101–110 of 175 posts
One of my favorite books growing up - and indeed among the very few I read voluntarily.
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Same boat. I'm not a vegan, and I try my absolute best to avoid thinking about what we put animals through. It certainly sits in a specific category of intrusive thoughts. The only real analog to this in my mind is being aware of my own mortality; I just avoid that thought and shove it out of my mind. Occasionally my comparatively relaxed life is harshly interrupted by an awareness of these facts and I'm ripped back…
Disclaimer: I’m “vegan”, for some definition of the word. Candidly, I think that reduction in animal suffering is worthwhile, but you get diminishing returns quite quickly. I’d suggest only doing things that are easy. For example: - While grocery shopping you’re choosing between two types of burgers with similar cost and enjoyment: pick the one that causes less suffering. - Your tires need to be replaced for a campin…
it's pretty easy these days, too. veg foods are prolifically available, and oat milk is damn good, even in my morning cappuccino.
it becomes something that is positive when it's always a minimization and hueristic rather than a ruleset and guilt-ridden.
essentially, "I'm vegan but i don't stress it"
So it wasn't an utopia. The mice had enough water and food, but they ran out of living space. It's so obvious I can't understand nobody pointed it out yet.
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It’s interesting to me at least that the group’s population crashed completely to zero and not to just a low number that then began climbing again. This is undoubtably a consequence of mice not being able to escape from the chaos due to the small size of the territory, but I do wonder what the minimum viable size would be to allow for a full boom-bust-boom cycle to occur.
I don't think it's that surprising, especially as an occasional result. Consider that surviving severe overpopulation is trauma. Survivors are physically and/or psychologically sick. They're not good breeders and at this point. Happens frequently in aquariums. Guppies breed like guppies. Overpopulate, then die back. The proximate causes can be varied. Maybe there's an ammonia spike, oxygen deficiency or other consequ…
I was thinking the same thing. From the article I got the impression that the final collapse happened because all the survivors were the same age, and too old to spawn a new generation. Semi-separation would at least break the synchronization.
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Only in the sense that people are bad with numbers and timescales, and that the fears themselves directly led to funding for research that happened to be successful at creating affordable solutions. The fictional population of NYC in Soylent Green (released 1973, set in 2022) was 40 million, whereas the actual population today is 8.8 million, but even 40 million would give it about the population density of Manila to…
> The fictional population of NYC in Soylent Green (released 1973, set in 2022) was 40 million, whereas the actual population today is 8.8 million, but even 40 million would give it about the population density of Manila today and wouldn’t look like it was portrayed in the film. Another example is Isaac Asimov's Trantor, a world-wide city enclosed with globes which requires the resources of multiple agricultural worl…
It would seem like the more obvious lesson would be, "when in conditions very different from what that species evolved for, new and often serious problems will arise". Which is, no doubt, true and even relevant. But, since we evolved for conditions very different than rats did, I'm not sure how much more can be concluded. It does point out, though, the importance of being skeptical of any other scientific study done…
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... and because of this, mankind has developed an interesting game called "war"...
Though this creates a bit of a problem if you're no longer having wars.
[1] Note that I wish for Russia to be completely driven out of Ukraine and to be treated as a warmonger like Germany was after 1945, this is unfortunately not realistic.
One of the worst jobs i ever had, occasionally required us to drown some mice. Excess population / euthanized "feeders" for pet snakes. The method was to put several mice into a small wire cage, and then submerge the cage in water. Usually I filled a bucket with hot water, beforehand, and made this operation fast as possible. Dunk and done. One day I came across a cow orker attempting to do this job (I had been busy…