World's first no-kill eggs go on sale in Berlin (2018) • Hacker News Board

Re: World's first no-kill eggs go on sale in Berlin (2018)

#341

Post by kelnos » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 10:29 PM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #78

slothtrop wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing's ever enough for vegans. > Would be more interested in seeing more means of producing tasty food without using animals and at reduced costs to the environment. There is increasingly more of that all the time. > On the other hand it just seems like another step into the direction of turning the chickens into optimized food machines. Another step? They aren't getting any more optimized, if anything new availab…

> Nothing's ever enough for vegans. That's a weird complaint on a site about eternal disruption, eternal improvement of things that are basically fine already. I'm an omnivore, and I'm comfortable with it. But that doesn't keep me from recognizing the ethical issues with killing and controlling other beings to survive. I really appreciate people pushing the envelope on this. If I could eat basically the same diet but…

> That's a weird complaint on a site about eternal disruption, eternal improvement of things that are basically fine already.

I disagree. Vegans generally adopt a hard-line, no-compromising position on things like this. That's the antithesis of a lot of what we talk about here, which is continual improvement, perfect-is-the-enemy-of-good, and making reasonable trade-offs and compromises to find better solutions.

A startup that said "We're going to build X in the most perfect, idealized way, and will settle for nothing less! We'll never ship until it's perfect" would be laughed out of town and burn through their money before shipping anything. And that's pretty much what veganism advocates for.

Re: World's first no-kill eggs go on sale in Berlin (2018)

#342

Post by kelnos » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 10:32 PM UTC

cies wrote: post #328

slothtrop wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's a weird complaint on a site about eternal disruption, eternal improvement of things that are basically fine already. I mean the subject matter is itself a disruption and improvement, which is being rejected. It is not the status quo. So I don't see that as analogous. > But that doesn't keep me from recognizing the ethical issues with killing and controlling other beings to survive. I also try to be cognizant…

Vegans are not necessarily asking for anything. They will simply buy products that no harm was done to animals for, given the choice. As a result they will buy more of the non-animal derived products. Some plant-meat/dairy/egg may be on the menu for vegans, but that's not what defines them. Sure some vegan may voice their believe that "all animals should be wild", but not even this belief is shared among all vegans a…

> Your statement "it's never enough for vegans" has two sides for me.

That's all well and good, but the only side that matters is the side that the statement was responding to: the original parent's comment that advocated for not bothering with technologies such as this, but instead moving toward an all-vegan society.

From that perspective, I think "it's never enough for [that kind of] vegan" is quite apt here.

Re: World's first no-kill eggs go on sale in Berlin (2018)

#343

Post by kelnos » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 10:37 PM UTC

JacobSuperslav wrote: post #82

wpietri wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nothing's ever enough for vegans. That's a weird complaint on a site about eternal disruption, eternal improvement of things that are basically fine already. I'm an omnivore, and I'm comfortable with it. But that doesn't keep me from recognizing the ethical issues with killing and controlling other beings to survive. I really appreciate people pushing the envelope on this. If I could eat basically the same diet but…

Hacker News, where technology > empathy

I'm really disappointed in these sorts of low-effort responses because they seem to be interested in shutting down discussion without allowing for any differences of opinion.

The idea that animals should be revered and never used as food is an opinion, not a fact. One can be sympathetic toward the treatment of animals raised for food, and advocate for better treatment while still consuming animal products.

The funny thing is that your comparison is also just flat-out wrong: the technology in question is also in part a product of empathy! Yes, there are efficiency and cost concerns around incubating eggs to maturity where the (male) chick will just be discarded, but there's also a strong empathetic argument that terminating an egg shortly after fertilization is much more humane than killing male chicks after birth.

Re: World's first no-kill eggs go on sale in Berlin (2018)

#344

Post by kelnos » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 10:47 PM UTC

kaycebasques wrote: post #160

bayindirh wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I value ethics and empathy deeply but, I don't understand vegans and vegetarians. Their biggest line of defense is "animals are alive and they have feelings and senses, we abuse them for food". That's sadly right. And they implicitly say that "eating plants are OK because, plants are not animals and they're just happen to grow. They don't feel, they don't understand". On the contrary, there's a growing mountain of re…

As a real vegan (not a meme about vegans that you saw from meat eaters) I can confidently tell you that "animals are alive and they have feelings and senses, we abuse them for food" is not my biggest line of defense. My biggest lines of defense are: * Dr. Kim Williams, former president of the American College of Cardiology, said "there are two kinds of cardiologists, vegans, and those who haven't read the data" * Ani…

Thank you for these references; it's great to see some logical arguments here rather than knee-jerk responses.

