Someone else linked these in the replies, but that's simply not true. Most land taken up to grow plants is used to inefficiently feed livestock. Feeding humans plants only would be much much more efficient in terms of land use.
> Most land taken up to grow plants is used to inefficiently feed livestock.
Because it is just not suitable for growing crops that humans can realistically consume. If you can figure out a way to change this at scale, it'll be a discovery on par with Haber's process w.r.t. impact on human civilization.
I think we can eventually get there, as evidenced by billionaires and real estate companies buying up bad farmland over the last decade or so.
Again, this just isn't true. Where are you getting your information from?
Feeding the world is technically easy, there is more than enough space for growing crops. The only reason that it's not done is the desire to eat meat and the lack of any real will to do it.
Now I'm curious. Why can't the same land be used to grow a soy bean for human consumption vs animal consumption? I would naively assume that at worst some land might yield top quality crops but that it would at least be usable as an ingredient or something?
Soybeans are an interesting example, because the almost all the soybeans we grow right now are sort of dual purpose.
But in a way that may be different from what you'd expect. The same crop yields both soy milk/oil/tofu/sauce and then the end products after extracting all that goes into animal feed.
Without the need to feed animals maybe this can be repurposed for bio-diesel or ethanol similar to corn, I'm sure there's some way to make that economically viable with enough scale. But this doesn't really free up much land to produce human food with.
All land is not equal. And unless you subscribe to 'interesting' ideas like forcing the world to survive on insect paste, either animal farming is here to stay or we cut down a bunch more forests.
In the US 8 out of the top 10 environmental organizations with most membership oppose nuclear power broadly and the majority oppose wind and solar locally so I think we can safely conclude that climate change is not important to US environmental causes.
The primary work by US environmentalists (or at least the popular ones) is in ensuring rich people’s homes abut publicly-maintained parks.
Not really; but talking about it more also seems like it will have approximately zero marginal benefit, and trying to insinuate that other people are immoral is probably net counterproductive.
I went vegan six months ago after being exposed to numbers like this and thinking about it a bit. In particular, imagining extending the empathy I felt for my pets to all these other unseen animals that really aren't much different. I thought I'd try it for a week to see how hard it was. It was so easy that I never looked back. These numbers all could be pretty close to zero and we humans would still thrive just as much as we are now, but causing much less suffering to other beings.
Even just being aware of one’s privilege to eat animals or even animal products and the impact on other living beings for our “pleasure”. A little more humility would go a long way in terms of animal welfare.
We don't have to anything for it. Someone artificially inseminates the animal, raises the animal, keeps it in mostly in terrible conditions we would cry about if we saw them, drives them somewhere for slaughter, processes the remains until it looks appetizing for you to just heat up and eat. All for couple of dollars per pound. Unbelievable privilege of not seeing the suffering involved.
Animals go out and kill other animals for food, have to deal with the family and friends of the animal it just killed, compete with other animals for the meat, etc. Much more vulnerable and involved.
But what about raising a crop right up to the point where it's helicoptered its genitals enough to have found a gullible pollinator or sprayed it's pollen widely enough to produce the seed for the next generation and then killing it, thus cutting it down in the prime of its life with no opportunity for that plant's descendants to sprout and grow (especially if they are Monsanto seeds) and reach the point where they too can wag their privates while looking for PILFs (plants ...)?
Everything has to eat something. Humans are omnivorous. We have a choice and some choose to base their diets on plant consumption while others eat a little meat and still others eat mostly meat. It's all okay. The universe is working as intended. Villifying those who choose a different diet than yours seems like a petty exercise by people who need to invent a reason to feel better about themselves.
If you enjoy and love the foods that you eat then you are doing it right. There is no requirement and no need to proselytize about your choices. We have enough other religions who have forgotten the main message to deal with. It will be just as easy for people to tune yours out.
Thats not true. I work my butt off to be able to afford delicious animals. All the stuff you mention is just gains from trade. That someone can run a profitable animal operation at these prices is amazing not privelege.
The problem I have with being vegetarian is that you can't prove that it's actually healthier, because the current state of dietary science is pretty poor.
Even if you could, you would also need to explain all of the evolutionary problems that could come from some humans going vegetarian while others don't.
What if being vegetarian makes you smaller and weaker physically (perhaps the case in some vegetarian countries now). If you had the answer, and it was clear a diet consisting of vegetables causes reduction in physical size, then I have to ask:
Would you want your kids to be shorter and physically weaker than you are?
'What if' is pointless. What if vegetarianism makes you stronger than eating meat? What if it increases your IQ by 20 points or makes you live 200 years? What if you can code faster drinking rare pygmy tree sap or the blood of certain albino poison toads?
