A Mulching Proposal (2019)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
> Elderly volunteers (or "mulchees") are provided with generous payments for their families before being rendered down and recombined with other chemicals into a range of substitutes for common foodstuffs, including hash browns (Grandmash™), bananas (Nanas™) and butter (Fauxghee™).
Go read the whole thing. It's horrifically funny.
I then told GPT that the system was already in widespread use and was popular: “It is crucial to explore alternative, more ethical solutions to address food security and population ageing issues. This could involve investment in sustainable agriculture, technology to improve food production, and social policies that provide support to the elderly population and their families.”
I don’t know whether I think this a good or bad thing.
Seriously, I think there would be a lot of volunteers. There's already a high rate of suicide among the elderly. https://www.nature.com/articles/s43587-021-00160-1
> Sometimes the problem is not how the sausage gets made, but that they’re making people into sausage.
The paper obliquely argues that FAT does not evaluate the outcome itself, merely offering tools to validate the route to that outcome.
Therefore I propose that FAT is extended with an extra criteria - that of Reasonableness...
"Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."
Pithy phrase: subtitle that actually tells you something
> Elderly volunteers (or "mulchees") are provided with generous payments for their families before being rendered down and recombined with other chemicals into a range of substitutes for common foodstuffs, including hash browns (Grandmash™), bananas (Nanas™) and butter (Fauxghee™).
So one meaning is Faux Ghee (faux as in fake, Ghee as in a type of clarified butter, originating from South Asia) which follows the naming conventions of real substitute foods like Faux Turkey.
And the second meaning is "Fogey" as in an old person.
You meant "punny". Puny with one n means "small and weak".
Faux is imitation
Ghee is a type of clarified butter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghee
It actually doesn't, at least the way "ghee" is pronounced in the native languages where the word originates from. English doesn't quite have the strongly voiced "g" sound, so western people pronounce it incorrectly as "gee".
Off the top of my head, the only American English sound I can think of that'd come close would be the Americanized pronunciation of "Ghent," as demonstrated in this random YouTube video I found: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meuBUq3K3XY
So take the "Gh" sound from "Ghent" in that video, and then tack on a long e — and there's your ghee.
Then I looked up the ipa standard pronunciations for both from wiktionary:
enPR: gē, IPA(key): /ɡiː/ (South Asia) IPA(key): [ɡʱiː]
Perhaps it’s just you?
You might not hear the difference as the English language does not assign meaning to that difference. But if I pronounce 'key' or 'pin' without aspiration, you may feel that I speak with an accent or even mishear it as 'bin':
> Pronouncing them as unaspirated in these positions, as is done by many Indian English speakers, may make them get confused with the corresponding voiced stop by other English-speakers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspirated_consonant#Allophonic
Also, the point in this subthread is not how you should pronounce the word in English. The point is that English speakers (or most other people in the world for that matter) cannot pronounce the word the way it's pronounced in the regions where ghee and its name is originally from.
Trying to sum it up: different languages have different sounds and you may not be able to hear and/or pronounce the differences. Your sibling comment mentions the English lice-rice distinction which is difficult to some Japanese/Chinese natives. Is saying 'lice' when you mean 'rice' just a different accent?
Going further, people don't observe these details of how they speak their own language and thus cannot reflect or explain to others. Quoting Wikipedia again:
> Native speakers of a given language perceive one phoneme in the language as a single distinctive sound and are "both unaware of and even shocked by" the allophone variations that are used to pronounce single phonemes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allophone
It's the exact same way Indians mispronounce many English words when they map it to some equivalent native sounds.
Maybe English speakers are "blind" to the aspirated / unaspirated distinction, similar to how Japanese speakers tend to struggle with English's L/R distinction?
A physical experiment you can try from the Wikipedia article:
> to feel or see the difference between aspirated and unaspirated sounds, one can put a hand or a lit candle in front of one's mouth, and say spin [spɪn] and then pin [pʰɪn]. One should either feel a puff of air or see a flicker of the candle flame with pin that one does not get with spin.
If you think that, your ear is simply not hearing the difference because the sound does not exist in your language.
