Which just makes it even more important that people with the privilege to change their diet for the better - people with access to fresh food and home kitchens and time to cook - take advantage of that and change their diet.
And that people fight, through collective action, for policies that make it easier for more people to change their diet, such as community groceries and farmers' markets in food deserts, higher minimum wages and better worker protections to give people more time and energy to cook, and so forth.
Recognizing that eating healthy is a privilege shouldn't discourage you from eating healthy. It should encourage you to fight to get more people that privilege.
The move threatens treaty rights and salmon recovery as energy demands from AI and crypto surge.
In a laboratory-scale study, green roof mockups kept 97.5 percent of microplastic particles out of runoff
Really, all this says is "microplastics that fall on soil stay in the soil", but, you know, could be worse?
Pain - especially chronic pain - can shorten one's life significantly, never mind one's quality of life. And people die from giving birth. It's possible to refuse those meds but I wouldn't call it exactly practical.
But really, what possible and practicable mean differs from vegan to vegan, the same way "thou shalt not kill" differs among different Christians. And it's the same with lab grown meat. There is a possible ethical consideration based on the sourcing of cell lines; some vegans may oppose lab grown meat based on that, other vegans might decide it's perfectly fine, still others would personally refuse to eat it but encourage its development for the sake of harm mitigation. Who knows. Put five vegans in a room and you'll have six different opinions.
The definition of veganism, from the Vegan Society:
Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment.
Please note the italics.
Living without modern medicine fits squarely within "not possible or practicable" because you can literally die without it. If you refuse vaccines or treatment for contagious diseases, it's even more compelling, because you're not only risking your life but the lives of others.
On the other hand, it is completely possible and practicable to live without lab-grown meat, so "were animals exploited to create this product" is a much more relevant consideration.
Farmed at scale, seagrass meadows could produce grain in quantities equivalent to 7% of global rice production, a new study finds.
Every so often when reading an obituary of someone, or an awards citation, you realise that you have internalised their work into your thinking without having read it directly. So it was with Donald Shoup, the California transport academic who spent his life working on the problem of urban parking, ...
but I've got some hangups about our ability to make objective decisions about what is "in something/one's best interests."
Yeah, me too :/ It's like every human (or animal) right - it has to be enforced by people, and people are pretty shitty. I don't think that means we reject the principle, it means we put guardrails around it to try and prevent errors and abuses.
And I certainly agree: lab grown meat is far less heinous and morally offensive than factory farming. It involves a moral compromise for vegans, but, well, so does almost everything else. We can recognize both aspects.
I think of it this way: in what situations can we act on a human's body without that human's informed consent?
And one of those times is when an action needs to be taken for that human's own good, and the human is unable to comprehend the situation enough to give informed consent. When a young child or an unconscious person needs medical treatment, for instance.
I think tracking or relocating wildlife would fall under that category. Does a bear understand why it's not safe for it to break into people's cars and eat their McDonald's wrappers? No. Does the bear want to leave its territory and be shipped somewhere without cars full of delicious McDonald's wrappers? Certainly not. But we can't convince the bear to leave those delicious McDonald's wrappers alone, so instead we relocate the bear, to protect both it and us.
On the other hand, harvesting a human's cells for medical experiments? Does require informed consent, even if, as the history of Henrietta Lacks painfully shows, that requirement has often been ignored.
And harvesting cells to clone for food falls more on the medical experiments side of things than the "for their own good" side.
💬 1 🔁 0 ❤️ 2 · Drying laundry · Changing habits for drying laundry can reduce your energy use and help your clothes last longer (and save you money). All that lint in the lint trap means your cl…
Joke's on them, I already talked like that 😆
Nature is amazing!
that will pivot farmers from meat production, and animal feed production to produce. we will need much less land to cultivate, so rewild them. IE, just abandon them and let nature reclaim it.
I would argue, for the US, we should not rewild, but rematriate. Return the land to the tribes we stole it from and let them decide what to do next.
After all, Native Americans were the keystone species in every biome in North America for tens of thousands of years. Restoring the pre-Colombian ecology requires humans to occupy and manage the land. The myth of human-free American wilderness is settler colonial bullshit.
Like, we essentially can't do anything with animals with that...
Yes. That's the point. Animals are sapient beings with rights, not objects to "do things with".
That being said, I recognize how far out of the Overton Window that attitude is.
