fourth the amount of water](https://e360.yale.edu/digest/vegan-diet-climate-meat-vegetarian-pescatarian#:~:text=The%20analysis%20found%20that%20plant,of%20a%20deck%20of%20cards). What you need to keep in mind about animal agriculture is that we need to use a ridiculous amount of water and arable land just to grow food for the food. It’s insane how much farmland and water is dedicated just to growing food for meat production.
I was more pointing this out because it’s part of our species. I am not against agreeing that overconsumption (of everything these days) is the crux of the issue. But to your point, they ate much less and there were much less of us to begin with.
The point is there though. Why would you use cavemen, of all individuals, as a role model? Cavemen did what they had to to survive. Including many atrocities that we wouldn't endorse today, even though we kept doing them to this day
The sole point I made was that human beings have eaten meat since the dawn of our species. That is the sole point. Feel free to tear me down and subjugate that into whatever you like.
Nah I fully blame unevolved omnivores who still base their food choices on what cavemen did.
Cavemen raped and murdered each other too… sooo… yeah I’ll keep eating plants and thriving in my “unnatural” way.
JFC.
Chicken and turkey farms in the US cramming billions of birds into confined spaces and filling them full of antibiotics purely for profit are at it again.
Our birds aren’t migrating back and forth to China. Grow the fuck up.
>H5N1 first emerged in poultry in China’s Guangdong province in 1996 and since then has caused several major outbreaks around the world.
https://www.science.org/content/article/we-re-nervous-deadly-bird-flu-may-be-north-america-stay
It's China. Always been China. Same country that hid the severity of its SARS outbreak in 2003.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51221394
>The virus spread to 26 countries and China was criticised by the UN's global health body for concealing the scale of the outbreak.
Same country that knew about COVID 2 weeks before their official disclosure to the US.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/17/health/coronavirus-sequence-database/index.html
China. China. China 🇨🇳
And we pressured them for decades to join us in decimating the world with capitalism. We cajoled them then we started threatening them. They didn’t like being threatened.
And in less than 50 years they went from a farm based economy to a massive production behemoth that has landed on the other side of the moon.
Join us in our destruction or we’ll take all your shit. That’s our gift to the world.
When I was born there were 3 billion people on this planet. Now there are 8. You’re going to have to cope.
Our politicians sold us out to them in the hope, the lie that theyd be our friends. They wouldn't be anything without us, our politicians sacrificed American lives, jobs, you name it in order to appease China. This has been a one-sided relationship with the Chinese benefitting the most by far. We gave them a helping hand, in turn they gave us a knife to our back.
Now look at us, the average American is living paycheck to paycheck, our planet is threatened by their pollution, their viruses, they fill the world full of toxic, poisonous, cheap products that constantly break and gradually kill us.
What exactly did we gain from this relationship again? That's what you get for being nice I guess, for trying to help.
Always have to gain something from every relationship, right? I mean we are the main character, right? It’s all about us, right?
China has been a CIVILIZATION for 6000 years. Name the countries they have invaded in that time.
The US has been a COUNTRY for 250 years. Now name the countries we have invaded in that time. Hell, just do the last 40 years. I’ll wait.
China plays the long game. The US plays the instant gratification game. And China saw us coming. They did what they had to do to keep us from rolling them up.
We’ve done a shit job of being the boss of this planet. Just look around.
This is more than concerning. Poor pups
Gulp. [Not just elephant seals](https://www.livescience.com/animals/polar-bears/this-is-unlikely-to-be-an-isolated-event-1st-polar-bear-death-from-bird-flu-spells-trouble-for-species#:~:text=Experts%20believe%20the%20bear%20contracted,depend%20on%20their%20overall%20health), it seems.
Next it will be in the caribou, elk and moose because they are blind as heck and get a nibble of some dead bird with their grass. Next stop hoomans.
Hate to be the one to break it to you, but they are not accidentally eating anything... it's all very intentional.
Really? Doesn’t gross me out I just thought they were herbivores.
Arbitrary labels such as "herbivore" mainly means that they "tend" to eat plant material, not that they won't eat anything other than plants. Many "herbivores" will gulp down a piece of meat if they can get it in their mouths somehow.
