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Comment by zazazache | Hacker News Reader

No, they don’t they feed hay to cows.

"hay" is USDA regulatory shorthand for grains and grasses fed to farm animals.

most of the "hay" exports to Saudi Arabia from Imperial county in California, and Yuma county in Arizona, of which I have personal and specific knowledge, is alfalfa - most valuable conversion of water rights for export.

And cows are somehow not eaten by people/don't produce milk?

They do, but the water:food conversion ratio is terrible.

Well that's first world for you.

Would you rather live in a world of 100 billion on efficient food only or 1 billion that can actually eat meat and other tasty things?

100 billion on efficient food only.

Or, you know, spread to space while we're at a local resource maximum.

So your ideal future is that of as many as possible miserable people?

In other words, you'd rather live in Bangladesh than the US you're apparently in? Why haven't you moved yet?

There's a difference between misery and limiting ones intake of climate-unsustainable calories. Not eating meat a few days of the week seems a small price to pay for allowing more people to live.

And walk me through how we limit population to allow resource excess, without artificial population controls and managing the economic impacts of a shrinking population, and I'll consider it.

All Western countries went into below-replacement fertility without any population control.

Life on soylent in a dorm is not worth living.

The majority of Western countries are consuming at a level, were it applied globally, would exhaust the planet.

Distracting people from fucking isn't a feasible sustainability target when applied to the whole world.

> The majority of Western countries are consuming at a level, were it applied globally, would exhaust the planet.

This is an argument against overpopulation, not for lowering living standards.

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