manachar

Our foodways still often have less than savory actualities, often filled with exploitation, environmental destruction, and far too often, literal slavery.

From chocolate to ahi, we would be fools to think that the way we desire to eat doesn't some things that could be done better.

I'm a "power user" who can eek into the terminal and light programming as needed.

We're not disappearing, per se, just being utterly ignored. Mass market is moving towards methods of turning all computing into a phone, with vendor lock in and the user as nothing but a consumer who needs to pay to do things with their own devices.

I am unprofitable as I do not need to pay for an app/macro/SAAS to do things but also don't do those things as a business and therefore will not be paying to outsource the costs of doing those things.

In truth, I am in this area in many areas, from computing to kitchen appliances and grills. It feels that global capitalism is highly antagonistic to products and services that empower users to do things themselves.

The definition of sentient used for this article includes plenty of other animals that we keep in often tortuous conditions (most agribusiness level animal raising) and then kill for food or even sport (think foxes).

When I think of where we are as a civilization and a culture, few things are more perfect an example than the idea of competing to profit off of making meditation "sticky".

It's a weird ball of everything you need to know about us as a species right now.

What's the systemic issue that keeps doing wealth gatekeeping?

It crops up over and over. If X is a path to upper-middle class or above, it's almost inevitable that filters and gates are put in to place that primarily work to ensure it's available only to children of the upper-middle class or above.

There's nothing inherently within most software development that makes it out of reach of being treated like a technical skill like electricians, carpentry, or plumbing.

Personally, I suspect it's more to do with "cultural fit" issues than skill issues. College is a great filter to find people who self-select and are trained to fit into the global corporate world.

Unfortunately, the side effect of this is concentrating wealth into the hands of people whom already have significant wealth and advantages. Efforts to counteract this (like the GI Bill, and college loans) have tended to have additional expensive barriers to weed out people deemed a "bad fit". For example, requiring more advanced degrees or hard to get internships (that may even be unpaid!).

> Men are made to be dumb, reckless and horny, the moment they become cerebral, emotional and scared that's the signal that society is on the brink of collapse.

This statement is wholly unsupported by history or science.

Some use this to be cynical of the Civil Rights movement.

Which is a weird critique, when the reason they had to be careful about their image was because of the general white supremacist and racist ideology of the time.

For example, American prisons are generally awful places where we mostly fail to provide prisoners the basic human rights we are required to provide. We even joke about prison rape as being appropriate punishment, despite it being clearly a cruel and unusual punishment. But, since prisoners are often not exactly sympathetic to the majority of the population, prison reform is an uphill battle.

Exactly. Regulation is the primary method necessary to ensure that the market doesn't do an unethical but profitable thing.

The other approach, which is employed by other specialties, is to have a professional trade accreditation group create certain standards that must be upheld by all people in that group. Doctors and lawyers are examples of how this works, and in what ways it fails too.

Additionally the M1 Mac Mini is a remarkably nice little machine. Not perfect, but fits the"I just need a basic desktop machine" niche very nicely.

Not just bike lanes, but urban/suburban planning based on pedestrian and bicycle traffic.

Watching subdivisions going in with utterly unfriendly approaches to people who want to get around with anything but a car is horrific to me.

There's something amazing/odd/horrifying about a world where it is generally no longer cheaper to do anything yourself.

I love to bake and cook. I can do so fairly frugally.

A supermarket frozen pie is still gonna be cheaper than anything I can make, especially if I count my time.

It's a benefit and goal of the modern global industrialized supply chain, but I cannot help feel that making me work a full time job to buy cheap things means we don't put enough economic value on people making things themselves.

Then again, I like not having to mine my own lithium, copper, etc. to get a computer.

At this point, most of our fruit is much more recent vintage than a few thousand years.

Strawberries, as we know them, only came into being in the 18th century.

Also, fruit is being actively manipulated to fit consumer's tastes and producer's profitability. The Honeycrisp apple is one of the biggest recent success stories.

Wonder if this is connected to China ceasing to accept trash/recycling from the US.

I really hate that recycling became essentially a for-profit shell game of shipping it somewhere else to be a problem rather than dealing with building the domestic infrastructure needed to correctly handle it (including not overselling recycling so we could get waste-to-energy plants as part of the mix).

Is it really worth pointing this out? Why?

This is (mostly) a non-sequitur to any modern discussion about climate, the atmosphere, and its effects on human life and civilization.

Life, at this point is used to a particular equilibrium. Sure, life has existed at different equilibriums. But we also know when those equilibriums are massively disturbed (via a great oxygenation event, massive asteroid, major volcanic eruptions, etc.) much of the life dies out (obviously depends on the intensity of the disruption) and it takes many years for life to adjust to and make a new equilibrium.

Humanity should be deeply concerned with how deeply we have disrupted the equilibrium, as this disrupts the world and biosphere that sustains us.

It might be useful if you're building an argument that humanity will be better off after the current mass extinction event is over. However, I tend to find this point more often leads to a George Carlin-esque cynicism and nihilism about earth being better off without humans (or human civilization) anyways.

