Humans in developed countries are in a position where we can reduce our harm to others. I believe that if you’re in a position to be safely and reasonably able to, that you should do your best to reduce the harm you cause. I would argue that reducing harm includes reducing the amount of animals that I eat.

However, none of this really applies to animals. They don’t really get the same privileges that humans do in modern society, nor do they have the conscious ability to consider their harm on the world. Furthermore, obligate carnivores don’t really have a choice but to eat meat, so they wouldn’t be able to safely reduce the harm they cause regardless.

Animals eat food, too. If you eat meat, you’re actually creating more demand for crops than you would if you ate the crops directly. Furthermore, migrant workers also work on animal farms, in slaughterhouses, etc. I hear it’s not always great.

I guess what I’m saying is, I’m fairly sure that going vegan helps both animals and the children of migrant workers.

One caveat is that I’m assuming you’d eat the same classes of crops that an animal would, namely things like corn and grains. But honestly that sounds about right for most people, vegans included. Many vegans eat a lot of processed shit too lol. (me included)

Edit: I should add that the most commonly suggested vegan diet that I’ve heard from other vegans is to have rice and lentils as your staple foods. I’m fairly sure those aren’t typically harvested by hand, but I could be wrong.

I tried for a while to make those small changes, but I always found it too hard to do, until I finally just decided to cut out all animal products one night, and I never really went back.

I think the difference was how I framed it, mentally. I always saw it as an act of willpower to not eat animal products, like I have to overcome my cravings in the same way I would if I was cutting calories. But quitting animal products altogether allowed me to frame it differently for myself – instead of telling myself “I shouldn’t eat this”, I can just say “I don’t eat this.” Like, it’s not on the table as something I have to consider. I don’t even have to recognize animal products as food.

Maybe if you cut things out one at a time you could do a similar thing. Though one problem is that it’s a series of changes and commitments you have to make, instead of just one thing. I feel like that could be harder, depending on who you are.

The comments responding to you are pretty unnecessarily hostile, but I personally get where you’re coming from. I personally think it’s best to watch the thing so that you can be best informed, even if it’s hard to do. Not even because of veganism being ethical, but because the fear of the unknown is a lot scarier than any documentary could be, IMO. Information is power, and having information (even distressing information) is empowerment.

Also, I loved meat too, but when I went vegan, I never really missed it. I was pretty worried about missing certain foods (one was sushi), but that never really happened to me.

Animals eat plants. If plants are sentient, the animals you eat still eat the plants. If your goal is to reduce suffering, eating animals means more animals eating more plants – more plants than you could eat yourself. Therefore eating the plants directly would reduce harm.

Did you just criticize… having a stance on things? Like the whole concept of believing things are true?

Even if you accept the premise that so-called ethically raised meat is ethical, there’s just not enough land to farm meat at the scale which people in developed countries demand it, unless it’s factory farmed. Ethically farmed, free range animals require much more space than caged up factory farmed animals, and the grass they feed on requires yet more land.

That means that there’s a limit on the supply, so I’m pretty sure that if someone tries to solve the whole animal rights issue by buying ethical meat, they’ll only push the ethical dilemma on to someone poorer than them (the one who would be priced out, due to the increased demand). That person would then have to be the one to make the decision of whether to go vegan or to buy factory farmed meat.

Admittedly, I could be wrong about this? But I’m pretty sure that increasing land use of meat, whether by regulation or economic demand, would necessarily lead to increased prices, so I don’t see how it possibly wouldn’t just shift the problem on to the less wealthy.

Describing vegans as making major dietary changes because they “saw one video” is a pretty dishonest interpretation. Rigorously sticking to a vegan diet can be fairly difficult, and requires you to be very aware of exactly what you’re eating – including innocuous seeming things like food dyes and white sugar, which can often be made of animal products. To me, that doesn’t read as impulsive, but instead disciplined.

Furthermore, while the decision to switch to going vegan could theoretically sometimes be done on impulse, one still has to make the decision every single day. It’s not just a decision you make and it’s done, it’s one you must always choose to continue to make. A vegan has to decide to continue to be vegan every day, likely while under scrutiny of themself and others.

I find it difficult to accept your description of a vegan lifestyle, being subsumed and made digestible by mainstream vegans who don’t care much for the politics aspect. I don’t believe that accounts for the majority of vegans, at least based on the surveys I’ve looked at. Perhaps I am wrong and many vegans just don’t really care, but based on my experiences, I just find that a little hard to accept.

Also, on the topic of hunting locally sourced meat, I think it’s sort of irrelevant to the discussion of veganism. Regardless of my, or another vegan’s opinion of how ethical it is, hunting doesn’t provide enough quantity of meat to ever fulfill every human being’s current demand for meat. To be able to provide good, healthy and ethical food for everyone, the majority of it would have to be plants. The end of monoculture crops and factory farming cannot possibly happen without a significant reduction of demand for animal meat in developed countries, regardless of how the meat is sourced.

