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Church - it's rare to read a sane comment like this on HN.

The world we constructed is pure hell for around 80 billion animals.


Veganism is about reducing suffering as much as practical and possible. Some people (you included) have a problem with that and reject it altogether because of cognitive biases.

Yes there are crop death and suffering due to veganism. A plant based diet however reduces this by about 75%.

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets


why should we wait for lab grown meat if we can go vegan right now?


> going against every bit of our human evolution

you're saying this typing on a _computer_ - how does that fit into human evolution?

IMO humans evolve in an ethical standpoint as well and tend to want to cause the least amount of suffering possible as we evolve. That is why we have medicine, don't usually own slaves, don't hit children, and don't abuse animals.


A bit random plug - I made a flashcard site and generated flashcards based on this resource (because I want to learn computer architecture, among other tech topics)

https://brightmind.space/app/en/topic/677e9b273de1c962084316...


Michael Flynn is a legendary name in Computer Architecture; his taxonomy - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn%27s_taxonomy

His computer architecture book (listed here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42621236) is still one of the best focusing on principles and design and hence timeless. The language is succinct and very focused on explaining things. I have found it much better than many popular textbooks on computer architecture.

As an example, the submitted article is just 18 pages (pdf) and yet manages to highlight all the major points; a absolutely beautiful overview.


Wasn't the first rule of flash cards not to memorize things which you don't already understand? Generated (LLM?) flashcards might result in you missing out on the whole "understanding the text and breaking it down into flashcards" part of the process - which seems rather important.


Yes, it's meaningless if the topic is mostly unknown to the learner. But that's not the goal of flashcards - the goal is to first read the text, and then reinforce what you learned with bite-sized questions/answers.

Everyone learns differently, I always found flashcards to be incredibly useful and entertaining.


This almost guaranteed to be a waste of time for others, though, because you created them for yourself, perhaps less so for you.

Learning isolated facts via flashcard give you the illusion of learning something. Most likely, when it comes time to apply it, it will not surface.


I got very positive feedback from students preparing for high school keystone exams (given that it can generate questions from a given online resource / PDF) so I'm pretty happy about that!


It's partly due to the insane subsidies that livestock farming receives in the EU.

If meat was not heavily subsidised, it would be much, much more expensive.


There's a reason these subsidies exist: maintaining Europe's food sovereignty.

See how well it turned out for Germany -and the rest of Europe- to transfer it's energy sovereignty to Russia...


I don't mind food sovereinty per se, but do we need to subsidize meat?

Lately, in the supermarket, there would usually be some meat at about 2€/kg, which I could not comprehend, as most other groceries have gone up. Pricewise it's competitive with carrots, potatoes and bananas.

How can meat end up cheaper than ordinary pastry? Measured per kg and yes, meat has a lot of water, but still..


> Sometimes I talk to my vegetarian friends and ask "If you want to be vegetarian, why don't you just eat natively vegetarian dishes? Why the fake meat?". So far no satisfying answer.

Because there are people who like the taste and consistency of meat, but object to killing animals.


Is it an addiction to the taste of meat?

If your objection to killing animals is strong enough there are millions of purely vegetarian recipes that are delicious and much more tastier than fake meat. Why not switch to those?


> With no corresponding change to the amount of fuel used to climb up to cruising altitude

Yes, but

1) a plane flying a larger distance has to lift a heavier load of fuel

2) emissions tend to do more damage at high altitude than they do at ground level

so I would not discount the benefits of reducing flight distance as much as possible.

Source: How Bad Are Bananas? by Mike Berners Lee


>emissions tend to do more damage at high altitude than they do at ground level

I've always been a bit dismissive of aviation as a carbon emissions contributor because globally it only accounts for around 2%. Thanks for pointing this out, I was unaware of this fact. Is the relationship between altitude and warming effect known? Are we talking linear or something worse?


I think we're still puzzling it out, as there's both radiative forcing and contrails (the vapor, or condensation trails planes emit).

If you check out these two emission factors from the UK government, one taking radiative forcing and contrails into effect and one not:

https://www.climatiq.io/explorer/emission-factor/domestic-fl...

https://www.climatiq.io/explorer/emission-factor/domestic-fl...

You'll see a noticeable difference, (almost a doubling)

Full disclaimer: Work at Climatiq, but the emission factors are not from us directly.


Appreciate the detailed answer - I was unaware that contrails were significant. TIL!


You're welcome!


2% is plenty anyway. I mean, we have to start somewhere.


Same here - I do fly 1-3 times a year and I always feel bad about it.

I can't help but think that flying will hopefully become a taboo topic, something that people do occasionally but definitely don't brag about.


> I can't help but think that flying will hopefully become a taboo topic

I hope we can figure out more environmentally sustainable flight, not hope we just stop flying


Agreed--I'm really excited about all this hydrogen fueled or eVTOL business that's going on lately. The future could be awesome.


I would disagree with "We were built for work". Evolutionary, we were built to survive until reproduction age and a bit longer after that, to care for offsprings.

I think people who misunderstand the FIRE movement think that early retirees don't want to do meaningful work, like volunteering, painting, making music, etc. I think that is the point of FIRE - to be able to do the most meaningful things you can think of.


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