SlowBoy
10d ago
There has to be at least one exotic meat that hits a sweet spot for: relatively tasty; more expensive in real life than the lab; nobody is familiar with the real thing. If I were in charge of a lab-grown meat company I'd throw money at this question until one suitable species could be identified. Ideally several. Find a few celebrity chefs willing to experiment with and serve the product. You might not want to go to the grocery and buy lab-grown meat for the grill, but your girlfriend will want to post nice Instagram selfies of herself enjoying the lab-grown whale meatballs at a fancy restaurant. Politicians are not going to ban your product if they enjoy it. If you could get lab-grown steaks served regularly at the French Laundry, it's over.
Artisinal meats are the perfect test-case for lab-grown. Everything is small-scale and gives the tech a chance to develop. Lab-grown will not win a head-to-head competition with real meat without significant R&D. Developing beef steak first seems to me like the worst proposition, driven by (well-meaning) idealists who want to replace meat consumption. Surely it'd be easier to pass off a fake chicken nugget than a steak. Steak is something everyone is familiar with, is a food cooked to be eaten as itself with minimal coverings or dress. People will not accept lab-grown steak as viable until the technology is fully mature. Why would you pay 5x for a substitute that's worse? Because it's moral? That's a terrible proposition for most consumers. If the lab-grown meat industry wasn't run by idealists with a chip-on-their-shoulder about the morality of meat, they could easily see the business model I'm describing.
SlowBoy
11d ago
Ban is a bad policy for getting to the goal.
If I wanted to eliminate lab-grown meat, I'd target the organizations that create it. Open investigations into the researchers and funders looking for political extremism. Target the patentability and profitability of the technologies involved. ("You can't patent chicken!") Publicize the process that creates these products. Labeling doesn't go far enough, you want to associate the components of lab-grown with dangerous chemicals and bad health outcomes. (I think when you look into the science of what they're currently doing, and not the glowing press releases, this is basically the truth.) Banning lab-grown just makes it exotic, and does nothing to stop its development in other localities.
If I wanted to popularize lab-grown meat, I'd start by making it exotic and sexy. Growing chicken and steak might be the ultimate goal, but this is a losing proposition: everybody knows what beef is supposed to taste like. I would develop unusual meats: lab-grown shark fin, panda bear, lion steaks, elephant. These meats would have a winning price-tag compared to "real" meat, and nobody can tell if they're not good enough. Run a promotion where the profits from every $70 "Penguin Steak" go to sustaining Penguin habitats.
I've also thought about opening a shell company that would advertise and sell lab-grown human flesh steaks. Sell a fun and fancy experience of getting to be a cannibal, except it's "ethical". This would generate a lot of publicity and interest. But I'm not actually sure whether that would ultimately be a winning or losing move.
SlowBoy
12d ago
A "man" obviously parses to anti-feminism. A "bear" can be anything, because it doesn't exist. That's the context in which the poll exists and is shared. You can't interpret the question facially, because it was linked to you (and you, and you, and you) as a referendum on feminism. Look, men are dangerous and bad, here's proof! Nobody voting has met a bear. Nobody in this discussion has met a bear. (I challenge anybody reading to name an occasion on which they met a bear they weren't actively going out of their way to meet. Zoos and national parks don't count! I'm sure there's somebody here, and I bet it makes for an interesting story.)
This comment is not intended as bear slander. They are fun creatures, and a few of them even parse as something magnificent. They can be dangerous, but they're really not a good avatar for the abstract platonified category of dangerous things. I've met bears, what do you want? They're not especially interested in us. They like food and protecting their children. Actually, it could be fun to meet a strange bear. I'm not especially sure I want to meet a strange man, and all the social entanglements that come with returning to baseline.
How many people will give an obviously ridiculous answer to a question when they have no skin in the game? Looks like at least 85%.
SlowBoy
18d ago
I imagine this is going to get modded for being inflammatory / antagonistic, but I guess there's a core question here that's worth answering.
I just laugh. I accept history as absurd. I read some nonsense in the news, and it makes me laugh how stupid everything is, and I don't suppose things were really less stupid in the past. I don't suppose that I'm less stupid. It's funny. You have to accept that basically illiterate positions, even if they're strongly-felt, are not strongly-reasoned. And that's how people are, and nothing you do is going to change it. Being frustrated about it is about as useful as being mad at traffic. They can't hear you, it's just how the world works.
