Seems like they haven’t gained traction since the reddit exodus. I wonder how the other alternatives are doing. Lemmy has a decent amount of activity at least, although I still wish more people would use it.

What makes you think that processing food through an animal is healthier than through a factory?

You have to compare the actual nutrients contained in the product to draw any conclusion about health effects, and the macros are fairly similar for the plant-based versions compared to a given meat product.

The average person (in developed countries) eats significantly more meat than the recommended upper limit by nutrition organizations.

If you just go by the naturalistic argument, you’d conclude that processed drinking water is worse than untreated water, and that vaccines are worse than “perfectly natural” diseases. It’s a common logical fallacy.

https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/appeal-to-nature

To me that’s more ethical than killing of billions of animals, and the latter is considered ethical.

I think most people would actually consider factory farming unethical, they just put the blame on the producers for treating animals like shit. And the producers are locked into a race to the bottom for competitive prices, so they’d blame the customers/market conditions.

It’s kind of funny, having the calves slaughtered to get the milk that is naturally meant for them is considered vegetarian (as long as you personally don’t eat the veal).

If they’re kept on abusive factory farms, that’s still vegetarian.

When the dairy cows gets their throats slit because milk production drops below profitablity after ~5 years, the milk is still seen as vegetarian (as long as someone else buys the meat).

No matter how much death and suffering takes place at the farm, the milk is seen as vegetarian. But at rennet, that’s where they draw the line.

From the consumers point of view, you can only choose products that are in supply, so we think our choices don’t really have an impact. People often see it as a systemic issue that’s outside of our control.

From the corporations point of view, the consumer creates the demand and if they didn’t provide the supply, another corporation would. They also see it as a systemic issue that’s outside of their control.

The corporations love nothing more than the message “just consume our stuff and don’t blame yourself for any environmental impact. You can’t be perfect anyways, so might as well book a flight, buy a gas car, or buy our beef.” It’s so comfortable for both parties because they don’t have to change anything and can just point the finger at each other for the negative consequences.

Of course it’s sometimes necessary to do something polluting. People who need a car and can only afford a used car probably won’t be able to buy an electric one. I don’t even think that’s unethical consumption. But those who can afford an electric car and choose a new gas car instead do something unethical. Ultimately many of these practical issues will be solved as green technology matures, there will be cheap-ish used electric cars in the future, for example.

Damn it

1. The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in “advanced” countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering

I don’t know, life before the industrial revolution was pretty shit for regular people too.

I’d rather not have to worry about my family (and friends) starving to death during the next famine. 40-60% of children in medival europe died before adulthood. I can’t even imagine the psychological suffering caused by this alone. Then there was frequent war and disease outbreaks, basically no healthcare, and so on…

I’m not saying that everything’s great nowadays, we urgently need to fix many issues. But many things were way, way worse before modern civilization.

But the majority of us loves our animals

And when the milk production drops, the vast majority of dairy cows get their throat slit and their bodies sold for profit. I surely wouldn’t treat those that I love that way, but I guess animal farmers just have a very different concept of “loving animals” compared to people who have pets, for example.

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I guess we should start barbequing pet dogs then. At least that’s less cruel than factory farms, fwiw.

I’d be very interested in the source for this…

America’s richest 10% are responsible for 40% of its planet-heating pollution

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/08/17/business/rich-americans-climate-footprint-emissions/index.html

The emissions of the middle class are also a huge problem and will have to drop to 0 as well.

I agree that many urban areas need a lot more and better public transport, which is a systemic solution.

In rural regions it’s not practical to build enough infrastructure to replace private transport though. Electric cars are a good solution there and will also get more affordable in the next years (over the lifetime they are already roughly as cheap as gas cars).

BP and Shell only have that much power exacly because people buy fossil fuels from them. If demand would drop, their profits and political power would drop accordingly. As long as we don’t even hold the biggest financiers of these companies responsible, how can anything change? Demand drives supply.

It’s like saying “As long as hitmans exist, I won’t give a shit about the people who pay hitmans, all consumption under capitalism is unethical anyways so anything goes.” As long as we ignore those who actually fund the problem, we won’t be able to fix anything.

Much worse for who?

My point is: if police were completely abolished, conservatives and the far right would feel very unsafe and immediately form militias that enforce their values. That would be much worse for everyone who doesn’t share their values, of course.

I get that in many countries, police is badly regulated and you might say that this wouldn’t actually change much, but I’d rather seek more accountability for police, compared to a complete abolishion, leaving a power vaccum that’ll be filled by right wing militias with zero accountability.

Divesting seems good to me though, much of the police is certainly overfunded (due to law and order populism) and does useless shit (like the war on drugs), while education, social workers and programs against poverty are severely underfunded. Changing this would surely help a lot with crime reduction and other issues.

Thanks for the links by the way, I will look more into them when I have more time to see if my concerns regarding abolishion are addressed.

So what’s the alternative to police? Just getting rid of them would just lead to militias taking their place which would be much worse.

I’d be surprised if any country responded militarily. It’s not in the interest of anyone to risk WW3 over Taiwan, and China knows this. In contrast to Russia, they are probably competent enough to take Taiwan in a day or two before anyone can send significant aid.

There would be massive economic implications though. The most effective deterrence that western countries have are sanctions, and they can’t let China invade without consequences to keep the deterrence effective (also for other countries), so they’d have to be used. Investment in China would probably be banned for decades to reduce reliance.

If hundreds of millions of Chinese fall back into poverty due to the invasion, that would be a serious threat for political stability in China.

Even if they managed to recover all chip factories after a full scale invasion (which the Taiwanese could easily sabotage), the production is based on a lot of western technology, which they couldn’t replicate for decades. So the factories would be of little use.

Chinas economy is also very reliant on exports to western countries (US, Japan, Europe), if they invaded Taiwan that would plunge the world economy into the worst crisis ever seen that would hit China especially hard. They’re already struggling with serious demographic and other economic issues that will put them into a difficult spot in the next decades. Invading Taiwan would be very, very terrible for basically everyone, and suicide for the CCP.

So 0°F was defined as the freezing temperature of a solution of brine made from a mixture of water, ice, and ammonium chloride (why in the world?). Originally, 90°F was set as human body temperature, which was later changed first to 96°F, and now it’s about 98.6°F.

Celsius is just: 0°C is the freezing temperature of water 100°C is the boiling temperature of water

Nobody uses a scale between -18 and 38. People in countries using Celsius just learned as a child that body temperature is 38°C, that’s all. -18°C has no special meaning to us.

At 0°C outside it’s freezing (32°F). 10°C is quite cool (50°F), you’ll need a jacket. 20°C is a comfortable temperature for me, if it’s sunny (68°F). 30°C is getting rather warm (86°F). 40°C is hell outside, or a bad fever (104°F). To boil water, heat it to 100°C (212°F).

I get that this seems confusing at first when you’re used to completely different orientation points, but for people who are used to C, it’s very intuitive.

The good ones tend to do something in-between, with a market based economy, but good regulations, solid welfare, and democracy. Scandinavian countries have the happiest populations in the world, maybe we should try to learn from them.

Unfortunately corporations get more power over time instead of less. They have an ever growing pile of money to buy media and politicians to push their interests, that’s probably the greatest challenge of democracy.

How is this anti western? Pretty much every country in the world is capitalist by now.