Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

npr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 215 posts

Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

#141

Post by wahnfrieden »

mseebach wrote: post #135
Clownshoesms wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here I am teetering on the edge of vegetarianism, and people are talking about blowing meat chunks off spines to extract that last bit of cash, and workers inhaling aerosolized pig brains. Might be the push I needed!

Once you've killed the animal, don't you owe it to eat as much as possible of it? Isn't it a bigger sin to throw away edible meat for aesthetic reasons?

Yes - and given that's the situation with meat consumption, it's no wonder some of us decide on throwing out the whole premise and going vegetarian :)

Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

#142

Post by andrewflnr »

ianterrellwt wrote: post #98
Sophistifunk wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's... not how logic works.

I think that might be how logic works. The fallacy seems to be with its parent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contraposition

You don't need to hedge. That's exactly how logic works.

Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

#143

Post by molloy »

ethbro wrote: post #139
ergothus wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been vegetarian for a bit over a decade (no fish, but dairy and eggs okay) - If you live in the right area, and have the right tastes, it's downright easy. In other areas, it's quite difficult. My personal tips & notes: * If you otherwise enjoy meat, there are a lot of meat-substitutes out there and more being developed. These tend to do a great job of mimicking processed meats and a terrible job of mimicking "r…

As a, for lack of a better term, total vegetarian, do you have any moral thoughts on different types of animals? Was the herbavore vs omnivore vs carnivore thing a consideration? Did you debate mammal protein vs fish? Curious how people arrive at "their" vegetarianism.

The term you're looking for is lacto-ovo vegetarian.

Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

#144

Post by molloy »

ergothus wrote: post #131
Clownshoesms wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here I am teetering on the edge of vegetarianism, and people are talking about blowing meat chunks off spines to extract that last bit of cash, and workers inhaling aerosolized pig brains. Might be the push I needed!

I've been vegetarian for a bit over a decade (no fish, but dairy and eggs okay) - If you live in the right area, and have the right tastes, it's downright easy. In other areas, it's quite difficult. My personal tips & notes: * If you otherwise enjoy meat, there are a lot of meat-substitutes out there and more being developed. These tend to do a great job of mimicking processed meats and a terrible job of mimicking "r…

You may not be aware of this, but the dairy and egg industries kill an insane amount of animals. I too was an ethical vegetarian for years before discovering that and reevaluating my dietary ethos.

Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

#145

Post by scythe »

Razengan wrote: post #119
scythe wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You cannot copy "all" of the information stored in the human body. Briefly, this happens because the physical limitations of information storage require cooling (Landauer's principle) which requires kT×log(2) energy per bit, or about 2.5 zJ at room temperature. The brain's memory capacity is about 2.5 * 10^15 bytes ( https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-the-memor... ), but the amount of information whic…

Copying a disk does in no way require simulating each atom of the disk, though? • We can already clone mammalian bodies. • I'll assume that "growing" an adult human body, with a "blank" or "default" brain, isn't too inconceivable. • Your real, natural brain can access the information within itself. • At the moment of "copying", we figure some way to biologically link the two brains together, and write some biological…

The disk is designed to be copyable. The brain is not. See e.g. this evolved circuit:

https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/

The brain is, as far as we can tell, more like that circuit than a disk. Information is encoded within the structure of the processor itself, rather than being one of 2^N easily defined conformations of a memory device. As such, there is no way to copy the memories of brain A into brain B -- it simply isn't a thing. It would be like saying: copy all of the stains on this shirt, but the stains are integrated into the fibers and are unique to the stitching. In particular, this statement is false:

>Your real, natural brain can access the information within itself.

It cannot, for example, I cannot fully describe how to walk, given a pair of human legs and a butt. My brain can only encode information into language in the particular ways in which it is "designed" to do so. There is no way at all for the brain to report, e.g., the number of synapses within it, even if the firings of some neurons are recorded electronically.

I say "design" in this sense because the structure of my brain is contingent on its fitness-for-purpose in a way that affected its formation, via biological evolution, similar to the way that the structure of an intentionally designed object is contingent on its fitness-for-purpose, which affected its formation as it was constructed by the entity which made it.

Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

#146

Post by nimchimpsky »

mseebach wrote: post #135
Clownshoesms wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here I am teetering on the edge of vegetarianism, and people are talking about blowing meat chunks off spines to extract that last bit of cash, and workers inhaling aerosolized pig brains. Might be the push I needed!

Once you've killed the animal, don't you owe it to eat as much as possible of it? Isn't it a bigger sin to throw away edible meat for aesthetic reasons?

well yeah, but getting sprayed with spinal column aerosol in your mouth isn't exactly appetising, was the point.

Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

#147

Post by ergothus »

ethbro wrote: post #139
ergothus wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been vegetarian for a bit over a decade (no fish, but dairy and eggs okay) - If you live in the right area, and have the right tastes, it's downright easy. In other areas, it's quite difficult. My personal tips & notes: * If you otherwise enjoy meat, there are a lot of meat-substitutes out there and more being developed. These tend to do a great job of mimicking processed meats and a terrible job of mimicking "r…

As a, for lack of a better term, total vegetarian, do you have any moral thoughts on different types of animals? Was the herbavore vs omnivore vs carnivore thing a consideration? Did you debate mammal protein vs fish? Curious how people arrive at "their" vegetarianism.

