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The Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894: predictions of 9 feet of manure in cities (wikipedia.org)
16 points by SweetSoftPillow 1 hour ago | hide | past | favorite | 18 comments
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hilbert42 28 minutes ago | next [–]
When I was a kid the only horse-drawn vehicle left on the road was the baker's cart. Once my dog came bounding into the
house at such speed that he skidded as he rounded the doorway to tell me what he had found. He jumped onto my bed
where I was reading a magazine and licked me on the face. I instantly knew what it was.
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devnullbrain 13 minutes ago | parent | next [–]
It can be quite the canine delicacy
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lotsofpulp 3 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [–]
I don’t allow shoes in the house, so the idea of allowing an animal whose bare feet have touched who knows what
outside roam around the house and furniture and bedding is interesting to me.
But then I read about getting licked by a dog that had just tasted poop (I think that is the implication here)…
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psunavy03 19 minutes ago | prev | next [–]
Don't we usually find that most of the times people predict some disaster befalling society due to the exponential growth of
something, it ends up hitting a limiting factor that stops the exponential growth?
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jtbayly 6 minutes ago | parent | next [–]
Or human ingenuity solves the problem because of the economic and other incentives that build up.
None of the fear-mongering ever seems to come true.
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rsynnott 1 minute ago | root | parent | next [–]
> fear-mongering
I mean, "bad things will happen if we don't fix the thing" is not fearmongering if, after the thing is fixed, bad
things don't happen.
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stefs 42 minutes ago | prev | next [–]
> The reasoning was that more horses are needed to remove the manure, and these horses produce more manure.
i think that even then, that's not a problem, as one horse drawn cart can remove a lot more manure than it produces, i.e. a
small number of extra horses can remove the excess manure of all horses and the overhead the extra horses introduce is
mimimal.
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recursivecaveat 15 minutes ago | parent | next [–]
If the footprint of the city is large enough, eventually transporting a cart of manure from the center to the edge
consumes as many "manure-miles" as it produces. Though that is probably comically large, because as you say: a cart
is a pretty big compared to its own horse's output.
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bryanlarsen 4 minutes ago | root | parent | next [–]
You don't have to remove to the edge, you have to remove to the closest railway terminal or water port. No city
could grow large without one or both of those.
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perihelions 34 minutes ago | prev | next [–]
/meta (This title should be edited IMO: the "predictions of 9 feet of manure in cities" part is not substantiated, and actually
contradicted by, the source article. It's an apocryphal story that didn't actually happen).
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lordnacho 24 minutes ago | prev | next [–]
This is similar to comments about how supposedly early environment scientists believed we were about to have a cooling
crisis before changing their minds.
It seems like that was not really the case. At least I don't find much evidence that this was the consensus.
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colechristensen 7 minutes ago | parent | next [–]
Generally overstated and repeated by folks with an agenda these days, but yes there were some concerns about
cooling particularly one or two steps away from actual research. And there were some periods of slight cooling in the
20th century and in the north atlantic there was the "little ice age" for a few hundred years depending on who you
ask.
There wasn't a consensus and science isn't a democracy where the most popular idea wins. Global climate ideas and
modeling are very new and if you go back to the 70s or the 20s "consensus" isn't what you're looking for, nobody
should have been particularly sure of anything as there wasn't enough information available.
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kerblang 30 minutes ago | prev | next [–]
Still, if every automobile owner instead had a horse, would methane emissions due to horse-farting worsen modern climate
change or improve it?
- Keeping in mind that your horse farts even you're not travelling
- And that methane is a good deal worse as a greenhouse gas than CO2
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gwbas1c 24 minutes ago | parent | next [–]
Doubtful:
1: Methane leaves the atmosphere a lot faster than Co2
2: The methane is a result of breaking down food where the carbon was captured from the air by the plants that were
the source of the food.
3: (And I'll let you figure out the numbers) You need to calculate the methane to Co2 ratio of the expected release of
methane vs Co2. I suspect there is significantly less methane released than (equivalent) Co2 from cars.
That being said, who wants to go back to horses? I don't.
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IAmBroom 39 minutes ago | prev | next [–]
All Malthusan predictions should be prefixed with "If something doesn't change radically, ..."
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SweetSoftPillow 1 hour ago | prev | next [–]
https://youtu.be/w61d-NBqafM?t=34
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1659447091 54 minutes ago | prev | next [–]
> More broadly, it is an analogy for supposedly insuperable extrapolated problems being rendered moot by the introduction
of new technologies.
Here I thought it was going in the direction of fear-mongering NIMBY types exploiting, what I would assume were, the
horrors of living through the Great Stink & cholera outbreaks to slow the rapid growth of London at the time
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Stink
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Lendal 9 minutes ago | prev [–]
The article describes it as a "useful analogy" but doesn't specify in what way it's useful. Seems the manner in which it's
useful depends on your worldview or even your intelligence. Does it mean that predictions of crisis are all equally valid or
worthless? Or does it mean that we should question how the conclusion was reached, or that we should require some
minimum standard of scientific consensus before publishing such predictions?
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