fnovd

The dual, contradictory model predicts reality better than a unified one can. A set of contradictory rules might create better outcomes than a set of straightforward rules.

Light behaves as both a wave and a particle. This goes well beyond human eccentricities. The universe does not care that our simple brains want to model it simply.

>"Wealth" is a measure of relative living standards.

No, it is not. This is like saying wealth is a measure of how fancy your car is. Correlated, sure, but calling it a measure is inaccurate at best and at worst an attempt to eschew nuance in favor of ideological conformity.

Technically vegans are omnivores, too: being an omnivore means you are able to consume both plants and animals. Humans as a species are omnivores. Choosing to consume animal products is something else. I had always considered being an omnivore exclusive from being a vegan but I didn't have a good answer for lack of symmetry between a diet I am capable of eating and the diet I do eat. The "vegan" word for it is Carnism [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnism

Do you have any sources on the percentage of grain that is not of human-quality? Are there any estimates of what percentage of the non-human quality grain can be filtered to become human-quality? We're not talking about fundamentally different plants, just the difference between seeds, stalks, & husks vs seeds alone. Even putting the exact number aside, we're talking about thousands and thousands of hectares of arable land used solely to feed livestock. Even if the number is only 80 million (back in 1997), it is still a large-enough number to beg the question: is this the best use of our resources?

>Africans, like most humans, are[0] (physical substrates containing) people; they're for doing whatever it is the person in question wants. Cows aren't[0]; they don't have any inside influence to bestow purpose upon them.

Putting aside the difference between sapience and sentience, are babies people? Are the mentally disabled people? As evidenced by law, we provide personhood even to beings that lack the mental capacity to bestow purpose upon themselves.

Even when we venture outside the "homo sapiens" sphere, we have different sets of laws governing what actions are acceptable when done to animals and what actions are acceptable when done to livestock. These distinctions are based upon our relationships with these animals and are not properties of the animal him or herself. Even within animals of the same species, the way in which we intend to use the animals governs what laws apply to our treatment of them. For example, in Alaska, dogs chosen for sled-pulling are no longer protected by animal cruelty laws and are in some cases legally considered livestock. [1] Are these dogs actually different than the ones living in our homes? Can we reasonably assert that intrinsic properties of these beings are the driving force behind the laws governing their treatment?

[1] https://helpsleddogs.org/iditarod-dog-kennel-horrors-no-anim...

That's exactly what I said:

>Words like "warp" and "profit" are a symbol of a fundamentally different way of thinking about what a "reasonable" relationship with an animal should be.

It's not a "false" implication as there is no true and objective measure of "reasonable". I substituted "fundamentally different" because I think it's more accurate than "false" or "wrong".

Cows aren't "for" meat or dairy any more than Africans were "for" enslavement. It is a purpose bestowed upon them by an outside influence, for sure, but it is not an intrinsic property of the being him or herself.

As far back as 1997, over half of all grain grown in the US goes to livestock [1]. So, going from animal protein to plant protein is a net reduction of farm labor and therefore requires less exploitation.

[1] https://news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-800-m...

At the end of the day, a cow to a dairy farmer is just a machine. Whatever airs people may put on when describing how they treat their animals, the reality is they would (and do) sell them off to the highest bidder once the the juice stops being worth the squeeze.

We don't do this to other animals we claim to care for: an old dog that loses his youthful energy is still given a spot in the home and, if the time comes, will be put down in a more-or-less humane way. An old cow that loses her ability to produce milk is sold to whoever can make use of what's left of her body and promptly forgotten. If economic demands are the reason for this practice, then we can confirm that the amount of profit one can derive from a cow is the primary driver of interactions with her.

Words like "warp" and "profit" are a symbol of a fundamentally different way of thinking about what a "reasonable" relationship with an animal should be. However, I don't think you can accurately describe what the relationship between a dairy farmer and a cow is without such language, as owning a dairy farm is a business and making a profit is of course a primary concern. We see companies large and small externalize costs in pursuit of profit. What's so sacred about the dairy farmer that we have to tiptoe around describing the nature of their business?

To the contrary, we (as a society) do worse things to animals when we aren't able to actually see it happening. If I were a boar, I'd rather have lived a natural life and suffered a tragic end than have been born and die in brutal slavery. Working in a factory farm setting is known to have a negative affect on the psyche [1]. The small-time farmer who just ships live animals off and the butcher who is cutting up an already-dead animal don't have this problem. To me, this signals that we do in fact see cognition in these animals, and ignoring it causes us to ignore that cognition in humans.

[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/108602660933816...

This is slightly meta, but I find it interesting that the person you're attacking is questioning the utility of a point-based system and yet that very system is trying to silence your speech rather than theirs. The mob wants you to know that refusing to question the mob is against the rules.

