Falling3

> Is that talking to ants, or is that running experiments on them?

Do you think we wouldn't be trying to actually communicate with ants if we found a viable way of doing so?

Messenger is being fact checked as well? I haven't seen or heard this.

Yea, but you specifically mentioned this as a career. You'd want _some_level of success if your passion project is your career.

You're right. It could've been used as a false dichotomy, but that was an uncharitable reading of the comment. I do disagree that it's a good counterpoint. It relies on a completely unsubstantiated claim that people with these kinds of upbringings turned out just fine and have no lasting issues because of it.

So if your comment were heavily upvoted you would've reconsidered your position? Or will any outcome whatsoever just reinforce your existing ideas?

Hellooo, False Dichotomy.

The richest 10% of the world population is responsible for almost half of all carbon emissions. The global median age is up and expected to continue rising. The global fertility rate is dropping. Population growth is projected to flatten in the next century.

Why would we waste time on population control, much less prioritize it?

Creating accountability is definitely a solid strategy, but I've got to point out that I absolutely procrastinate all of the things you mentioned in your first several paragraphs.

> and also a subset of Americans

I think you're underestimating just how many American men are circumcised. The WHO puts it at between 76 and 92%.

It seems that there are specific kinds of difficult experiences that promote growth and others that inhibit it. There are certain kinds of widely felt hardships like economic downturn that can unite communities and help bring out the best in people. There is a definite silver lining. There's no upside to shitty parenting.

Aren't oranges typically picked well before much if any fermentation has had a chance to take place?

Got a source on that? What I'm seeing is 0.16% as a high for orange juice.

Yes, and the sources and estimates I've referenced disagreed with you. I'm completely willing to change my opinion, but you've presented nothing substantive so far.

Feel free to cite something in defense of your argument.

I've seen this thoroughly debunked several times. What "numbers" are you alluding to? The most commonly cited number I've seen from a 2003 study is 7.3 billion crop deaths per year, which experts seem to agree is likely a large overestimate. Even if that were the case, that puts crop deaths at an order of magnitude smaller than the number of _land_ animals slaughtered every year; that number is further dwarfed if we included aquatic animals.

Additionally, the crops where some of the highest number of field deaths are encountered (such as soy and corn) are also primarily as animal feed.

So no. Vegans do not kill more animals.

I don't see how that kind of pet treatment has any link to whether someone is a vegan or not. And in my experience, the correlation is inverse if anything.

I get only having so much room on your plate for worrying about things... but it seems like you're trying to turn that into an Appeal to Relative Privation. Just because there are other issues you can rank higher in importance, doesn't mean this one ceases to be important.

> Just because you're interested in something and it's important to you, doesn't mean you need to impose it upon other people!

We're talking about a moral issue though. If you want to argue against advocates on moral grounds, that's one thing - but how is "it's not important to me" a relevant argument?

If you don't donate to battered women's shelters, can you still refrain from domestic abuse? If you don't advocate for the protection of children, can you still treat them with respect personally?

You don't have to take an interest in animals or veganism or farming or any of that to recognize a moral argument about them. If you think that argument is flawed, engage it at that level. Otherwise, I just don't see how your sentiment matters in this discussion. It wouldn't be mentioned in any other discussion about morals.

Nothing, but I don't believe that accurately reflects the situation. Almost everyone I've ever discussed animal ethics with is against unnecessarily harming animals - those we eat included. They're either left with trying to make the increasingly difficult and unsupported case that eating animals is necessary - or admit their own inconsistency.

I disagree it's too simplistic. It's a logical fallacy that we wouldn't be advocating for in any other context than our treatment of non-human animals.

It's also just a disingenuous argument. If our actual concern were the welfare and lives of animals in the wild, we would be capturing and caring for those individuals - not breeding new ones into existence.

And that's why we don't use "but Nature did it first" as a justification in moral discussions.

The problem isn't that Intuit wants to charge something instead or nothing. The filing fee is not the harmful part. The problem is they can't directly ensure people use their service. But they can indirectly make it hard to file without using their service by lobbying against tax code simplications that would benefit most fillers.

Your argument makes it sound like you do not know what the issue in question actually is.

Lobbying is bad when it helps a single company at the expense of tens of millions of citizens. The situation is far more objective than you're pretending.

Except Costco is very upfront and honest about what a sample is and how it works. The food-based analogy would be they offer you an entire meal then slap you after you take your first small bite letting you know you have to pay to continue eating.

I know lots of other vegans would. I'm far more excited to be able to give my cats a cruelty free diet. I just hit 16 years and I'm honestly not sure that I'd want to go back to eating meat at this point - even ethically produced.

Veganism is neither a religion nor a diet; it's a philosophy that impact various areas of consumption and usage beyond just food.

As a vegan, I'm thrilled about the prospect of this. This is the only realistic route to anything resembling the cessation of large scale animal farming.

I think you're ultimately right, but let's not forget food has historically been used to signal status as much as anything else.

Yep. Animal ag is both directly and indirectly subsidized pretty heavily in the US. If we removed their subsidies and moved them to lab grown meat, the economics work out in favor of the latter much sooner.

Some of them - sure. But anyone who would've been able to repay the loan at a reasonable interest rate is still going to have an extremely difficult time with these APRs.

> And then the 1000% APR is argued that it's the actual cost of risk with these loans since they default so often.

Isn't that a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy?