
IKEA Will Be Entirely Meat-Free This Christmas - gredelin
https://swedesinthestates.com/ikea-will-be-entirely-meat-free-this-christmas/
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olivermarks
It's my understanding that ikea meatballs are made from mdf materials and dust
that is produced as holes are drilled in their flat pack furniture. Not a
single piece of material is wasted and the meatballs are a staple of their
store cafes worldwide. I'm assuming the huge build up of these meatballs will
be re routed to other locations during this Christmas experiment. Perhaps
future mdf meatballs will have all meat additives removed and we will begin a
new era of vegan foods.

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tantalor
Good source of fiber

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Skunkleton
Cellulose

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krustyburger
Only in the UK, despite the name of the site reporting it.

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justizin
that ... explains a lot about the menu lol.

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big_chungus
“As part of our commitment to supporting our customers to live healthier and
more sustainable lives, we have decided to launch our first-ever ‘Meat-Free
Christmas’ in our restaurants.”

I think there's a big difference between supporting customers who want to eat
less meat (i.e. offering a veggie option) and removing the meat option
entirely. There aren't any statistics on this, but if there's no meat at all,
I might leave and go somewhere else. Maybe Ikea could have convinced me to eat
less, but I'd likely end up somewhere else with no reduction whatsoever.

I guess it's Ikea's store and it can do whatever it wants, but I personally
don't like the idea of some company telling me how to eat because a marketing
guy decided it fit well as part of a corporate sustainability initiative.

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mongol
Yes this is a kind of newspeak. This is not about supporting, it is about
making choices on their customers' behalf.

I am thinking of the parent/child relationship, parents knows what is good for
their children so they don't need to ask. Except, in some cases some parents
actually don't know. IKEA is treating their customers like children here.

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kangnkodos
No Swedish meatballs? I guess I'm not visiting IKEA.

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goda90
I feel like meatballs can be more accurately replaced by a meat-substitute
than a burger can. So maybe they'll go that route?

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dawnerd
They already have veggie balls that are pretty tasty. I pick up a frozen bag
of them when I go.

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egdod
It’s so convenient when a single decision can:

1\. Save the company money.

2\. Virtue signal how woke the company is.

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russellbeattie
I guess "virtue signal" is the cool new catchphrase used by cynics.

Is there any way for a person or company to do anything of any good without
being accused of this? Probably not. Anonymous commenters on the interwebs
loves these types of throwaway accusations.

Actually, now that I think of it, mentioning "virtue signal" and "woke" is
really just sending a virtue signal about how you're the truly woke one...

And I'm sending a virtue signal right now about how I totally get what's
happening, and you don't, which shows how woke I am...

I don't think this particular hole has a bottom.

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debatem1
I assume that virtue signalling works much like normal POSIX signalling,
except that a process must already be woke to send or receive such a signal.

The implications for power management are troubling, to say the least.

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fao_
It's funny because a fair amount of vegan-based products (specifically meat
substitutes) contain wheat and gluten, which I can't eat because of a physical
disability. While there has been much more acceptance, etc. in recent years,
and the amount of things I _can_ eat has gone up, it's still frustrating to
see vegans and vegetarians -- something that is for many people a dietary
choice -- being catered to before people with physical disabilities.

Vaguely related, I'm not really won-over that everyone cutting meat out of
their diet would have a considerable effect on the environment. The
overwhelming majority of deforestation is done for crops, not pasture. And off
the top of my head the most the majority people contribute to climate change
is about 10%. So, sure, everyone stops using cars, and eating meat, etc. ad
nauseum, that still leaves governments giving billions in subsidies to the
coal and oil industries, etc.

It's a nice gesture, but that's all I'm seeing happening lately. Everyone's
making gestures to climate change, but there has been no inter-governmental
effort to actually charge, prosecute, and put to use the assets of the people
who are responsible for covering up climate change for over forty years. I
fear by the time it happens millions will have lost their lives in climate-
related disasters.

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notafraudster
There exists a paradox in social choice theory (game theory applied to
elections), the paradox of voting -- this comes out of Anthony Downs around
1950.

We can roughly consider that the utility value of voting is equal to a formula
that looks like: E[voting] = pV - c, where c is the cost of voting (time cost,
information cost, etc.), V is the value of your preferred candidate winning
over other candidates, and p is your probability of being the pivotal voter.
By pivotal voter, I mean that if everyone other than you cast their vote
first, and then you cast your vote, the question is would your vote have a
capability to change the outcome.

The typical view is that c is small but non-zero, V is reasonably large and by
definition positive, but p is infinitesimal. And so, no one should bother
voting. And yet, people do vote, an off-equilibrium behavior. And although it
could be the case that someone's subjective belief in p is much higher than
the true p is, this seems an unsatisfactory explanation because even stupid
idiots know that their individual vote is unlikely to make the difference.

