For me, the answer was yes. I stopped eating pigs first, and then cows and other mammals, and then octopi (octopodes?). I've been cutting back further on chicken and fish, too, though I eat a lot of eggs and some dairy still.
I don't know that it's morally right or something, but it doesn't cost much and the potential upside seems high enough to do it.
It helps the planet, is good for my health, reduces deaths of sentient beings to feed me, has greater trophic efficiency... and the big thing is that vegetarian food and vegan food tastes good. I still eat meat periodically, but I feel much better and happier since I've reduced my meat consumption greatly.
At some stage my son was wilfully damaging plants.
As part of the discipline to make him stop I showed him videos of plants sped up.
It becomes a bit harder to deny that they aren’t the inanimate objects we perceive them to be because they are slow when you see them react to stimuli and they show what seems to be intent.
Although it certainly isn’t a consensus opinion there is a real possibility that (given that the nervous system specialises what normal tissues can also do) plants are considerably more “conscious” than we give them credit for.
They have been proven to be able to communicate.
There are even suggestions that they could “see” without specialised eyes.
I’m not sure where this would leave moral vegans.
Besides attempting a diet of fruit - we clearly need to kill to survive.
PS:
To clarify my own positioning on this - I eat meat. I occasionally go vegetarian for health or spiritual reasons. I do believe we can and should strive to minimise cruelty, waste and environmental damage and impacts.
The lives of some livestock are significantly better than that of many wild creatures and it can be a humane choice given that they would not exist without our intervention.
That said I don’t think that we are currently near the level of responsibility that we could be. Our levels of cruelty, waste and environmental impact are unacceptably high and will seem barbaric to our descendants.
This is a lot of very commonly repeated speculative talking point soup when people are trying to rile up vegans. I'm not a vegan, and I'm not saying you're being disingenuous here, but if you use these lines to try and engage vegans at some point and don't get the level of engagement you're looking for, it's because this kind of both-sides moral equivalence between meat eating and plant eating is pretty common in the needling-vegans scene :)
That said, if we think there's a continuum with humans, dolphins, apes, and maybe octopuses on one side, and fungi & prokaryotes or something on the other, then plants (and maybe shellfish?) are certainly 'better' to kill and eat than cats, eg.
Given that we cannot not kill something to live yet, the current local minimum would be to live by eating some kind of cultured microorganism?
Something like cultured algae or a genetically engineered organisms that expressed suitable proteins.
Fruit might be an acceptable minimal choice given that it’s “voluntarily given” to some point of views.
Strangely the thought of engineering an animal to make a meat fruit seems repugnant - imagine an animal modified to grow flesh that could be removed with little pain and no injury.
Vat grown meat is an interesting thought - if we can pull it off.
Ultimately only something like molecular nanotechnology could free us from killing to live.
What logic makes plants better to kill than cows, better than octopi, better than cats? because vegans might the argument uncomfortable doesn't render it invalid either
It's also entirely implausible, from an evolutionary perspective, that plants should have developed the capacity to feel pain on a scale similar to other organisms given that they haven't developed the ability to move away from situations that might cause them pain (pain being a proxy for survival risk).
Keep in mind that instead of fight or flight plants have a range of internal chemical responses available to minimise damage and that this does make pain plausible:
Videos of plants calcium signalling response to damage:
You can find a lot more material in this vein.
My point is that we are “animalists” and not very well predisposed to recognising the true nature of plants given how different they are to us.
> Although it certainly isn’t a consensus opinion there is a real possibility that (given that the nervous system specialises what normal tissues can also do) plants are considerably more “conscious” than we give them credit for.
Yes, that is a possibility, but it's also an entirely ridiculous argument to make to argue against veganism. If you want to argue that the nervous system is just a more specialized version of other tissue and consciousness could therefore, in principal, arise in any kind of organic matter, or inorganic matter even, then one obviously can't prove that statement wrong, but it also seems to entirely miss the point given our current scientific understanding. Obviously humans cannot live in a way that completely avoids any (theoretical) harm to our environment, but veganism is by far the dietary choice that minimizes suffering in this world (though there do exist differences in the kind of vegan diet with regards to its environmental impact).
It’s a choice I respect even if I do not choose it myself.
It’s a ecologically sound choice and does clearly minimise “suffering” according to some measures (given the choices available today).
I’m personally not fully convinced that it is a healthy choice for humans over their whole lifespan, but I realise that this is something that can be debated.
I’m genuinely interested in the idea that we don’t “get” plants yet.
I’m curious as to the personal response of vegans if plants we’re to be shown more aware than we give them credit for.
I’ve also hounded my “moral” vegetarian friends (i.e. those who choose it as a moral stance) with questions about what they would do if vat-grown meat where to become viable.
