Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of humans • Hacker News Board

Re: Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of humans

#191

Post by throwaway0x7E6 » Fri, Oct 28, 2022, 12:36 AM UTC

mandmandam wrote: post #148

nemo44x wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha that’s great! Hopefully we continue to see these numbers as increase as a leading indicator of a wealthy and well fed society.

From your perspective, you just made a smart comment that adds wider context on this issue. From mine, it's something of a cosmic horror that people can think like this and be proud of themselves. We are wreaking havoc on the Earth and all life on it; strip mining it to the bone for the shallowest purposes. And some people have this strange glee about it... It's Lovecraftian to me. Like cultists worshipping death and…

Yes.

Re: Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of humans

#192

Post by rcarr » Fri, Oct 28, 2022, 12:39 AM UTC

rafaelero wrote: post #161

rcarr wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every reputable nutritional organization says vegetarian / vegan diet is ok Ok yes, optimal no. You cant say a diet (vegan) that requires artificial produced supplementation (vitamin b12) in order for you to survive is the optimal diet for humans. It just doesn’t make any sense. If our ancestors ate vegan diets before we had mastered science we literally would not be alive having this conversation because they woul…

> You cant say a diet (vegan) that requires artificial produced supplementation (vitamin b12) in order for you to survive is the optimal diet for humans. You know animals don't produce B12 as well, right? They come from bacteria in the soil. > The longest living populations are eating diets that are heavy on plants yes, but not vegetarian or vegan. Take a look at the Seven-day Adventist study (the population with the…

> You know animals don't produce B12 as well, right? They come from bacteria in the soil.

Good luck with your soil recipes.

> Take a look at the Seven-day Adventist study (the population with the highest longevity ever recorded). Between this group, the ones excluding all animal products from the diet actually live longer than the rest.

Not true. Pesco-vegetarians had a lower death rate.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4191896/

Re: Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of humans

#193

Post by dvzk » Fri, Oct 28, 2022, 12:41 AM UTC

version_five wrote: post #168

nemo44x wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha that’s great! Hopefully we continue to see these numbers as increase as a leading indicator of a wealthy and well fed society.

Yes! Happy to see more people celebrating human achievement amidst all the usual doom and gloom that people like to leverage to push their political beliefs. The GP should be commended. Seriously, it's a bit tiring that [vegetarians] people that want to control what I eat get a pass for posting the same tired stuff every time it came up. If any other fanatic jumped in with their own agenda at every conceivable junctu…

As a cyclist, online cyclists are among the most annoying people in the world. What’s worse is most of them aren’t even athletes.

Re: Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of humans

#194

Post by nemo44x » Fri, Oct 28, 2022, 12:42 AM UTC

virgildotcodes wrote: post #184

imwillofficial wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not equate animal lives to human lives. I am fine with the death of billions of animals to keep humans fed. This is their job. This is the way of nature. We’ve just streamlined it a bit

Humans are but one species of animal. We may like them better, given that we are them. We may like our families more than strangers as well. That does not mean that a machine that used unfathomable cruelty to concentrate the rest of humanity into a slurry for the pleasure of our family members would not be a horror.

Humans are more important by far. This idea that a cow’s life is as precious as a human’s life is the worst type of misanthropic thought.

There is a hierarchy and although we shouldn’t torture living things, giving them “1 bad day” is totally ethical when used to endure and pleasure. I admit we don’t live up to that standard necessarily, but we should strive for it.

Ideally everyone that wants to is eating happy animals at their pleasure.

Re: Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of humans

#195

Post by notch656a » Fri, Oct 28, 2022, 12:44 AM UTC

nemo44x wrote: post #179

mandmandam wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From your perspective, you just made a smart comment that adds wider context on this issue. From mine, it's something of a cosmic horror that people can think like this and be proud of themselves. We are wreaking havoc on the Earth and all life on it; strip mining it to the bone for the shallowest purposes. And some people have this strange glee about it... It's Lovecraftian to me. Like cultists worshipping death and…

I guess we can agree to disagree. Livestock is something only the wealthy could eat daily and today we have discovered methods that allow anyone to enjoy this. This is great progress. You’re free to choose your lifestyle of course and I’m grateful to live in a place and time where that’s possible. But I don’t subscribe to your beliefs. I have access to the same information you do. I possibly have a more critical appr…

A cow was worth about 10 months of skilled labor in ancient Rome [0].

