To be honest I'd rather live in the world where people have an overabundance of care for each other rather than the world where people disregard the well-being of others entirely.
Of course it's not binary, and it shouldn't be binary... but comments like this are hellbent on making it that way. I understand why you feel this way, but the hyperbole doesn't help anyone.
Apple is moving in the opposite direction in macOS, so I wouldn't hold my breath on them choosing to do this whatsoever. Sideloading goes against their entire iOS app philosophy.
This would also mean that Facebook would start sideloading and attempt to circumvent any of the tracking/privacy enhancements they've built in to iOS.
Doesn't Vox consider articles living artifacts and regularly change them as they become more informed? More like a wiki that's meant to be highly relevant in search results?
I'm not saying this is right or wrong, but it's their self-inflicted mode of operation.
I never take counteroffers and make it clear at every job that I don't take them because in my view if they could have paid me more but didn't, they were stealing from me. If I presented a case for a raise and didn't get it, they were also lying to me about the inability to give me one. Why hang around at a company like that? If I'm valuable to the company, it's foolish try to save a few dollars because it'll just end with them spending far more recruiting a replacement.
I have no way of knowing if this has resulted in better salary increases over the years than if I had played it differently but it certainly feels better than working for people who I feel are cheating and lying to me.
“Stealing” from you is a very confrontational view of the situation.
In any negotiated situation, both sides can usually give a bit more until they reach their limit. Maybe the employee could offer an extra few hours of focussed work and the employer can offer an extra 5% salary. That’s where the negotiation lands.
That can flex on either side as leverage and options move, but it’s just business.
The alternative is to nail everyone to the wall in every negotiation but that doesn’t seem constructive long term.
There's a way to play it in a less antagonistic fashion.
If you really want to stay, you can still look for another offer with the conditions you want, and use it to point out that the company is being unreasonable in its demands and that market conditions for labour have shifted, and actually they are putting themselves in a bad position trying to enforce their preferences against prevailing conditions.
(IMO most people shouldn't go more than a few years without checking the job market and getting an offer, even without intent to switch jobs.)
Some people have been working with Photoshop for decades, it's integrated into industry wide workflows. For me some complex 4-key shortcuts (the legacy save for web claw) are second nature. It's the devil we know very very well.
>And as a predatory animal, the fact that something "needs to die" for me to feed doesn't factor into the equation.
I'm having a hard time following this... are you saying that you don't think about the reality of killing animals for food because of some biological mechanism outside of your control?
My interpretation was more: nature doesn't have morality, animals don't have morality, other animals aren't worried about killing each other, the only reason we are worried about it is because we are projecting the horror of death that comes from being a cognizant being onto animals that are unlikely to even have a concept of "death", so it's not a moral conundrum for an animal that has evolved to eat meat (humans) to eat meat.
Or, said another way: if animals being killed to be eaten is inherently bad, should we not be trying to replace the diet of all lions on earth with BeyondMeat too?
I also find it a frustrating American-centric/urban-centric point of view that 'killing animals is bad', when I (among others) have grown up in areas where it's a basic part of life to farm/hunt meat for survival.
I think that’s because the American urban centric view looks at where the meat comes from in the US and it’s not equivalent to hunting on a farm. It comes from factory farms that are pretty sickening when you see videos and pictures. Sure maybe some folks in rural areas or hunters are similar to what you described but 95% is factory farms in US supermarkets.
Also part of the point is that in this culture it’s not for survival. If you need it to survive that’s a different story and not what most people dislike. However US consumers have a choice, so why not make the best of it. Choose meat from sustainable farms or just avoid it.
>I also find it a frustrating American-centric/urban-centric point of view that 'killing animals is bad'
This isn't really even an American centric view. It might be a silicon valley centric view or Upper class suburbs of America centric view. But the fact of the matter in most of America, the working class areas, the rural areas, etc. There are absolutely no moral qualms about hunting, or killing animals or eating meat.
I grew up in an area with "traditional" slaughter techniques. Basically a hog is tied down and its throat is slit, while alive, the animal's heart pumps the blood out into a bucket. This ensures the blood doesn't remain in the meat, which makes it taste gamey. The screaming and thrashing of the pig will haunt you for days but the meat definitely tastes better.
Anyways, I dislike the utilitarian/primitist argument because you can justify any number of cruelties with an appeal to nature. Cats play with their food all the time so why can't we torture animals for fun?
Humans should ponder the morality of killing animals because we have the will and ability to do so.
We certainly are lucky to live in a society of plenty where we can make the moral decision on how or what we eat. I don't have any negative thoughts against people who completely opt out of eating meat for that reason.
But just to comment on your first point, we would never let an animal suffer like that when we grew up. A quick shot to the temple to switch it off immediately, and then cut and hang the meat to bleed out worked just as well for us.
Don't get me wrong, we were always taught to minimise any suffering and to give our livestock the best/healthiest/least stressful lives possible, and to treat them with dignity when you needed them for food.