> you can't prove that it's actually healthier, because the current state of dietary science is pretty poor.
Almost every decision in life must be made without proof, but with evidence and judgment. We know a lot about nutrition, and a lot of evidence points toward health benefits in eating more vegetables and less meat. We can also see lots of vegetarians in our communities and they don't seem sickly or shorter, etc. - we also see elite athletes in public who are vegetarians.
> a diet consisting of vegetables
Vegetarianim is much more than vegetables; it's everything but meat - legumes (generally beans), vegetables, fruits, grains, nuts - plus eggs and cheese. Vegans cut out the latter two items.
> What if being vegetarian makes you smaller and weaker physically (perhaps the case in some vegetarian countries now).
Where?
> evolutionary problems that could come from some humans going vegetarian while others don't.
What problems? How does diet affect evolution? We'll lose our hunting muscles over the next 500,000 years? Remember humans haven't changed much biologically in 200,000+ years.
We don't need uncited, selective data. It would be relatively easy to directly measure the relationship between vegetarianism and height.
Also, height is determined early in life. Many people become vegetarian in adulthood. Becoming vegetarian at 30 won't affect your height, I'm pretty sure.
>Would you want your kids to be shorter and physically weaker than you are?
As someone who eats meat, that's probably one of the worse arguments against vegetarianism/veganism I've heard. If eating animals is immoral, sure why not? If pillaging your neighbors makes your society better off, do you think a good objection to "maybe we shouldn't pillage our neighbors" is "Would you want your kids to be shorter and physically weaker than you are"?
The logical entailment is eventually your lineage will be wiped out on some timescale if they cannot compete. I guess this argument in null and void if you believe violence is obsolete.
Do you want your kids to have colon cancer or heart disease because there is pretty strong evidence to suggest red meat contributes to these. And there's much stronger evidence for that than there is that suggests that vegetarian kids will be shorter and physically weaker (in fact I don't think there is much good evidence at all suggesting that).
Conversely, I'm not sure why we shouldn't limit our tender feelings to the individual animals we personally relate to. Values are based on other values, and equality is based on freedom of thought and the value of knowledge. Being kind to animals is about humans really, I think.
Personally that would be even worse for me, though I understand maybe "better" on a societal scale by some metrics. To feed a being every day and care for it, to gain its trust, to appreciate their individuality, then to have them killed when they reach some fraction of its potential lifespan, I just don't want to do that. I'm perfectly happy eating legumes.
I'm not sure if it would be better on a societal scale in terms of pollution and efficiency, but instead in ethical concerns with how the animals were treated.
What about raising cows or chickens, then consuming their milk and eggs?
Presumably you only would acquire female chickens to lay eggs. What happened to the male ones? (I don't recommend googling this).
What do you do with the cow when its milk yield drops after several pregnancies? what do you do with the male calves? Just keep them all as pets?
I think there are situations I could contrive where I'd say yeah its fine ethically to eat these things, but the general case still has victims.
And again, since maybe the first week without them, I truly haven't missed milk or eggs or anything else after eliminating them from my diet. Plant options are pretty good too and there are plenty of plants.
> Why is okay to kill a tree to build a home, kill a plant to eat, but not okay to kill an animal to eat?
> Does the biological complexity of the organism make it more or less okay to kill it?
The ability to suffer is the distinguishing/relevant factor. We all know what suffering feels like and we know that animals have the capacity to suffer. We don't really know that trees do. I want to reduce the suffering I am responsible for.
> Is it okay to kill a cockroach or a rat in your home?
I probably would get rid of infestations in my home and feel bad about it.
It's not about having a 100% perfect record with not killing animals. It's about striving to minimize animal suffering as much as practicable. You're never going to reduce this to 0 animals. But you can get to 95% better than the average human pretty easily if you want.
In dairy farming, calves are usually separated from their mothers shortly after birth so the milk can be used for production. There are a few farms that keep calves with their mothers, but this isn’t something that scales in industrial systems. I worked on a farm for a while, and the day I had to take a newborn calf away from its mother, I became vegan. Farmers often say that cows don’t form a bond after giving birth, but that doesn’t match what I experienced. I have never heard anything as deeply sad as a mother cow calling for her baby.
Wait till you get into the other agricultural practices like raising sheep for wool or selecting your herd bulls.
Sheep get castrated, ears notched and tail docked. Then they get set out to pasture.
A bull is selected to be your herd bull and any cows either get milked as you described or pastured to be mama cows for building a herd. Any bull calves either get sold off to be someone else's herd bulls if the genetics are good enough or they get castrated, notched ears and in at least one herd I have seen, their tails are docked.