If you keep the fat trim that's maybe ~600-700 pounds of usable meat.

That's about 0.01666 of a month's salary for a pound of meat. So if you were willing to spend 10% of your salary on meat, you could have a quarter pounder everyday. Not cheap, but if you really liked meat and you had a semi-skilled job you could afford to eat it everyday.

[0] https://www.money.org/uploads/pdfs/press-releases/ANAPR.10.1...

Re: Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of humans

#196

Post by hombre_fatal » Fri, Oct 28, 2022, 12:44 AM UTC

rcarr wrote: post #140

rafaelero wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people don't care about being body builders, so I am not sure why you are getting into this topic. Every reputable nutritional organization says vegetarian / vegan diet is ok and on top of that the longest living populations are mostly eating plant-based diet, suggesting they are not only nutritionally appropriate, but also desirable in order to maintain body function over time.

> Every reputable nutritional organization says vegetarian / vegan diet is ok Ok yes, optimal no. You cant say a diet (vegan) that requires artificial produced supplementation (vitamin b12) in order for you to survive is the optimal diet for humans. It just doesn’t make any sense. If our ancestors ate vegan diets before we had mastered science we literally would not be alive having this conversation because they woul…

I don’t grant your claim that a diet isn’t optimal just because it includes a b12 pill. In fact that it’s so trivial to supplement makes me wonder why you take for granted that there’s some magical bonus from incidentally getting it from a non-supplement.

It’s like saying getting vitamin D fortified milk is superior to taking the fortification yourself.

I bet this cashes out into the appeal to fallacy. Frankly I see no reason why the optimal human diet can’t be some undiscovered 100% artificial diet that we can synthesize from scratch. To say otherwise, including your b12 belief, leads to some pretty hilarious reductios.

Re: Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of humans

#197

Post by BurningFrog » Fri, Oct 28, 2022, 12:45 AM UTC

edflsafoiewq wrote: post #167

BurningFrog wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good way to grasp huge numbers on a national or global level is to see what they are per person. In this case, 1.9 billion tonnes per 7 billion people is about 270kg (600 lb) per human

Unfortunately I can't grasp the number of humans either.

The cool part is that the ungraspable numbers cancel each other out, and you're left with a human scale number.

Re: Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of humans

#198

Post by dirtyid » Fri, Oct 28, 2022, 12:45 AM UTC

retrac wrote: post #25

Going off on a tangent, but the scale of production is very hard to grasp. I'm probably not the first person to observe this, but I once did some napkin math about steel production, and what I realized kind of blew me away. About 1.9 billion tonnes in 2020. Like with billions of dollars, I have no intuition for such numbers. Context is needed. Global steel production just before WW I was about 70 million tonnes. So p…

I like those comparisons of how much meter cube of XYZ next to a skyscraper. The one where all humans can be compressed in a relatively small 100s meter^3 cube was eye openning.

Re: Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of humans

#199

Post by myshpa » Fri, Oct 28, 2022, 12:46 AM UTC

heavyset_go wrote: post #76

Arnavion wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It would require having 3 to 4 protein shakes a day or doing lots of cooking and prep. All the natural vegan protein sources outside of protein shakes weren’t lean; they also contained lots of carbs or fats. This made hitting macros hard. A large number of Indian people are vegetarian (plants + poultry eggs + cow/goat milk), and I've never heard of them having such problems. Why? I certainly didn't have any dietary…

If you're body building or doing serious exercise, it can be hard to get the protein your body needs to recover and build muscle on a strictly vegan diet. I've tried it and it's difficult.