Comments pelagicrabbit has made

  • Moral mandate to not help spread disease

    In the American West, releasing mice to a new location may very well spread deadly diseases like Bubonic Plague and Hanta Virus to new populations where they infect and kill other animals and people. How is that ever a good idea?
    Even if you are not in the West, how can it a good idea? Every species has pockets of disease and sickness and as a result, it is almost always bad to plunk individuals down where they can infect others or where they have no immunity to local germs.
    As much as some may argue that we have no right to kill, we have no right to assist a sick animal in infecting other animals or people, either.
    On Umbra on live trapping posted 2 years, 1 month ago 28 Responses

  • re: Irradiated Food

    I don't know how much food outside the US is irradiated, but I have read that factory farming (which is largely how food is produced in the US) increases the odds that food like meat or eggs has harmful bacteria in them from the start.
    I would never leave eggs out - I have seen too many cases of food poisoning. I say this in spite of owning one of those old wire egg baskets -mine is now decorative. Just a generation or two ago in the US, people regularly left eggs out on the counter in these baskets. On Umbra on refrigerator downsizing posted 2 years, 4 months ago 34 Responses

  • the friends we have in Europe

    ... go to the grocery store/various markets much more often than we do, for the most part. I go maybe once a week or so, they go almost daily. Many of them live closer to markets, which is nice, but for me to have a small fridge would require a drive of (at minimum) a mile round trip each day to get to the dirty expensive store I never shop at.
    The market we actually shop at is about 7 miles away, so a 14 mile round trip would use about a gallon of gas every day and a half in my car (about 24 MPG for my car)
    I can't imagine my comparatively massive new fridge being worse than all that gas.
    My old fridge bit the dust last year & could not be resurrected.  When we started looking for a new one, the paperwork said that it used X amount of energy (expressed in kWh a year). I worked it out to cost under $50.00 a year in electricity - iirc, around $48.00 or so. My car using an extra gallon every day-and-a-half works out to 20 gallons of fuel a month extra. At $3.00 a gallon (conservative figure, because gas is actually closer to $3.20), that is $60.00 a month and $720.00 a year.
    Public transport isn't possible where I live, so I can't consider that (even though I live in the center of town, the bus system is unreliable, expensive & slow).
    So, $720.00 dollars (plus tires, wear, tear, pollution, time, my energy, etc) in order to not own a big fridge that costs less than $50.00 a year to own doesn't make economic sense to me.
    Unless people in the US are willing to radically change urban planning to include better buses & other public transport methods, more centralized amenities, my new fridge will probably remain a better choice. It isn't as simple as "smaller fridge = better", at least not for our family. On Umbra on refrigerator downsizing posted 2 years, 4 months ago 34 Responses