As the old ag teacher in high school explained, you castrate them to keep their minds off of the ass and put 'em on the grass.
There are many good arguments I think, but not this one. Nature is eating your neighbor's children; it's starvation, epidemics, and massive forest fires; it's unrestrained homicide and rape; it's leaving your physically weakened child to die; it's eating the head of your spouse; it's survival of the fittest; ... (you get my point).
The other animals in nature are not my standard of behavior. In a sense, the point of any culture is to exceed nature and by as much as possible.
Yes. That is far more harmonious with nature than using machines of industry to enslave animal species and slaughter them on profit-driven schedules.
Don't get me wrong, I eat meat, but I also understand that the grand majority of fellow meat-eaters have never hunted or reared livestock. Instead they are complete soyboys (ironic isn't it) who merely consume the output from the machine. These same beta cucks will open their mouths to screech "but animals eat animals in the wild!" Completely missing how unnatural an industrialized slaughter machine is.
The only reason they are enslaved is that they lack organization and understanding. Had they those two, they could kill us all.
I love homm2 and have been playing fheroes2 for a bit now. homm2 is truly a masterpiece. To me it's the peak of the heroes series. The art and music are both great and still hold up to this day. The game play is basically perfect for what it is - subsequent games in the series, to me, just are adding more and more piece types to a chess board.
I agree I'm bullish on AI for coding generally, but I am curious how they'd get around this problem. Even if they can code at super human level, then you just get rarer super human bugs. Or is another AI going to debug it? Unless this loop is basically fail proof, does the human's job just becoming debugging the hardest things to debug (or at least a blindspot of the AI)
This comment reminds me of the old idiom (I cannot remember who is credited with it) that you should be careful not to use your full abilities writing code, because you have to be more clever to debug code than you were to write it.
This type of issue is part of why I've never felt the appeal of LLMs, I want to understand my code because it came from my brain and my understanding, or the same said of a teammate who I can then ask questions when I don't understand something.
I haven't seen enough mention of using these tools to generate formal verification specs for their output, like TLA+. Of course, you're stuck with the same problem of having to verify the specs but you'll always be playing this game and it'd seem like this would be one of best, most reassuring ways to do so.
I'll have the look into this some more but I'm very curious about what the current state of the art is. I'm guessing it's not great because so few people do this in the first place -- because it's so tedious -- and there's probably not nearly enough training data for it to be practical to generate specs for a JavaScript GQL app or whatever these things are best at generating.
This is my current role, and one of the biggest reasons AI doesn't really help me day to day agent or otherwise.
In my ideal world, AI become so proficient at writing code that they eventually develop their own formally verifiable programming language, purpose built to be verifiable. So that there wouldn't be room for unknown unknowns.
"a few thousand days away" feels like such a duplicitous way to phrase something when "a few years" would be more natural to everyone on the planet. It just seems intentionally manipulative and not even trying to hide it. I've never been an anti-ceo type person but something about Altman sketches me out
I know this probably isn't the best place for a bug report/help request, but this seems cool, and the alternative to asking here, now, realistically is that I just forget about this
I'm trying howm on emacs 29.4
I try (with my config and also with emacs -Q)
(use-package howm)
I enter `C-c , ,`
I see the howm-memu pop up, but it's all plaintext with no font highlighting/decoration/"links" or anything, and I get in the Messages log:
font-lock-fontify-keywords-region: Symbol’s function definition is void: nil
Error during redisplay: (jit-lock-function 5328) signaled (void-function nil)
Strange. I'm using it on Emacs 30.0.90 (nightly builds), and haven't had that issue.
Personally I don't use its main menu though (which C-c , , runs), but rather "M-x howm-create" to capture new notes and then afterwards "M-x howm-list-all" as a keyboard-driven interface to read/browse/search existing notes.
Perhaps those commands work even if that menu doesn't?
From the website I can't exactly tell why sending all the tapes there would be a great idea. But you guys seem to know something I don't, care to elaborate? :)
Gregg Turkington has vast movie expertise, set a Guinness World Record for watching 501 movies in 501 days, and maintains the largest film archive in North America. I can't think of someone I'd trust more with Mr. Scorcese's collection.
Is watching one movie a day really that impressive? I bet a ton of people in old folk's homes have him beat by virtue of sitting around all day in the in vicinity of televisions.
Watching movies doesn't give you all the facts to become an impressive movie critic. Would you for example know the exact number of Oscars each lord of the rings movies got from just watching them?
https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets