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Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
18hr ago
I mean, if the lab meat was literally identical in every way to real meat, then sure, I’d eat it. In practice though, I’d imagine it’s more like AI-generated media: the difference in quality is noticeable, but certain factions downplay the differences for political reasons.
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
17hr ago
It's premature to talk about differences in quality before it's even on the market.
For that matter, if it's so much worse, there's no need to ban it.
t3tsubo
6hr ago
The campus protests are run directly by the propaganda arm of Hamas?
Spicy lawsuit just dropped: https://static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/content/uploads/2024/05/National-Jewish-Advocacy-Center-the-Schoen-Law-Firm-and-the-Holtzman-Vogel-law-firm-vs-1.pdf
The American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) and the National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP) are accused of providing substantial assistance to Hamas. The plaintiffs, who are survivors and victims of Hamas's October 7, 2023 terrorist attack, are alleging that AMP and NSJP are Hamas's propaganda wing in the United States
Summary:
- AMP and NSJP are successor organizations to groups that were previously shut down or held liable for providing material support to Hamas.
- Within hours of the October 7 attack, AMP and NSJP allegedly disseminated a "toolkit" that identified them as "part of" Hamas's "Unity Intifada" and called for "confrontation by any means necessary," including "armed struggle."
- The groups allegedly instigated riots, violence, and chaos on American college campuses, recruiting students as "foot soldiers" to support Hamas through intimidation and fear tactics.
- AMP and NSJP are accused of providing crucial communication services to Hamas, which cannot legally hire American PR firms due to its terrorist designation.
- Hamas and other terrorist groups have publicly recognized and expressed appreciation for the support provided by AMP, NSJP, and their campus allies.
I can't exactly tell how much of this is BS and how much of it is real just from the claim but it is definitely going to be an interesting argument. I cannot wait for discoveries.
Even if the lawsuit is successful though, I can't see the US government really clamping down on campus protests. The whole situation has been an interesting case study for the rest of the world as to how to infiltrate/affect US political sentiment and public unrest though.
Jiro
13hr ago
Lab-grown meat strikes me as like deciding that it's evil to draw pictures of Mohammed, but if you use a special light refraction method, you can have something that looks sort of like Mohammed but doesn't count as a picture for religious purposes, so Muslims lobby for use of this method and dozens of scientists spend millions of dollars figyring out how to get people to accept this method instead of normal photography.
You’re waiting at a bus station and there’s a big queue beside you at the next stop. Your bus pulls up and the big queue realises they’ve been waiting at the wrong stop the whole time and shuffle over.
In this situation are you in the right to take your place at the head of the new queue and reap the rewards for your good judgment or should you respect the misdirected queue and move to the back?
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
13hr ago
I fail to see how this analogy is remotely appropriate.
The primary reason that people who are vegan/vegetarian (for non-religious reasons, and even plenty of those) condemn the consumption of meat is because their heart aches at the idea of eating cute little animals, with souls, emotions and a life of endless frolicking in the pastures to look forward to. Most of the arguments advanced alongside that primary concern, such as "sustainability" and environmental issues or resource consumption, are there just to buttress their core concern.
I wholeheartedly agree with @Quantumfreakonomics when he says that:
I am not a person that cares much about the suffering of animals, especially not the ones that taste good. Still, strictly speaking, the suffering is not an integral part of the process. If it could be removed, all else being equal, that would not decrease my utility in any way. I am agnostic on lab-grown meat. If it tastes good, is cheap, and is of comparable healthiness to legacy meat, I will eat it.
After all, I've repeatedly said much the same myself.
Hence the recent fad, only just losing steam, of feverishly trying to find vegan substitutes for meat products. Impossible Burgers and all that jazz. Vegans, begrudgingly, note that they either like meat or that people who otherwise care dearly about animal welfare are dissuaded by the dullness of a life without nice steaks or a side of ribs to go with it.
So lab grown meat completely cuts the Gordian knot. No cute animals were hurt (or at least far fewer, if you don't look too closely at where fetal bovine serum comes from, but presumably we can avoid that too). What's there left to object to, on primary moral grounds? A chunk of vatgrown muscle tissue is probably less sentient than an equivalent amount of fungi.