People are fascinating: I know someone who is against eating “wild animals”. For some reason, to her, farmed crocodile and ostrich are still wild animals.
one could argue the need to displace grazing landmass, that could support free-range animals, with endless fields of low-throughput vegetables that need more land and water per capita-calorie/nutrient is far more damaging to the planet.
> though I eat a lot of eggs and some dairy still.
See, I feel like this just erodes from your argument. There’s not necessarily any trauma at all to the chickens or the cows involved in the production of eggs or milk. Trying to group that with the consumption of meat feels just very irrational.
Egg farms grind male chicks alive. They burn off the tip of the hens beak without anesthesia (which we know is high in nerves) so they don’t fight each other in captivity; which they don’t do nearly as much in nature because surprise surprise they’re not as stressed. Hens laying eggs every single day of their lives (because they’re taken away daily) live much much shorter lives and develop physiological issues more often. When they’re finally exhausted after a few short years and stop producing as much, they’re turned into chicken nuggets or broth cubes.
Cows producing milk are constantly inseminated. Maybe they don’t care or maybe it’s a form of rape. Nevertheless, their calves are taken away from them shortly after they’re born (so they don’t eat the milk instead of the factory) and slaughtered. Cows call for their missing baby for several days. Dairy cows are also living much much shorter lives (imagine how long a human that does nothing but give birth would live) and are turned into hamburgers afterwards.
Not to mention cheese which need casein to be made and that can’t be obtained without killing cows as it’s the acid in their stomach, basically.
So, yes, eating milk or eggs doesn’t directly require the animal to die. But it’s so close and it enables such a cruel, abhorrent, and revolting meat industry that it’s impossible in my opinion to ethically justify eating eggs and milk (let alone meat or fish)
> Not to mention cheese which need casein to be made and that can’t be obtained without killing cows as it’s the acid in their stomach, basically.
Casein is not the acid in animals' stomachs. Caseins are one group of proteins in milk, and the main component of cheese.
You're probably thinking of rennet, the enzymes in animals' stomachs that help them digest their milk.
Rennet is used to coagulate milk to make cheese, but in modern cheesmaking practice the vast majority of it is produced by bacterial or fungal fermentation. Rennet taken from the stomachs of young ruminants is used only by a minority of "artisanal" or traditional producers.
Since you got this one completely wrong, is there a chance that the rest of the information in your comment is also slightly off, do you think? Would you find it very hard to re-examine the source of what you know about animal agriculture and try to find out how much of it is really true?
My mother tongue isn’t English and I indeed mixed up rennet and casein because they sound completely different in my language.
Natural rennet cheese may be “artisanal” in your corner of the world, it’s 99% of cheese where I live —just in case, 99% might not be totally accurate, it’s an exaggeration to mean “the vast majority”
My mother tongue isn't English either and I live in a corner of the world that has many traditional cheesemakers and a proud cheesemaking culture that goes back centuries if not millenia. Most cheese where I live as in the rest of the world is made with microbial rennet simply because it's cheaper, more available and easier to store and handle.
I'm sorry but I don't believe that 99% (or "the vast majority") of cheese where you live is made with animal rennet. If that's true, please let me know how you know this.
“ En France, l'utilisation de présure d'origine animale est une des conditions des cahiers des charges pour prétendre aux dénominations de protections fromage fermier, appellation d'origine contrôlée et la marque de l'Union européenne, Label rouge.”
Loosely translated, it means that for a French to cheese to have one of the protected names (Roquefort, Brie de Meaux, Camembert de Normandie, etc) they must use animal rennet. Since farms making these want the protected names because they sell so much better, they use animal rennet.
In the supermarket you can also buy industrial cheese which doesn’t have to use animal rennet. But at the fromagerie they mostly (only?) sell artisanal cheeses, all using animal rennet.
Yes, that agrees with what I said above: supermarket cheese is the vast majority of cheese that's produced and consumed worldwide, quite unfortunately I might add. PDO cheeses are a minority of all cheeses and only produced in the EU. French PDO cheeses are a minority within a minority, and only produced in France.
Even in EU and even in France, most cheese made and eaten is not PDO and PDO cheeses are made by few and small producers. Camembert de Normandie fermier is famously made by a handful of farmers (five, I think?) and regulators are constantly pressured by the dairy industry to loosen the standards of the PDO, for example to allow pasteurised milk to be used and to allow the "Camembert de Normandie" label to be applied to cheese made in Normandy but with cows other than the race Normande that the traditional producers make it with.
Even in the rest of the EU, outside France, there are bsically two kinds of PDO cheese. There's the kind that are made by few producers in limited amounts and have more stringent requirements like the use of animal rennet, or the use of traditional wooden implements to preserve artisanal bacterial cultures, and that sort of thing, like Camembert de Normandie and Mozzarella di Buffalla Campagna. Or they are made at a larger scale with modern equipment and materials allowed (but not required), of which bacterial rennet is one example, like Manchego or Feta.