Positive thought: if cultured meat goes mainstream, I expect there will be demand for "ethically sourced" cell lines - or some ad campaign will use it as a selling point - and shift the idea of not exploiting animals just a tiny bit closer to the mainstream :)
Unusually aggressive lone star ticks, common in the south-east, are spreading to areas previously too cold for them
cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/23993774
> Practical Retrofitting for Obsolete Devices | Much like classic cars can be fitted with an EV motor, it is possible to retrofit older devices in order to make them usable again in a connected world
To get the most out of mutual aid, we ought to create participatory commons in which everyone can contribute and there is no fundamental division between organizers and beneficiaries.
Tldr:
>The revolutionary idea at the core of the concept of mutual aid is that those who have a problem can solve it themselves by working together.
The form factor is the problem. We carry a propaganda faucet slash ad delivery service with us 24-7-365, we check it obsessively for a quick dopamine fix throughout the day, and we have convinced ourselves this is good for us.
Low margins just means big corporations have th advantage, because they make profit through volume.
If renting wasn't profitable at all, landlords wouldn't rent.
And in many cases they don't. Which is one reason why ten percent of US houses are vacant.
But that misses the point, which is that housing should not be a for-profit industry.
If you repair a house, if you maintain a house, if you renovate a house, you have the right to be paid for your labor. Any profit you "earn" from rental payments, above that amount, is money you didn't earn - it's money you were able to extort from your tenants because you have a piece of paper saying you own the house and your tenants do not.
Whether a landlord makes $1 profit or $10000 profit, that profit is still "earned" by collecting rent on property, not by creating any value for anyone.
Housing is a human right. And rent collection is theft.
If I boycotted any platform that hosted shitty people I certainly wouldn't be on Lemmy 😆
The United States was preparing in advance for bad actors like Trump since 1787 and it didn't fucking help.
I'd argue the article's point is "new communication technology encourages a particular form of psychosis, and LLMs are especially prone to encouraging psychosis because they generate such a believable imitation of speech".
I've been coming to believe LLMs dangerous to mental health in general for a lot of reasons, and I thought this was an interesting discussion of how a basic human instinct - to look for patterns and assume rational thought and meaning behind those patterns - has always gone wrong when applied to technology and is particularly dangerous when applied to LLM-generated content.
(Because there is a reason for every LLM-generated utterance, and that reason is "make the company money". LLMs are capitalist speech acts in their purest form.)
BTW, what's wrong with Substack? Is it just the "Substack hosts fascist blogs so everyone using Substack is fascist by association" thing?
A managed economy could happen and would be highly efficient, especially because running a nation is a collective endeavour. Individuals fail but groups have memory.
Yeah. Imagine how prosperous the United States would be if the current administration was running it as a managed economy.
One in ten houses in the US are vacant.
https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-vacant-homes-are-there-in-the-us/
"Society" has more than enough housing. We just distribute it poorly.
This is hardly unique to AI. When I used Reddit, r/bestof (a sub that reposted the "best" comments from Reddit threads) was consistently full of posts that confidently, eloquently, and persuasively stated bullshit as fact.
Because Redditors as a collective don't upvote and award the truest posts - they upvote and award the posts that seem the most trustworthy.
And that's human nature. Human beings instinctively see confidence as trustworthy and hesitation and doubt as untrustworthy.
And it's easy to project an aura of confidence when you post bullshit online, since you have all the time you need to draft and edit your comment and there are no consequences for being wrong online.
Zero surprise an AI algorithm trained on the Internet replicates that behavior 😆
As always, the poor are human shields for the rich.
Social movements are powerful engines for change, and they coalesce around a vast range of issues, causes, and communities. But they fall into two basic categories: inclusionary and exclusionary.
Good discussion of two types of social movements: Inclusionary (building a wide coalition by appealing to many different groups) vs exclusionary (building group solidarity through us v them strategies). The challenges to both, and the ways the elite try to capture and appropriate inclusionary social movements to maintain the status quo.
Why is this "solarpunk"? Because solarpunk is a social movement, not just an aesthetic. If you want to make positive change (environmental or otherwise) you need collective action, and understanding the challenges to collective action helps you decide what orgs are worth committing to and see when those orgs have been appropriated.
The other articles in the series are “Widening the We” and “The Growth of Malignant and Exclusionary Social Movements” - linked at the bottom and also worth reading.
Truly, we need to reclaim the commons, including our most fundamental common realm, the atmosphere. Saito has illuminated the critical path, starting by organizing and building power in the communities where we live. Indeed, we must build the future in place.
Before the large-scale use of fossil fuels, removable textile layers kept homes warm in winter and cool in summer.
Appropriate technology in action. And as a bonus, textile insulation could use material from all those fast fashion clothes dumped in the desert or otherwise abandoned to dissolve into microplastics :/
With science-based management and real-time data, Utah’s brine shrimp fishery balances the economy and ecology.
