..was considered the epitome of processed food.
That could well be the result of a FUD campaign by the trillion-dollar meat industry, which may feel threatened by plausible vegan/vegetarian alternatives to their products, which tend to be the result of practices that are cruel and destructive to the environment.
Also, hot dogs, bacon, jerky and deli meats are now considered carcinogenic. Why aren't those considered to be "the epitome of processed food"?
And, yeah, extreme greed and creative bankruptcy tend to go hand in hand.
A few more points:
cows mostly eat grain because we stuff them full of grains to fatten them up (just like we're doing to ourselves). They're perfectly fine eating natural growing grasses that we can't eat.
Right now grass-fed cows are only 4% of the market, so we are, in fact, growing massive amounts of grain on arable land, with all the issues you brought up, in order to feed cows. From Cattle Daily, "over 60% of cropland in the US is used to produce livestock feed", or 200 million acres. Also, "hay production occupies around 60 million acres of US cropland annually", so the hay is grown on cropland and fed to the cows; they're not necessarily grazing non-arable pasture. From that same article, "In the Amazon rainforest alone, over 70% of deforested land is used as pasture for cattle ranching".
So again, much or most of that 200 million acres currently used to grow food (mostly corn) for livestock could be used to grow plants to feed people directly. This is not a hypothetical "switch" requiring additional land or water use.
You only need to raise one cow per person per year. Small families do manage that. It's significantly less work as nature does most of the work for you and is being accomplished all over the world.
This does not scale: How many Americans have enough land available to raise (grass-fed, grazing) cows, even if they wanted to? And what would happen if everyone tried doing that?
the USA EPA states our animal industry contributes 3-4% to our climate impact.
Does that estimate take into account deforestation, transportation, refrigeration, everything it takes to grow feed, etc, or just methane emissions? I.e. does that include the impact of the 200 million acres used to feed livestock?
You can't do the same with vegetables nor grains and they aren't renewable resources.
Plants can be composted and help regenerate the soil. And of course they are renewable because you can sow the seeds from one plant to grow new ones.
You can prevent/resolve most cases of diabetes though low carb diets.
If you're suggesting that vegans/vegetarians have higher rates of type 2 diabetes, the opposite is true: there is an "inverse association".
I'm not buying the sustainability argument. Here's a story from a few years ago (via Bloomberg):
McDonald’s Linked to Amazon Deforestation in New Report: Brazil’s beef supply chain, among the most complex in the world, is the key culprit in the deforestation of the Amazon, which reached a 15-year high in 2021.
More here (Burger King appears to be a much bigger culprit):
Approximately three quarters of the world’s soy goes to animal feed. This soy production has left an enormous scar on the Earth’s surface. More than one million square kilometers of our planet - equivalent to the total combined area of France, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands - are dedicated to growing soy. In South America, soy and cattle interests have converted vast areas of the Amazon rainforest, Brazil’s Cerrado, the Argentine Chaco, Bolivian lowland forests and the Atlantic Forest in Paraguay from diverse native ecosystems into soy monocultures. From 2001-2010, an average of approximately four million hectares of forests were destroyed each year, mostly for soy and cattle.
Also, the idea that plants aren't renewable resources is absurd. Maybe the way commercial agriculture is done today is not renewable or sustainable (I would agree with that), but that obviously includes beef.
There's also regenerative agriculture, which seeks to greatly reduce pesticide and synthetic fertilizer use, increase biodiversity etc. There is evidence that it increases yields and improves soil health.
Americans eat an average of 0.23 lbs of beef, 0.18 lbs of pork, AND 0.32 lbs of poultry per day (source). That's a lot of freakin' meat, almost three quarters of a pound (or a third of a kilogram) a day.
Cows need to eat a LOT, and they mostly eat grain. Instead of using that grain to feed cows, we could eat it (and other vegetables grown on that land) ourselves, saving enormous resources.
We also buy a lot stuff we don't need, and that doesn't last (planned obsolescence in almost every industry). Which is why our economy requires massive resource extraction, more than the planet can handle. I recently read that large swaths of Borneo's rainforests are disappearing to make parts for American RV's (source).