The kind of PDO cheeses that must be made with traditional methods, materials and equipments and for which modern alternatives are not allowed are basically artisanal products and again very unfortunately, few and far between, because they tend to be the best cheeses one can have.
This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine because I recognise the supermarket cheese that most people eat as inferior quality, and I'm really worried that most people have forgotten what cheese should really be like.
im sorry, but you cant dismiss the rest of his valid points purely because he got 1 out of many incorrect. I detect a hint of bias might be present on your side from your username also...
Where did I dismiss any of "his valid points"? I asked if they thought they might want to re-examine where their information comes from. How is that a dismissal of any point, valid or not?
> I detect a hint of bias might be present on your side from your username also...
What bias do you mean? I make cheese so I know a couple of things about how it's done.
Great job arguing something I already agree about and similarly abhor while also completely missing the point: I specifically said “necessarily.”
We have family friends that provide eggs and milk from their free range chickens and cows and that’s certainly not how they do it. Your fight is with greed enabled by capitalism leading to these animal abuses, not people who want to eat/drink their eggs or dairy.
you're generalizing quite a bit here, perhaps driven by emotion. it's possible given the movement for compassion for animals to purchase local, free-range, cruelty-free sourced eggs at any decent grocer.
You can’t make eggs without killing male chicks, shortening hens lives, and killing them off. Free range, organic, local, or factory. The specifics of it may vary depending on the mode of production but not the reality: it enables animal exploitation and suffering.
> You can’t make eggs without killing male chicks, shortening hens lives, and killing them off.
Yes, you absolutely can. Hens lay eggs whether there's a rooster around or not.
I live in a farm (not mine, I'm a guest) and we get a few eggs each day from the hens in the coop outside my window. We don't kill the male chicks off. I don't think anyone on the farm can even tell which chicks are male befor they grow up. We occasionally slaughter a rooster when there's too many of them and they start to fight each other. We also slaughter a hen once in a while. Last year, we slaughtered four animals, altogether, one rooster and three hens.
In factory farms, male chicks are killed off, but there's no reason for that other than the industrialisation of production and consumer demand for plump birds with big breasts (at least in the US as far as I can tell). The birds in our farm are lean, their meat is dark, chewy and wiry because of all the muscle fibers and it has to be coooked for several hours before it is edible. Their bones are also hard and impossible to snap with your fingers, like you can the bones of factory chicken. The taste also doesn't compare. Real free-range chicken (not "free range" as in growing up in a factory with a 2 x 2 concrete yard outside) actually has taste and it tastes of game bird, not what supermarket chicken tastes like. Chickens and factory chickens could as well be a different species. Tasting the flesh of the farm chickens has put me off eating the supermarket birds, just because it makes me think that it can't be healthy eating something that was raised to be degenerate and fat like that.
So you're talking about factory farming but there are other kinds of farming that have very different effect on the animals farmed. Maybe you should try to learn more about that?
My point of view is that exploiting animals for food is wrong. No brand of “ethical” farming can change that fact for me. Raising animals to kill them for food before the end of their natural life is something I refuse to partake in.
Male chicks aren’t ground at birth in your farm, that’s better in my book. But they’re still raised to be eaten. I’d still argue that hens laying eggs every day shortens their lifespan because it puts strain on their system. As far as I know, hens don’t naturally lay eggs every day, all year. They lay an egg and keep it around for a while to see if it’s growing or not. After a while they eat it and start over. They also don’t produce eggs all year but only part of it. But because farm hens are there for their eggs and later their meat, we take their egg every day and they have to lay another the next day. Some farms also use lights and heaters to trick the hens into thinking the season never ends and have then lay all year long.
I don't know what hens do what you say. The hens we have here, when we leave the eggs in their nest, the next day they've laid a few more. Once they have laid around ten eggs they'll incubate them until they hatch. That's how we end up with new hens. Some eggs we take and eat, some we let them hatch into chicks. I've never seen a hen eat an egg. What they do eat is the egg shells when the eggs have hatched. Appparently it helps them replenish the calcium needed to make new eggs. Is that what you have in mind, perhaps?
I don't think laying eggs puts strain on hens' system. Far as I can tell, that's what hens are made to do.
> Raising animals to kill them for food before the end of their natural life is something I refuse to partake in.
That's fine by me. Nobody's forcing you to partake in anything. I don't agree that raising animals for food is wrong or exploitative.
Edit: sorry for the Fisking. I wanted to address this too:
> But they’re still raised to be eaten.
Yes, absolutely! That's why we raise farm animals. We raise them for food. We breed them, we tend to them, we keep them safe from predators and disease, we feed them, we care for them and then we kill them and eat them. That's the deal.
You (kind of) can by now. Killing male chickens after hatching is outlawed in Germany since the beginning of this year. From [1] it reads like Germany subsised research into preselecting female eggs and only hatching these ones.
This is still killing male chickens in some way, but arguably less gruesome than how the industry has dealt with male chickens before.