It’s not that I aim to villify hunting, it’s just that hunting is neither here nor there, in my opinion. It is what it is, and I’m not primarily concerned with it.

I apologize for my wording, the intent of my statement was not to refer to you as a “colonizer corporatist”, I was referring to your comment about multinational corporations in bangladesh. I meant to say that many vegans care about situations like that, in the same way that you care about them. Deepest apologies for my poor wording there.

I saw comments on this post from like, 3 different hexbear users, which is a far cry from a brigade.

He co-invented PDF in '91. His PhD thesis, referenced in the summary, is a solution to the hidden line problem in computer graphics.

I switched to vertical tabs in every program that i could, and I think it might have actually made me a little more productive. Visual studio has an option for it, and I highly recommend using it if you use VS. I can have a bunch of different tabs open so that I can quickly reference them if needed.

Vegans and vegetarians are on average poorer than people who eat meat, so the penthouse thing is mostly fiction.

Also, veganism is defined as not consuming animal products where it’s possible and practicable. If it’s not practical for someone to not consume animal products, then that’s just how it is. A vegan would not argue for one to eliminate animal products to the detriment their own health, well being, or livelihood. Instead, a vegan should only advocate eliminating animal products when you’re in a position that it’s safe and reasonable to do so.

Vegans are just as much concerned with people who have been forced into shitty living situations by colonizers and multinational corporations as you are. Just because they care about animals, doesn’t mean they think animals are more important than people.

I don’t like SBF at all, but I also think veganism should be a respected ethical position. Just like how I don’t like Caitlyn Jenner, but I’ll still use her preferred pronouns.

I’d personally consider it pretty cruel and inhumans to force someone to violate their own ethics on a daily basis.

I disagree with your interpretation of how an AI works, but I think the way that AI works is pretty much irrelevant to the discussion in the first place. I think your argument stands completely the same regardless. Even if AI worked much like a human mind and was very intelligent and creative, I would still say that usage of an idea by AI without the consent of the original artist is fundamentally exploitative.

You can easily train an AI (with next to no human labor) to launder an artist’s works, by using the artist’s own works as reference. There’s no human input or hard work involved, which is a factor in what dictates whether a work is transformative. I’d argue that if you can put a work into a machine, type in a prompt, and get a new work out, then you still haven’t really transformed it. No matter how creative or novel the work is, the reality is that no human really put any effort into it, and it was built off the backs of unpaid and uncredited artists.

You could probably make an argument for being able to sell works made by an AI trained only on the public domain, but it still should not be copyrightable IMO, cause it’s not a human creation.

TL;DR - No matter how creative an AI is, its works should not be considered transformative in a copyright sense, as no human did the transformation.

Out of curiosity, I went ahead and read the full text of the bill. After reading it, I’m pretty sure this is the controversial part:

SEC. 3. DUTY OF CARE. (a) Prevention Of Harm To Minors.—A covered platform shall act in the best interests of a user that the platform knows or reasonably should know is a minor by taking reasonable measures in its design and operation of products and services to prevent and mitigate the following:

(1) Consistent with evidence-informed medical information, the following mental health disorders: anxiety, depression, eating disorders, substance use disorders, and suicidal behaviors.

The sorts of actions that a platform would be expected to take aren’t specified anywhere, as far as I can tell, nor is the scope of what the platform would be expected to moderate. Does “operation of products and services” include the recommender systems? If so, I could see someone using this language to argue that showing LGBTQ content to children promotes mental health disorders, and so it shouldn’t be recommended to them. They’d still be able to see it if they searched for it, but I don’t think that makes it any better.

Also, in section 9, they talked about forming a committee to investigate the practicality of building age verification into hardware and/or the operating system of consumer devices. That seems like an invasion of privacy.

Reading through the rest of it, though, a lot of it did seem reasonable. For example, it would make it so that sites would have to put children on safe default options. That includes things like having their personal information be private, turning off addictive features designed to maximize engagement, and allowing kids to opt out of personalized recommendations. Those would be good changes, in my opinion.

If it wasn’t for those couple of sections, the bill would probably be fine, so maybe that’s why it’s got bipartisan support. But right now, the bad seems like it outweighs the good, so we should probably start calling our lawmakers if the bill continues to gain traction.

apologies for the wall of text, just wanted to get to the bottom of it for myself. you can read the full text here: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/1409/text

I agree, fuck russia, I despise the Russian army, but calling people of a specific nationality “orcs” feels kinda racist to me, idk

I’ve seen people calling all russians orcs, not just the soldiers, even though I’m sure there are a lot of russians who are opposed to the actions of their government. It feels like it could become another harmful, racist stereotype if we all keep repeating it and defending it.

Like, when the war is over, will Russians still be called orcs?

I’m pretty disturbed by the attitude of lot of the comments on this thread. While this law is probably not going in the right direction, this knee jerk reaction of calling any regulation of porn “puritanical” and an infringement of your rights is crazy to me. I feel like access to internet porn is not a fundamental human right, and it’s not puritanical to maybe want to prevent kids from being unwittingly exposed to a shitload of porn at a young age.