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ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3hr ago
It seems like the actually reasonable answer is to de-escalate and decrease the power and influence of the government so people can make their own choices about their own personal lives.
The experience of the past few years clearly shows that that would make them more ravenous to seize the reins of power.
anti_dan
3hr ago
This seems like a non-sequitur. We aren't talking about things that are vaguely politically associated, but rather things that exist within the same particular moral niche.
doglatine
3hr ago
No rhetoric intended — “Mycoprotein” can include regular mushrooms but in the meat replacement context, it’s usually used to mean microfungi like Fusarium venenatum. These are cultivated in big vats in roughly the same way you’d cultivate brewer’s yeast, rather than on more traditional farms like field mushrooms.
I’d be pretty surprised if the issues you raise were a serious problem. We have a huge amount of experience at preventing bacteria or pathogens getting into a whole range of industrial biotech processes, and in this case we can very tightly control the inputs and monitor conditions. Hell, if necessary, you could just include antibiotics as inputs into the process, though I doubt it’d come to that.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
3hr ago
"Destroy your opponent before they can destroy you" does not at all sound like the "reasonable answer". Especially since this won't literally destroy them, they'll still exist and be even more ravenous to seize the reins of power. It seems like the actually reasonable answer is to de-escalate and decrease the power and influence of the government so people can make their own choices about their own personal lives.
I don't even get why there are "sides". I don't care whether the meat I eat comes from a "farm" or a "lab", I just care whether it's cheap, tasty, and nutritious. Let them both try their best and we can judge them and eat them according to our own preferences. I'm on team freedom, and that means nobody gets shut down pointlessly just to "own" the other side.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3hr ago
You've already called me a liar and and stated that I should not be listened to. Why are you still trying to talk to me?
anti_dan
3hr ago
Most cows don't eat cultivated plants for their entire diet. They graze on "free" grasslands.
No_one
3hr 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.
anti_dan
3hr ago
I mean, lab grown meat is an "elite" thing though. Never heard someone stocking at a Wal Mart warehouse talk about it.
No_one
3hr ago
BioTech investors.
These also include the 5 food corporations that own almost all food processing and would love to have a new, very safe market.
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
3hr ago
Ban their stuff before they ban ours.
I don't see why the do gooders couldn't undo this ban and ban real meat anyway if they have the kind of influence to enact a ban on real meat in the first place. "Get them before they get us" doesn't apply if you are not, in fact, getting them.
I don't really believe in first mover advantage for laws, laws get overturned all the time. What appears as first mover advantage is likely just durable public sentiment.
anti_dan
3hr ago
Brewing uses strong disinfectants (which meat cultures could also use between batches I suppose) and the yeast also has its own natural defenses against bacteria. Mushrooms also have their own natural defenses (nice rhetorical trick attempt with "mycoprotein" I suppose). The problem with meat is meat is not a full organism, its a part of an organism. It doesn't have a billion years of evolution on its side. You have to re-create that for the beef ribeye you are trying to recreate.
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
3hr ago
This doesn't constrain their future actions. It's just as easy to repeal this law and ban real meat as it was before the ban. Maybe if it were a constitutional amendment or something you'd have a point.
TitaniumButterfly
3hr ago
It's gonna be California first.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
3hr ago
The FBI only has 35k employees, not just special agents, and is in a similar situation with a wider breadth of requirements.
This "they can't catch everybody" argument is tiresome, because it's true of every police force ever. According to the 2022 figures on this page, the case clearance rate for murder is only 52.3%, and this doesn't count the portion where the courts fail to convict. Thus, in the majority of murderers in America, the killer gets away with it. Does this mean laws against murder are pointless, and we shouldn't bother enforcing them? For auto theft, the closure rate is only 9.3%. Does that mean that the laws against carjacking have been "nullified"? Their aren't enough traffic cops to catch even a tiny fraction of speeders or red-light-runners; does this mean enforcing traffic laws has no effect at all, and is a waste of money?
This is a fully-general argument against law and government in general. No society in human history has ever been able to catch all criminals… but they don't have to. You just need to catch enough, and punish them harshly enough, to have a significant deterrent effect on the general population.
jake
3hr ago
A tad late to this but can give info as a former reddit powerjanny (I figure Zorba knows who I am, or will with this mention)
Mods of even the largest subs are given no tools to identify bad users. We were never told by admins when a brigade was happening, we had no method of specifically detecting brigades, we had bots that would ping if a thread was linked and we would sometimes get warnings from other mods, but that's it. My default when I see a locked thread with mods complaining about brigading is the thread was just especially provocative.
Spam is the majority of bad user activity on reddit. If it's a picture of the sort of shit you'd find in a gift shop--like shirts and mugs--in almost every instance it was a spammer. A second account would comment asking "Where can I get this?" and then either OP or a third account would reply with a link. Then there's the submission and comment reposting mentioned here, very common, and accounts we'd label auction accounts. Those accounts followed a pattern so clear you could look at the first page of their profile and know, not that this was hard. It'd be like 2-3 submissions, 2-3 comments made in the last few days from a >6 month old account. These were different than the word-for-word repost bots, as repost bots only very rarely messaged modmail while the latter would frequently message with invariably broken English of such content as "Why ban" or "And why is ban??" (That why.)