My first point is that this type of cruelty is just a basic part of life and survival for the people who practice it. You would condemn it as cruel just as some would condemn you for killing an animal with a gun. I'm just saying it's a rather arbitrary line to draw. How much cruelty is too much and for what purpose? Why would you draw a neat line around your actions and call it moral, then say that anything outside that line is overly cruel?
Note that in my story I did eat the meat - I may have understated how delicious it tasted. Freshly butchered pork made this way is unlike anything I've had in North America. Is killing for sustenance more moral than killing for sport, or for taste?
I don't pass judgement on people who hunt or slaughter animals this way, but I don't buy the idea that killing animals is simply a part of life and above moral consideration - or for that matter GP's argument, that it's perfectly moral to kill animals for food because it's as nature intended.
No! Lions eat to survive and do not have choices due to evolution. Humans on the other hand can choose how to source their nutrients.
I don’t believe that animals eating animals in an abstract sense is wrong. The problem for me is necessity and scale. We don’t need animal protein to survive and the scale of the death and environmental harm is too much to ignore.
How is any of that true for lions and not true for humans? I eat to survive as well – if I did not eat, I would die. I have also evolved to eat meat, as lions have.
Environmental concerns I think should be excluded from this offshoot of the conversation, which is spawned from ethical concerns about killing animals, not environmental concerns.
> How is any of that true for lions and not true for humans? I eat to survive as well – if I did not eat, I would die. I have also evolved to eat meat, as lions have.
The difference is that humans can process plant materials into what is needed whereas lions cannot. The humans/lions analogy breaks down because most of us do not live in the Serengeti fighting for survival.
The ethical dilemma is: are you eating to live or living to eat?
In the past we needed to eat animals to survive, so there was a purpose for animal farming. Now that we don't need animal sourced proteins we are consuming mainly for ignorance or human pleasure.
As we improve the technology and the fidelity of plant based and/or synthetic products improve it will be more clear that we don't need to keep killing animals to satisfy our taste buds.
Do you understand that the vast majority of humans are eating to live? No, most humans could not afford to be vegetarians or vegans. Most humans, although not in the Serengeti as you put it, are in fact, fighting for survival. Most humans choose meat, because it's nutritionally dense and depending on how it was raised, provides a 'full protein' unlike plants. Nevermind the obvious health issues involved with eating "process'ed plant materials" that your body is not at all designed to eat.
> No, most humans could not afford to be vegetarians or vegans.
There are large vegetarian human populations such as people in parts of India.
>Most humans, although not in the Serengeti as you put it, are in fact, fighting for survival.
Humans fighting for survival cannot choose things freely. I am going to go out on a limb and claim that the majority of the HN audience can make choices.
> Most humans choose meat, because it's nutritionally dense and depending on how it was raised, provides a 'full protein' unlike plants.
You can’t have it both ways the humans fighting for survival cannot afford “well raised” meat.
There are plant sources that provide complete proteins by themselves and others can be combined easily to provide complete proteins.
> Nevermind the obvious health issues involved with eating "process'ed plant materials"
You do realize that beef is essentially processed plant materials? Meat is not magic. We can adopt better alternatives, but we choose not to do so.
>There are large vegetarian human populations such as people in parts of India.
This is a common fallacy. There are at least a couple of studies that show the negative health effects of "vegetarian" Indians after they moved to the US. They were very surprised to find that despite eating the same things as they would in India, their blood work would come back with nutritional deficiencies and contribute to poor overall health. Why? Because they were never vegetarians. In India, food production was very much local for these people, and they were often or always eating vegetables that were picked the same day, in or near the same place they lived, the vegetable plots were not sprayed with pesticides (like they would be in the US), and so they consumed a fairly large amount of animal (insect) flesh as a result. Secondly, a very small minority of the total human population is vegetarian, and for very good reason. If you listen closely, your body will tell you what you need to ingest. We were made to eat everything around us...we should continue to eat everything around us.
>Humans fighting for survival cannot choose things freely.
As someone who's struggled for survival most of my life (and continues to do so), I assure you, I've had plenty of choices. Maybe we're talking about a different type of survival or struggle though.
>You can’t have it both ways the humans fighting for survival cannot afford “well raised” meat.
I grew up in Eastern Europe during the "dark days". We were fighting for survival. We raised pork, chicken, turkey, duck, rabbit in the heart of the city, as did most of our neighboors. Was it "well raised"? Hmmm, probably not by your standards, but it kept us alive when the stores were literally empty. We certainly couldn't afford the nice cuts, we sold those to the professional class (the type you find in this HN thread it seems).
>There are plant sources that provide complete proteins by themselves
I read a lot about nutrition and studies on proteins, microproteins, short and long fibers, etc. I have yet to find a study claiming a plant source can provide the amino acid range necessary to create a complete protein. In fact, I've not read a serious study ever claiming that a plant protein, is at all the same as an animal protein. Same goes for fiber, probably a much more important aspect for mammalian health. A calorie is not a calorie. A protein is not a protein. Anyways, we're getting off track. Meat contains fats in amounts that are critical for human development. Some plants can contain some fats, but once again...a plant fat is not an animal fat. They're not interchangeable.
>You do realize that beef is essentially processed plant materials?
