sbooher

We’ve incrementally changed the definition of a social network, and hardly anyone notices, or cares.

X is now a place where you can post the most anodyne comment like “Happy Saturday folks” and immediately get 50 trolls arguing that it’s NOT a happy Saturday, and BTW you’re an ugly BIT*H. Every one of Elons’ 50 daily posts will be boosted and you have to see them. Your feed is now filled with right-wing content 24/7 from anyone who paid for a checkmark. From the moment you log into the system, you may be in fight-or-flight mode, and every single interaction is a potential argument. That’s our collective definition of a social network now, and if you want to opt out of that, you’re in a “liberal echo chamber”.

No, Bluesky lets folks actually use a network as before - finding interesting content, connecting with others, and yes, having civil disagreements. The change is that trolls whose only purpose in life is to find as many people as possible to argue with and shout at, can now be blocked from a user’s feed. It’s not a new innovation - it’s the way it used to work.

No, I actually think it's a large negative impact today, but rather than just accepting that's the way it is, I wonder why. Why is the US food system geared toward mass-scale industrial feed lots? What could be changed? On a trip to Ireland I never saw a ruminant in a feed lot, only on pasture, and they were slaughtered 1-2 years after our cattle. Why? Tax policy? Are other countries just not as smart as we are?

Hmmmm… The danger in the constant back and forth of poor nutrition science being hyped up in the media, reversing last week’s headline, is that eventually the general population just gives up, and stops listening/acting on ANYTHING coming from this expert group.

Those who want to drive food guidelines by other factors than actual health, should be honest about their motivations, whatever they are, rather than claiming that they are scientifically/health driven. Arguments for animal welfare, water use etc need to be backed by good science as well, not just platitudes. I’ve had people try to make the argument to me that all the water falling on all the pasture land in the US needs to be ‘counted against’ meat. That because we treat some animals poorly, we should stop eating all of them, rather than asking why we treat them that way, or how other countries might be doing it better. I’ve yet to see a good study on the millions/billions(?) of small animals that are killed in millions of acres of U.S. monocrops, but I’m guessing it would be eye opening. For every warning statement on animal CO2 use, I can find a seemingly well done study on positive CO2 capture by regenerative farms (i.e. traditional farms before feed lots). Carnivores on Twitter seem to have had amazing individual successes getting rid of their own specific inflammatory diseases, but then often assume that experience can be extrapolated to everyone, and often discount the long-term health impact of zeroing out plants completely…. It goes on and on.

Lastly, my statement about eating like my grandparents used the words “I” and “my” and was obviously my own rule - hard to imagine what you found ‘uncharitable’ about that statement. I’m somewhat new to HN - are we not allowed to share our own experiences here?

If there is any information domain were it’s harder to figure out the real truth than current US politics, it’s “nutrition science”. As someone who actually tries to invest the time to check on sources and methods beyond the clickbait headlines, it’s really a mess. Poor scientific methods (observational studies), cherry-picking data to match a bias (Ancel Keys), conflicts of interest all over the place, etc. At a very macro level it seems like a few things are true: (a) 300,000 years of human evolution eating meat; (b) per-capita leveling off or even a drop in consumption of red meat, that didn’t stem the huge spikes in disease; and (c) being told to swap out good fats (meat, eggs, dairy) for industrial seed oils and ‘fat-free’ cookies to make up the calories, leading to an explosion of diabetes.

Fallacious arguments abound for the carnivore group all the way over to the militant vegans who would want to tax or outlaw meat eating altogether, while telling us to shut up and eat our processed patty of canola oil and isolated pea protein. For now, I’ll keep eating like my grandparents ate - you know, real food.

Pea protein isolates, rice protein, mung bean protein, canola oil etc are Not food. I would not feed this to my dog. In fact, lined up against a bag of cheap dog food, you might pick the dog food... In a world awash in heavily-processed food, we now add this to the mix and get excited about it.

Statements about how "inefficient" cows are in making meat re calories ingested, usually fail to mention that for most of the cow's life they are eating grass on a range, which is not used for anything else. We didn't need to make that grass, it's sitting there. Statements on the use on land assume we would have condos and coffee shops sitting there, but for the cows on it.