Are you trying to contain your anger? When I get angry (or broken-hearted or tired or what) I find it useful to let the feeling wash over me. Instead of trying to suppress whatever I'm feeling, or working myself up about it, I just feel it for what it is. It's like a kind of meditation. In many cases, the worst of the hysteria and ranting comes from people who aren't very attuned to their feelings, full of emotion because they never resolve any.
SlowBoy
18d ago
Yes! I don't want to be around bums. Regular people don't want to be around bums. I do not want nice expensive public parks to be full of smelly, unwashed, dirty, mangy bums. I don't want to walk through a park and get harassed for change. My sister doesn't feel safe in public when bums are loitering around on the street. My mother won't even bother going to the park.
It's not about being poor. Poor people are not bums.
If you can't have nice public parks, nice parks will all be private.
The park is no place to be a bum. There's nothing illegal about being a bum. But the police station is also not the place to go when you're sick.
SlowBoy
18d ago
People want clean, nice public spaces not occuppied by drug addicts, criminals, and bums. If you make it so that cities can't kick out the bums, then these nice public spaces will all become privately-owned or corporate. And public parks become de facto property of the bums.
Talk about abstractions like "status" just seems like a distraction to me. I think this is a sign of a society in decline. We can't do anything, we have to parse out all the implications of natural rights and status. Well. I feel very confident in saying that the people who designed our Constitutional system of rights would have gladly kicked some bums out of public.
SlowBoy
24d ago
I would imagine it as reversion to the mean, where most of the Kennedys regressed to mediocre politicos with no special ambitions or purpose. Denouncing Bobby and endorsing Biden is very rational if you're "normal" in many senses of that word.
SlowBoy
26d ago
I think the current map looks more like Russian Pyrrhic Victory than Ukrainian Pyrrhic Victory. With the caveat that final borders are not yet drawn.
SlowBoy
27d ago
Strelkov was important in 2014, but pretty marginal in 2022.
Strelkov started the chain of events that bubbled up to the war. It's a much bigger point: Putin didn't "just woke up" and create a war, there was already a war. It was started by other individuals, and Putin actually refused several earlier opportunities to escalate the war the way he did in 2022. The situation changed in 2022, which precipitated Russia's direct invasion. You can actually admit all of this without wanting Russia to win, or having to change any of your other opinions.
Nothing had changed in 2022 in terms of Ukraine's ability to join NATO
This is blatantly not true: The US refused to make a guarantee to Russia that Ukraine would not join NATO.
SlowBoy
27d ago
Well, last post you were supposing Putin's peace terms were the end of the Ukrainian ethnicity, now you're falling back on asserting that we don't really know what was in them. Which isn't entirely true: according to all reports the deal included total Ukrainian neutrality. And we have some of Russia's most recent peace terms, which are stronger now that they've conquered territory: they aren't as you've feared.
SlowBoy
27d ago
Definitely. But in this case, China is exporting arms to Russia, which it does not really export to the West. I wouldn't put it past them to sell to both sides if they wanted to, but it moots any simple analysis about the US arms industry being larger than Russia's.
SlowBoy
27d ago
The fact that China outcompetes Russia and US is bad for US prospects against Russia when China is currently supplying Russia.
SlowBoy
27d ago
A lot of Ukraine's ability to resist was predicated on US assistance, which has become increasingly rare due to resistance from House Republican leadership.
Ukraine has received oodles of money from the US, and oodles more from Europe. There has been no shortage of aid.
SlowBoy
27d ago
House Republicans have sabotaged the compromise bill that would have provided aid (and limited immigration) at Trump's behest.
That bill would have enshrined minimal allowable amounts of illegal immigration into law before the proposed countermeasures kicked in, and would have transferred great authority over such enforcement to the discretion of DHS. It was a bad bill that deserved to die.
Ukraine could very well be forced to give up land in an eventual peace agreement
Ukraine is not getting Crimea back, and probably not much of anything else they've lost. The only question is how long it will take for everyone to accept this reality.