Most European countries have a fraction of the per capita carbon footprint Americans do.
I think someone else already commented on how inefficient and dangerous cars are. There are many cities all over the world with good public transportation where you simply do not need to own a car.
how would US look like if all their unreasonable demands met?
People would eat more plants (generally considered a healthier diet anyway), ride a bike or take the bus or train, not spend so much time in front of screens, not buy so much stupid crap they don't need, maybe spend more time with each other in person, etc.
"When you launch an online-capable game, these technologies may activate using kernel, admin or user privileges, and monitor and collect from your gameplay and device’s RAM or other memory, processes, visuals, communications, and file storage for the purposes of detecting violations of, and enforcing, the Rules of Conduct."
EA may collect relevant information needed for our investigation and enforcement purposes such as your account information, details related to an Unauthorized Third-Party Program, any EA PC Game files that were modified, and times cheating was detected.
So essentially Saudi Arabia is getting massive, global spyware capabilities.
Here's an article from Politico just last night: "Former GOP officials fear US strikes on alleged drug smugglers aren't legal"
The Trump administration is facing growing calls from former government officials — including some in Republican administrations — to offer a legal justification for President Donald Trump’s two missile strikes this month on boats allegedly piloted by members of a Venezuelan drug cartel.
Another Politico headline: "In new lawsuit, fired FBI leaders allege rampant politicization by Trump allies":
A former acting FBI director is accusing Director Kash Patel and other allies of President Donald Trump of orchestrating a politically motivated purge of the bureau’s leadership, seeking to punish officials who worked on Trump’s criminal investigations and submitting to White House pressure to gut the bureau’s workforce.
From The Detroit News:
President Donald Trump's readiness to accept a luxury jet as a gift from the ruling family of Qatar for conversion into a presidential aircraft has revived the conversations around emoluments and the notion of a president otherwise allegedly profiting off of the office....
But there are constitutional prohibitions against the president receiving gifts from foreign entities or even domestic ones. It's a conversation over emoluments, territory that Trump has been forced to navigate, and litigate, in the past.
From TokenPost:
U.S. consumer advocacy group Public Citizen has urged the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) to investigate whether President Donald Trump's official memecoin, TRUMP, violates federal laws prohibiting the solicitation of gifts.
From The Hollywood Reporter: "Judge Rules Trump’s Use of National Guard During L.A. Immigration Protests Is Illegal"
From PBS: "Judge blocks Trump’s executive order to dismantle Education Department"
In their lawsuit, the groups said the layoffs amounted to an illegal shutdown of the Education Department. They said it left the department unable to carry out responsibilities required by Congress, including duties to support special education, distribute financial aid and enforce civil rights laws.
This is just the stuff off the top of my head. Seems pretty constant to me.
Now if you're a low memory persistence, medium IQ dopamine addict, you may actually get a lot of AI slop in your feed. As in actual slop, not the good stuff. Because that's what you actually like watching in short term, and then your low memory persistence means you fail to recognize it in before enough of the next video is watched by you so that algorithm assumes you'll click on the next one too. Which it is correct in assuming, as your low memory persistence will get you to click on it again and again.
And just because you hate yourself for liking AI slop, doesn't mean that youtube has a problem with AI slop. It's a "you" problem, not a "youTUBE" problem.
This frames the issue as an individual problem, rather than a societal problem, when YouTube is deliberately putting out an addictive product, and actively works on making it more addictive.
To put it another way, what if the "low memory persistence, medium IQ dopamine addict[s]" are thousands of teenagers with unformed brains and therefore poor judgment? Is that not a societal issue?
What we need to do is focus on the value of the work created by a worker, and then can we leverage AI to produce the same amount of work for less hours of the person's time, giving that person more hours to their life but the same amount of pay.
Isn't that exactly what he's saying? That a worker's productivity gains should to the worker, not their employer?
The only item you mentioned that deserves derision is the CD player.
What if you want to listen to music or an audiobook that isn't on the radio and isn't being streamed? You might be able to play music from a thumb drive or something, but in many cases you would still need to get the original music from a CD.
"Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago." -- Bernard Berenson