There is also the paid political activity on reddit. Some are mods, most don't need to be paid, they happily follow party line. It's easy to look at political subs, especially the new ones that have started popping up this year and will continue to pop up ahead of the election, and see the same usernames in the mod lists, and other usernames posting links to those subs and other political subs, all pushing narrative. I'd imagine if you opened politics right now it wouldn't take long to find a year-old account with more than a million post karma that constantly posts articles hating on the right, that person is paid for what they do. And, yknow, don't forget Ghislaine Maxwell. As to those random subs popping, the paid users either start new ones or take over dead ones, then upvote bot submissions in their critical windows so they're pushed to wider visibility and actual users start upvoting.
As for LSC, I'd imagine most specifically bad use there is spammers and powerusers farming karma, with a minority of the paid users who will post whatever boo Trump or boo Righties article to every possibly relevant sub.
I'd be happy to answer or try to answer other questions. I started before Trump arrived and the site lost its mind, I thought it'd be interesting, it was, it quickly turned terrible. I stayed day-to-day to ban spammers, I stayed long-term to enforce no politics and keep frothing ideologues off the mod list.
TitaniumButterfly
3hr ago
Penguin steaks would be a terrible idea (don't ask me how I know) but I think you're on to something overall.
doglatine
3hr ago
There are lots of other large scale processes that have very high cleanliness standards and can’t use strong disinfectants, from brewing to mycoprotein cultivation. Honestly seems like one of the less difficult things to get right.
TitaniumButterfly
3hr ago
It's probably a lot more expensive than real meat in any reasonable scenario.
Makes a ton of sense once you're in space. Delivering cow chunks from the surface of the earth could be extremely expensive (not to mention time-consuming) while assembling cow chunk analogues on site from available raw materials could be quite cheap given the right technology.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
3hr ago
Richard Hanania defended the bill passed this week by the House adopting of the IHRA definition of anti-semitism, on the grounds that "making judgments about discrimination is what they're for." Ironic that he now supports massively increasing the scope of what is considered "discrimination" in the workplace and on campus.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3hr ago
If violence is your last resort, you're not prepared to use it at all.
And that's why the only possible response to someone cursing you out is a mag-dump.
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.
Salami slicing is an actual problem. Coordination is an actual problem, a very serious one.
Let's say a man with a pencil mustache and a dapper black suit hands you a button. You press this button, and a randomly-selected two to five percent of the US population is abruptly mulched, the trains stop running and the power and water goes out for the indefinite future. There's also a 75% chance that the American Blue Tribe ceases to exist as a sociopolitical force, and a 25% chance that the Red Tribe ceases to exist.
Do you pressing that button right now is a good idea?
TitaniumButterfly
3hr 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.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
3hr ago
If violence is your last resort, you're not prepared to use it at all.
Exactly. Particularly if you are also fundamentally opposed to preparing for its use, and particularly to organizing in any fashion ("We are the people who, when someone orders us to breathe, suffocate to death. It's our superpower."). They mumble about "2nd amendment remedies" coming someday, eventually, when the gubment finally "goes too far"… and when their past idea of "goes too far" finally comes to pass, well, it's not that bad, but next time…
These are family and friends I'm talking about, and they have such terrible understandings of how successful rebellions and insurgencies are fought. Ridiculously wrong understandings of how the American Revolution worked, how the Taliban worked, how "fourth-generation warfare" works; it's all 80s action movie fantasies about how "lone wolf" fighters with naught but their rifle and the clothes on their back will Chuck Norris their way through hordes of faceless mooks to inevitable victory.
Back in my junior year of high school (98-99), we had an exchange student from the former Yugoslavia, briefly escaping the wars. And (until lefty classmates stopped asking because they didn't like the answers) she had interesting things to say about the conflict. My later readings have mostly matched what she said: that people and families who tried to hunker down on their lonesome — particularly those who "headed for the hills" and tried to make a go of it in the woods — got picked off by those who grouped up. It was the organized, the militias and such, who survived.
As I've seen it put, a rebellion is not going from one government to zero to one, but from one government to two to one. A successful rebellion is a parallel state — as is a successful mafia; the difference between the two is mostly down to political ambitions (as in the case when the Ming restorationism of the "Three Harmonies Society" degenerated into the modern "Triads" who draw their name from it).
In reply to Isaac Asimov's dictum that "violence is the last resort of the incompetent," fellow sci-fi author Jerry Pournelle replied, "you're right; the competent use it before it's the last resort."
TIRM
3hr ago
There's an obvious point that various contrary factions are pushing and pulling the government. So push to get the laws you want or be stuck with the laws they want. Whoever "they" are in any context.
And laws are very sticky, so there's a huge first mover advantage.
ChickenOverlord
3hr ago
At least in Zimbabwe, the black citizens now have less economic prosperity and less political freedom than they did in Rhodesia.
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.
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