Speaking for myself on a very subjective issue:

I do. My gradual elimination of meats was done on a roughly sliding scale of animal awareness - pigs seem more aware than turkeys seem more aware than chickens, and most fish come in below that. I based this mainly on my understanding of there general awareness of the world, which is hardly a strict scientific method, but I was trying to acknowledge the concept you're describing, figuring that while it was all bad, if I wasn't going to immediately do totally right, I should choose to do it in the least bad manner.

Insects are actually a point of confusion for me. My general rule of thumb for whether I think I should kill something to eat it (or have someone else kill it for me to eat) is based on my instinctive empathy: If I saw the animal injured, would I feel bad for it? land-based animals - Yes. Fish - Yes. Eggs? No. (lots of issues in the egg industry, but the base concept didn't bother me). Bacteria? No. But this leaves insects in a weird place. I will kill an insect that is a pest to me without much concern. Mosquitos are dead if I get a chance, houseflies are welcome to leave, but if they don't, I can swat them without guilt. Ants, while an absolutely favorite creature of mine, also fall prey to my self-centeredness. BUT - the idea of hundreds/thousands of insects getting ground up DOES bother me. I _think_ that's because I don't empathize with the bugs the way I do with animals, but I don't like what it says about us to kill in such numbers even if I don't empathize directly, Regardless, while I don't have a solid answer, it was easy enough to give up the few foods involved. (Pretty much Junior Mints, in my case)

Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

#148

Post by ergothus »

molloy wrote: post #143
ethbro wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a, for lack of a better term, total vegetarian, do you have any moral thoughts on different types of animals? Was the herbavore vs omnivore vs carnivore thing a consideration? Did you debate mammal protein vs fish? Curious how people arrive at "their" vegetarianism.

The term you're looking for is lacto-ovo vegetarian.

That's the term, but most people that don't deal with vegetarians don't know it. (I've also seen a number of vegetarians & pescatarians that don't know it, which is somewhat surprising to me). But yes, I'm an ovo-lacto vegetarian.

Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

#149

Post by Laforet »

justboxing wrote: post #66
touchofevil wrote: post #23

I did a bunch of research (googling) back in the late 90's or 2000s when the mad cow disease outbreak first happened mainly in England. I thought it was pretty terrifying and I wanted to know what the hell was going on. I read about Kuru all the way back then and the take away was that people shouldn't eat the brain and nervous tissue of other people or Kuru could result. But also it seemed that mad cow disease was o…

> The AMR process entails blasting off that meat stuck to the spine and skull with some kind of high pressure for use in ground meat. This is true. A while back, I read stories of how (Mostly low-wage Mexican) Workers at Meat Plants were getting a strange neurological disease that confounded their doctors. The cause was then traced to them inhaling the aerosol of the Animals' brains being blown out, mostly Pigs. Rela…

If it is of any consolation, the odds of picking up such as disease is likely to be very low. Bone meal feeding was extremely prevalent prior to human cases of CJD started to emerge and the number of cases remained thankfully small.

A similar argument could be made for other bad things such as thalidomide: we understand now that it is actually quite safe when used outside a fairly short window when the long bones of the limb is developed in a foetus. While the number of victims are numerous, it is an extremely small fraction out of all the doses prescribed in Europe before the ban.

Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

#150

Post by ergothus »

molloy wrote: post #144
ergothus wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been vegetarian for a bit over a decade (no fish, but dairy and eggs okay) - If you live in the right area, and have the right tastes, it's downright easy. In other areas, it's quite difficult. My personal tips & notes: * If you otherwise enjoy meat, there are a lot of meat-substitutes out there and more being developed. These tend to do a great job of mimicking processed meats and a terrible job of mimicking "r…

You may not be aware of this, but the dairy and egg industries kill an insane amount of animals. I too was an ethical vegetarian for years before discovering that and reevaluating my dietary ethos.

I'm in the process of reducing my dairy and egg intake. Soy milk was okay, but I've found I much prefer almond milk, and it works well enough in my cooking. We have some egg replacer we use for baking, but I've not yet tried in it cooking dishes. Cheese is a harder one, as the vegan cheeses aren't bad on a pizza but don't fill all the roles of cheese for me.

You make an excellent point about those industries - I originally had a comment about them above, but dropped it as it was getting a bit (more) off topic. My point at the time is that I'm not ethically against the actual act of eating eggs or consuming dairy, but you are correct that those industries, even many of the "friendly" ones, do things that I'm not ethically okay with.

The hardest part about becoming a vegetarian was actually admitting to myself that my actions AREN'T ethical by my own definitions, and that I would have to accept that while not giving up on the idea of improving. Kind of like how we are about charity - we all spend money on our own frivolities that we would spend to help someone in need were they in front of us...but we try very hard to not have such issues in front of us.

Post reply on HN