u/Neat-Peanut-1141

Hey, I've recently heard someone say "Magnesium and Zinc, that stuff does not exist in the soil anymore". That made me super curious and I did some basic research about the topic.

It is not only the soil that gets depleted. The plants are not optimized for nutrition anymore.
E.g. in the book "How innovation works" I've read that plants have been bred to yield much more. E.g. they first bred wheat to have more grain per plant, then the plants grew too heavy and folded over. So they bred them further to be shorter but have more grain.

And now the same area can feed much more people (like 10x maybe!?) but the nutrients did not keep up with that! The nutrients are spread thin basically.

And something new I've learned, when they fertilize the soil with eg. potassium, that can hinder the plant to take in other nutrients.

In this video I remixed three ideas:

#1 Confidence
Trust and confidence in the future of a country drives investment. People build houses, plant trees and build infrastructure. A loss of confidence can lead to the downfall of a society.
Here is a nice explanation in the "Civilisation" documentary: https://youtu.be/3YvjanfFz0A?t=437

#2 Merchants build societies
The rise of societies is caused by merchants, building them from the bottom up. People come together in one place because specialization and exchange create wealth. Governments form later on, initially to protect trading routes and create property rights. But when the government makes too many rules, the very mechanism that created the society gets suffocated.
From "The Rational Optimist" by Matt Ridley:
https://cpcglobal.org/publications/The%20rational%20Optimist.pdf

#3 Reducing bureaucracy in England
Loosening up property rights in England was a precursor to the Industrial Revolution. Rules were in place to keep land within the family, and people were not allowed to sell it. Farmers had many fragmented strips of land, but it was impossible to unite them. Then the problem was solved, which caused more roads and canals to get built. People also had a better stake in their land, because instead of many little strips they had one big patch they could invest in efficiently.
From a new article in "Works in Progress":
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/how-abolishing-the-stakeholder-state-caused-the-industrial-revolution/

I’ve been building ListenDock, a tool to turn PDFs into audio (MP3s).

I’ve added Kokoro as a free TTS service and you can bring your own API key for the document processing. I'm pretty impressed with Kokoro, it just doesn't support as much languages yet as paid services.

Curious if this makes the product feel more useful, and whether users will come back more regularly now. What do you think?

I've created reminders on my iPhone that I get every day, its somewhat helpful but its just text. Would you find an app helpful that sends you motivating pictures, eg with pictures of fit people or memes to stay on track?

Over the years I got myself down by 57 pounds. I know exactly what I did wrong to become overweight. I ate way too many sweets like muffins and chocolate. I ate huge meals and I ate cake and cereals to relax. Back then I even went bicycling and sometimes swimming. But it didn't help because when I got home I ate huge meals afterwards.

When I started to loose weight I didn't do everything correctly right away, but over the years I kept optimizing small things. I think the first improvement was to replace eating a box of cereals with healthy bread and then I stopped buying chocolates. Later I started replacing potato chips with nuts (even though they are also high in calories). So first I did a lot of food replacements.

Another huge step was trying out keto. I stopped eating bread (that was unimaginable for me before) but replacing bread with meat sausage had a huge effect. I only did that for a while bc too much keto can be unhealthy for the hormones I think. Not eating breakfast for a while was another improvement I added at some point (I have an on-off relationship with breakfast now). Lately I started eating greek yoghurt (sometimes with banana, a banana only has 100kcal and when its ripe it tastes like a sweet).

My best lever is to not buy the wrong things, the good food occupies the fridge basically (meat, greek yoghurt, cheese, kiwis, bananas). My weight is now fluctuating up and down a little, but I never got as overweight as I was initially.

My current problem is that I still get weak sometimes when I come across a bakery, I love cake too much. So with the whole vibe coding trend I created an alert-like app that reminds me not to get weak when I come close to a bakery. I don't want to put the link here but in the apple store you can find it with "Stay Lean: Calorie Navigation". I'm currently self experimenting if it helps. Where is your weak spot?