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SteveKirkland
5m ago
I also maintain that it would be a tragedy of almost unimaginable scale, think it should be our last resort
Scientific Advisor: The Russian army accidentally on purpose cross the West German frontier. - Is that the last resort?
Jim Hacker: No.
Scientific Advisor: Right, scenario three. Suppose the Russians have invaded West Germany, Belgium, Holland, France? Suppose their tanks and troops have reached the English Channel and are poised to invade? - Is that the last resort?
Jim Hacker: No.
Scientific Advisor: Why not?
Jim Hacker: We'd only fight a nuclear war to defend ourselves. That would be committing suicide!
Chief Scientific Advisor: So what is the last resort? Piccadilly? Watford Gap service station? The Reform Club?
If violence is your last resort, you're not prepared to use it at all. Von Neumann knew there was only one way to get it done: “If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today?”
You don't need to be frothing at the mouth and shooting every minute of every day, but it needs to be the goal you base all your other plans around reaching or it will never happen, just like writing a novel.
Crinnle
13m ago
The average user is getting younger, less attentive and mostly importantly dumber.
Meh, I'm not convinced. People have been saying this about the internet for 30 years. Enshittification has been happening since the beginning but if it was lethal I think the internet would be dead by now.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
14m ago
I do not see a route by which the establishment arm of the GOP regain authority over and support from their base, which has been in open rebellion for some years now.
I agree with this. Which is why my scenario is that the Republican party will be suppressed; we'll have at the very least Democratic dominance, as in the early 20th century, maybe more. I wouldn't rule out the GOP getting banned.
..As for the rest, I maintain that the ultima ration is preferable to an uncontested blue tribe win, and that it favors Red Tribe.
I'd like to believe that last point, but I don't see sufficient evidence, particularly given my first-hand experience with other Red Tribers — I don't see my parents or brother winning in any civil war, regardless of the veritable arsenal of guns and ammo they've accumulated. You certainly aren't providing any evidence of that. Comparisons to the Taliban are facile and misunderstand how the latter won. Sheer numbers of people and (merely-civilian) guns are not nearly as relevant to victory as command and coordination. A small, disciplined force almost always overcomes an uncoordinated rabble of individual, independent actors.
And since you're not going to provide such, for no other reason than because you don't have any (and when you claim other reasons for not sharing, you are lying), yes, I suppose I am simply stating that you offer no explanation, are a liar and thus should not be listened to.
gattsuru
22m ago
There's a few vendors that passed USDA clearance last year, though they've had production and funding problems that have kept its products from having too much of an impact on the store shelves, and it's not clear the tech is going to get there very soon.
On the other hand, when or if the tech does get there, there's not much trust that it's gonna be left for people to choose. Whether for environmental, animal suffering, or macroeconomic reasons, there's going to be a massive push to 'regulate the unpriced externalities' of conventional meat, and many routes for that, like restricting grazing permits, will be near-invisible to normal people.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
38m ago
Thanks for hunting that down! It's not quite the same as the post I remembered, since that used user polled data from SSC/ACX readers and even claimed that meth (which is available on prescription, as rare as that is) was the best option (according to users). Still, this one states much the same, so I appreciate you looking it up.
fishtwanger
40m ago
Around a decade ago I saw a report that some research group had produced vat-grown ground beef, and made a burger. At the time, the theoretical cost was $50 per burger, and it apparently tasted mediocre. But I have hope that America's engine of innovation (given time and effort and lack of government regulation) will improve quality and bring down prices until it's competitive. One of these decades. crosses fingers
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
40m ago
Well, as a pure form of nicotine it's even less likely to cause any harm as compared to vaping, which is already reasonably close to net neutral in terms of effects on your health.
I prefer vaping for the convenience, but if I knew I was going to go through nicotine withdrawals, I'd buy some gum or buccal formulations. Otherwise, I don't really see the appeal myself.
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
45m ago
If we are assuming do-gooders puppeteering the state then a state ban is just a distraction anyway.
SlowBoy
1hr 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.
SteveKirkland
1hr ago
Can you link a study on that from any group that isn't openly pushing to abolish meat? Because I'm familiar with the propaganda tricks: classifying all rain that falls on grazing lands as "water used for animals", etc.