Do you believe that there’s no trauma involved in the dairy and egg industry? Spend a few minutes watching this about dairy. https://youtu.be/roIWg4ntj9k
Earthling Ed also has videos about egg industry, but the gist is make chicks are crushed in a meat grinder alive.
That’s greed enabled by modern capitalism and general “don’t ask don’t tell” apathy. That’s not how milk and eggs were produced for the majority of mankind’s existence after the transition from hunter/gatherer to farming.
This is what I don't quite get. Perhaps eating octopi seems gratuitous since they are expensive and not integrated into everyday customs/life. But hard to imagine an octopus is on a higher status than a pig or a cow which are fairly close to us evolutionarily.
"Allow" implies some sort of consent. I understand that you mean in an evolutionary sense, but it's clear that most living beings are averse to dying, even when possessing the most biologically primitive nervous systems. I prefer to head off any arguments in bad faith, "well, why don't all the cows just run away?" Some people are very comfortable resorting to satirical absurdity when discussing suffering, as evidenced by ridiculous arguments like "plants feel pain, why do you eat plants?"
Genuine question and not an attempt to bait you, but curious why the latter is a ridiculous argument? I’ve not heard that argument, but I have seen the occasional piece of research pop up to suggest there’s more complicated communication or social structures in plants. Particularly fungi. I’ve no idea how true any of it is and what why more may learn about that in the coming decades. So while I personally don’t have evidence or believe it to be true, I couldn’t with absolute conviction rule it out either.
I'm definitely open to discussing the possibility when it's with someone arguing in good faith. It seems like that's where you're coming from, so thank you.
I won't bury the lede further. Plants can't experience pain, at least insofar as we conceive of it, because they don't have nociceptors that signal pain. Therefore, if they do have any sort of phenomenological experience, whether it would be recognizable to us or not, there is no sense in describing anything they experience as "pain".
There may be simple damage-avoidance reflexes, but comparing that with what it feels like to break a bone would be like saying that pedestrians and vehicles should share the road. The difference in quality is so significant that it makes better sense to categorize those reflexes as not pain at all although in service of the same tissue-protecting goal. My legs are not a vehicle I don't think.
A final point on the deficit of nociception, is that the experience of pain is so central to our lived experience that it's difficult to conceive of what that would be like. It's like the alpha channel in rgba... Without that signal for opacity, there's no color at all.
If the above is not enough to convince, there's some recent research that sought to systematize the analysis of sentience. Here's the 8 points used:
1) possession of nociceptors;
2) possession of integrative brain regions;
3) connections between nociceptors and integrative brain regions;
4) responses affected by potential local anaesthetics or analgesics;
5) motivational trade-offs that show a balancing of threat against opportunity for reward;
6) flexible self-protective behaviours in response to injury and threat;
7) associative learning that goes beyond habituation and sensitisation;
8) behaviour that shows the animal values local anaesthetics or analgesics when injured
As you can see, plants are immediately out of the running on the most fundamental point. As you continue down, it becomes more and more absurd to say that plants feel. There's no mechanism by which that would be possible.
I think you're misplacing the reasoning for the pain argument as "they can't feel pain the same way mammals do" whereas the contending logical argument is actually "we should avoid eating plants for the same reason we should animals - that is, it would be against their desires". The plant reflex is an indication of the latter.
Else you could easily ethically qualify meat eating that is limited to the consumption animals killed while blinded and under the influence of anaesthetics.
I see what you mean. I took it for granted that it's clear that sentience is a prerequisite to the capability of having desires. If someone did argue that plants have desires then I would question what they mean: either they're implying conscious preference of future states, desire predicated on sentience or they mean some metaphysical teleological conception of desire. The first two are mistakes, the last is not really the type of argument that I find fascinating beyond its relevance to social ritual or linguistic games.
Not necessarily. A large part of what makes killing unethical is that it's a subversion of the creatures' preferences. In my mind I imagine that sentient beings have a little sandcastle-shaped plan for the future. Killing them is like stopping on their sandcastle. It's not the only way, but it's the worst because that sandcastle can never be rebuilt.
I'm writing the arguments and questions below in good faith. I'm legitimately conflicted over this, and I admit that I haven't engaged in any research on this subject.
From what I can tell, the moral argument that you're presenting seems to boils down to the fact that we arbitrarily value animal life more than other kinds of life. I'm not saying that this is somehow "wrong" -- I'm bothered by the fact that the it's often presented in a way that makes it seem like it's some kind of universal truth, based on some criteria of the subject itself (e.g. presence of certain biological structures or phenomena), rather than specifics about the human experience.
> Plants can't experience pain, at least insofar as we conceive of it, because they don't have nociceptors that signal pain. Therefore, if they do have any sort of phenomenological experience, whether it would be recognizable to us or not, there is no sense in describing anything they experience as "pain".