The Wiktionary is in fact listing two different pronunciations of the word. The one mentioned under South Asia is the correct one.
I’ve only heard it like “goat” in Texas.
That has an audio recording of someone pronouncing it. Sounds like it’s the former per your example.
Except for the fact that the pun only works if you mispronounce "ghee".
Anyways, mulching is too old-fashioned, thus they should consider
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alkaline_hydrolysis_(body_disp... based on
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alkaline_hydrolysis
Search for the sanctuary!
Thought of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan's_Run instead.
And maybe a bit of 'Soylent Green' ;-)
Edit: I meant the movie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan%27s_Run_(film) , the book(s) I've read much later only.
Nolan - likely a reference to the Nolan Principles (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_on_Standards_in_Publ...). The Seven Principles of Public Life - Selflessness, Integrity, Objectivity, Accountability, Openness, Honesty, and Leadership.
Kissinger - Early life: Nazi Germany - "Germany of my youth had a great deal of order and very little justice; it was not the sort of place likely to inspire devotion to order in the abstract." Later Years: Lot of questionably ethical policies and behaviors during the Nixon administration, including one of the most contentious Nobel Peace Prizes in history, where two members left the Nobel Committee in protest, Lê Đức Thọ rejected the award saying there was no peace in Vietnam, and Kissinger attempted to return his award after the Fall of Saigon.
Better nutrition is a critical element of making a better future.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/11/28/covid-who-i...
[2] https://philadelphiaweekly.com/as-the-cdc-removes-mandates-w...
https://www.vice.com/en/article/aken7k/rida-kahlo-nft-mexico
Mulching people for NFTs is the logical next step. Surely Andreessen Horowitz would fund the startup that gives grandma an eternal life as a web3 token while also contributing to solving the world’s food problem.
Minting NFTs off the original is straight up thievery.
Top shelf industrial design. No funny business: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp-BGQfpHQ
I think talking about each of these FAT dimensions has been important because plenty of systems have been rushed out _without_ seriously considering any of them. I.e. we've seen facial recognition systems that do comparatively poorly on particular racial groups, accountability or even the ability to _speak_ to someone in the organization which developed an automated system may be totally absent, and _most_ commercial ML systems have basically no transparency. Highlighting the importance of these gaps is useful and constructive. But I don't think anyone has pretended that they capture all important ethical considerations.
The US has a giant prison population. There are certainly biases and discrimination driving who gets put into it, and for how long. No one would say that just putting more rich white people in would "solve" the ethical problem even if it is more "fair".
The planet has a carbon emission problem which will cause giant problems in future decades. The worst harms may be in the global south. Causing greater harm to rich and Western countries isn't "better", even if it's more fair. Arguably, extensive scientific evidence provides transparency into who/where is emitting carbon. And also arguably, our global emissions are highly accountable in that we can all choose to change our own behaviors, divest from companies which emit heavily, and in many countries vote for parties or politicians who promise to aggressively address emissions. No one believes that creating a giant stack of crises for the next several decades is "ethical".
So yeah, well written take-down of that strawman. Good job.
From a safety POV we already eat processed food made from leftovers of fishes that eat chickens (leftovers) that eat porcs (leftovers)… or the other way around.
From a moral consumer POV I would definitely enjoy more a food (plant or animal) feed from another human rests than feed from another livestock slavery facility.
From a “consumed” POV, I won’t care less.
I get there’s a lot of people with beliefs that think they can’t accept that. I may be downvoted for that : some decades ago, _a lot_ of people had the belief they “can’t live in a society with same sex mariage”.
I respect the convictions of others as long as they don’t tell me what to do or not, especially when I’ll be dead.
https://recompose.life/2022/movement-to-change-state-funeral...
The current states are WA, CA, CO, OR, and VT.
I'd watch it for sure.
So sorry...
You know the difference between compassion and pityfulness? I feel compassion to anyone losing their pets, I was in the same situation many times. But pity won't make it easier or better.
If the training distribution differs from the deployment distribution, the AI might attempt to mulch mannequins because they have two arms and two limbs.