I am not a vegan. But I do hold a lot of environmental values.
There is a LOT of interesting writing on the economy of the meat industrial complex.
In essence: It is totally propped up by with subsidies from the US Government. They LOSE money on every cow slaughtered. They destroy our planet. All of the profits go to the billionaire farm owners who lobby to keep the laws in place. It is so horribly corrupt.
Personally, I find it disgusting that we give hand-outs so these billionaire ranchers can:
- Feed us unhealthy food
- Destroy the environment with greenhouse gasses and farm run-off
- Take up MASSIVE amounts of space
- Use massive amounts of water
- Create drug-resistant bacteria by pumping the animals full of antibiotics
- create horrible living conditions for animals and suppress anti-meat propaganda with ag-gag laws
- Pay their workers in the factory farm a pittance to do depressing, disgusting work so the owners can hoover up all of the profit.
You're linking to a website with a clear agenda, hardly a reliable source. First off, who are the billionaire ranchers and secondly, why would it be wrong for them to exist (since they exist for every other major industry, too, including tech).
- Farm land for vegetables takes up MASSIVE amounts of space, and it's not the same as leaving that land to nature and wildlife
- Animals have to be killed in the production of veggie farms, from pesticides to rodents
- Water doesn't get "used" up when you feed cattle with it. It goes through the same cycle it has for billions of years for all the other animal life on this planet. What gives?
- Factory farms are more common for vegetables than they are for cattle, and it's not like the harvesters are getting paid any more than the ranchers. They're often paid less. 91% of cattle ranches are family owned (https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Highlights/2015/Cattl...)
And in turn more water used, and that water doesn't go back into the ground as urine.
That said, actual ranching (i.e. giving livestock room to graze) would be far less of an environmental burden (so long as it's in places where one doesn't have to burn down forests to make that grazing land).
I'm not sure if 7M vegetarians would move the needle much, but even ignoring them, that's about 0.6lbs of meat every day for every man, woman and child.
Assuming toddlers and the elderly don't eat that much, that puts some adults closer to a pound of meat a day every day.
That's a lot more meat consumption than I would have estimated.
> that's about 0.6lbs of meat every day for every man, woman and child.
That doesn't sound all that high at all. I probably would've guessed slightly lower at less than 0.5lbs/person, but knowing the average American diet that seems well within reason. If I ate a 1/4 lb burger twice a day (i.e. for lunch and dinner) or a 1/2 lb burger once a day (i.e. just for lunch or dinner), that'd be pretty close on beef alone.
I think more needs to be done to promote grass fed beef as well. If done well, it can have a negative carbon footprint, versus imitation meats which have many of the same problems that grain fed beef does (monocropping, destruction of local ecosystems, use of pesticides, etc.).
They eat grass, distress the soil and leave their fertilizer behind. The grass regrows, which captures carbon via photosynthesis.
Obviously I have no idea what I'm talking about, so I don't know if the methane produced by cattle has a bigger impact. But it definitely seems better than both grain fed meat and monocrops, in terms of energy input and environmental/ecosystem impact.
The major energy input in the system is the sun, not fossil fuels for fertilizer/pesticide production and farm equipment to plant and harvest crops.
Yeah I've never heard of carbon neutral cows. If you're saying that the grassland would be replaced with concrete, then there would be a reduction in carbon sequestration.
But still, I don't think it's close. Cows produce a lot of methane:
> Cows emit a massive amount of methane through belching, with a lesser amount through flatulence. Statistics vary regarding how much methane the average dairy cow expels. Some experts say 100 liters to 200 liters a day (or about 26 gallons to about 53 gallons), while others say it's up to 500 liters (about 132 gallons) a day. In any case, that's a lot of methane, an amount comparable to the pollution produced by a car in a day.
> In New Zealand, where cattle and sheep farming are major industries, 34 percent of greenhouse gases come from livestock.
> Initially, grazing areas were filled with a variety of grasses and flowers that grew naturally, offering a diverse diet for cows and other ruminants. However, in order to improve the efficiency of feeding livestock, many of these pastures became reseeded with perennial ryegrass. With the aid of artificial fertilizers, perennial ryegrass grows quickly and in huge quantities. The downside is that it lacks the nutritious content of other grasses and prevents more nutritious plants from growing. One commentator called it the "fast food" of grasses.
> Believers in naturally grown, mixed-species pastures say that the use of them will reduce greenhouse gases, improve animal health and meat quality and reduce the use of artificial fertilizers.
Sounds like it's still a carbon emitter, but if you're going to do it try to find cows that are eating on native, organic grass.
> They eat grass, distress the soil and leave their fertilizer behind. The grass regrows, which captures carbon via photosynthesis.
I think the equation is a lot more complicated than that. For instance, did you know that the vast majority of weight that your body regularly sheds is due to the carbon you breathe out? The average human breathes out around 2.3 lbs of C02 per day. That increases a lot when you're engaging in physical exertion.
I'm guessing that the same holds true for cows, but the poundage is going to be a lot higher because their body mass is a lot larger. Cows (and people) have to eat as much they shed in order to avoid wasting away, and most of that is carbon.
I would expect that a fully grown cow is essentially carbon neutral, not carbon-absorbing, if you're just looking at the dietary cycle.
Oxford and CSIRO scientists already proved grass fed cattle is worse for greenhouse gases than CAFO beef farming. Carbon sequestration no where near makes up for the increases emissions.
Yeah, definitely a stretch, and one that I feel distorts the picture.
"Billionaire ranchers" conjures up an image of some guy with a cowboy hat and gold chains in a mansion overlooking endless expanses of pastures and barns. In reality most independent ranchers don't live so lavishly :)
How do local farmers fall into the mix? I buy a cow every year from a local farm - they raise and slaughter the cow and deliver the whole thing butchered and packaged. I much prefer this to anything I could buy at the grocery store.