But I do question how much of some the things you reference are actually problems.

We have plenty of fresh water. Distribution is often our problem when it comes to getting that water to humans everywhere, but stopping livestock production will not fix that.

Does it really matter how much of the USA is used for livestock grazing? Are we missing out on using that land for other things that are important to us?

I have no opinion on soybean production, but, again, does it matter that the lion's share of soybean production goes toward feeding livestock? And if soybean cultivation really is that bad for the environment, are there other things we could be feeding livestock that don't have such bad effects?

The carbon emissions suck, but are there ways to reduce these through better process?

I don't think any of these problems are unsolvable, but likely they're expensive, and there's no political will to tax the bad behavior to the point that it becomes financially better to do the right thing. Getting around that is likely easier than getting a significant chunk of the world to go vegan.

And that's the issue I have with most logical arguments around veganism. Meat production and consumption has a lot of problems, certainly, but vegans seem to believe that the only way to fix those problems is to throw the baby out with the bathwater, when there are almost certainly solutions or at least mitigations to those problems. I get that as an individual, you aren't going to fix those problems, so personally going vegan is a way for people to avoid being a part of the problem. That is a satisfying route for some people, but not for everyone.

Re: World's first no-kill eggs go on sale in Berlin (2018)

#345

Post by kaycebasques » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 10:49 PM UTC

belorn wrote: post #332

kaycebasques wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a real vegan (not a meme about vegans that you saw from meat eaters) I can confidently tell you that "animals are alive and they have feelings and senses, we abuse them for food" is not my biggest line of defense. My biggest lines of defense are: * Dr. Kim Williams, former president of the American College of Cardiology, said "there are two kinds of cardiologists, vegans, and those who haven't read the data" * Ani…

Animal agriculture has its list of problem but so does crop agriculture. There are no free lunches here. One can argue about which problems are more harmful than the other, and its pretty clear that there exist some horrible practices in Animal agriculture. However when faced with a list of only the harms from the animal agriculture, I feel forced to mention a bit more facts about the whole picture. For example, fres…

> In quite a few times I have seen studies showing that the lowest carbon emission in any food group would be either shellfish, seaweed, or insects… Vegan would exclude two of those…

There's a whole strand of veganism called bivalveganism which supports the usual vegan diet + eating bi-valve creatures like mussles precisely because their cultivation seems to have a lot of positive environmental benefits (or at least, it's one of the least harmful, as you mentioned) and because they seem to rank pretty low in terms of sentience / capacity-to-feel-pain.

> Crop agriculture is however the most common source for water pollution

Again I think the most compelling rebuttal is the fact that dairy/meat is the primary driver of crop agriculture today. We can feed the world on literally a fraction of the crop agriculture that we currently do. The vast majority of that crop agriculture goes towards feeding the animals we use for dairy or meat. So in terms of thinking about the whole picture, as you mention, any problems with crop agriculture are exacerbated by meat/dairy reliance.

Re: World's first no-kill eggs go on sale in Berlin (2018)

#346

Post by Razengan » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 10:49 PM UTC

kelnos wrote: post #339

difosfor wrote: post #59

I suppose it's slightly more animal friendly. On the other hand it just seems like another step into the direction of turning the chickens into optimized food machines. Would be more interested in seeing more means of producing tasty food without using animals and at reduced costs to the environment. Working towards one final giant culling of all unnaturally engineered animals and just continuing on with a small numb…

I think this just depends on your values and moral code, and there's no clear right or wrong here. I personally do not see a problem with using animals as food. If that's good enough for all the other omnivores and carnivores in the food chain, it's good enough for humans. There are certainly a lot of problems with the sustainability and humane-ness of our livestock farming, but I don't see "become vegetarian/vegan"…

> If that's good enough for all the other omnivores and carnivores in the food chain, it's good enough for humans.

