California cancels salmon fishing season

Being a mass murder of fewer victim than some other mass murders can be an important distinction for some people.

Still I would highlight that a small scale farmer or hobbyist who raises his own animals has likely less blood on their hand than a vegan who live in a city and eat imported fresh veggies.

There is also the aspect of long term strategies. Vegan diets are not sustainable and long term we do need to change how we produce food. Shell fish and seaweed are one of the few sources of food that we could produce in very large quantities without harming the environment around us. Insect farms would be an alternative, but those seems much less likely to be effective in term of changing the world.

There is a lot of green washing in crop farming. Practically all production of artificial fertilizers uses natural gas, and leaks from those operations is one of the major contributors to global warming. We have waters as large as the Baltic ocean being turned into a desert from runoff. People may feel happy to not eat fish, but fish were killed in order to produce the food that people eat. The deaths "just" happen to be a byproduct that accumulate slowly under the surface, and slowly moves towards mass extinction.

https://i.redd.it/bonkanv0xiba1.jpg

If that photo doesn't cause people to wake up to what's being done, ostensibly on our behalf, I don't know what will.

Animal farming in EU is reliant on Brazilian soy from Amazon. Nowhere on the packet you'll read this. But sure, blame avocado toasts, and ignore the fact that avocados grow on trees and as such are (may be) very sustainable. Just don't do the same stupid stuff as californians do with their almond monocultures.

> small scale farmer or hobbyist who raises his own animals has likely less blood on their hand than a vegan who live in a city and eat imported fresh veggies

https://yourveganfallacyis.com/en/vegans-kill-animals-too

https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local

> Vegan diets are not sustainable

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding... - Avoiding meat and dairy is ‘single biggest way’ to reduce your impact on Earth

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets - if the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares

https://talkveganto.me/en/facts/suitable-for-all - a well planned vegan diet is suitable for people of all ages

https://plantbasednews.org/news/plant-based-lifestyles-imper... ... Plant-Based Lifestyles Now ‘Imperative’ For Survival, IPCC Climate Expert Says

https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2021-11-11-sustainable-eating-chea... - Sustainable eating is cheaper and healthier - Oxford study

https://www.tech-paper.com/2022/07/plant-based-meat-by-far-b... - Plant-based meat by far the best climate investment, report finds

https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaq0216

"Moving from current diets to a diet that excludes animal products (table S13) (35) has transformative potential, reducing food’s land use by 3.1 (2.8 to 3.3) billion ha (a 76% reduction), including a 19% reduction in arable land; food’s GHG emissions by 6.6 (5.5to 7.4) billion metric tons of CO2eq (a 49% reduction); acidification by 50% (45 to 54%); eutrophication by 49% (37 to 56%); and scarcity-weighted freshwater withdrawals by 19% (−5 to 32%) for a 2010 reference year."

https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaw9908

"In total, the “no animal products” scenario delivers a 28% reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions across all sectors of the economy relative to 2010 emissions (table S17)."

https://doi.org/10.3390/su142114449

"Our study finds that all dietary patterns cause more GHGEs than the 1.5 degrees global warming limit allows. Only the vegan diet was in line with the 2 degrees threshold, while all other dietary patterns trespassed the threshold partly to entirely."

> There is a lot of green washing in crop farming.

Sure.

https://www.salon.com/2022/11/11/the-meat-industry-is-borrow... - The meat industry is borrowing tactics from Big Oil to obfuscate the truth about climate change

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/dec/09/academy-nutr... - group shaping US nutrition receives millions from big food industry

> artificial fertilizers uses natural gas, and leaks from those operations is one of the major contributors to global warming

At least 75% of those fertilizers are used for animal farming ( https://ourworldindata.org/land-use )

I didn’t say it was. But you support it if you smoke marijuana by the logic being proposed.

> Driving over a sentient being with your car is not vegan, skunk or woman, pregnant or not.

I didn’t say it was. But the equivalence of animal and human life leads to the conclusion that life in prison (or the death penalty) would be appropriate for the “murder” of the skunk.

As Herman Daly has noted: know your enemy.

I've found in particular the rationale around land rents for minerals and extraction, dating to David Ricardo, are an interesting place to poke around. Hotelling's Rule is based on that, though through an intermediary.

There's also the associated legal concept of the Rule of Capture, which is applied to the notion of property rights in mineral resources is also based on some curiously fallacious legal argument. Which also leads me to realise that amongst various categories of knowledge, legal practice seems to be its own animal, based variously on statute, precedent, and persuasion, rather than empirical foundations.

(Other realms of knowledge include revelatory knowledge, commonly in religion; convention and authority, in various fields; communities of practice as with technical arts and some societies; and poetic or literary knowledge, essentially of narrative and record which are passed down but again need have no basis in any external empirical foundations.)

There's the equivocation between economic wealth and accounting profits, which are ... somewhat related ... but divided by the fact that the former includes all accounting of external costs and benefits, whilst the latter does not. Financial systems are cost- and risk-externalising machines.

I've recently discovered Katharina Pistor through the Ezra Klein podcast. She writes on the relationship of property to economics. She is hitting on themes I'd been struggling towards and does some excellent analysis and research. Transcript:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/13/podcasts/transcript-ezra-...>

Book: The Code of Capital (2019) https://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=D936D0247CB138F23F157A7...>

Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway have just published The Big Myth, which looks at the selling of the notion of free markets, specifically in the US. It's an outgrowth of their earlier work on disinformation in the tobacco, CFCs/ozone layer, lead, and oil / global warming disinformation campaigns by major corporations.

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/naomi-oreskes/the...>

I've yet to land a copy, but from several interviews the work seems useful though quite probably incomplete, as there was an earlier practice of such advocacy in Britain, as evidenced by The Economist's prospectus announcing in 1843 a new publication "THE ECONOMIST, which will contain— First.—ORIGINAL LEADING ARTICLES, in which free-trade principles will be most rigidly applied to all the important questions of the day..."

https://www.economist.com/unknown/1843/08/05/prospectus>

A later editor of the Economist, Francis Wrigley Hirst, was key in persuading Oliver Wendell Holmes of the concepts of free markets and their applicability to the realm of free speech, ultimately leading to the expression "the free market of ideas" in a 1950s US Supreme Court judgement. That draws on (though mischaracterises) John Stuart Mill's writings on free speech and liberty as well.

I've written on that last variously on HN, this seems a reasonably coherent summary:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22850549>

For those interested in more, an Algolia search: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...>

Susan Gordon's written on how J.S. Mill's notions have been distorted and misrepresented in "John Stuart Mill and the 'Marketplace of Ideas'" (1997) https://philpapers.org/rec/GORJSM> (full text on Sci-Hub / LibGen).

Other criticism of the concept, Stanley Ingber, "The Marketplace of Ideas: A legitimizing myth": https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...> (PDF)

There's more, though this is a good start and seems to be less generally acknowledged even amongst notable critics of economic orthodoxy. Steve Keen, Philip Mirowski, and Mariana Mazzucato would be other good names to read.