Oxford and CSIRO scientists already proved grass fed cattle is worse for greenhouse gases than CAFO beef farming. Carbon sequestration no where near makes up for the increases emissions.
Do you have a citation for this? Curious about how they figured that, given:
* The emissions from the livestock themselves should be identical given the same number of cows and the same dietary input; CO₂ output might increase for pasture-raised cattle, given the higher physical activity, but methane output (IIRC the primary concern re: cattle and their environmental impact) shouldn't change all that much
* Non-livestock emissions (from e.g. motorized equipment) seem much easier to minimize in a traditional ranch setting - especially considering that independent ranchers once upon a time ran their ranches without motorized equipment at all, and some still do - than for a modern factory farm
Now granted, I haven't read the entirety of the 127-page report, but it doesn't seem to say much of anything about CAFO at all (searching for "CAFO" or "factory" gives zero results, and searching for "concentrate" gives five results that all have nothing to do with CAFO), so I'm not sure how that's supposed to function as a citation for the specific claim that CAFO is somehow more environmentally friendly than free range ranching.
What the report actually seems to be claiming is that free range cattle ranching is not carbon neutral on a global scale. It can be carbon-neutral or even outright carbon-sequestering on a local scale, however, with the right diet / plant availability and other factors, albeit with other environmental tradeoffs/externalities (for example, the crops that help reduce methane output when used as feed tend to require more fertilizer to grow).
Stop misrepresenting the facts, they are not Oxford or CSIRO scientists at all. It's the "Food Climate Research Network" which is a think tank operating out of the University of Oxford. No one has "proved" anything.
In science it's actually hard to "prove" anything. You can disprove something though.
I paid off my student loans around 6 years after college because I:
- Chose a degree that would lead to a profitable career ( Computer Science )
- Worked during the day and went to school at night, paying for my books and other expenses as I went through school. ( I was a manual QA worker at a tech company. )
- Lived below my means. Always took public transit, never owned a car, always had multiple roommates.
- Avoided large purchases or expensive trips
- threw a large part of my paycheck at the problem. I wanted to get ahead of that compound interest.
I support student loan cancellation. Over a trillion in debt. SOMETHING needs to happen. I understand why it needs to happen. But as someone who "did the right thing", it stings to get left out in the cold on this one.
And either way: Even people still IN debt paid a LOT of money towards our student loans. What happens to the money people have already paid off? There will still be a 10-year wealth gap for people around my age. I will be outbid for homes by people a decade younger than me.
I delayed retirement contributions, home purchases, and having a family to pay off my student loans.
> Lived below my means. Always took public transit, never owned a car.
I worked >10 years in the industry and am quite well-to-do, but I always take public transit and never owned a car. I never thought that was living below my means. Maybe it's different in US...
I've been seeing this a LOT lately. There is plenty of work out there, but some of the offers I have been seeing are PATHETIC.
Check out this job posting: metaltoad dot bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=103
> 90k max salary
> 9 years of industry experience
Totally clueless. Good luck with that.
Recently talked to a certain Beaverton, Oregon based shoe company. APPARENTLY, they hire a lot of their new hires as "contractors" and dangle the "full time" carrot in front of their face for a year. Swear up and down you are not a second class citizen... except you can't use the gym. Or go to the holiday party or use a lot of their facilities. And your badge is a different color.
Yeah, go sell that to someone else. Good luck finding a competent engineer.
Why do we cut our hair, trim our beards, make music, pierce our ears or wear clothing? None of these things are strictly necessary.
The Ancient European Picts, Mayans, Native Northern Americans, Polynesian islanders, all of these humans were HEAVILY tattooed, often with ritual significance.
Tattoos are an ancient human art form. Ötzi the iceman had visible tattoos.
It is a way to memorialize the past and express yourself.
We are dealing with this in Portland, Oregon right now. Massive handout to a billionaire baseball team owner, zero consideration for public transit or how the stadium will affect local traffic, very close to densely populated high-value neighborhoods who do not want a bunch of drunks wandering around.
The data seems to add up to sports stadiums actually having from no effect to negative effects on the surrounding area's commerce, but they have already tried to trot that pony out.
Amazing how much of our money politicians are willing to spend to buy a new toy because they like baseball.
You're using it wrong. The things that bash is good for are not the same things that Python should be used for. For what bash is good for, it is the simplest and fastest language one could use.
For a task like taking backups on servers that involves invoking bunch of commands, I'd rather not use a scripting language that asks you to open a process, bind variables on its stdin/stdout and all the boilerplate handling.
How do you do this in a scripting language without complication?
$ ssh remote.server 'mysqldump db | gzip -c' | gunzip -c | mysql db
It's the power of individual commands though I admit bash sucks as a language but it got invented forever ago, so can't blame it. But we need something better than bash. Fish is close but not too good.
Plugging programs together; pipelines. It exposes the UNIX principle. You can use it to augment, to extend, to improve programs written in any language you can imagine, past, present and future. If the program is written in C, C++, Rust you'll get the performance of those programs. What I'm saying you might find very obvious when using it interactively but there have been so many instances where it fulfils my needs. More often than not in certain problem domains it's the first thing I reach for and it usually solves the issue. I'd also like to add that I exclusively write POSIX shell scripts rather than Bash.
I was at my local arcade and I was lucky enough to come across a group of friends that met up every week to play Killer Queen. They had the full 10 people and someone asked me if I wanted to sub in while they went for a beer. One of the most exciting arcade experiences I’ve had in a long time. You get 10 people hunched over that game and it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen or done before.
The medium SEO is so much better by default than my gatsby-hosted site with a few hours of work.