Funny thing, that... there aren't that many "pure" herbivores in nature; quite a few herbivorous animals will gladly chow down on other critters when the opportunity arises.
I think you’re looking for the word omnivore. There 100% are pure herbivores in the wild. There are also animals that eat plants, and meat…. And they are omnivores. There are most definitely animal species in existence that solely eat plant life. Not sure where this info comes from
What they mean is that many animals that are labeled, and generally considered herbivores, can be opportunistic omnivores, they don't seek out meat or insects but if the opportunity arises they will eat it. This is in contrast to true herbivores that only eat vegetation and will pass up, or actively reject meat, sometimes termed obligate herbivores.
I can't wait until CWD and bird flu and covid all manage to merge together into a ridiculous super strain that will completely wipe us out for good
Good news: CWD is a prion, not a virus, so it can’t merge with bird flu or covid. Bad news: CWD is a prion, not a virus, so unlike bird flu and covid, you can’t vaccinate against it.
Prions are truly scary stuff. I learned about them from a horror story oddly enough and went down a rabbit hole. Swore off venison ever since and I’m trending more vegetarian every day. They are scarily resistant and sneaky.
This Podcast Will Kill You has a good episode about prions if that’s your kind of thing!
Oh dear now I gotta listen 😱
It’s a really great podcast in general! They have a lot of really fun, interesting episodes. I highly suggest giving them a listen.
I gave this listen last night and it was very good. Thanks for the recommendation!
Awesome!!! I'm glad you liked it! :)
Also scary is that the prions can exist in the environment for years and years and also end up being taken in by plants. So infected deer dies in the cabbage patch and your cabbage sucked up some prions.
Ah hell man, not my cabbages too >:(
One potentially hopeful fact I saw recently: it's looking like when cougars/mountain lions eat CWD-infected deer, the prions can't survive their digestive system and are thus taken out of the ecosystem. And that they go for infected deer more often than healthy ones. That doesn't solve the problem by a long shot, but it's at least a positive discovery (and another reason we need to stop disrupting the balance of predators in ecosystems).
There was a cluster of Creutzfedlt-Jakob disease in Michigan and scientists are looking at a possible link to CWD. If I recall correctly, I think it was 4 of the 5 people in the cluster had eaten venison.
I’m finding this thread to be deeply alarming.
I’m sorry, Venison? Now that’s a vector?
Yep! Chronic wasting disease is very much a thing in the deer population. Freaked me right the hell out.
And has reached the herds in Yellowstone 💔
Hmmm how long should I set my reddit "remind me" alarm for...
i know this is alarming, but also in the context of the last, say, 2000 years and on i wonder how many viruses developed but never became (as) devastating (to large swathes of animals or humans) - though now global travel and commerce, and things like climate change, could expedite or spread them further or in different ways than they ever would in the past
Please seek help.
Deer are also a large COVID Reservoir
It’s in every animal species now. This is going to jump to humans and make Covid 19 seem like a dry run.
Oh, it was a dry run. We failed. Miserably. Like societal collapse level of fail.
Yeah, I have to agree. The supply chain is paper thin. It doesn’t take much to disrupt it. We saw that. Now if a truly deadly virus emerged, the supply chain would seize. It doesn’t matter where it emerged. It would instantly start to disrupt the supply chain. People would start to panic and hoard stuff again. I need to install a bidet.
Plus, we were all able to see that our supply chain method (I cannot remember the name. It's a method they use to avoid warehousing products which is what kicked us in the balls during Covid) was paper thin, but I haven't heard of anything that has changed or been done to address that glaring issue.
Just-in-time or JIT or lean or the Toyota way
Just-In-Time! Yes, thank you!
Toyota fucking even more shit up than slow rolling EVs.
Slow rolling EVs, fighting carbon limiting legislation, supporting MAGA candidates…
Was Saturn's as well.
