valgor

It is amazing what people will do in the name of health and environmentalism except stop eating animals.

What would be an appropriate moderate approach? Because for anyone completely shut off to the idea, any approach is too extreme. And for anyone remotely interested with be intrigued enough to learn more on their own.

We still need cars, but we don't need meat. And there are people working on reducing transportation and energy emissions because that is a hard problem. Buying beans instead of meat at the grocery store is not a hard problem, and one any of us can immediately do.

And if you are worried about plant matter and all the land used for it and transportation emissions around it, what do you think the major of animals eat? They are confined to sheds, not green pastures. They eat plants shipped to the farms, and they eat a hell of a lot more than humans do. Eating the animal means we take a fraction of the total calories the animal consumes. It is completely inefficient. More here: https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local

No one denies we evolved eating meat. But that is the pasted. We can do better in the future. "Tradition" is a word worth censoring.

If you are concerned about the plants, you will be happy to learn that a plant-based diet kills far fewer plants than a meat eating diet. It takes a lot of plants to grow animals, and we only get a fraction of the total calories the animal consumes.

Now that you understand, I highly recommend one of the two to get you started: https://challenge22.com/ or https://7dayvegan.com/ Let me know if I can help!

The animals don't like it. The environment does not like it. Eating animals is not a "live and let live" situation because you are denying others the right to live.

Just looking at Firefox's docs[0]: "The clone can take from 40 minutes to two hours (depending on your connection) and the repository should be less than 5GB (~ 20GB after the build)."

It would take some time (to say the least) to even start building a new browser capable of what Firefox can do given that size.

[0] https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/contributing/contrib...

Animal agriculture causes great environmental damage, extreme cruelty towards animals, and is all together unnecessary. Therefore, there was no turkey on my plate this Thanksgiving and avoided the problem you are having.

Curious how humans make methane? I know cows add significant methane to the atmosphere, but never thought about what else emits methane.

If you end up with the higher paying job, one thing you could consider is donating a portion of that money to effective organizations that support initiatives that interest you. So your more boring job can still contribute to important work happening in the world.

Easiest thing we can do as concerned individuals is to stop eating meat and dairy. Much of the deforestation happening across the world is due to farming animals and growing the incredible amount of food farm animals require.

What is a good way to support sci-hub? Given the nature of illegally share documents and the constantly server hopping, I have always been apprehensive about supporting sci-hub even though I want to.

It says "CWE" a lot, but does not say what a "CWE" is. Anyone know?

Very interesting idea. If you had to pay, who did you pay? My thought is the money would go to charity, but since that is (usually) a good thing then I don't know if paying money for failing is a good enough incentive.

"I prefer to advance humanity, even minimally." - Part of advancing humanity is expanding our moral circle. Pointlessly hurting animals is not an "advanced" society.

A lot of that stuff is known as humane washing in the animal rights world. Exploiting and inflicting suffering onto animals is almost always unethical. The only way to treat animals ethically is to not test on them at all.

Anything, living or not, can be exploited. Being a person or nonhuman animal does not exempt one.

That is just another form of the tolerance paradox. And the conclusion of that would say, yes, only welcome people that are socially open minded people.

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

As a long time member of the FSF, the criticisms are pretty on point. I wish they would give up on the GNU/Linux battle, and focus more on protecting people's data. The could easily find comrades with numerous other organizations wanting to protect people's data, and then find new organizations willing to join the free software crusade.

It is interesting how much the author knows about free software awhile also completely missing the point of free software. He references a "bad actor" a lot, as if bad actors are only black hat hackers. Instead, a perfect use case is if certain software was free, many forced upgrades or back end services that send data back to companies would be removed instantly. I don't want free software because I want to hack my own code (usually), but because the level of trust I have on free software is much higher since the software was built with respect of the user.

Not all sources of food contribute equally to climate change. That is why this article is about cows, and why I commented about cows. They pollute the most.

Reducing total emissions is another question.

Checkout the first graph on this site: https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local?fbcli...

It shows how eating animals and animal products is far worse. So even if we don't immediately eliminate all carbon emissions, reducing our consumption of animals can have a huge impact.

Not eating cows or drinking cow milk reduces your carbon emissions from cows 100%. You actually don't need technology or a start up to solve this issue!

For every vegan that posts, there is also the insufferable drivel of someone that is above veagns. The person that has to tell the world they will continue exploiting and abusing animals because vegans are annoying. Not sure why you act like you are adding so much rich information to the conversation by complaining about a vegan.

You will be happy to learn that the majority of soybeans fed to live stock, so if you are worried about the environment, soy is better than meat.

It is amazing the levels people go to in order to make something evil less evil. Just stop eating cow and drinking milk! Get some tofu and oatmilk. Many problems are solved, not just the methane emissions problem.

We should go as far as possible assuming proper safety guidelines. To do otherwise is an injustice to the future.

The thought that if the Great Filter is behind us and we kill ourselves is more depressing than the Great Filter is ahead of us and we kill ourselves. I'm not very concerned with which type of intelligent life expanses into the universe so long as at least one type does it successfully. Being human, AGI, or alien does not matter. So finding ETs or creating super power AGI would be a win in my book because it increases the changes that someone will make it.

While interesting, the ethical implications are what got me interested in the extended mind theory. If I cut out a piece of someone's brain, and that turned them into a lesser functioning human being, then what I did would be considered unethical by most people's ethical frameworks. But what if I took away your paper and pencil, or computer, or abacus? Is that unethical? This has tangible effects on schools that lack funding for tools, or those imprisoned without access to books and writing material.

I think some commenters are forgetting how science is done. Just because you are researching X does not mean your only output is X. An investment into SETI is an investment in science and technology. All the arguments on this forum about why we should not allocate funds to SETI can be used in the same manner for why we should not investment in pure mathematics or any other potentially "useless" human endeavor. SETI researchers will come up with novel ways to solve their problems and invent new technologies along the way, the same as every other branch of science and engineering. It's how we got SETI@home and now boinc is used for lots of problems like protein folding (1).

Plus, for those of us that have read Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu (2), we understand that SETI research is the biggest gamble in scientific research. High risk with the highest reward. What could fundamentally change humanity more than definitively finding intelligent life out there?

Lastly, some commenters need to go read Carl Sagan's Contact. He goes over all of this nay-saying!

[1] https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/ [2] https://www.amazon.com/Three-Body-Problem-Cixin-Liu/dp/07653...

I'm not sure if your scenario is completely hypothetical and you are limited to $1000, but if you are a company and not an individual, why not hire someone with the intention that he or she will work heavily on OSS that you require in your organization?

Great read!

I'm ignorant of numerical computing, so I have to ask: is Fortran still used because it is that much faster than C or any other specialized language? I assume that is the case because I'm sure someone would have rewritten those routines by now otherwise.