SlowBoy
27d ago
The one actor responsible for this war is Putin, and all the kvetching about NATO expansion and Euromaidan elides the fact that Putin singlehandedly launched an expansionary war of aggression to conquer territory, massage his ego and restore the glory of the Russian empire. Putin was under no personal threat from the west, nor was Russia.
This is a really bad cliche by now. Putin represents a moderate faction within Russia compared to the hardliners who wanted to invade 10 years ago after Maidan. Putin did not single-handedly launch the war (if one single man is reaponsible, it would probably be Strelkov). And Putin is not irrational for feeling threatened by NATO and the US.
SlowBoy
27d ago
No doubt Putin did offer peace but I see no evidence it was anything less than the end of Ukranian nation/ethnicity (heavy Russian culturalization).
The terms as discussed to that point said no such thing.
SlowBoy
28d ago
Russia believes that Ukraine is a core interest, and NATO encroaching on Ukraine violated their security. Even if the war is a net loss (a debatable question), they model it as a smaller loss than Ukraine joining NATO (de facto or outright).
SlowBoy
28d ago
Europe can easily raise this money by massively slashing welfare and benefit spending
What do you mean by "easily"? I suppose the money is there, but Europe's entire political formula rests on the welfare state. Which nations want to upend this?
SlowBoy
1mo ago
Americans pay about $1000/month.
How much of that cost is borne by consumers, and how much by insurance? How much of that is actually paid, and how much is negotiated away when the drug manufacturers and hospitals and insurance companies square up? In this system, Novo Nordisk would be stupid to charge less, and it's not especially their fault that drug costs are so high.
SlowBoy
1mo ago
I guess. He's not really telling people to lift weights or invest or make their lives better. I do think he would just tell cons to suck it up when policies he likes cause bad outcomes, instead of trying to change policy.
SlowBoy
1mo ago
Sure, Trump isn't telling people to lift weights. What generalization do you want to make? That makes all the difference. The GOP isn't running on a platform of gym access and diet subsidies. If that's what you mean, I agree with you. But there are plenty of influential right-wingers with millions of followers -- BAP, Cernovich, lots of the guys Rogan brings on -- who are talking about these things.
SlowBoy
1mo ago
Who defines "the core messaging of the right"? OP included "right-wing influencers". Those people are overwhelmingly discussing self-improvement. Politicians? Nobody is running on lifting weights and eating clean but there is absolutely a culture of "personal responsibility" and individual freedom. Whats's fair? Donald Trump isn't talking about it, but there are plenty of things that fairly characterize "the left" that Democratic politicians aren't running on either.
SlowBoy
1mo ago
When is the last time a politician or right-wing influencer told someone from West Virginia that they have the power to improve their life by relocating, retraining or abstaining from drugs?
There's Cernovich, or Bronze Age Pervert, or dozens of smaller accounts. Maybe you're thinking of Ben Shapiro and Cadence Owens and Hanania types. Beyond them, there is an overwhelming surplus of righties telling kids to buckle up, lift weights, learn to cook, invest, mew, code, read, write, train, work, learn, mog. If you step outside academic credential and op-ed circles, it's hard to find right-wingers who aren't talking about such things.
SlowBoy
1mo ago
What are you talking about? The provenance of mail-in-ballots is basically unverifiable, and chain of custody was long-since destroyed, in some cases while ballots were being counted. You cannot prove a negative, and the unverfiability of election results is what has been concluded by everyone who has actually studied the problem.
You need to start with a niche, because the product isn't good enough to compete in the general market. Nobody will pay 5x for a steak substitute that's worse. But lots of people would try, at least once, an exotic whale steak. It can't cost much more to grow that than a beef steak. You wouldn't pay $100 for a bad steak, but would you pay $100 to try shark fin soup? It's an endangered species, it's an illegal dish in many places, and isn't that a good deal?
Once you have a niche, there's a productive market that incentivizes lab-grown meats to get better and better (instead of relying on government handouts and PR campaigns to convince people to replace meat in their diet).
I agree that beef is delicious, and I don't especially want to replace a nice steak with something lab-grown. I'm skeptical of the whole technology. But in a Machiavellian sense, this is the line I would pursue if I was in the industry. I actually feel like this is a billion-dollar idea lying on the ground, and if I had the money to invest in lab-grown and impose my vision, I would.
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