1457389

Yup this is true when defined narrowly enough, but impossible in practice. Plus you'd have to address the argument that cutting short a happy life is a moral harm.

If we were a society that was capable of doing this at scale, there would certainly be far less of a reason to be vegan, but I hesitate to say there would be no reason at all.

>Taken to its extreme, we'd end up with a world where we tried to save everything, even every insect, and we'd end up with an unsustainable world or at best a planet-sized zoo where everything was controlled and coddled

We are in the middle of the largest extinction event in this planet's history, and it's our fault as a species. A major causative factor is our dependence on needless animal slaughter to get our jollies. I'd say we are at the opposite extreme to the one you hypothesize, and perhaps some extreme thinking to rectify this is needed. Don't let conciliation become collusion, even rhetorically.

I think that possibility went out the window as soon as he brought up abortion. I'm not here to change his mind in particular, I'm just here to win the argument.

What isn't as true in coding shops is the torture and killing of sentient creatures, which was the whole point of this article. I think my point about the fixation of certain elements of this forum on inappropriately narrow and pecuniary perspectives still stands given that the comment I responded to was one of the first posted.

plants -> livestock -> meat -> metabolic energy is less efficient than plants->metabolic energy. In the interest of minimizing suffering caused there is an obviously superior approach to providing our society with metabolic energy. Your move.

I see your point, though probably not in the way you mean. So let's pay attention shall we? FCS and FBS are collected from slaughtered dairy cows once they have exhausted their productive lifespans and rendered into meat. Details:

>After slaughter and bleeding of the cow at an abattoir, the mother's uterus containing the calf fetus is removed during the evisceration process (removal of the mother's internal organs) and transferred to the blood collection room. (3). A needle is then inserted between the fetus's ribs directly into its heart and the blood is vacuumed into a sterile collection bag. This process is aimed at minimizing the risk of contamination of the serum with micro-organisms from the fetus and its environment. Only fetuses over the age of three months are used otherwise the heart is considered too small to puncture. (4)

>Once collected, the blood is allowed to clot at room temperature and the serum separated through a process known as refrigerated centrifugation.

>It remains questionable as to whether or not fetuses have already died from anoxia (deprivation of oxygen) prior to serum collection. Nevertheless, no anesthesia is given, despite their possible ability to experience pain and discomfort.

Gestation period for a cow is around 7 months. Drawing an analogy to studies of human sentience (I am not an expert though), this is proprtionally well past the 1st trimester point where foetuses can feel pain. To speak in your language, FCS and FBS are essentially sourced from blood sucked out of the hearts of late-stage unanaesthetized 2nd-3rd trimester abortions. In this light it is not very difficult to see why vegans such as myself still have reservations about cultured meat.

You need serums and growth media derived from animals. Not derived as in scraping a few cells with a spatula but as in grinding up foetuses into fetal calf serum, or the like. Synthetic media are nowhere near as cheap or effective, at least from what I remember working in biomed research a couple years back.

You shouldn't eat meat because its production causes animal suffering. It's pretty simple really.

I presuppose the need to justify just about everything actually. Your surprise at this approach kind of explains the gaping logical holes in your previous comments. Please though, continue with your "specific" statements, I'm enjoying this.

EDIT: mixed you up with the other commenter, disregard the last 3 sentences, sorry.

>We need food to survive.

Non sequitur, food isn't synonymous with killing animals

>Almost all life consumes other life for survival

Appeal to popularity, almost all life does all sorts of things that we don't condone or have decided is suboptimal.

>There is nothing more natural than eating.

Non sequitur and naturalistic fallacy. Eating is natural but that doesn't imply killing and eating animals is natural. Even if both are, that isn't in and of itself a valid justification for that behaviour.

Trust HN to find a way to make animal suffering all about their career prospects...

>the highly classified “source code” developed by the agency to break into computer systems of adversaries like Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.

Sure sounds like a plausible candidate considering what Shadow Brokers were touting.

>how can I possibly trust the author after statements such as Imperial Rome was a dim backwater by comparison.

Well you could read the rest of the article and see if the statements hold up...I see nothing in your comment that justified what was essentially censorship on your part.

>refresh rate that's fast enough for your brain's ability to process it

Lol can we keep junk science out of threads like these. Nobody knows enough about the tech yet to say things like this, especially with such vehemence. Let's start with the fact that the visual system definitely doesn't have some sort of unitary processing rate. It's incredibly context dependent, just like VR.

From personal experience I have never had VR sickness, and I use my Note 4 Gear VR every week on flights to watch multiple ~2hr movies and play timepass games with no ill effects. On the contrary it's pretty fun once you get off HN and actually try it...

Except it's not. Autophagy as a process happens at the cellular level but the whole reason it's important is because it has emergent ramifications for the entire living organism, impacting on metabolism, senescence, carcinogenesis and a number of other endpoints that operate at organismal scale. Your characterisation of this as "fundamental biology" obscures this emergence.

Appropriateness aside, I think the real reason we don't have a Nobel for Biology is probably a result of the fact that Alfred Nobel cared more about the pursuit of knowledge for the betterment of the human condition, rather than for its own sake. I imagine he learned the limitations of the latter approach the hard way through personal experience considering his most (in)famous invention...