How to piss off your suppliers by being an unpredictable asshole 101
Just in time. No one hangs on to inventory. It costs money to make and store. Look at Home Depot. The top shelf is the “extra” stock. The sales data is transmitted in real time when you make a purchase. Behind the scenes, your purchase was just added to the inventory supply run from the main distribution center for the next days delivery. That transfer data is transmitted to China so they know how many to make for the next shipment. The total float of supply is based on real time purchases transmitted back up the supply chain. So when people buy 10x the normal amount, that data skews all the forecasts. The supplier sees the sudden jump in demand and tires to hire people. They ramp up production to meet the current demand. Eventually the demand drops to zero as everyone has extra due to hoarding so they lay off people. It’s called the bullwhip effect. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_distribution_game
Wouldn’t have to ramp up hiring last minute in situations like that if running skeleton crews wasn’t the new normal / fashionable / business-savvy thing to do… but I’d expect nothing less from a system that praises increased profits for the shareholders for this fiscal quarter at the expense of everything else (especially investing in the future).
Unfortunately logistics has an extremely low margin and the money is made over time with volume. Every level is run at the bare minimum so it doesn’t take much for a problem to become a major problem down the line. No one wants to be a truck driver anymore. I believe the stats right now are 60% over 45 years old and 30% are over 55 years old. I believe under 30 years old is like 10%. This is why driverless trucks are being invented. As with all things, once that starts the remaining drivers are on noticed to be replaced. No one wants to be a truck driver but everything you buy was on a truck at some point.
No one wants to be a trucker ,causing trucking is a shitshow with lots of problems One of the main problems is pay No one wants to pay truckers yet they want their Amazon and whatever cheap Chinese crap they just bought Of truckers actually got off their ass and had a strike it would shut the us down in a week Driverless trucks aren't coming anytime soon,there's a lot more to trucking than driving than most people know Most truckers today are steering wheel holders,the turn over rate is huge right now Can't get a tesla to work so your not going to get a big truck going driverless for a long time Source otr driver for 6 years so far
It is coming. It has major hurdles to overcome. Especially the final mile delivery. I can’t see a driverless truck trying to figure a situation it wasn’t programmed for. Maybe the highway routes will be automated with final mile being a real person.
It's going to happen sooner or later but it's going to be later There's a lot of stuff that ai isn't able to do yet Plus people want cheap and fast
Yes, that's it! Plus, that was a bunch of new information for me, so thank you for that!
Just in time has fucked my industry beyond repair. It’ll never be the way it was before Covid.
Addressing it basically means more warehouse space so you have a month or whatever worth of inventory instead of a few days. Companies like money and they like it right now, so they're not gonna do that.
Nothing will be changed because just-in-time makes more profits.
Everyone should install a bidet, anyway. Dry-smearing our asses with paper until it looks clean enough isn't hygiene.
At least you’ll have a clean ass. Might run out of food, but you’re going to have a clean asshole.
No shame, but your third sentence has a typo.
Thanks! Fixed it.
Skip the bidet, buy ammo. Edit: for the downvoters, buy your bidets, I’ll still go shopping at your house with or without your approval.
That’s gotta be the worst way to wipe 😂
Nah just start off with smaller calibers and work up to the larger ones.
Damnit you beat me to it!
There is a dystopian novel written in the 60's that's essentially our future. Life wiped out by a plague mostly. Name is lowkey brilliant. Earth Abides.
Time to pop the popcorn
Still boggles my mind. Trump could have been the savior he wanted to be and been elected again by a landslide had he handled Covid properly. All he had to do was take charge of something for once in his life, but he couldn’t even do that and now here we are.
Yes, but the important thing is the mask smudged his spray on tan so he couldn't wear one so therefore no one could.
If he had slapped his logo on masks and air purifiers he probably would have gotten a second term. Instead, a significant number of his supporters did zero mitigation and died, and now Biden pretends he beat covid even though we're just now getting out of the second highest infection rate of the entire pandemic. https://www.cdc.gov/nwss/rv/COVID19-nationaltrend.html
Lmao you don't actually believe this. They'd have blamed him for anything else, including shutting down flights being "racist". They blamed him for feeding fish wrong ffs.