No. The point is the number 1 concern is we're destroying insect ecosystems to anthropoform the world.

Pesticides are a problem, but almost always secondary to wholesale habitat destruction in order to make farmland (mostly to grow feed for cattle in this country) and suburbs. Pesticides are just a tool to make those new "more profitable" landscapes.

Modern commercial farming leaves no room for nature, and suburbans folks seem to think ants and spiders shouldn't exist. Turns out the same things that kill "pests" and "weeds" generally make it tough for the cute things we like.

We're reshaping the world, often in ignorance on how much we actually depend on these ecosystems we are destroying.

I've thought of this when thinking about bringing recently extinct creatures back from extinction via cloning.

Take New Zealand or Hawai'i and try to bring back an animal that humans caused to go extinct. Like the Haast's eagle.

The eagle only went extinct around 1400, but did so because the Maori hunted the moa to extinction. So bring the eagle back you need to bring the moa back. To bring the moa back you'll need moa habitat, which have been radically changed and are in short supply.

More broadly, it shows a central problem with humans who want X but don't want to dedicate the work or resources for X. Take the current issues in restaurants in America. American consumers want cheap and well prepared food, but aren't willing to pay very much for it. So, and entire industry matured using exploitive employment practices and keeping wages below the cost of living let alone a living wage. The business can't pay enough and make a profit with the price consumers are willing to pay.

So yeah, we want pandas and gorillas and the buffalo to roam, but often aren't willing to pay the bill needed to do so.

In the dawn of the web, one of my favorite websites was despair.com.

I laughed at the sarcastic cynicism and sendups of corporate culture.

Then they rocked my world with a poster of a drop of water falling into a larger body of water with the text: "No single raindrop believes it is to blame for the flood" and the title "Irresponsibility".

Still available apparently, with the base idea being clearly more true than ever.

The problem is group actions require group solutions. I can go vegetarian and live a zero impact life, but the flood will still come unless we invest in mitigation and infrastructure.

Depends on the farm and how much hustle the farmer is forced to have to try to make a profit on a commodity profit.

Most modern farms have an insane work load to desperately try to pay the bills making a product that may be worth less on the commodity market than it cost you to grow.

The older style family farm was usually only super busy for relatively brief periods of time (harvest, calving season, etc). There was always work to be done, but you fit the work in to the rhythm of the day and had the family to help.

Oh, you had to get up and milk the cows, collect the eggs, etc, but your total acreage and consumer base was usually small enough that daily work was kept in a manageable balance.

Additionally, I think you're missing the point of the article, which is clearly stated as instead of trying to balance two different lives we need to make our lives whole again and allow what we do for income to be as satisfyingly part of our lives as any other aspects.

This point is... well bluntly a double edged sword.

Like farmers it meant you might have to attend to something in the middle of the night. Or the crunch season has hit so you put off watching the telly or playing a game. But it also means you're close to your family and house and can spend time with them, often even while working.

The article is questioning the relatively new division between our working lives and our personal lives and advocates demolishing that boundary for a more holistic experience. I'm not 100% sold on this, especially for workers who are not owners of their labor (i.e. employees rather than founders-partners). These people will make family of their coworkers only to be laid off at the first economic down turn, or skip out on looking for new employment to better capitalize on their skills because they have built a life at Acme.

Worth remembering that cubicles were invented as being good for workers as it replaced what amounted to the standard open office floor plan with the bossman looking over the workers.

Cubicles provided privacy and focusing ability.

Of course, like all technology, cubicles, work-from-home, and open floor plans all have pluses and minuses.

Personally, I have started to consider the possibility that the problem is we keep thinking about The One Perfect Solution To Rule Them All rather than realizing that no system is good for 40 to 60 hours of work a week with the varied tasks and times needed at each.

For most office work you need places for private and individual focus time, places for quick informal chats that don't disturb others, places for small meetings, places for small work groups to collaborate, places for larger meetings, and others.

That's without getting into individual worker preference - some love cafe settings for focus, some want bright sunny windows, some dark basements, most will have different preferences for different work.

I suppose with enough redundant space you could offer all those things, but that's expensive.

Work from home, with proper infrastructure for meeting and collaboration spaces is likely the best fit for many office jobs, but I know from experience that such things also have "work" invade private life and time in ways that can be very off-putting (and vice-versa).

When I say all words are a lie I am aiming for the same observation of Magritte's "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" or the old koan about the finger and the moon.

Arguing about whether it's a lie (i.e. intentionally deceptive) or "just" untrue in a non-legal setting seems pedantic.

Words lie to us. They make all appearances at being the thing we are referencing without a lick of their reality. Worse, we sometimes forget that words are just agreed upon fictions and use arguments about those fictions instead of getting at the reality of the matter.

Of course all fiction is a lie.

