The problem is the one of those who get stuffed (the one of those who get stuffed) (the one of those who get stuffed)

https://youtu.be/RDTxeY7akNA

I wasn’t talking about lab-grown meat, but about Beyond, Impossible, Gardein, and similar product lines.

The reason why people eat meat ultimately comes down to habituation, a lot more than any deep preference. Supermarket shoppers are already alienated from production in that they buy products that are already obscured from their sources; the only way you can visually identify a pork sausage is by the label. Economic incentives currently prop up the meat industries. If favorable policies to making animal products were erased, we would quickly see a major shift in consumption patterns.

For the time being, and potentially always, there is going to be an inherent concern about contamination of meat, quality of livestock feed, also bone and cartilage pieces in ground products, that simply don’t exist with plant-based products.

As for lab-grown muscle tissue, AFAIK it will always run into the trophic ladder problem, which will prevent it from reaching price parity.

Just because “hamburger” traditionally meant cow flesh doesn’t mean it always will. We can have an ideal of something that is nutritious and umami that is detachable from how it originated. “Burger” can come to mean anything of that texture and macronutrient composition. Ultimately, I would say it doesn’t matter too much whether someone is eating Gardein cutlets vs. seitan or tofu or tempeh. The Beyond eater does not necessarily visualize themself eating an animal body. There’s nothing inherently wrong with these products, though what you’re observing does have some situational applicability to how things are today. But if the Impossible burger tastes better and is cheaper and doesn’t involve the same risks as the beef burger, won’t everyone come to see the plant-based product as ideal, and quickly come to see slaughtering animals everywhere as barbaric because of its economic irrelevance? I don’t think people have an underlying tendency to revert to animal products just because they’re animal products. I think they’d be perfectly happy to forget all about what animal products look and feel and taste like, if the plant-based “imitation” product is better in every way.

20 years ago I remember Quorn burgers being totally unpalatable. These days I could go to Burger King, order an Impossible burger, enjoy it more than I would a beef burger, not have to worry about the ethical/karmic burden, and not give a single thought to “what I am eating is ‘supposed’ to emulate animal flesh”. We don’t have to wait for a “one day”; I would say that day is here right now.

Maybe there are some people who will always be drawn to the idea of eating an animal that was killed. However, I think the vast majority of people would be okay with cheap plant-based protein as soon as they got used to it. I don’t think the idea of “vegan food should look distinct from animal products” is a useful approach, for the same reason you gave of expecting oppressors to voluntarily police themselves with no incentive. I don’t think it’s worth it to worry about the aesthetic and semantic purity/distinctiveness of vegan food, as long as the vegan food displaces the animal products. But that’s just my opinion.

How much are the mortgage payments, if you’re comfortable sharing? Just to get a scope of the need.

I’m aiming to do a sort of gambit myself this year that will end up making me a more frequent contributor here once I pull it off.

One thing that plays into this is concerns about food quality. For instance, there is a chemical difference between grass-fed beef and factory-farmed beef. The latter is the overwhelming majority of what’s on the market today, and the former can (and should) be prohibitively expensive.

For the past 2 decades, fast food places have been adding larger and larger fractions of textured vegetable protein into the mix of menu items with ground meat. In some cases (Subway chicken?) it was as much as 45%. People that want to be eating maximal amounts of animal tissue are going to be disappointed that they’re in one sense almost halfway to replacing all the meat in their diet.

An encouraging trend is how much better the vegan ground (and cutlet) options have been getting, and how they are approaching price parity with meat. Perhaps economic forces will do most of the work on their own.

I’m optimistic that there might not end up being all that much rhetorical convincing to do.

If you’re federated with dotWorld, most of what you see in your All feed ends up being dotWorld.

Having the ability to not be under unaccountable admins, who can directly threaten your account based on activity or “patterns”, is a huge plus. Fewer bots, and fewer conformists; the conversation always feels a lot more personal and human. Also on the Fediverse, people tend to value privacy and security and self-determination. That steers a lot of the culture in a different way from Reddit, but most of the social environment is how the cookie crumbles on each instance.