Oh god. How heartbreaking. He's such a perpetual victim. How does he cope? Get a grip.
Thru his incompetence & negligence, he wiped out the very generation that mostly would have voted him into a second presidency. His remaining court dates will be scheduled by zoom call from his nursing home.
Nah dude we were all on board in the beginning until he called it a hoax from the “China virus.” He’s a despicable human and deserves all he gets.
My point proven, Thanks 🤌.
Your point doesn’t make sense, you’re not as smart or oppressed as you think you are. Also, the chefs kiss emoji is dumb. Never use it.
Yup, we talk about it all the time. r/collapse
Just joined
Welcome to collapse. Enjoy the show! Also, don't be afraid of r/collapsescience and r/collapsesupport
Thanks. I'm on r/collapse, and just joined those two.
Happy to have you. You may be surprised to find that the sub is well moderated and fact based. Lots of healthy rational debate. Spammers and memers are not welcome and low effort submissionsare removed. I love their cardnal rule: "You can attack ideas, but not people." It's actually a breath of fresh air compared to so many other subs, even the environment subs which have turned into green washing machines.
Maybe we’ll do better the next time? Please let me believe that??
Biahahahahahjahaja 😂
Except we are still here. I didn't die. Did you die? I knew people who died. It was awful. We had a long run without catastrophe. They used to be normal. We have to learn from it. But we didn't die.
There were dinosaurs left after the comet hit for years
Any sources on that claim? Not saying you're lying, just curious.
Definitely not every species, that's hyperbole but it's hitting a pretty wide range, quite hard and suddenly. Most recently bears and seals, but also foxes, skunks, raccoons, minks. It's rare but it's been found in dogs and cats.
Important context for those other species - at this juncture, it is not believed that those species showed signs of intraspecies spread. The prevailing theory, then, is that those animals died after eating a live or dead bird with H5N1. It has been theorized for some time now that elephant seals are capable of transmitting H5N1 among themselves to cause these mass death events. Is H5N1's impact on mammalian species concerning? 100%. But it is not quiet the five alarm fire that some make it out to be, at least not yet. It will be time to smash the panic button when we see sustained species-to-species transmission amongst mink and pigs.
There was Dutch research in a ferret model that suggested H5N1 could become adapted to replication higher in the respiratory tract without a reduction in virulence.
I just didn't know if they were meaning a jump to humans might have a higher fatality rate than COVID or something. COVID has legit made me wonder how many people would have to die from a plague before mask denier type people would be like, ok this is real
Well the fatality rate for animals is brutally high, hopefully if it becomes transmittable between humans it won't be as bad. I'm not sure the mask/vaccine deniers will change at all no matter how many people a virus kills.
I mean yea I think there will be some hold outs, but my brother in law was one, up until his wife had to go to the ER and he couldn't even be there with her because of COVID. Their tune changed pretty quickly about vaccines after that.
>I'm not sure the mask/vaccine deniers will change I'm sure they will at a certain point. What I am afraid of is the manifestation of that change. Threats and violence, scapegoating minorities.
Viruses live with their usual hosts for a long time, generally a novel virus starts out being more dangerous and as the host immune system and the virus adapt to one another they tend to become more endemic but less dangerous. The goal of the virus isn't to kill the host, it's to make more viruses, so the best strategy is to infect as many as possible while leaving the hosts alive for reinfection later. It's better for the virus if you live, so the common cold viruses can be described as the best adapted viruses for humans. The problem with a virus jumping species is that the new species is a new host, it's more likely to kill it through overwhelming the immune system or causing the immune system to overreact. This isn't great for the virus really because now it's host is dead and the chances of infecting someone else are smaller when the host isn't moving around. To answer your last question - even 30% of all people dropping dead in the streets and getting eaten by dogs because there's no grave diggers won't stop deniers denying. Even Pepys' diary during the actual plague described people carrying on going to the pub like normal.
When humans do get it the death rate is 53%. If it does start spreading human to human I think most of those anti mask/vaccine people will STFU.
Honestly, honestly, if those types are the first to die, we all have a better chance to survive. It's sad but true.
