The US is strange then. This side of the pond, the UK is not considered a leading light in vegan progress. Lots of other countries have more vegans. I’ve lived in more rural areas in the UK (e.g. Wales) and although it was harder, it was still possible.
It isn’t one or the other, it’s both: soya oil and meal (what’s left after pressing the oil out) are so-called “co-products” - you get about 20% oil, and 80% meal. The meal goes almost exclusively into animal feed, the oil then goes into various other products, including animal feed and food industry, where it is used in mostly non-vegan products (because vegan products only constitute a small proportion of industrially produced food products).
Your 80% figure pressed for oil includes soya meal used for animal feed.
90%+ of soya grown is used for animal feed. Funny how those of us that eat a lot of tofu manage to find it cheap very easily, and I’m still finding new types of Tofu 35 years later… I’m in the UK, but surely wherever you are can’t be that far behind the rest of the world?
We get tofu blocks in various forms from all supermarkets (Aldi, Lidl, Asda, Tesco… etc.) for about £1 per block. Equivalent meat costs probably £3-£5. We sometimes get fresh (unpackaged) and deep fried tofu from our local Asian cash-and-carry, plus various tinned, vac-packed and jarred varieties. Occasionally we get “expensive” tinned braised tofu from local wholefood shops as a treat. Occasionally we get a Chinese take-away - several of our local ones do Tofu and Seitan. Our favourite one does their vegan dishes £1-£3 cheaper than the non-vegan options.
We don’t buy frozen ready meals, but vegan ones do exist. We like cooking, and cook a lot from scratch, but there are lots of jarred sauces and sachets you can get that are vegan - it’s completely possible to make a quick meal with a jar of pasta sauce, a tub of marinated tofu chunks and frozen veg, and it would still be cheaper than using frozen chicken chunks instead.
It’s there if you go looking for it. A vegan diet is pretty cheap in reality - about 30% cheaper the way we do it, and we’re not particularly frugal about it, nor do we put in much effort to achieve it. We buy the things we like where we know we can get them, probably just like you do.
Limited mental capacity these days, so I don’t have the spoons to properly research and implement a solution at the moment. I installed Nepenthes last year, but I’ve never managed to get round to integrating it into my site. It’s low priority at the moment.
Around 2010, I used to work at an MSP, and once had a customer that ran a custom LAMP stack website for local radio UK stations web presence. It was a bit slow, running on a dedicated physical server, but every time it snowed, the website would 500 out - because of too many requests to the “School Closures” page. The site had no caching other than Apache’s internal cache, but PHP pages could not be cached because “reasons”, and the original developer was “not available”. I optimised their MySQL indexes, increased the number of Apache workers, and it improved the render time per page and number of concurrent connections. Stress testing looked good.
Anyway, some months later, 2AM one snowy morning, I was on call, and it went down again. This was when I discovered the school closures problem. After diagnosing, and then liaising with the customer to discuss the options, I was told “just make it work”. I ended up modifying the PHP script to add some “on spec” caching that saved the HTML to a temp file in ramdisk, and only re-ran the query-and-render code if the cached copy was more than 5 minutes old. It was hacky, but it did the trick, and I was finished by about 4 AM. This hack was later applied at their request to a number of trouble-points in the source tree, as and when things broke.
We recommended adding a Varnish cache, and found a more generalised caching library but they wouldn’t/couldn’t authorise engineering work for this - they were running on a shoestring - and they already had the tech break-fix contract with us, and decided it was sufficient to just spot fix things as they broke rather than fix the root cause.
I left that MSP in 2012, so I don’t know what happened after that, but as far as I know, the site could still be running… unlikely, but possible.
I have my blog address (which goes to my home server) in my Mastodon profile, and every time I post on Masto, my server gets a request from every Mastodon site that federates with my instance - i.e. hundreds of requests. It’s no problem for my server, because my blog is a static site, but for anything that dynamically generates every single page impression (like worpress or joomla), it could be a problem. Caching settings might help, I suppose.
Truth is, though, I get far more traffic from vulnerability scanners and AI crawlers that don’t honour robots.txt (or aren’t yet listed).
So THAT’S what it means to put your data in the cloud - vaporise it!
Rapist Pedophile of America?