All words are a lie. All narratives are built of symbols and cliches and agreed upon fictions in an attempt to point to reality. Reality is a thing we cannot touch or experience directly and is always filtered by our tools, experiences and perceptions. Even math might be merely a model, one where we convince ourselves integers actually exist (where does one thing become separate from another when reality seems to be built of atoms with probabilistic shells of elections and waves of electromagnetic interactions?)

As for being harmful? Well, fiction and non-fiction narratives are all powerful tools for shaping how we perceive of our reality. They can be harmful or helpful. Some of our favorite fictions are things like justice, freedom, liberty, or any conception that we all have rights.

Additionally, when we tell fictions we are crafted a world we can aspire to. We make gods and heroes to imagine what it would be like to be better. We make villains and demons to remind us of what we should avoid. Without these I do not believe we would be in a better place. One could even call these noble lies.

Of course, this does mean fiction can be dangerous and should be selected carefully. Ayn Rand has a peculiarly powerful hold over people because her fictions are good at making a deep impression on people. Vacation Bible Schools and overtly Christian education are aimed at controlling the narrative young minds receive. Then there's the constant mythologizing of history done to legitimize modern political stances (e.g. Civil War was some sort of lost cause about state's rights, Mayflower was the first "real" colony, founding "fathers" were near perfect, etc.).

Narratives are powerful. Worth noting Plato came to your same conclusion in his Republic. Essentially deeming all myth and plays and stories as too dangerous to be allowed.

Humanity often has periods of instability following major discoveries that unseat orthodox ideals. An argument can be made that much of the cultural instability in the modern US and its animosity to science can be rooted in an "allergic" reaction to the ideas of evolution and a greater understanding of just how old and vast our universe actually is.

Personally, such an argument would be a bit simplistic, but you'd be a fool to ignore how discombobulating evolution has been to much of Evangelical America. People who believe they are the center of universe tend to find it difficult to accept evidence to the contrary. To use another literary reference, there are a lot of warty bliggens in the world.

Democracy is supposed to be more involved then showing up every 4-5 years.

For most Western democracies the reason governments have been increasingly aligned with corporate interests is those have been the interests actually doing the hard work of democracy. They gather like minded people together, lobby, and keep sustained pressure on elected officials. They constantly work at a democracy whereas most people seem to think politics is an every 4 year divisive inconvenience that's best not discussed.

In other words, democracy is captured by corporate interests precisely because they lobby daily whereas most people can barely be counted on to show up to vote.

Can an executive chef be replaced with enough data? I'm inclined to believe so.

Also, recipes are not copyrightable or otherwise able to be locked up in some form of intellectual property. Thankfully. I would hate to see a world where I could only buy chocolate chips and chocolate chip cookie recipes from Nestle.

Of course, it would be nice if they add attribution as needed, but tough to prove for something like this (bacon weave being a fairly common new fangled technique applied to everything from tacos to ice cream).

Their Tasty content is social media gold (well produced food "porn"). It's highly viral and well liked by many people. It's weird to me that you're getting downvotes for suggesting that Buzzfeed take this content and do more with it.

I may personally hate the idea of social media popularity being used to dictate the content of a menu, but I suspect there's a kernel of a great idea there. After all, this is essentially the big data or Netflix approach to deciding what content to make. Likes are just one metric that would be needed, but you can certainly get an idea of the kinds of things that make people drool.

Buzzfeed will likely first want to move into more cooking shows before opening a full restaurant to see if they can create some more fans, possibly even see if they can have their own homegrown celebrity chefs, then branch into restaurant/food space.

Using your definition, there's no such thing as human rights.

Life, liberty, and property are all things that are only guaranteed by societal standards and enforcement. Murder, theft, and enslavement is the norm where the rule of law and enshrinement of rights are absent.

Much of the US enslaved human beings for hundreds of years - liberty is clearly only something we get by being a member of a specific society.

Most people in America do not have enough money in savings to pay for a single ER visit.

What do you expect to come of it? Finding more planets is helping understand the universe and give a rough idea of how common Earth-sized planets are.

It wasn't really good enough in Rogue One, but of course will be getting better.

Personally, I hope that never really becomes popular. Culture is already far too backwards looking and nostalgia filled for my taste. I'd hate for us to get stuck using dead actors providing something mimicking a performance.

Far more interesting will be the possibility of wholly CGI actors with artificial vocaloid voices. That'll be a ways off since a voice actor would be cheaper.

O'ahu has some of the worst traffic in the country hugely because of spread out neighborhoods/subdivisions rather than investing in density. We don't have enough land to build large enough highways, subdivisions, and the standard car-based strip-malls.

I will admit, from a certain economic standpoint, ag land in Hawaii is much less efficient than low-density housing. I do believe that the negative externalities not included in that point of view should be considered (e.g. environmental cost, harm to the tourist industry, the ever nebulous quality of life, etc.).

The economic pressures to build subdivisions are huge as the cost of housing is way out of proportion to the incomes of locals, but demand continues to outstrip supply and with as limited of land as we have, we're just not going to be able to ever reduce costs by trying to supply demand with subdivisions. Unfortunately, we also tend to pass laws limiting height and density and don't have enough mixed zoning areas.