But of course, like the environmentalist movement and the cleanest and greenest source of energy we had/have/can have*, nuclear, much of the opposition arises from the abhorrent idea that their self-flagellation and virtue signaling will become entirely redundant. What brownie points do you get for not eating a cow, when the average Joe who just wants to grill is using a steak that's indistinguishable from one made the old fashioned way, tastes just as good, and might even be cost competitive?
We're not there yet, and the last overview I read of the topic suggested it's not going to be easy at all, but the sheer idea that their performative ascetism is moot must gnaw at their bones (veganly).
*Barring fusion, or farming black holes I guess.
SlowBoy
16hr 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.
TitaniumButterfly
17hr ago
For that matter, if it's so much worse, there's no need to ban it.
Off the top of my head I can think of several things that were worse but ended up being mandated by the government. It's not hard to imagine this happening with lab-grown meat.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
18hr ago
Cultured meat has been a staple of the tech-futurist utopian memeplex for years, if not decades.
And a staple of SF for longer than that... but in many SF settings, the vat-grown stuff is considered inferior.
ResoluteRaven
14hr ago
Lab-grown meat has made it surprisingly far given how many people hate it for different reasons: Cattle farmers and the meat industry want to kneecap their economic competition, conservatives dread a future where steak is banned and scientists in white coats force feed them pink slime, hardcore vegans think that true commitment to their cause should require sacrifices and this sort of moral shortcut would undermine the whole puritan thing they have going on, economists hate it because it's currently expensive as hell, non-Westerners laugh at the whole enterprise, and environmentalists who can do math insist on switching to insect, soy, or mushroom protein instead.
Really the only groups rooting for its success at the moment are biotech investors hoping to get in on the ground floor of the next big thing, biologists who are overconfident in their ability to pull it off, and the aforementioned liberals and environmentalists who haven't crunched the numbers.
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
17hr 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.
TitaniumButterfly
17hr ago
in many SF settings, the vat-grown stuff is considered inferior
It would have to be, or else people wouldn't be growing it the traditional way any more. I suppose there could be a pure status signaling element but most people aren't going to care enough to sustain that at scale.
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.
SteveKirkland
17hr ago
The groups pushing lab grown meat are already talking about banning real meat, so it seems both fair and sensible to do unto them first.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
13hr ago
We can synthesize infant formula but it's not as good as the real thing. We synthesize fake sugar, fake chemical food (by which I mean things like jelly beans - highly processed food with paragraphs of exotic-sounding ingredients). That was instrumental to the global obesity crisis and millions of premature deaths yearly.
Why would we be capable of synthesizing meat that's just as good as real meat? We probably couldn't tell if the synthetic meat was bogus in some subtle way. Maybe it has the wrong hormones, or the wrong mix of hormones or an absence of certain kinds of proteins. The people who brought us the food pyramid are hardly going to help. After obesity, microplastics and an ongoing crisis of mental illness we should be very wary of any novel synthetic-agricultural processes.
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
17hr ago
This is only true in the sense that groups pushing gun rights are already talking about establishing a white ethnostate.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
21hr ago
Why isn't that fear enough?
Because, in my assessment, it's not rational. It appears that others agree with me, Abbott and DeSantis among them, among a number of other leaders and their supporters. Defiance of Federal authority is observably being coordinated, right out in the open where you can watch it happen.
You can believe that such defiance is inevitably doomed to fail, but I disagree, and it appears others disagree as well. Very well: we've made our predictions, and the outcomes will be as they will be.
What matters is not respect, but obedience. Blues don't need or want Reds' respect, only their submission.
It doesn't seem to me that they're getting it, and the trend seems to be that they're getting less of it over time.
Because you will be punished if you don't?
It seems to me that their capacity for punishment is declining, and that well-chosen actions can force it further into decline.
Trump is certainly being punished. He has survived so far, and is plausibly going to win the election. If he does, they will stonewall him and continue their efforts to destroy him, and the result that matters is that the system will continue to bleed credibility and thus capacity. If he does not win the election, or if they succeed in destroying him, the system will likewise continue to bleed credibility and thus capacity. 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. Abbott has not yet been punished, and neither has DeSantis. Even if Trump is destroyed, and Abbott is destroyed, and DeSantis is destroyed, someone else will step up to take their respective places, and the process will continue.
This implies we have any meaningful ability to do so.