It sounds like you're trying to imply that the vegan food industry is particularly harsh on bees. This is not the case. Livestock consume far more of our crop yield than we humans do, at least in the US. We would need fewer commercial beekeepers if we ate plants directly. You're always losing caloric efficiency when you take extra steps through the food chain. There is no environmental damage caused by eating vegan food that isn't magnified when consuming animal products.

Plants don't have a central nervous system that can experience discomfort or stress. The terms are used as an analogy. My laptops emits heat when it is "stressed" as well.

Apparently the concept I was referring to is called appeal to nature, not a naturalistic fallacy.

The largest consumer of crops grown in the United States are our farmed animals. Eating soybeans directly instead of sending them to factory farms reduces the amount of animals killed, both in the factories and on the fields. There is no trade-off in terms of animal death when switching to a plant-based diet. You are always killing fewer animals.

It's a bit silly to compare killing a plant to killing something with a central nervous system. Plants don't think or feel. Birds and mammals certainly do.

Unfortunately there is a part of our brain that just wants to eat the stuff we're used to eating. It's really hard to change your diet, whether that's to lose weight, to mitigate a disease like diabetes, or to eat with your ethics. From my experience, the most successful way to cut out animal products from your diet is to have a passion for cooking. Trying out a new vegan recipe every week or so will start to build up your repertoire to the point where you're hankering for a dish that just happens to be vegan instead of consciously fighting against your desires.

>I'm really into bodybuilding but the human body simply can't recover unless it eats beef/salmon/eggs/chicken/etc at least one or more times per week, especially after the minor injuries that inevitably come with lifting weights.

Is that so? How would you explain bodybuilders like these?

https://www.menshealth.com/fitness/a19535559/vegan-bodybuild...

>Eating meat is natural

Relieving yourself outdoors is natural, and we've been doing it for ages. Killing intraspecies rivals/competitors is natural, and we've been doing it for ages. Dying of a preventable disease is natural, and we've been doing it for ages. I don't think we should base our behavior off naturalistic fallacies.

Is eating meat better for your health than abstaining? Usually not. Is eating meat better for the environment? Usually not. It's very easy to just eat meat and dismiss veganism as impractical because that's the socially dominant position to have.

It's easier than ever to transition to a more vegan diet. There are hundreds of replacement products to ease your transition if it's something you care about. There are ethical, environmental, and health-conscious reasons to reduce or eliminate meat consumption. Conversely, many arguments for eating meat are just appeals to tradition or appeals to nature. The industrial production of meat, which is universally detested, actually supplies the vast majority of meat consumed in the US.

You can be a free-market capitalist and also realize that corporations are superorganic entities that, like their organic components, don't always make the "right" decision when faced with a choice between mutual gain and zero-sum thinking. Empirically, the argument that raising the minimum wage would close these warehouses has an extremely low prior probability. Amazon's warehouses exist where they do because Amazon's customers exist where they do.

He's making too much in nominal profit and needs to put money somewhere productive. Today, that place is his workers' wages.

Comcast owns 30% of Hulu through NBCUniversal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hulu

That's not really an answer at all. Eating dog isn't seen as abhorrent because of the possibility of consuming parasites or the quality of the meat. It's seen as abhorrent because we view dogs as trusted companions capable of basic emotion. GP was merely stating that this quality, which is the one that actually causes people to scoff at dog-eaters, is also present in pigs.

Using DoorDash or UberEats as your delivery service instead of building your delivery staff in-house is like using AWS or DO instead of building your own in-house ops team. Since most delivery workflows are pretty much identical (go to restaurant, pick up food, deliver food), it seems like any restaurant other than a "typical delivery" place would benefit from using someone else's infrastructure.

People typically don't buy luxury bags with the hope of selling them for a profit, though.

Heroes 3 has been working on Wine for years, when was the last time you tried?

I'm now imagining a disenchanted musician spending 8 hours a day at the cubicle making "business music."

All Apple would have had to do is enable a "Battery Saver" mode in some deep nested menu and turned it on by default, and this would have never been an issue in the first place. The fact that they hid it and denied it is going to cost them. It signals a deliberate misleading of consumers, and is a legitimate scandal.

You can't hide the bad intentions in good ones and call it a wash. "Extending the battery life for consumers" isn't a good enough reason to do what they did. A menu option ticked by default would have given the 80% who didn't mind this the same exact experience and the 20% that did the freedom to run their battery to the ground. However, doing so would have forced them to admit that the battery life was going to degrade over time given normal usage.

>As a Jewish Kekistani, it infuriates me. I don't like identitarians,

I can't tell if you're deliberately trolling or not, which I guess is the point you're trying to make.

If you really wanted this plan to work, why would you publicize it?

Is your enemy the SV companies that delete hate speech, or the people you use hate speech to attack?