93 points
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What? Prions suddenly being in dirt instead of a human being doesn’t kill them, there’s a whole thing with Mad Cow and soil from the UK as i recall. Part of why they’re so fucking horrible is that you practically can’t kill Prions.

Obscenely high temperatures are required.

The rich should be turned into fuel pellets instead.

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34 points

Composting is a specific set of chemical processes that take place in a hot, highly oxygenated environment with the proper mix of nutrients for microbial growth. It is not comparable to ordinary decomposition in soil.

Composting can destroy prions, but it might be different to ensure you’ve destroyed all of them. Read more here: https://www.beefresearch.ca/fact-sheets/can-composting-destroy-bse-prions/

PS: I think it’s not good to joke about killing people, even shitty people.

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30 points

To be fair, nobody said you had to kill them.

Just cut off parts as needed for food, or bury them in a deep composting pit.

At that point, they might die, but that’s on them for not pulling themselves up by their bootstraps.

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3 points

I’m not sure you want any of it for food if there’s a risk of prions

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16 points

PS: I think it’s not good to joke about killing people, even shitty people.

Then it’s time to stop joking

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9 points

Who’s joking about it?

This is a war, people die in war. If our enemy doesn’t want to die, let them forfeit their “power” and surrender.

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1 point
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I think you will find that war isn’t a very useful metaphor for this kind of conflict. … you get that it’s metaphorical, right?

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-1 points

Well, I was trying to be charitable. People who seriously want to murder people they’ve never met have serious emotional problems and should seek therapy.

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10 points

You actually literally can’t kill prions, they aren’t alive, they’re basically the virus debate’s bastard older brother with a rap sheet that’s just a list of all the people they’ve sent to the hospital, and then followed up bankrupting the hospital because literally everything that victim touched has to be scrapped because hospitals usually don’t have the tools required to break down prions enough for it to be safe to keep anything that might have gotten the patient’s prions on it.

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5 points

Misfolded proteins if I remembered right, and Auroclaves (and tools that can survive it) probably ain’t cheap.

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2 points
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Surgical tools can be autoclaved, not really big things like beds.

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-1 points

Auroclaves

The definition makes it sound like a fancy pressure cooker.
Guess we can just use a really heavy duty pressure cooker to cook the stuff before composting it?

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

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2 points
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The rich should be turned into fuel pellets instead.

Until the process is started with them alive, it’s fine

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46 points

Ugh. I hate being that guy, and I realize it’s a meme, not science, but I can’t leave it alone.

Composting doesn’t get rid of metals, so you’d need a way to deal with them if you wanted to be safe.

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10 points

Especially if the compost is used for mushrooms. They have tendency to absorb heavy metals from the ground so you have to be careful where you pick them from and what kind of compost you use if growing at home.

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7 points

Most plants that we eat are excellent at taking up heavy metals too - potatoes and herbs especially.

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1 point

I didn’t know that! Thanks for sharing that info.

I was really into growing culinary mushrooms for awhile was cautioned about my compost choices and to avoid fish based ones because mushrooms absorb mercury(and others like cadmium) particularly well. I didn’t know potatoes and herbs did that too

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10 points

I’ll bring the magnet.

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11 points

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9 points

I got it. Force the rich to eat each other until the problem solves itself.

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6 points

No, it would increase concentrations. You need to get the rich to launch themselves into the sun

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5 points

So.

We force them to eat each other until their concentrations are high enough to extract the metals for industrial uses.

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4 points

That’s a feature.

We force them to gorge on themselves until there’s one, inbred, leaded rich guy left. Then we put it on display as a warning to everyone else

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3 points

We’re halfway there; many of the rich want desperately to strap themselves on top of a million tons of explosives in the shape of a penis. All we have to do now is convince them that there are poor people with money on the sun, and they’ll trip over each other to be the first to steal from the poor sun-people.

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6 points

also doesn’t remove prion diseases

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9 points

Not that I disagree with you, but it doesn’t make sense that they are stable in soil given that they are proteins, and those are relatively quickly decomposing in soil.

(Don’t) Ask me how I know.

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7 points
*

Prions are quite stable, and also they don’t need to stay in the soil for long, just enough to get reconsumed. Supposedly that’s how CWD (chronic wasting disease, not coarse woody debris), is spread among deer.

Edit: in context with composting, overall temps would be higher in such a pit but not by much. Its anywhere from room temp to 140F/60C. Prion destruction is a lot higher temp wise. As for bacteria in the pile, maybe? It might be more likely to become meaningfully degraded in a compost pile instead of normal soil.

As for cwd prion bio accumulation, it’s been hypothesized but not demonstrated (like grass picking it up from the soil itself). It’s spread in saliva and indirectly from the environment which is probably why you shouldn’t feed deer in areas with cwd and explains a lot of the spread. Also apparently the scrapie prion can endure for 16 years. Wtf.

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5 points

a quick look at wikipedia will show you are wrong

“In 2015, researchers at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston found that plants can be a vector for prions. When researchers fed hamsters grass that grew on ground where a deer that died with chronic wasting disease (CWD) was buried, the hamsters became ill with CWD, suggesting that prions can bind to plants, which then take them up into the leaf and stem structure, where they can be eaten by herbivores, thus completing the cycle. It is thus possible that there is a progressively accumulating number of prions in the environment.”

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1 point

Okay but if we’re going to be that guy, “eat the rich” doesn’t mean consume their flesh.

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21 points
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Mortician here!

Recomposition (or Natural Organic Reduction) is already legal in several states: California, Washington, Vermont, Oregon and Colorado!

As of right now, I think the compost is only allowed in national and state parks, but they’re doing testing on farms to check if there’s dangers to us consuming the crops and it’s been very successful and safe.

Most diseases and viruses can’t survive the composting heat and the plants are thriving. It uses 87% less energy than cremation and burial and stops embalming fluids from leaking into our ground water. I’m really glad this is an option.

There’s a scam company that claims you can put cremated remains in the ground and grow a tree… yeah, cremated remains turn into concrete when wet and the heat of cremation denatures nearly everything beneficial for plants. We constantly have to tell people not to put cremated remains on plants or the plants will join the family member that passed…

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3 points

With the disclaimer that I don’t know anything about your field…

IMO, if eating food that was nourished by dead humans was inherently unsafe, I believe we would have had significant issues well before now. I have no doubt that when agriculture was new, cemeteries and areas where people have died and left to decompose, would have been used to grow food and if it created any problems, I think we would have seen issues before now.

Again, I’m not a farmer, mortician, scientist, or any other preceived or direct authority on the subject.

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3 points

What you’ve said is true. In my forensics class, we learned that police can actually use plants to find dead bodies, because you can see a noticeable oval of healthier plant growth. Older cemeteries flourish. There’s a few stories from the Neolithic Era about planting crops on the deceased, both humans and animals, but it’s mostly been erased from history. It wouldn’t surprise me if it’s happened during Famines or situations like the dust bowl where civilizations weren’t rotating crops and depleted the soil.

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2 points

I heard there was a time when cemetery grass is premium for farmers with grazers

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19 points
*

How is that supposed to remove lead and mercury from the food supply? If you use that as fertilizer, the heavy metals will still be in there, and likely get picked up by your crops…

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15 points

#mulchtherich

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2 points

A hashtag I can get behind

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