Not sure why all this talk of beef? I brought up meat, and meat seems to equal beef only in the American mind set. Most of my red meat consumption is goat and pork. I raise and grow about 90% of my and my family's food (some years 100%), and am intimately aware of what meat, fungus, plants, microbes are and are not. Let me assure you, meat is not essentially "processed plant materials". If you believe there's something in likeness between a cut of goat meat that's been raised on forest browse and pasture, and American white bread or breakfast cereal, I believe you're mistaken. That's a very reductionist view, and one that is not supported by any scientific research I've read.
I'm hearing a lot of arguments here brought up that seem very similar to the arguments made 50-70 years ago by stock farmers who claimed that cows and pigs can't possibly feel or think anything. Now its my vegan friends claiming that plants can't possibly feel or think anything. I wonder what fallacy humans will come up with in 50 years time.
> the vegetable plots were not sprayed with pesticides (like they would be in the US), and so they consumed a fairly large amount of animal (insect) flesh as a result
This doesn’t make any sense. When you eat/cook vegetables, you don’t leave insects on it. You actually wash the vegetable. What you are suggesting is gross and so u healthy.
What do you mean by this? Some things that will give someone a stroke is sitting in front of a computer screen all day, eating highly processed carbs and other "food-like products".
No, my family and I eat everything. Most often right out of the ground without washing. Nobody in my family is on any prescriptions, and no chronic illnesses. Bugs are your friends. Microbes are not the enemy.
> I'm having a hard time following this... are you saying that you don't think about the reality of killing animals for food because of some biological mechanism outside of your control?
Pretty much everyone needs to kill things to live, even vegetarians (thousands of baby plants were killed to make every loaf of bread). Theoretically there are fruitarians who don't, but my understanding is that is not a sustainable diet and many famous frutarians regularly cheated.
Yes. It’s the cycle of life. Biologically, I am a carnivorous animal, so are you. We simply possess the faculties to choose not to be in a reasonable way, but it doesn’t stop the fact that nature/universe/god/whatever made you to eat the life out of other animals.
Doesn’t bother me either.
Side note: This is beyond the convo of the merit in how we do this today. Whole different convo.
Under FERPA, students have the right to contact your school and tell them to delist your directory information or submit pseudonymous information instead.
However, data that is not considered PII isn't an issue, so even if you chose to anonymize yourself, they can still use Google Analytics to track your behaviors and remain compliant.
Raising awareness and trying to get policy changed? Civil disobedience? If you have even a small percentage of the student body you have more than enough to affect change.
Basically the same options citizens have, but at a much smaller scale, meaning individual contributions matter more.
If you zoom out again, humans are the only hope for the survival of all multi-cellular earth life in general.
The sun will destroy earth in 2-5 billion years. But before then, an asteroid will likely destroy all most/all life on earth in the next couple hundred million years or so. And before that, a super volcano will likely destroy most/all of the animal and plant life on earth.
Assuming human technology advances fast enough to avoid catastrophic climate change and MAD succeeds at keeping us from destroying the earth ourselves , we're the only species that has a shot at making any "not-human-centric ecosystem" survive beyond earth.
(ignoring any life that may exist outside our solar system)
Of course, 22 Billion years from now the entire universe might die and kill everything anyways, but we may end up giving Bambi & friends a few billion years of existence they wouldn't have otherwise had. So I'd call that a net gain.
Scientists have troubles envisioning a sustainable world in the coming decades (due to the ongoing, human-driven, accelerating collapse of biodiversity) but somehow we may save the world in millions of years? See IPBES report for a summary.
Maybe we should focus on the pressing and critical issues instead of worsening them in the hope that a distant event could justify our suicidal behavior.
Seems we're already working on fixing the problem, no? Hence why the IPBES report exists!
But if this modern narrative of "We've angered the gods!" makes you feel good, I'm not sure anything I can say will refute your certainty about our coming doom.
"A new study reports continued climate-altering carbon emissions and intensive land use have inadvertently greened half of the Earth’s vegetated lands. Green leaves convert sunlight to sugars, thus providing food, fiber and fuel, while replacing carbon dioxide (CO2) in the air with water. The removal of heat-trapping CO2 and wetting of air cools the Earth’s surface. Global greening since the early 1980s may have thus reduced global warming, possibly by as much as 0.25oC, reports the study “Characteristics, drivers and feedbacks of global greening” published in the inaugural issue of the journal Nature Reviews Earth and Environment. Two of the authors, Dr. Jarle W. Bjerke and Dr. Hans Tømmervik works at Norwegian Institute for Nature Research at the Fram Centre in Tromsø, Norway."
It’s impossible to measure that kind of net gain, because the very idea of “gain” is subjective, existing only in our own mind.
Is plastic waste good or bad for the environment? Is more forestation a gain or a loss?
Such question cannot be answered without factoring in a human perspective. (Or some conscious things’ perspective, but either way, “the environment” has no perspective as it has no goal or objective)
Of course it's not binary, and it shouldn't be binary... but comments like this are hellbent on making it that way. I understand why you feel this way, but the hyperbole doesn't help anyone.