To put this proportionally, Russia has 1/55 of the world’s population yet 1/22 of the world’s billionnaires.

This suggests that over those 4 consecutive years (very interesting time frame) of increasing numbers of Russian billionnaires, inequality has been on the rise.

my roommates watching me put espresso in the houseplants

they’re living out my dreams fr

I think it dates back to the 2020 primary campaign where she ran as a spoiler for the left. She rushed to be the first to declare candidacy, she tried to accuse Bernie Sanders* of defaming her and to cause a rift between her campaign and his, she stayed in the race when everyone else was dropping out, which was clearly a collusion to peel off voter share from Bernie while everyone else was endorsing Biden.

*Who then proceeded to not run in 2024, take a whole bunch of compromised positions especially on the first year of the Gaza extermination campaign, and do a few nothingburger “fighting oligarchy” rallies and tours that don’t even attempt to leverage any power.

There are plenty more examples of Warren being disingenuous and flimsy on progressive positions. On consumer protections and anti-monopoly stances she’s pretty good, but doesn’t amount to more than a machine politician outside of that.

If someone is going to be a successful progressive politician, they’d better take principled socialist stances, stick to them, and fight for them. Otherwise we just get an endless string of Obamas who defise radical movements, triangulate with the Republicans, and eventually their entire legacy is overturned by the next Republican administration.

This is how “ratchet politics” works.

Let’s watch and see what course of action the Greeks take.

Both those possibilities (20h work week and 6h work week) sound great. The prospect is either working less, or working the same amount and keeping the monetary value of your labor, as opposed to working full-time just to pay 3/4 of your income just sustaining your existence, which goes straight to landlords or bigger companies.

And if you can arrange a living that avoids the most common money traps, you can easily get by with 20 hours of work per week or less. I’ve certainly done enough juggling of part-time jobs to know this.

85% is a bit of an overestimate, but not by all that much. For the United States, total wages paid by companies to employees are about 11 trillion, out of a GDP of 29 trillion (stats from a year or two ago). This doesn’t count sole proprietorships and partnerships, but the high-end estimate is 62%.

@[email protected]’s implication that wealth follows linearly from income isn’t super rigorous, but it does match up closely enough in this case.

If you have a Materially Productive Job and you have the ability + information required to calculate how much revenue a worker contributes to the company, you’ll know that this checks out. I wouldn’t expect everyone to be adequately positioned and also care enough in order to have that insight though.

Nitpicking whether the executive and shareholders appropriate 85% or 50% of value is pointless. It’s a huge amount, it’s far more than income taxes, and it is the most important dynamic of the capitalist economy. And it is further corroborated with reports (from mainstream/orthodox sources) over the past year of how the majority of consumer spending is done by the rich.

Would you want to arrange something regular where you can get enough to avert crises like these before they become severe?

This was exactly 1 day before “Pokemon GO-To-The-Polls”.

Are you familiar with alternativeto.net? One of the most useful sites out there.

Weirdly enough, I would say that this is more practical for Americans than anyone else. Security reasons have more on the line than boycott reasons ever could.

“Any other option will be just like me or worse” is the line that abusers use to keep others subjected to them.

I’m terrified of no longer being able to travel across the country without being hunted down, but I also know that the integral existence of the country is actively accelerating the polycrisis and making the world a worse place.

I would be willing to shift the burdens of risk from the whole world to just my country.

Is it feasible to cover that distance on a bike? If so, how much does a bike cost? My commute is 3 miles and on foot in this snow it’s been taking me almost 40 minutes.

Also pm me your Paypal in case your cashapp is no longer active.

He’s a cow detangler. Every now and then your cows get tangled, kind of like a rat king, or maybe they get their legs twisted around each other like bread ties.

Here is a helpful resource to understand how important it is to keep your cows straightened out.

Point is, every time the Onion interviews him, he’s in a new state. But he’s still a cow detangler. So I suppose he’s a roving cow detangler, who gets the cows loose from each other and then travels to the next call.