I think your reply just confirmed that OP has a point. "Boys will be boys" is no justification for rudeness

So am I the only one here who knows what Pahrump is (in)famous for?

I think we may be seeing the beginning of that proof in the way the Gear VR sold out in hours.

I guess you've never seen a review article. The whole point is to go through the prevailing literature and rationalize the results, with the end goal of providing the consensus position among experts. Which is to say, cherrypicking "a few lines" of citations is one of the worst ways to interpret a review article which draws from hundreds of separate and often conflicting studies. You will note that I quoted from the abstract, where they clearly state their position.

This review draws from 204 studies, 20 of which you have cherrypicked one-line statements from. I don't see the utility in getting a 10% cursory review of a review from a layman who has an axe to grind.

Complexity of course exists, but not in the dishonest sense that you implied in your initial comment. What I am telling you, and anyone else that is listening, is that as of 2009 experts in the field have concluded that it is absolutely practical to be healthy on a well planned meatless diet, notional doctor and newspaper strawmen be damned.

If so they are relying on a pretty simplistic interpretation of the cost/benefit of sweatshops-style labor for developing societies. Sweatshop laborers can be argued to be investing in their own futures through one of the few avenues to a stable income they have access to. Same can't really be said for the staggering majority of livestock.

>So yes, it is theoretically possible to eat complete and healthy without meat. It's also theoretically possible to put 3 chop sticks on top of each other, put them on your head and walk like that to your super market. That doesn't mean you can do it, by adding some beans and nuts to your diet. It's so complicated that some doctors think they can't do it for a long time to themselves.

This is such FUD nonsense; pretty deplorable on this forum. There's nothing theoretical about eating "complete and healthy without meat" - people have been living on vegan and vegetarian diets for centuries without ill effects. People have become bodybuilders, MMA fighters while being vegan too, not that the vast majority of humans need to measure their diets by those of elite athletes.

As for "so complicated" here is the American Dietetic Association:

>It is the position of the American Dietetic Association that appropriately planned vegetarian diets, including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. Well-planned vegetarian diets are appropriate for individuals during all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and for athletes.

[0]http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19562864

[0] Lived experience [1] Gorelick DA, Levin KH, Copersino ML, Heishman SJ, Liu F, Boggs DL, & Kelly DL (2012). Diagnostic criteria for cannabis withdrawal syndrome. Drug and alcohol dependence, 123 (1-3), 141-7 PMID: 22153944

I'm sure you can search around and find a lot more, there is a growing understanding/acceptance that it exists.

Opium comes from plants. Marijuana often has physical withdrawal symptoms for chronic users. I'm sure there are many people whose lives/potentials are limited by marijuana abuse.

Legalization/regulation is a good step, but let's not kid ourselves.

Hypothetical logic is flawed anyway. Higher ability Asian graduates could be less / only equally successful in the workplace due to pervasive external bias too. A lot of this is exacerbated by the fact that "soft skills" are more important for high status careers, and your "soft skills" are pretty much defined by tribal associations. It's the core of how we interact socially, and it causes problems that are really only fixed by alleviating scarcity.

What happened to the other comments here?

> The business-school community closely studies each school's “return on investment” or “value added” ratio—how much an M.B.A. degree adds to a person's salary, compared with how much it costs to obtain. At Dartmouth's Amos Tuck School, the nation's oldest graduate business college, tuition this year is $11,000, and the average starting salary for graduates is around $43,000. “That four-to-one ratio has been constant for at least the fifteen or twenty years. I've been aware of it,” Colin Blaydon, Amos Tuck's dean, says. Harvard also reports a four-to-one ratio, down from the heady seven-to-one ratio of 1969, but not so far that Harvard has any trouble filing its admissions quotas.

Interesting. Ratio for recent years is roughly 2.

[0] http://www.hbs.edu/about/facts-and-figures/Pages/mba-statist...

>shared experiences and cultural knowledge

So you have replaced a debate about values and shared definitions to one predicated on groupthink. Basing your moral decisions on shared experiences and cultural knowledge leads to the exact kind of in-group/out-group thinking that the idea of rights was designed to combat. It isn't a perfect moral framework, but it is one that has achieved a great deal of good in the last few centuries.

Relevance? I am sure Dutch zoologists would similarly agree that use of the term 'monkey' is just plain wrong in this instance.

I see what you are saying, but the same logic implies that there is no vital need to imprison animals, considering that the vast majority of people can get their sustenance from plant based products more efficiently.

However, I would personally argue that a rights based system only works when you have a way to have rights clash and reach compromise positions. An open ended right is not very useful because just about every right becomes impossible to enforce or provide at the extremes. When you provide certain agreed upon rights to both humans and orangutans you can have meaningful discussions about where those rights intersect and how those confluences should be handled, and in this way you avoid the absurd implications of absolute rights.

Paper tapes can't catalyze their own creation and modification. DNA can with the addition of ribonucleotides.

This is around when they start giving it away, in the hope that the enhanced livelihoods they generate frees the next generation of entrepreneurs to create even better uses for their capital.

At some point we get The Culture. Or so the hopeful prognosis goes...