So, they lack the biological machinery to feel (let's call it) animal-like pain. Is the argument that it's our moral obligation to reduce the phenomenological experience of animal-like pain in this universe? And by extension, that other kinds of "pain" (for lack of a better word) are less important? If so, isn't it more to-the-point to simply say "we shouldn't hurt things that are like us"? (This simple perspective is obviously problematic in its own ways -- I'm not necessarily advocating for it -- I'm just trying to clarify the essence of what I'll call the "nociceptor argument").
> A final point on the deficit of nociception, is that the experience of pain is so central to our lived experience that it's difficult to conceive of what that would be like. It's like the alpha channel in rgba... Without that signal for opacity, there's no color at all.
The argument here seems to be something like: "it's incomprehensible to humans, so therefore it doesn't exist." Again, it seems more straightforward to simply say that the fundamental criteria is whether or not the thing experiencing "pain" is sufficiently "like us".
I think basically what I'm trying to say is this: the "nociceptor argument" feels like a way of skirting around the fact that morality regarding animal rights boils down to human-specific feelings we have about animals -- and that those feelings are rooted in the fact that they're like us, and some quirk of our psychology causes (most of) us to feel pain when we see or imagine something like us in pain.
I personally don't believe that reality has hard boundaries of the kind that the "nociceptor argument" presupposes. Humans conceived those boundaries because they're useful to us as a part of how we model reality. From your response to another commenter ("...the last is not really the type of argument that I find fascinating beyond its relevance to social ritual or linguistic games"), I imagine you might find these arguments to be too metaphysical for your taste, but in my opinion, it's important for people to realize that these moral frameworks are rooted in human culture and psychology, not some biological reality independent of our species.
I'd be very happy to hear your thoughts or rebuttals, if you care to share them.
I see where you're coming from. It's a failure on my part that I didn't make it clear that one of my ideals is continual expansion of our moral intuitions. It's also partly a choice to leave it out because it can become so unintuitive that it affects the basis of the entire argument.
Since you expressed openness to this dialogue, I'll share. When I really, really stretch my moral imagination to the point it decouples from practical logic, I find myself feeling spiritually reverent for the things that the mental abstraction "complexity" points at. I arrive at this by synthesizing a particular metaphor from Alan Watts with Mihalyi Czikszentmihalyi's ideas on complexity.
In the same way an apple tree apples, the universe peoples. It also dogs, and weathers and softwares and cows. Of it emerge these beautiful structures, including plants. If I was capable of surviving the endeavor, cherishing and protecting every single one of those things that the universe expresses would be my ultimate ethical goal. I don't know if there's farther expansive rings of morality. I imagine I might be able to peek at some with the help of deep, deep meditative practice or other tools.
The thing that re-embodies me is the Buddhist idea of bodhisattvas. They are beings who have reached enlightenment, but then rejected paradise in honor of the work still left to do on this plane of existence.
That's basically the outline of my metaphysical beliefs.
Finally, specifically regarding pain and plants, I agree that we bend our intuitions to the experiences that make sense to us. My argument is that the word "pain" and what we understand pain to be, is predicated on a specific biological structure, nociceptors. To speak of pain without nociception is like saying the water in my hand isn't wet. They're enmeshed, dependent properties. So, if plants do experience something that increments the universe's suffering counter, which I leave as a possibility, we would have to imagine some other form of communication. Language and thought extrudes from the human body. As a consequence of that fact, there are just some things it can't capture, and attempting to do so places us closer to the choice: bodhisattva or buddha.
You've understood me perfectly. No counter-arguments from me; what follows are just some thoughts that your comment inspired.
> In the same way an apple tree apples, the universe peoples. It also dogs, and weathers and softwares and cows. Of it emerge these beautiful structures, including plants.
I love this framing.
> If I was capable of surviving the endeavor, cherishing and protecting every single one of those things that the universe expresses would be my ultimate ethical goal.
Whenever this thought comes to my mind, I can't help but think about the Christian idea the human beings are inherently sinful (I may not be getting this exactly right -- I'm not a Christian). As you point out: we're forced to "destroy" expressions of the universe in order to survive. Maybe this is OK, and their destruction is part of that expression -- or maybe we're inherently sinful, and the best we can do is damage control.
> The thing that re-embodies me is the Buddhist idea of bodhisattvas. They are beings who have reached enlightenment, but then rejected paradise in honor of the work still left to do on this plane of existence.
This is fascinating. I'll be doing some reading on this.
> So, if plants do experience something that increments the universe's suffering counter, which I leave as a possibility, we would have to imagine some other form of communication. Language and thought extrudes from the human body.
Fully agreed. Something I was trying to express in my first comment is that I find this conclusion perfectly acceptable (i.e. that we exclude plants from our moral framework, because of their incomprehensibility), but that it's important to recognize that it's grounded in our own ability to comprehend the experience of others (as opposed to something inherent to the "other" itself).
