botexpert

The only fruit I eat is strawberries because they are the healthiest.

What kind of citation? This request is a little bit of a stretch. The majority of people on Earth identify as followers of abrahamic religions. Bunch of them accept the ideas of love, compassion and empathy as a foundation of their religions. You see where the reasoning goes from there.

> That isn't my belief system, hence the disagreement. Do I have to stand up for what you think is right?

Moral relativism really won't help you here. From everything you've written it is very unlikely that you are a consistent speciesist.

As I've said before, you were brought up through convenience, you didn't choose your values, but you interpret them as choice. It is equivalent to people growing up when slavery was acceptable. Even hundreds of years after the war there was still a huge bunch accepting discrimination as a right thing to do.

You are also avoiding the subject.

You are mentioning greater good, last resort methods etc. etc. Eagles aren't last resort, meat every day in your plate, drinking another mammals milk isn't last resort or greater good, raising 60 billions of animals every year, cutting rainforests for soybeans and corn, emitting huge amounts of CO2 and methane for the sake of steak isn't greater good.

I'm not really sure which straw you are reaching for? If you do not care about global warming, about animals (including human animal), if you really do not care, then yes, you are consistent speciesist but that is very unlikely.

Most of the conversations I had people did admit they discriminate because it is convenient and if only this other choice was more convenient they'd do it. They put themselves first. They also saw the hypocrisy and inconsistency of their actions.

Eagles being used for drones, dogs eaten in China, all stem from the speciesism that is indoctrinated through all pillars of growing up.

Slavery was convenient yet it was abolished.

Democracy brought Hitler, yet what he did people did not condone.

If people decide what is right and yet due to convenience act inconsistently it is worthless.

Being born into a world where slavery is convenience didn't make one decide that slavery is right. Just like use of animals or eating their flesh, wearing their skin wasn't one's decision to do it. One was raised in the convenience framework which was some time ago "necessary" and currently isn't. One was nurtured and educated to find it fine but the current values made it inconsistent.

It is not right given our current values. It is now a question of how do people get out of their indoctrination and convenience to stand up for what they believe is right.

Are you really claiming eagles are the last line of defense against drones? That is what I get from your line of reasoning. The only reason why they decided to use eagles is because it is convenient, some idiot came up with it and given that non-human animals don't get the same moral considerations as humans (speciesism alert!) it was acceptable and ignored from the stance of non-human animal cruelty.

So, if a serial killer doesn't hold the same values as I do, I guess it's fine for him to kill? Or is it not fine just because he's killing homo sapiens? What if he was killing homo erectus?

We do share the same values. I'm just making my actions consistent with those values. I'm coming from the same sentiment OP had.

Given that all of vaccines and medical treatments are tested on animals it is quite obvious I should not want to use any of them. I thought your initial remark made that point but it seems to me you were looking at the ingredients.

The amount of animals being abused by medicine has dropped significantly, I'm not an absolutist and yes I'd definitely do my best not to require medical attention. Would I be stupid enough to endanger other animals by not vaccinating myself or my children?

Your last remark is a little bit more inventive than the "anti-venom" one but it is still coming from an absolutist framework.

Do take in mind that animal testing is an old practice, and there's plenty of evidence that data collected on non-human animals is useless in most cases. So, modern medicine would do a lot to find new ways of testing and making in-vitro or some other models of human biological system.

Here's a nice popsci http://www.livescience.com/46147-animal-data-unreliable-for-... article of how bad of a classifier non-human animal testing really is.

I guess now you will point to my inability to use antivenom when miraculously a snake bites me under my office table.

Imagine that, and yet here's French police training eagles to fetch drones. Each training session a risk of serious injury. If something happens it obviously wouldn't be considered cruelty.

Animal cruelty is a different matter. For example, lifetime imprisonment of a dairy cow isn't cruelty. Or free-range boxed-in-a-huge-building chickens in the dark isn't cruelty.

Truffle collectors that starve their dogs - also isn't considered cruelty.

Given that the world we live in is focused on human convenience, with gluttony based on non-human animal flesh, it's really hard to be surprised.

When you have engineers making efficient assembly lines for slaughtering chickens, cows, pigs, all sentient, feeling animals, how is using eagles for fetching drones not the same act of dismissing animal's wishes as morally relevant, or starving dogs for finding truffles, or any human centered activity that risks the life and well being of another non-human animal?

Let's say lottery has N numbers. Tickets contain K numbers. What is the least amount of tickets M that you need to buy so you guarantee when the winning ticket is pulled that you matched at least R numbers on that winning ticket with your pool of tickets? LP(N, K, R) = M.