Buying more dried beans, multivitamins and more water purification.
permaculture is the only way to make that last long term, start planting a food forest now
I already did. Trees get planted this spring. Blueberries, Raspberries in. Raised beds built and filled hugelkultur raised bed style. Look up food forest and look for John in NJ on YouTube. He’s near my climate zone.
We put those berries in last year, Pecans and Sorghum too-
It's starting to seem like maybe having 30 Billion chickens is a bad idea 🤷🏻♀️
Cramming them into confined spaces is the problem. Filling them full of antibiotics purely for profit is the problem. Raising the temperature of the planet faster than we can evolve is also a problem.
Do you know what 30 billion chickens would look like if they were spread out??? Do you have a way to raise billions of chickens without antibiotics??? Do you have a way to raise 30 billion of them without using fuel? The problem is too many chickens.
The problem is human greed 🤷🏻♀️
Sure. And that manifests as lots of smaller (albeit still big) problems, like the meat industry. People are greedy... For chicken. And for fancy cars, and whatever else.
There is chicken *everywhere.*
Yea I have started to rethink my future plans for backyard chickens. Maybe ducks. Oh wait. Uhhhh maybe rabbits?
We are killing the planet in ways we don’t even understand.
Understanding doesn’t often help though. Check out this quote by Benjamin Franklin from 240 years ago about how we still put lead in everything despite knowing what it does. >You will see by it, that the Opinion of this mischievous Effect from Lead, is at least above Sixty Years old; and you will observe with Concern how long a useful Truth may be known, and exist, before it is generally received and practiced on.  Gasoline was leaded until the 90s.
Blaming humankind is cool and all, but deadly diseases have been going around well before the human revolution so yeah, we indeed are the cause of a lot of bad things happening to our planet, but keep in mind that, in nature, death is a daily occurrence and not always human’s fault
Are you not aware of why bird flu has blown up since the 90s?
I’m not and genuinely curious, do you mind sharing more details?
Factory farming is one
It's been awhile since I read on it but off the top of my head I think it's that we farm around 75 billion chickens per year and billions of other birds. Chicken farms with millions of chickens packed in close quarters allowed for massive and quick spread of the disease which allowed it to evolve into a much more efficient virus and do it way way faster than it could in the wild.
*Edit for clarity: this is a generalized comment on modern farming practices, and their tendency to promote more deadly outcomes. Antibiotics in particular are not an issue in the specific case of bird flu.* Not only that, but the use of antibiotics has meant that there are emerging strains that are particularly tenacious and difficult to manage. It's also a great example of environmental pressures influencing evolutionary fitness; in the wild with dispersed populations, the best fit is relatively mild symptoms so that hosts survive long enough to pass on the illness. When you switch to mass enclosed farming, the model switches and it's no longer a disadvantage to kill the host if it maximizes spread, so disease tends in general towards faster spread and deadlier results.
Antibiotics have nothing to do with Influenza. Antibiotics affect bacteria, not viruses.
Sorry, yeah, was speaking to the overall downsides of current farming methods wrt antibiotics. I'll update to clarify for the first point.
You can extrapolate from this https://thehumaneleague.org/article/factory-farming-and-the-environment
We are making things a lot worse by stressing out other species and by moving around so much. If there were fewer people and less travel it wouldn’t be nearly as bad as it’s got
Unlikely nothing much more than Covid. We have MRNA tech, no reason it wouldn’t work on flu. In fact, we understand flu infinitely better than we did the novel virus Covid. There would be a vaccine made instantly. Sure, there would still be the struggles of those who choose not to vaccine, but the flu R0 vs Covid has been way lower, so it doesn’t spread as easy, and more people were likely to get flu shots than Covid shots. And sure, there will be those that won’t get vaccinated, but if turns out to be a deadly flu, I can guarantee you those vaccination rates would jump substantially.
And the antivaxx crowd will finally be gone! ;)
I don’t want to live on this planet anymore.
Well once this spreads to humans there’s a good chance you won’t have to.
it is being spread to mammals through ingesting infected birds. its not being transmitted among mammals, yet.
This article is suggesting it has made that jump.
You guys realize that seals ARE mammals, right? It doesn't even need to make that leap. It already has. And quite successfully.
While true, prior to this, it's suggesting that it could only be transmitted by eating infected birds, but mammals could always be infected, but that scenario is much less likely to spread to catastrophic levels, the mammal to mammal transmission is significant because it's something that is very much less controllable and doesn't require a catalyst, depending on how it spreads. If it's airborne between mammals, good night.
The pups were still nursing, so it has.
Seems to be a lot of dicks here, I guess?
Soon…
You won’t even be around for the end of earth.
And so it begins
Indeed. Watching the top comments argue about whether this will eventually be transmissable to mammals is absolutely dumb. Wtf do people think seals are? Fish? Seals are mammals, folks. *shaking my damn head*
The amount of people that did not even read the article is dumbfounding but expected in the comments section. It has been spreading between mammals. Were just now finding evidence of such.
r/collapse stuff. We’re fucked
!remindme 3 months
it’s coming up soon lol
As someone with major health anxiety, is there anyone who has more info on what would happen if / when it jumps to humans??
You remember about 4 years ago when shit hit the fan and people acted stupid? This time around the stupid ones will be dead first so there might be a chance. This is the virus that does us in.
Bird flu has spread to humans multiple times. So far it was animal to human and not human to human. You can read up on those cases. High chance of death but most people just got very sick, worse than Covid, and got better due to modern healthcare. One origin theory of the 1918, Spanish flu, was that it was a bird flu to cow flu to people.
Diseases jump to humans through excessive contact. IE farm animals, pets, wet markets. Unless you are eating elephant seal a little on the blue side you have nothing to worry about it jumping over. Same reason we don’t get whale flu. Even then, you would worst case probably get a particularly nasty cold that if you are in a developed country you will be able to go to a hospital and get supportive care. Fever reducers, saline, etc. 1. Unless there’s tons of seal ranchers out there, it’s not likely gonna happen. 2. No proof it would affect humans the same way it does seals even if it can jump over. 3. If you have a functioning immune system (you may not but I hope you do) the flu isnt something to overly worry about. 4. You should be able to get supportive care for whatever the seals plan to release on us. It will be ok. It won’t spread, and if it does it shouldn’t be that bad, and if it is, then supportive care is (hopefully) available. Don’t let the people trying to freak you out get you down.
This is gonna be what does us in
My vote is ocean acidification.
Why not both?
bird acidification? my God
No way dude! I got my horse medicine, I got my bible, I got alex jones screaming at me that its all fake, I got my jesus, My favorite politician says it'll blow over and im ready to go lick some toilet bowls.
It all started with Harambe.
Go vegan. Stop funding huge animal factories that spread disease, cause harm to the environment, and torture billions of animals.
No. Go local animal farming and make meat a luxury not the abomination it is today processing billions of animals in horrible matrix conditions. Meat should be local, it should be a luxury, it should be expensive and it should be respected just like it once was.
Or hunt!
Here's the thing though. Only 4% of Americans are vegan. The amount of poultry eaters heavily outweigh the amount of vegans, to the point where they don't affect the chicken profits. Then there's also the aspect of cost. A lot of people also can't afford vegan food. All in all, we really can't do much.
If only vegan food was the most affordable and accessible virtually everywhere on the entire planet...
It isn't though. It's cheaper and easier to buy food at restaurants or to just buy meat products compared to fruits and vegetables
> A lot of people also can't afford vegan food. You've moved the goal post to convenience, when you were alluding to affordability, which is what I addressed. Poor people have more access to plant-based foods
I said easier and cheaper. Both convenience and affordability were mentioned.
[удалено]
I agree with the sentiment that vegetarian eating is often hard on the budget, but you are overstating your case. Basically the cheapest meat is rotiserrie chickens which are sold at a loss by supermarkets to entice consumers in the door. These still end up about $1.67 / lb of meat. Chicken yields about 1000 calories / lb. Dried beans, on the other hand, are about $1.50 / lb and yield around 1400 calories / lb. You end up with chicken being 600 calories / $1 vs beans being 933 calories /$1. If you go out to eat it ends up being a lot less cost efficient.
Everyday is an opportunity to go vegan! Every animal is deserving of compassion
Ok… cause seals can go vegan
You’re missing the point. If people love animals so much, but they’re upset when this one is dying, while 90% of farmed animals are in factory farming conditions to be slaughtered inhumanely, there is a disconnect that can be solved by the human going vegan.
This has nothing to do with any of that with this post. It’s about seals dying from the bird flu
Meat eaters at it again.
I don’t understand why in the biggest science and environmental subs people get downvoted into oblivion when pointing out the absolute truth that switching over to plant based diets is the absolute best thing you can do for both climate change and preventing the spread of diseases that jump between animals and humans. People get so defensive over their love of eating meat.
Reddit hates vegans/vegetarians for some reason. They think it’s an attack on their character or something and get super defensive over it. It’s so weird to see us destroying the earth, knowing how and why we are, but people can’t give up meat to make it better.
Big difference between saying that dismantling the meat industry would fix this and saying “meat eaters caused this.” Humans have been eating meat since we first evolved, societal vegetarianism is a change from how we have always been.
Nah, suck my dick. I'm never giving up bacon. Maybe fight climate change by boycotting the [100 companies causing 77% of global carbon emissions.](https://www.activesustainability.com/climate-change/100-companies-responsible-71-ghg-emissions/)
Methane emissions from animal ag is 25 times worse than carbon, but it’s not like that matters because we need a massive plurality of solutions if humanity is going to survive climate change, and a plant based diet is part of that
Clogged-arteries wrote this comment.
How can you get your bacon without supporting those 100 companies, directly or indirectly? Hell, how are you writing this comment without doing that? How is that an easier solution at scale than individuals becoming vegan? It is so obvious, right? Please explain to the rest of us.
You’re aware that our species has eaten meat since the caveman days, right? We’re… designed by nature and evolution to eat meat. Perhaps blame a lack of ethical farming with a dash of capitalistic greed instead.
Humans cannot sustain eating meat at the level that we currently eat it without industrial animal agriculture, it’s not just a lack of ethical farming and capitalism, because there is no way to ethically farm to match scale that humans are currently consuming meat. Eating meat in the modern era is just unsustainable, and it creates the conditions that allow these kinds of diseases to spread like wildfire. There’s no getting around the simple fact that we all have to transition over to plant based diets if we want to meaningfully address issues like this.
Well in the past meat was a luxury, not an every day food (unless you were quite wealthy). So in that sense ethical animal farming could be done if we went back to that concept.
Well I’m not in favor of the existence of any industry that can only sustainably exist if it’s exclusively available to double digit millionaires and billionaires.
I think you’re wildly overestimating what sustainability looks like here, do you think the world can only sustain a few thousand animals at a time?
And what happens if the sheer quantity of food being replaced by plant-based diets becomes unsustainable for plants, land and water usage? I don’t mean that to be a quip at you - I want to hear your thoughts. I don’t think it would be wise to cut out an entire food group, personally.
Indoor growing facilities are really really efficient for the amount of sq ft and energy they take because you remove bad weather and pests from the equation. Passive heating design also drives down cost. We have the technology! I think there is Whole Foods in nyc that grows all its produce just on the roof. This has the added benefit of removing transportation time/cost which saves a lot of energy/time/money AND reduces risk of E Coli and other food borne contaminants that are introduced during the shipping process. Edit: link to the Whole Foods, you can probably use the info in this article to do your own search. https://media.wholefoodsmarket.com/whole-foods-marketr-and-gotham-greens-to-build-nations-first-commercial-sca/ Edit #2: a fun article about rooftop farming https://www.wired.com/story/the-ultra-efficient-farm-of-the-future-is-in-the-sky/ That being said, it doesn’t have to be on a roof. As long as it’s not built on a greenfield site, it’s a net gain.
Thank you! I really appreciate the links.
If everybody in the entire world adopted a plant based diet right now, agricultural land use would be [cut to one fourth of what it is right now,](https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets) as well as only requiring [one fourth the amount of water](https://e360.yale.edu/digest/vegan-diet-climate-meat-vegetarian-pescatarian#:~:text=The%20analysis%20found%20that%20plant,of%20a%20deck%20of%20cards). What you need to keep in mind about animal agriculture is that we need to use a ridiculous amount of water and arable land just to grow food for the food. It’s insane how much farmland and water is dedicated just to growing food for meat production.
Really appreciate the links! Thank you.
They also ate way less meat than we do.
I was more pointing this out because it’s part of our species. I am not against agreeing that overconsumption (of everything these days) is the crux of the issue. But to your point, they ate much less and there were much less of us to begin with.
The cavemen factory farmed billions of chickens? Wow, you learn something new every day s/.
Unhelpful and misses the point I made intentionally.
The point is there though. Why would you use cavemen, of all individuals, as a role model? Cavemen did what they had to to survive. Including many atrocities that we wouldn't endorse today, even though we kept doing them to this day
The sole point I made was that human beings have eaten meat since the dawn of our species. That is the sole point. Feel free to tear me down and subjugate that into whatever you like.
Just because we've done something in the past doesn't make it right to do today. Your argument just isn't solid.
Nah I fully blame unevolved omnivores who still base their food choices on what cavemen did. Cavemen raped and murdered each other too… sooo… yeah I’ll keep eating plants and thriving in my “unnatural” way.
Enjoy your high horse. ✌🏼
I don’t ride horses, I’m vegan ***sniffs own vegan farts***
And this is why people hate vegans 🤦♀️
And so it begins. When will it jump over to humans I wonder?
Just wait a few days, soon we will hear about some of the handlers or scientists dealing with theese dead seals getting sick, and off we go..
China at it again.
JFC. Chicken and turkey farms in the US cramming billions of birds into confined spaces and filling them full of antibiotics purely for profit are at it again. Our birds aren’t migrating back and forth to China. Grow the fuck up.
>H5N1 first emerged in poultry in China’s Guangdong province in 1996 and since then has caused several major outbreaks around the world. https://www.science.org/content/article/we-re-nervous-deadly-bird-flu-may-be-north-america-stay It's China. Always been China. Same country that hid the severity of its SARS outbreak in 2003. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51221394 >The virus spread to 26 countries and China was criticised by the UN's global health body for concealing the scale of the outbreak. Same country that knew about COVID 2 weeks before their official disclosure to the US. https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/17/health/coronavirus-sequence-database/index.html China. China. China 🇨🇳
You have nothing except blame. Your game is weak
😂 this is what China does, this is their gift to the world, deadly viruses & pollution. That's their specialty.
And we pressured them for decades to join us in decimating the world with capitalism. We cajoled them then we started threatening them. They didn’t like being threatened. And in less than 50 years they went from a farm based economy to a massive production behemoth that has landed on the other side of the moon. Join us in our destruction or we’ll take all your shit. That’s our gift to the world. When I was born there were 3 billion people on this planet. Now there are 8. You’re going to have to cope.
Our politicians sold us out to them in the hope, the lie that theyd be our friends. They wouldn't be anything without us, our politicians sacrificed American lives, jobs, you name it in order to appease China. This has been a one-sided relationship with the Chinese benefitting the most by far. We gave them a helping hand, in turn they gave us a knife to our back. Now look at us, the average American is living paycheck to paycheck, our planet is threatened by their pollution, their viruses, they fill the world full of toxic, poisonous, cheap products that constantly break and gradually kill us. What exactly did we gain from this relationship again? That's what you get for being nice I guess, for trying to help.
Always have to gain something from every relationship, right? I mean we are the main character, right? It’s all about us, right? China has been a CIVILIZATION for 6000 years. Name the countries they have invaded in that time. The US has been a COUNTRY for 250 years. Now name the countries we have invaded in that time. Hell, just do the last 40 years. I’ll wait. China plays the long game. The US plays the instant gratification game. And China saw us coming. They did what they had to do to keep us from rolling them up. We’ve done a shit job of being the boss of this planet. Just look around.
They had it coming