(Not the OP). In summary I think you mean that animal rights activists anthropomorphize non-human animals and they want us to treat them like we treat humans. They don't anthropomorphize plants so they don't care what happens to plants. Is that right?
If that's your point, I agree and I think that goes a long way to explain why there are very fewer objections to eating insects, or why many vegetarians are fine eating fish, but not cows.
Yes, this captures the essence of what I'm saying.
I would just add for clarity that I don't think that it's "wrong" for us to elevate life that's more like us, and so I don't think it's "wrong" for animal rights activists to behave in the way that you're describing. I only take issue with justifying that behavior by pointing to specific biological features, when to me, it feels closer to the truth to say that we behave this way because it feels right, and it feels right because of something inherent to the human experience. I believe this is an important distinction because it helps us realize that human experience is context-dependent, and so our sense of morality will be, too. (E.g. one could argue that it's less moral to eat meat now than it was 500 years ago.)
I understand what you are saying about implied agency, but it really must have worked like this on some level. Cow (physiology and behaviour) had to allow domestication. People tried to domesticate cheetahs, they didn't breed in captivity.
Jarred Diamond makes a point of this in "Guns, Germs and Steel". I don't have a copy at hand but, from memory, he argues that we domesticated horses but not, say, zebras or onagers because they don't have a disposition that is amenable to domestication. Cheetahs are another famous example, like you say (and I wish we could have domesticated them because then there would be more of them around).
It works the other way also. Humans have the kind of disposition that allows us to domesticate animals. We find it easy to care for other animals. By contrast, lions or wolves would never be able to domesticate sheep because their natural tendency is to kill prey animals on sight, basically. Human's aren't obligate carnivores and despite what some people in certain communities will claim, we are not a predator species and we have no instincts to kill everything that may be food. Check out how little kittens play for example, and how human children play, how many small animals kittens kill and how many small animals human children kill. We have an instinct to nurture and care for other animals and we used it to domesticate our farm animals.
We are not violent, bloodthirsty lions or wolves. We are curious and inquisitive apes and we like to learn new things and figure out how things work. We used this trait to understand how to breed farm animals and how to take care of them and how to use their natural tendencies to our own ends.
And just to be perfectly clear: I don't think that's morally wrong, not in any way, shape, or form and not to any degree at all. It is our compassion and intelligence that has made us farmers of other animals, not our cruelty and greed, like the meat-is-murder people claim. But it is cruelty and greed that is responsible for factory farming and its horrors are something that should rightfully concern us all.
Which is why it makes sense to simply not eat any of them. It seems to be the healthiest option too, as long as you have access to enough healthy calories from plants.
That's not right. You need much more than calories from food. You can take all the calories you need by eating sugar for example, or dietary fat. If you don't eat meat, or cut out any major food groups, you need to be vary careful to supplement your diet with the nutrients that are now missing from it and since we don't really understand nutrition and our needs for nutrients very well, there is a risk of messing up and making yourself unhealthy in the process.
That is why I specified “enough healthy calories”. What I meant was that as long as you have access to enough produce. Basically some people need to eat meat because it’s the only way to get enough nutrition. But if you live in California near a well stocked grocery store for example, then you just need to learn what a healthy vegan diet is and most people will do better on a vegan diet. At least according to NutritionFacts.org. A vegan diet has incredible health benefits including significantly reduced risk of heart disease and cancer.
I was not attempting to say all calories are the same. You definitely have to learn what foods are right to eat. But I think meat is only necessary for people that live in remote areas without enough access to healthy produce.
OK, thanks for explaining what you meant, I didn't understand you at first.
To be honest, I don't know what NutritionFacts.org is, exactly. I agree that most Californians, like most Americans (North and South) would do well to cut down on their meat consumption a bit, because it certainly looks like they eat way too much. But I don't think that needs to mean going vegan.
Traditional diets from places like the Mediterrannean or South-East Asia go a long way towards keeping people well-fed without excessive meat consumption, and there's no reason to not adopt, say, a vegetable- and pulses-heavy mediterrannean diet, rather than going vegan, if a healthy diet is the point. In fact, if that's the point, it's probably easier to eat healthy when _not_ going vegan, because of the missing nutrients that must be supplemented.
I grew up on a plant-based diet. Not "vegan" or "vegetarian" but "plant-based", meaning that most food I ate was made of plants: rice, pasta, potatoes, beans, chickpeas and lentils, green beans, okra and peas, tomatoes, aubergines and zucchini, tons of olive oil everywhere, garlic, onions, celery and carrots as the base of sauces and soups, liberal amounts of good cheese and yogurt, plenty of fish in the summer, and some meat once or twice a week as I was growing up, primarily chicken and pork (I don't like beef). I don't think there's anyone that can fault this way of eating for being either excessive or unhealthy and I still cook and eat that way today, the way my grandmothers cooked.
You’re right that the American diet has gone way too far to meat, and eating a more Mediterranean or South-East Asian diet would be a big health improvement.