Abbott has done so before, and Biden backed down. Abbott is doing so again, and Biden is very likely to back down this time too.
There is more defiance to Federal authority now than there was two years ago, five years ago, ten years ago. It does not seem to me that the trend supports your interpretations or predictions.
...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 also maintain that it would be a tragedy of almost unimaginable scale, think it should be our last resort, and do not believe that discussing it in detail is a good idea, especially in this forum. I continue to decline discussion of the ultima ratio beyond these points, and continue to be comfortable with your assumption and assertion that this means there is no substance to my argument. I invite you to dispense with the questions and simply proceed to state that I offer no explanation and thus should not be listened to. Others are free to draw their own conclusions.
One of my thoughts on this issue is it highlights I am not a free speech absolutists. A quote from Godfather 2 highlights my view on this:
“Michael: The soldiers are paid to fight, the rebels aren't.
Hyman: What does that tell you?
Michael: They can win.“
When we had campus protests a decade ago I did not care. College kids being silly and they will grow up and take the corporate job and pop out a couple kids. Now I watch the protests and I see a future Supreme Court Judge, the executive team at Disney, and at worse a future HR executive whose rules I need to follow or I end up unemployed.
I do not care about your speech when I think it will just stay in academic circles or in fringe communities. Today I am increasingly pessimistic that it will stay only speech and instead fear that it will become the government. How does a liberal Democracy protect itself if it’s very values allow it to be attacked? Pacifism seems cool until the Mongol horde is outside your door.
It’s also made me greatly admire the Jewish community which seems capable of defending themselves while white people seem to just rollover when their interests are attacked. Judaism at its core is a people while White America’s core is the slave morality of Christianity. Conversion to Judaism in Christian white spaces is starting to become a small thing. Antonio Martínez García converted. There are rumors Milei wants to convert but has not for political reasons as the leader of a Catholic nation. If I was not a believer in Christ I would convert.
No_one
14hr ago
In much of Europe, meat is almost banned in public institutions.
City canteens rarely serve it, university canteens the same. E.g. in Berlin, the limit is one dish with meat per day on 4 different days.
TitaniumButterfly
14hr ago
It doesn't really make sense to say that the government banned something so that the government wouldn't mandate it.
Makes perfect sense to me. It's not like 'the government' is a person with a coherent agenda. Governments do things all the time with the intention of constraining their future iterations.
zPvQINBQvfFR
16hr 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).
MathWizard
formerly hh26
16hr 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.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
4hr ago
Not mine; from a screenshot (of a Mastodon post, I think?) that was passed around Tumblr:
there once was a lamp that could turn anyone into a woman by merely standing in its light. people came from far and wide to see it, but to their dismay the lamp was rarely lit. for this lamp ran on a special fuel, and that fuel was heavily guarded. it had all been gathered up and stored in a fortress, and that fortress had only one way in or out, through a big iron gate. the only way to get the fuel was to get permission from the person in charge of the gate, the girl light gas keep gate boss.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
4hr ago
What's the distance here? To me, waiting at the next stop makes it sound like they're a block or two away. In that case I think that they're too far away to really have a good objection if you're at the front of the line. On the other hand if the bus pulled up a few feet away from the stop like @DradisPing suggested, then you don't get to jump to the front of the line because the people waiting were slightly off.
The Bipartisan Consensus Against... Lab-Grown Meat?
This was not a tweet I expected to see today:
-Senator John Fetterman
Lol. LMAO even.
I am not a person that cares much about the suffering of animals, especially not the ones that taste good. Still, strictly speaking, the suffering is not an integral part of the process. If it could be removed, all else being equal, that would not decrease my utility in any way. I am agnostic on lab-grown meat. If it tastes good, is cheap, and is of comparable healthiness to legacy meat, I will eat it.
I can't help but be reminded of the law of undignified failure. Cultured meat has been a staple of the tech-futurist utopian memeplex for years, if not decades. Gallons of digital ink have been spilled discussing the feasibility and/or inevitability (or lack thereof) of cultured meat on places like the Effective Altruism Forum. Skimming through the top results, I don't see, "what if the proles hate our guts so much that they ban cultured meat out of spite?" on anyone's "factors to consider". It's also a harsh lesson that even the most positive-seeming improvements have to face-off against reliance interests who want things to stay the same. There is a lobby for everything.
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