231–240 of 314 posts
meat eating is destroying the planet.
https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector#sector-by-sec...
Please don't spread dangerous lies! By saying that meat is destroying the planet you're distracting from the true source of climate change: oil.
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I wrote that women’s education is necessary, but not sufficient. All the women in Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan can have PhDs, but it is not going to do them much good if the men collectively decide to oppress them.
Au contraire, the men can collectively decide to oppress them, but it is not going to do them much good if all the women in Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan have PhDs. What is it, I ask you, that makes a population difficult to oppress?
> Some grain by-products, such as maize husks, are unsuitable for human food. And feeding grain to animals does generate food for people indirectly, in the form of milk, meat and eggs. However, this process is highly wasteful. For every 100 calories of grain fed to a cow, just three emerge as beef. Along with other feed crops and pasture, rearing animals also uses land that could produce human food. But we don't only…
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this is not business, thus is vandalism. Its the same as if i go and rip apart public street furniture and sell them as metal scrap for profit.
Pillaging, exploitation, and destruction of the commons leading to ecological and societal degradation and eventual collapse has been documented as what capitalism does since there was a thing called capitalism There's still plenty of boosters who will use fallacious arguments defending it that were just as tired hundreds of years ago. Some people let their aspirations of greed blind them from what's clearly happenin…
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That is a contradiction to my statement in what way? Do you think the United States is the only wealthy country? The fact is that the war in Ukraine is leading to shortages and those are felt by the poorest, not the richest.
Every time! I don't talk to dishonest people. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I'm totally aware that vegans consistently invade this kind of thread on HN to promulgate their vegan propaganda, like little prophets of malnutrition sent into the world by a god of famine, but this time, what was the lie? I can't see it.
As far as I can tell it's true that meat production and consumption is very unevenly distributed: the USA and Argentina produce almost double as much beeef as anybody else:
https://ourworldindata.org/meat-production#beef-and-buffalo-...
https://www.mekkographics.com/meat-consumption-by-country-an...
1. We already produce way more food than the entire world can eat, even if it were distributed equally
2. When population begins butting up against the limits of food production, demand for cheaper plant based food will rise. Most will be unable to afford meat, making the meat market naturally shrink itself for economic reasons. Likewise if meat becomes too expensive due to resource constraints.
3. At the point where population exceeds food supply, there will be at worst 1 generation of starvation, and then population will stabilize to have enough food
3a. Infinite growth of the population is not sustainable or desirable. Even if meat were banned, this same story will eventually happen again with any vegetable that is less calorie efficient to grow. Do we want 30 billion people eating literally one food, or 25 billion eating a varied, though less land efficient diet? At some point, the world will have to accept that there isn't enough food to have 3 children. At that point, when the 2 child policy is global, what kind of diet should be possible? We can stretch it so that we're all eating literally one crop and there's absolutely nothing more we can do to feed the world, but hopefully we stop breeding a bit earlier than that, to end with one where people can still enjoy meat.
> "... a Russian naval blockade has prevented past harvests from reaching their destinations. The loss of this output has caused already high grain prices to surge. The World Food Programme warns that 47m people are at risk of hunger as a result." I understand that the point of the article is about reallocating and tightening up the belts of consumption, so to speak. However, how about exerting more pressure onto the…
How will 'exerting more pressure' help? We may already be past the point where there is a good solution but the best approach so far would be de-escalation, negotiation and cooperation in an attempt to avoid all this. Every attempt to exert pressure has put the west in a less favourable position. More pressure has built an energy crisis in Europe; rivals in Asia awash with cheap gas and contributed to a global food s…
There's a largest war started by russia (8 years ago!) and going on in the middle of Europe with a threat of use of nuclear weapons.
As evident by now, russia is uncapable of maintaining any trustworthy agreements with any other nation, let alone its neighbors. It openly laughs at any civilized rule of law principles and considers this a weakness.
It may not seem that way on a distance, but this war is against the West, against its values, its societies, and its economies. The whole world already feels the blows.
Russia is increasingly acting as a rabid dog. The 'anti-russian sentiment' is a product of its own making, not for the first time in its imperial history.
How does one deal with a rabid dog that brought itself to your yard? Asking the dog to deescalate? Abandoning your yard? Letting the dog into the house?
This dog is driven by a violent agony and the violence will eventually tear it apart. But meanwhile someone needs to fend it off and contain.
Ukraine so far is fending the rabid russia with its own flesh and blood.
The war is on. Can the world exert more pressure? Not dragging feet with delivering the offered weapons. Not diluting the sanctions. Not agreeing to buy the stolen grains or harboring the russian assets. Consolidating and be decisive against the aggressor instead of making this Yankees' business or, worse, let the rabies take over Ukraine...
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Pillaging, exploitation, and destruction of the commons leading to ecological and societal degradation and eventual collapse has been documented as what capitalism does since there was a thing called capitalism There's still plenty of boosters who will use fallacious arguments defending it that were just as tired hundreds of years ago. Some people let their aspirations of greed blind them from what's clearly happenin…
Replacing capitalism with X will not eliminate the underlying socio-psychological factors that push humans to secure themselves at the expense of other humans and the environment. All capitalism does is give participants a high degree of agency that reveals these factors (and that’s also why regulation is needed—the market doesn’t work well when malicious actors exploit information asymmetry). In long term, we should…
Let's take Natchez, Mississippi. In 1850, half of America's millionaires lived there. It was the wealthiest city in the country because we richly rewarded and encouraged human enslavement.
The brightest minds had very lucrative careers in slave economics and slave labor studies and there was lots of focus on optimizing human enslavement for maximum profit.
It was the silicon valley of the 19th century and you'd have a bright and successful career if you pursued working in the slavery industry. Slave technology, slave accounting, slave management - you don't even need to directly interact, you can just make the tools.
In fact speaking of silicon valley let's talk about the first rush of San Francisco. It wasn't gold, it was whale oil in the 1830s-1850s. San Francisco was the perhaps the largest whaling port in the world as people were highly encouraged through aggressive economic incentives to go and wipe out every species of whale off the planet. And they were well on their way to success when cheaper substitutes, by pure chance, became available.
This is the problem. There's nothing "natural" about these things - they are human created systems that we have constantly redefined and had to because the base driving force is one of negligent exploitation and extraction.
We have other systems, driven by hate and violence for example, such as racism and war. We don't make peace with richly rewarding and encouraging them. We instead seek to minimize these human tendencies. We don't look kindly on war profiteers or race-baiting crowd agitators.
These things existing are as inevitable as any other human behavior, there's an angel and devil inside all of us, what we choose to reward and structure things around is a choice we can make.
We can do better than total war, we can do better than Jim Crow, and we can do better than cooking the planet with capitalism. We have to. There's no choice.
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You get more protein per X acres eating corn than feeding that same corn to cows and eating the cows. If you prefer meat then chicken is worse than eating corn but still much better than cows. We eat beef because it’s delicious and that’s it’s only advantage at scale.
Corn is not a complete protein, though. So it's not a valid substitute for chicken or beef, which do provide all the necessary amino acids.
And as it turns out, isocaloric (compared to meat) plant based protein sources offer enough protein for basically everybody.
> Some grain by-products, such as maize husks, are unsuitable for human food. And feeding grain to animals does generate food for people indirectly, in the form of milk, meat and eggs. However, this process is highly wasteful. For every 100 calories of grain fed to a cow, just three emerge as beef. Along with other feed crops and pasture, rearing animals also uses land that could produce human food. But we don't only…