NutritionFacts.org is a non profit run by Dr. Michael Gregor, who runs a YouTube channel full of health advice. He looks at the latest scientific data and shares it on his channel. Based on his interpretation of the best available data a fully vegan diet seems to have a lot of health benefits. I became vegan for moral reasons so I haven’t researched what a more mixed diet would be like, but I’m glad my choice is a healthy one.
Thank you for pointing those out. I'll have a look when I can. I have to say, given that I grew up on a Mediterrannean diet and I still eat this way I don't have a strong motivation to cut down on the amount of animal products I consume. I think this may be a nuance that is ofetn lost in discussions about eating meat between people from different cultures.
> I think this may be a nuance that is often lost in discussions about eating meat between people from different cultures.
Definitely. USA meat culture is so gross I have rejected it all. And I really like the vegan diet! I really direct my criticism at my own country and culture, and generally don't have much to say about other cultures.
If you're a utilitarian part-vegetarian then you'd preferentially eat cow over smaller intelligent animals.
If we assume small animals and large animals experience the same amount of sentient pain during the slaughter, we can minimize the amount of pain per pound of meat produced. This means that beef is likely the best choice of meat for consumption. Unless we somehow developed whale farms someday.
I don't have the slightest bit of guilt eating meat products, including octopus, but it seems pretty self-evident that "pain per pound of meat" is a ridiculous standard. Pain doesn't exist in measurable units, the entire idea of trying to quantify it in relation to food production, much of which happens with little to no pain at all, seems pretty silly.
If we draw on human comparisons, it's generally agreed that more deaths are worse than fewer, and I posit that the weight of a person doesn't factor into that calculus. If we assume that a given quantity of meat will be produced and that animal deaths are undesirable for analogous reasons to human deaths then it's perfectly natural to attempt to minimize deaths per pound.
You're not comparing humans to humans. You're comparing cows to (say) chickens. The underlying assumption then is that chickens and cows share the same experience of pain. That's not proven, seems unlikely to be the case, and is, in any case, currently unmeasurable.
Maybe (I would argue feeding more people is better), but the GP is referring to pain, not death. Cows can be killed pretty quickly - perhaps not painlessly but pretty close to it. Lobsters not so much.
I'm not joining in on the ethics of meat eating debate at all, but as someone who's lived around chickens a good chunk of life, calling them extremely intelligent would be...a stretch.
That's surprising. I have no first hand experience, but I have been told by people who keep them as pets that chickens and cows are pretty much in the same league. Both can have distinct personalities.
I don't know about cows, but there's chickens in the farm where I live and they're the dumbest animal I've ever seen. They also don't seem to care when one of them is taken by a predator (something took one of our roosters two nights ago and the other chickens didn't make a sound, although he certainly did).
Pigs are intelligent and sensitive and they have compassion for their kind and other animals. A lady I know worked in a lab that made experiments with pigs and with dogs and she saw pigs taking food on their snouts and giving it to the dogs, who were intentionally left without food, through the bars of their cells. And pigs know when you come to take one of them for the slaughter and will raise hell and try to get in the way and defend their kin. It is a heartbreaking thing killing a pig. It is very unfortunate that pigs don't produce milk or eggs or wool and we just want them for their meat becaus there's no other reason to keep them around than to kill and eat them, unlike cows or goats, sheep, chickens, ducks, horses, donkeys, dogs, cats etc etc...
(I mean, we kill those other animals too, to eat them, but we also keep some of them alive for their other products or work)
Thanks for that data point. It makes me feel quite a bit better about eating chickens, and makes me redouble my efforts to wean myself off bacon. I already don't eat pork in any other form, but it's really hard to pass on a strip of bacon at a breakfast buffet.
Really dumb animals can have distinct personalities, which is why I think what gets inferred from some of the quirky behaviours octopus display in terms of intelligence gets a bit overrated.
Chickens are amazingly stupid, disloyal, impulsive animals. Not anywhere close to pigs, and far away from octopi. (I grew up on a farm with both chickens and pigs).
I have. Extremely intelligent might be a stretch, but a little. Certainly curious, emotional and social. Id rate them at the level of cats, dogs and pigs. My cat is dumb as fuck, no way she could outsmart a cow.
Even vegetarianism supports unreal violence against cows. You should make the leap to veganism if you’re interested in to avoid unnecessary cruelty to animals.
It feels like Google has been directing their in-house designs on ML/TPUs while Amazon went all in on ARM. It will be interesting to see how those bets pay off.
No, but Microsoft bought some off the shelf Ampere and Cavium/Marvell servers. But they keep them for internal use only for now :(
Huawei makes their own silicon and servers with that silicon — also only internal, not available on huaweicloud :(
The only other player is Scaleway who bought first gen Cavium ThunderX's way back when. And Packet of course but that's bare metal only, no cheap small VPSes.