I know what my inputs and outputs are, and the inputs are extremely minimal. It's likely that the US wastes a lot of grain fattening up cows and even sheep (US carcass weights for "lambs" are double the UK's, which hurts quality for zero benefit), but those are inefficiencies due to our historically cheap feed prices.
fishtwanger
1hr ago
I'll file this away as an unconfirmable theory, then. :-)
zPvQINBQvfFR
1hr ago
Animals don't turn sunlight and rain into meat. You need to feed them plants. Which you have to grow first. Possibly on vertical farms run by hippy vegans.
Some animals can graze but I think this could sustain only than a small fraction of current meat production (after a quick googling, I saw the figures of 10% of beef production and 30% of sheep and goat meat production being sustained by grazing).
Quantumfreakonomics
1hr ago
There's an argument that we have to stop the slippery slope to banning real meat as soon as possible. I'm not sure how well it holds up.
SteveKirkland
1hr ago
Meanwhile the other side already uses government money to publish anti-meat propaganda. The reasonable answer is to grab the gun of state power and dump the mag before they get their hands on it, because they won't hesitate for a second once they have it pointed at you.
Feel free to elaborate. It's not the EAs that are able to ban meat, lab grown or otherwise. It's the state, which has just now banned lab grown meat apparently in order to "steal a march" and prevent itself from banning real meat.
CertainlyWorse
Dedicated Pessimist
1hr ago
She said maybe, then the day of said she was tired. I asked her out to lunch instead since I didn't have another free evening this week. She confirmed this morning for today at 1:00. By the time I replied, she'd already unmatched with me.
This behaviour is common with the apps. Just flakey unavailability due to juggling multiple potential options. Next time if she says maybe and doesn't suggest an alternative, she means no.
She said yes, shouted "Text me! :)" as I walked away. No reply to that text message sent later that day with my #. No reply to the text I sent today asking about tomorrow. There will be no further texts.
This is also sadly not unheard of. Don't let it get you down. If you can approach one girl IRL, you can approach more, and many will follow through on meeting you.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1hr ago
Precisely. The government's one and only legitimate role in this would be to mandate that it has to be labeled correctly and can't be falsely advertised as ordinary meat. Other than that, they need to stay out of it and let the people make up their own minds on what they choose to purchase.
SteveKirkland
1hr ago
Please don't do this pretending not to know who he's talking about thing. It's embarrassing.
He can link you a dozen lesswrong-ea-bay-area-forum posts that you're already familiar with, so all this does is waste everyone's time for a low effort sneer.
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
1hr ago
"Those", being the same government that just banned it?
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
1hr ago
In this thread we're talking about a government action. It doesn't really make sense to say that the government banned something so that the government wouldn't mandate it.
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
1hr ago
This is only true in the sense that groups pushing gun rights are already talking about establishing a white ethnostate.
SteveKirkland
1hr ago
The vegan nerds can't be said to be "behind" the push for fake meat, because the endless funding is coming from the "elite" set desantis identified.
It's probably a lot more expensive than real meat in any reasonable scenario. In most soypunk the farmland is all poisoned nuclear waste, not that scifi writers have enough understanding of economics to make the alternatives realistic.
Meat might be the most capital+labor/calorie efficient food ever. Vegan nerd fantasies of vertical soy farms powered by millions of acres of solar panels can't match up to species that turn sunlight and rain into steak all by themselves.
Agreed.
Disagree. Where's your evidence of this? The internet and computers are only making centralization of control more effective than ever.
Also wrong. You cite the invention of guns removing the power of castles. Yes, there was a trend, for centuries after the invention of gunpowder, that made "the naked exercise of force less practical," gave power to "the people" and drove the rise of democracies. Such trends of labor-over-capital in military effectiveness peaked over a century ago, and the trend has been back toward high-capital "knightly" military elites, leading "government versus masses" conflict to look less like the French Revolution, and more like the German Peasants' War.
We're seeing in Ukraine the failure of "war of movement" and "hordes of expendable replaceable meat" of the past century, and to elite battlefield drone operators as the new knights:
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