If there’s a larger “food chain” on the interstellar scale where some intelligent species mass-consume others, would it be “good enough” for some aliens to farm humans like we do animals?

Re: World's first no-kill eggs go on sale in Berlin (2018)

#347

Post by grecy » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 10:50 PM UTC

kelnos wrote: post #339

difosfor wrote: post #59

I suppose it's slightly more animal friendly. On the other hand it just seems like another step into the direction of turning the chickens into optimized food machines. Would be more interested in seeing more means of producing tasty food without using animals and at reduced costs to the environment. Working towards one final giant culling of all unnaturally engineered animals and just continuing on with a small numb…

I think this just depends on your values and moral code, and there's no clear right or wrong here. I personally do not see a problem with using animals as food. If that's good enough for all the other omnivores and carnivores in the food chain, it's good enough for humans. There are certainly a lot of problems with the sustainability and humane-ness of our livestock farming, but I don't see "become vegetarian/vegan"…

> But I also recognize that a lot of people just don't have any kind of emotional response to this sort of thing, and that's ok too

I will guarantee that a massive percentage of people do in fact have a very strong emotional response to this kind of thing, but it's all just "out of sight, out of mind".

If you make people be involved in the killing of millions of baby chicks, they'll suddenly care very, very much.

Our modern world is doing thousands of thousands of utterly horrible things each and every day, we just don't get to see it or be involved, and we're way too busy making our next mortgage payment and getting the kids to school on time to notice.

Re: World's first no-kill eggs go on sale in Berlin (2018)

#348

Post by zo1 » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 10:51 PM UTC

Razengan wrote: post #346

kelnos wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this just depends on your values and moral code, and there's no clear right or wrong here. I personally do not see a problem with using animals as food. If that's good enough for all the other omnivores and carnivores in the food chain, it's good enough for humans. There are certainly a lot of problems with the sustainability and humane-ness of our livestock farming, but I don't see "become vegetarian/vegan"…

> If that's good enough for all the other omnivores and carnivores in the food chain, it's good enough for humans. If there’s a larger “food chain” on the interstellar scale where some intelligent species mass-consume others, would it be “good enough” for some aliens to farm humans like we do animals?

It's all good and well to argue about it while we're at the top of the food chain. No guarantee that'll always be the case, though.

Re: World's first no-kill eggs go on sale in Berlin (2018)

#349

Post by Razengan » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 10:53 PM UTC

bayindirh wrote: post #125

JacobSuperslav wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hacker News, where technology > empathy

I value ethics and empathy deeply but, I don't understand vegans and vegetarians. Their biggest line of defense is "animals are alive and they have feelings and senses, we abuse them for food". That's sadly right. And they implicitly say that "eating plants are OK because, plants are not animals and they're just happen to grow. They don't feel, they don't understand". On the contrary, there's a growing mountain of re…

> I value ethics and empathy deeply but, I don't understand vegans and vegetarians.

That’s a ironic contradiction. If you witness the conditions in which animals are born, raised, harvested and culled by the millions, and still be okay with it, you really don’t have a claim to empathy.

[I enjoy meat]

Re: World's first no-kill eggs go on sale in Berlin (2018)

#350

Post by cultus » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 10:53 PM UTC

belorn wrote: post #332

kaycebasques wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a real vegan (not a meme about vegans that you saw from meat eaters) I can confidently tell you that "animals are alive and they have feelings and senses, we abuse them for food" is not my biggest line of defense. My biggest lines of defense are: * Dr. Kim Williams, former president of the American College of Cardiology, said "there are two kinds of cardiologists, vegans, and those who haven't read the data" * Ani…

Animal agriculture has its list of problem but so does crop agriculture. There are no free lunches here. One can argue about which problems are more harmful than the other, and its pretty clear that there exist some horrible practices in Animal agriculture. However when faced with a list of only the harms from the animal agriculture, I feel forced to mention a bit more facts about the whole picture. For example, fres…

You are completely glossing over the fact that animals need to be fed.

Sustainable grazing (most grazing isn't) is a perfectly good use of marginal land, but that cannot produce anywhere near the meat we consume. Most animal production requires producing feed from other agricultural products. It is inherently less efficient to do this. Chicken is more efficient than beef, but still much worse than just eating plants directly.