There are two major lines of rebuttal to the paradox. The first is that
individual equilibrium models are not appropriate for assessing these kinds of
questions. The second line of rebuttal is that there must exist other terms in
the equation. The most promising of these is that the civic religion we have
built around voting (social pressure to vote, personal moral imperative to "do
one's part in society", the dumb stickers, how good it feels to stand up for
what you believe, etc.) creates a "consumption value" of voting. So maybe the
equation is E[voting] = pV - c + d where it is assumed that d >= c for many
people, who vote.

I mention all of this because based on your post, p = 0, V = Infinity, c =
high, and d = 0. If you are looking for a call to action, all you need to do
is consider the great many benefits of changing your d term.

Finally, I think it weakens the approachability of your third paragraph
argument (why bother, states should do it instead) that it comes after your
second argument (environmentalists don't even help the environment) or your
first argument (vegans annoy me because I can't eat gluten, why aren't people
listening to me).

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einpoklum
> The utility value of voting is ... E[voting] = pV - c, where c is the cost
> of voting (time cost, information cost, etc.), V is the value of your
> preferred candidate winning over other candidates

That patently ridiculous. There are varigated and complex motivations for
voting in general and for voting for a certain candidate or party in
particular. It has to do with your sense of identity; self-fulfillment vs
passivity; commitment to peers, family, friends; sense of gratitude for past
actions by the candidate or the party/movement; and these are all factors
which are almost orthogonal to whether the candidate you vote for wins.

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notafraudster
This is ultimately what goes in the d term in the next paragraph, yes. I agree
that in hindsight people getting tripped up in the initial model before the
criticisms elaborated on it were ignoring something that is obvious to
everyone who isn't a game theory dweeb. My point in introducing the paradox
was to introduce the solution to my comment's parent.

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thrower123
That's literally the only reason I would ever make the trek to go to the
store.

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mlaretallack
IKEA breakfast are the only reason I visit. That's one place I new to visit.
Amazon it is then...

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ycombonator
The only reason I go to IKEA is for their Swedish Meatballs, not for their
Kindergarten themed furniture. Good luck being meat free and depriving your
customers of vitamin B12

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tomweingarten
B12 is largely misunderstood. B12 isn't produced by any animals, it's only
produced by certain bacteria. It used to be available in plant based diets,
but modern hygenic practices have more or less stopped that. In modern
industrial farming it's common for the animals to not get enough B12 either,
so they often get B12 from supplements as well.

Fortunately it's incredibly cheap to synthesize supplements and you don't need
much of it at all, so this is not really a concern for vegans.

[https://www.forksoverknives.com/vitamin-b12-questions-
answer...](https://www.forksoverknives.com/vitamin-b12-questions-
answered-2/#gs.bwgt4c)

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vsviridov
Implying intensifies

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m23khan
I am sure in 2-3 decades eating meat in West / developed World would either
become prohibitively expensive like caviar or it would be outlawed.

It seems that nowadays humans want to completely redefine what is humanity -
all social, cultural, religious values are being discarded altogether or are
being completely redefined.

I don’t know whether this is good or not - all I know is that there seem to be
political or social movements behind each and every one of these movements and
to have band of people redefine and reinforce, by law and through media, an
altered version of humanity for our Children is a scary thought for me.

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Rebelgecko
Why would it become prohibitively expensive? Are ranchers going to stop
selling beef?

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mumblemumble
It's one of the more resource-intensive foodstuffs there is; if the planet
keeps getting more crowded at the current pace then I wouldn't be surprised if
it's not long before people forced to shift toward less expensive food sources
by basic economic forces.

Alternatively, vat meat takes over.

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core-questions
People said the same thing in the 1960s, and a hamburger costs me less now
relative to purchasing power than it did then.

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bogomipz
>'“As part of our commitment to supporting our customers to live healthier and
more sustainable lives, we have decided to launch our first-ever ‘Meat-Free
Christmas’ in our restaurants,”'

So a company that was predicated on planned obsolescence, that has littered
the planet with disposable flat pack furniture is now going to support
"sustainability" by getting rid of meatballs at its fast food lunch counter.
Got it.

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core-questions
Oh yes, all that terrible flat-pack furniture... which is literally just
captured carbon, if you think about it, and makes extremely efficient use of
low grade wood.

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imtringued
You mean the melamine formaldehyde they bulk up with saw dust?

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core-questions
Look, I get it, you have hardwood furniture in your beautiful mansion or
whatever, but the rest of us need tables and chairs too.

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bogomipz
You don't have to be rich to buy furniture whose primary design consideration
isn't "cheap to ship." The metal and dowel based joinery of Ikea is a joke and
it's a direct result of the "cheap to ship" design mentality.

You can find lots of furniture that uses proper joinery without breaking the
bank. Lastly its false economy to buy the same disposable book case every 3-4
years when a well made one can last a lifetime. And they're quite easy to find
second hand.

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core-questions
What are you doing to the Ikea Billy that is making it break and need
replacing every 3-4 years? I've had mine for 20 years.