LP(N, K, K) = (N choose K), is winning the lottery and for that to be sure we need to buy all tickets.

LP(N, K, 2) is solved, I believe, for many values (theoretically).

LP(N, K, 3) is already a problem.

There was a paper by Microsoft Research where they find shortest path from one point to another in time equivalent to 5 memory reads + they sped up significantly the precomputation times and lowered memory requirements.

I've known ADHD people with extreme self-control (amazing time planning), persistence and will to learn but when they tried concentrating it wouldn't happen. Either something in their brain can't click to grok the subject or they get constantly distracted by their thoughts. The time they put into the subject is huge but they get so little from it.

I've tutored several and am amazed at how well they try to avoid the problem by being better organized but their brain sometimes just can't focus on the important stuff which limits their ability to learn stuff that requires serious attention as quickly as others.

As for the beef and soy exports it's not enough to check just the exports number. The most important number is beef consumption. Per capita the US has a pretty small consumption. But compared to EU or China, the US is leading, extremely in absolute amounts.

http://beef2live.com/story-world-beef-consumption-per-capita...

Brazil (with Argentina) is main soy exporter for most of the worlds livestock.

In the documents below you can find clear numbers of how much hectares is used for pasture, corn, soybean etc. and how much stays forest.

The cause of that deforestation is clear, it is soybean + corn + beef = animal agriculture. Brazil has one of the highest rates of deforestation in the world.

http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/758171468768828889...

https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/1...

It's a feedback loop. The warmer it gets more CO2 gets produced, not just by humans but by nature. The melting of ice caps will produce about 100 years of human CO2 equivalent methane (CO2 yearly production of 2016, I believe).

Humans are the source of the problem. They can remove themselves from the equation but it requires a less convenient life for most.

Amazon rainforest is being cut enormously. About 90% of cut Amazon is solely for beef production and soy exports for USA beef production.

Of course, the enormous convenient life of average USA citizen might need more government control (24/7 AC, cars everywhere, heavy reliance on animal agriculture etc.) and that stuff costs but it is long-term investment. Of course, no one sees 100 years as long-term, 100 years is invisible. Huge amount of forest also cut for palm oil. The new plant oil that ends up everywhere (sunflower oil turned out more expensive in this millenia).

I've heard from many parents that they don't care if their lifestyle habits promote the business-as-usual culture.

IMO, ML is nowhere close to useful in these problems when most of the clients just use pen and paper. It should be fairly easy to beat that with some simple search heuristics.

Scheduling problem (the general one) maps easily to the vehicle routing problem. Vehicles are routed and service customers. On-demand requirements and scheduling are probably easier to conceptualize in that framework (think Uber but with ride-sharing bus sized cars, or team picking up and delivering food from restaurants to locations, or repairmen doing stuff at people homes).

All needs combinatorial search and machine learning is only one little piece of the puzzle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nurse_scheduling_problem

Above is a nice example. There has been some nice contests with the above problem and the ILP solvers work extremely fast and great and solve them to optimality. Although Staffjoy constraints might have been more general.

Either way you could easily attack any custom problem with an ILP solver. It depends how long it would take to get a feasible solution and then how long to minimize the costs or fit the budget.

In order to speed up the solver you might use ML but that would require previous data. Probably the only way to speed up the solver is to learn it through reinforcement learning on a batch of data. Takes time and time and time. Not to mention that your ILP solver has to be equipped to merge with any ML machinery you are using.

Why would politicians tax energy usage if no people demand it? Why would politicians tax meat if no one demands it?

This kind of appeal to futility only brings change when consequences happen.

From my perspective the difference between believers and non-believers is invisible.

It's a branch of maths that formalized a bunch of things and allows lovely proofs for certain interesting settings that economists, sociologists and politologists observe and analyze.

Other than that it currently isn't used that much in computer science.

The easiest diet is a diet filled with starchy vegetables and fruits. It fills you up insanely, it's low on calories, and is extremely hard to overconsume.

Try eating a cup of beans, try eating two cups of beans. Practically impossible to do at one sitting. Try eating 10 bananas, extremely hard to do all at once.

People just don't realize how much calorically dense foods they eat and how little their physical activity is.

there's also dead oceans by 2048 which is the most pessimistic estimate.

but some numbers are fine.

the amount of land that is used for livestock is incomparable. water pollution, dead ocean zones, all caused by animal agriculture.

the amount of environmental destruction and pollution is incomparable. more than 90% of destroyed Amazon rainforest was for the sole reason of raising more livestock.

yeah, CO2 equivalent footprint might not be 51% but the oil industry does less environmental damage than animal agriculture. highest CO2 footprint isn't even cars and transport but heating and cooling.