Actually, vegans care about those insects too! The logic goes as follows:

• Plant-based diets not only don’t kill and torture animals who have a higher capacity to suffer than insects, but just as importantly
• Plant-based diets use substantially fewer crops than animal-based ones. This is just a consequence of thermodynamics that every step of the chain loses more and more energy, and thus more crops are needed at each stage. This is a major reason (other than prions) why you won’t usually see carnivores raised for food: it’d be wildly inefficient because you’d need way more crops and way more resource usage. The land usage for animal products is massive, and even the most “efficient” animals like chickens take 1.5 to 2 kg of crops for 1 kg of growth (we’re talking about cows here, though, where the ratio is fucking enormous: around 4.5:1 to 7.5:1), and even then a lot of this growth goes toward things like bones which are used for byproducts rather than food.

Vegans don’t eat insects because we care about insects. Vegans don’t eat honey because we care about insects. And logically, we don’t eat meat, milk, eggs, etc. because we care about insects. Veganism is about excluding animal exploitation “as far as is possible and practicable”, not about being literally perfect. And the difference in scale here is enormous. This argument is made all the time without realizing that if you care about insects, the first and most effective thing you can do is not to use animal products.

Answer:

• The water-intensive farming is absolutely fucking the ecology of the American southwest in a way that’s effectively irreversible on human timescales.
• The money being generated by this farming is going to a select few completely undeserving, morally bankrupt people who know the damage they’re doing and are hoarding swathes of land and water rights they were given for effectively nothing generations ago.
• This alfalfa is then shipped internationally to Saudi Arabia literally halfway across the world, generating greenhouse gas emissions and other forms of pollution.
• This alfalfa is then used to grow cattle, meaning that value is being extracted from the US – at a meager cost compared to the externalities we bear – and given to the theocratic shithole whose entire economy is based on destroying the planet that is Saudi Arabia.
• Edit: the cows produce a bunch of methane over their lifetime.
• The cows are then brutally murdered for food despite extensive evidence that cows can feel pain and do feel emotions like fear.
• This cow meat is then fed to people despite the fact that 1) red meat is a class 2a carcinogen (and frankly in light of evidence that vegetarian and vegan diets reduce risks of certain cancers by double-digit percentages, we’re all just waiting until it’s confirmed rather than heavily suspected as a carcinogen), 2) it substantially increases the risk of heart disease, and 3) it elevates the risk for diabetes when compared to plant-based foods which are cheaper and less resource-intensive to create.

It’s a benefit to essentially everyone if alfalfa farming becomes less profitable. The entire chain from water to cow meat is unjust, cruel, and otherwise fucking terrible.

I’m so sorry that these shitposts keep getting shittier.

Just doing my part. 🫡

This is a series where I make a meme out of every line of dialogue in The Room. It was running every day, but I got kind of burnt out on it for a bit and started having gaps of a day or two. I’m intending to get back to doing it daily now.

It’s likely in your best interest to move away from Gmail, if not immediately then over some period of time (e.g. start new email signups with other address, gradually move over existing ones, etc.)

Same here with plant milk in coffee. It gives you a ton of really yummy variety. I’ve accidentally had dairy milk put in my coffee, and every time I recognize it by how noticeably worse the coffee tastes.

Another one for me was nutritional yeast on popcorn. I mixed it into my usual popcorn seasoning, and popcorn legitimately isn’t as good to me now without nooch.

The Boston Herald is tabloid trash.

Mark’s lines are so criminally underappreciated I swear to god. lmfao

This one’s top 10 for me.

And this boulder could generate huge amounts of energy if I pushed it up to the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro and let it roll down.

44 upvotes and 0 downvotes for a comment that doesn’t understand that energy density measurements like this tend to measure the useful energy of a system.

He secretly paid people to grind his POE2 character to become a top-leveled character and then claimed credit for it. Yes, he is pretending to know what he’s doing.

I was wondering why a certain word wasn’t showing up…

So the map is more accurately titled “How American Twitter users refer…”

Further reading

ODT supremacy.

Scratch a neoliberal…

In all seriousness, capitalism is exactly why we’re here right now. (That said, technocrit is an idiot with some of the dumbest takes on this site. They blanket basically everything as fascist/fascism-adjacent, and I’m not going to say The Economist promoted this, because they didn’t.)

Not only that, but we make it goddamn trivial for not just Wikipedia but for other Wikimedia projects. Doing this is just stealing without attribution and share-alike like the CC BY-SA 4.0 license demands and then on top of that kicking down the ladder for people who actually want to use Wikimedia and not the hallucinatory slop they’re trying to supplant it with. LLM companies have caused incalculable damage to critical thinking, the open web, the copyleft movement, and the climate.

so you dont have to manually manage memory

Not sure how this got upvoted with this glaring mistake. You have to manage memory. The point is that the compiler catches it if you make a memory management mistake, making things like data races, uses after frees, etc. literally impossible (short of intentionally using the unsafe tag).

I don’t actually watch wrestling, but I wanted to appeal to a specific audience instead of going for the easy Dateline NBC joke. (Here you go btw)

It’s also just dumb that imagery taken from a street isn’t doing anything privacy-invading or illegal yet they still feel the need to coddle paranoid NIMBYs. Street View can sometimes be useful for OSM, since you might’ve been there but forgotten to document something, are too far away, etc. Street View as a concept works to the public’s benefit, although Google owning it and it being proprietary isn’t good. I can see this removal feature being a good thing by probably one out of every thousand times it’s actually used, namely in the case that you have some kind of stalker (even then, though, satellite view 99% of the time would give you a concerning amount of info compared to Street View).