Huawei Cloud does have Kunpeng ARM servers available in some AZ (at least I know Bangkok AZ2 has some). They also run managed Redis on ARM so cheap that it will cost more to run it yourself on Intel VM.
I'm excited to see the price drop when Elasticache moves to ARM.
If they are good enough for internal use, they should be good enough for public use. Not really sure what is stopping them from exposing it to the public... I am sure there is _some_ demand for it.
There are a number of reasons not to launch as an external cloud offering. A few:
- Reliability (performance and availability) could be below Azure standards
- Supply chain maturity - they may have difficulty scaling procurement and deployment to meet orders
- Lock in - major cloud providers typically provide product guarantees with forenotice on the order of years before a deprecation. It's a big commitment to launch a product externally.
- Business case - maybe the TCO doesn't make sense when compared with Azure's data on demand and price point
No, but they've been working closely with Qualcomm since the Windows Phone 7 days (10 years ago). Their recent Surface Pro X runs a customized Snapdragon 8cx dubbed "Microsoft SQ1".
It is not like Google or Microsoft does not have the expertise in house for these task. The Core and Interconnect on Graviton2 are licensed from ARM based on Neoverse. It is Fabbed on TSMC 7nm.
While there are still a lot going on with customisation, I would not be surprised if ARM have have a few solution on hand already.
The cost advantage of fabbing its own CPU is so huge, it is only a matter of time Google or Microsoft make their own CPU to compete.
You can run the same binaries on Graviton as on other Arm server platforms from eg HP or Lenovo, in the same way that you can run x86 binaries on Intel or AMD processors.
Microsoft has come a long way lately when it comes to open source. Apple seems to be the only major company that is still not an enthusiastic participant.
Apple wrote and open sourced their C++ compiler (clang) and C++ standard library (libc++), both part of the LLVM project, years before Microsoft did. In fact it was more than a decade ago in 2007 that Apple open-sourced clang, and now widely adopted by the industry. Sure Apple's participation in open sourcing may not be "enthusiastic" with huge "️Heart Open Source" billboards but it gets real job done and has real positive impact.
Perhaps Apple's contributions aren't as visible, but just off the top of my head here's two major open source contributions from them: Swift[1] and FoundationDB[2]
Plus there's a page for all their OS components: https://opensource.apple.com. There's also WebKit and LLVM, which started at Apple and are still heavily driven by engineers at the company.
WebKit was certainly started at Apple. I just checked and the paper for LLVM was actually published before Lattner joined Apple, so I guess it's not quite true that it was "started" there (though, of course, most of its development has happened there).
That's correct. LLVM was started at UIUC, Apple later hired Lattner with the intention of making LLVM production-ready (in part as a replacement for the GNU toolchain), and ultimately to replace the GCC frontend by a custom / dedicated one.
The Clang project is part of the LLVM ecosystem, but is a major effort in its own right, so I think it is right to give credit where credit is due, in the same way e.g. the Rust compiler uses Rust as a backend, but credit for it doesn't to to the LLVM project.
This is an extremely disingenuous statement. WebKit was forked from KHTML and everybody knows this. It "certainly" sounds like you're trying to rewrite history (and you make a similar assertion elsewhere in this thread)..
I say it is disingenous because it is completely counter to what can be found on something as mainstream as the wikipedia page.. one does not have to dig deep.
If you want to dig deeper, the mailing list archives are available for all, and I think given the contribution KHTML made to Webkit initially it is poor form to diminish its role.
"Blink started at Google". It's all context. As someone mentioned, it's technically correct but in the context of this discussion thread which is about open-source origins and contributions, saying Blink "started at Google" comes across as dishonest. Blink started at google with a fork of Webkit, which itself was not created in a vacuum at Apple.
That’s correct, but in the context of this source release, I think it’s not more incorrect to say “Apple created WebKit” than it is to say “Microsoft created this library” (it started life as a Dinkumware product)
Apparently it is gaining traction. For example, the Tensorflow project is working on building a next generation library with Swift - https://github.com/tensorflow/swift
Only because Lattner is part of the Tensorflow team, and they still don't have a solid story regarding OS support, in spite of several people pointing out how much better supporting Julia would have been.
Which incidentally also supports Windows out of the box.
Thank you, the second link you provided was an extremely interesting read. It seems to me that Swift has reached a level of maturity where the language and the ecosystem can now exist independently of Apple’s support.
Appart from siblings' mentions, I think they also opensourced networking libs/protocols, bonjour and cups. Cups should be mentioned especially, since that was a basis for network printing under linux. (I hope im right on this)
While Im not a fan of the corporation, its strategy and most of the policies, some dilligence is due here. They are known to release low level stuff.
CUPS was not originally written or open sourced by Apple. CUPS was released in the late 2000s as open source and soon after became the default print system for most Linux distros. Apple hired the original creator and purchased the source code in 2007.
