Sorry, I was trying to add my support. You gave good evidence for a meat preference and I wanted to back it up with evidence of genetic aversion to the specific vegetable mentioned in the original article.

Reminds me of the incident in February where a waymo tried to get through a bunch of street revelers, and their response was to set it on fire. From the old pcmag story :

San Francisco Fire Chief Jeanine Nicholson noted that it had tallied 55 incidents where self-driving vehicles had interfered with rescue operations in the city.

Edit: unrelated to above quote, pc mag also says:

In some cases, residents have put orange cones on the hoods of cars, which makes them temporarily immobile.

(see also the autopian story it references)

However, no one is born loving hot dogs or disliking broccoli

But we ARE! Doesn’t anyone remember the whole kerfuffle about the ‘bitter’ gene and PTC sensitivity?

Reminder that Palantir is the same company whose bosses are deep in bed with AmericaPAC – which got big write-ups (link is to one comment, but you can read more there and lots of places) because Elon Musk is gathering voter data seemingly for that PAC to target swing state voters with canvassing efforts.

Water/sewer systems

Scratch that comment. Vote Harris! :-)

Wow, that’s a long read, and IMO, it misses a key point. Namely: similar to plastic industries spending tons of money to convince us that recycling is an individual problem and responsibility (despite the fact that most plastic can’t be effectively recycled), this article mostly frames Climate Change as an individual responsibility to stop eating meat and dairy. Thankfully, at the very end, it gets to a better solution, which is to stop spending our tax dollars on subsidies to harmful agro-businesses.

The start-point, however, is that Big Farming has co-opted natural conservation groups by giving them cash to join ‘mitigation’ groups that are “Greenwashing” the subject such that no one talks about real solutions (such as making meat more expensive). Have a bunch of quotes:

So the meat industry did what other industries have done under similar pressure in the past: demonstrate that it could change just enough to avoid being forced to change even more by the government.

In fact, that inaugural conference in 2010 was officially titled the World Wildlife Fund Global Conference on Sustainable Beef. (WWF has helped to found similar industry roundtables for poultry and soy — most of which is fed to farmed animals — and a certification program for seafood.)

For its collaboration, McDonald’s makes sure WWF is well compensated; from 2015 to 2022, the company donated $4.5 to $9 million to WWF-US.

WWF is hardly alone. Two of the other largest US environmental organizations — the Nature Conservancy (TNC) and Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) — also closely collaborate with large meat and dairy companies, ranchers, and trade groups on a range of initiatives. But outside observers, along with some former and current employees at EDF and WWF, argue that those initiatives often do more to improve the companies’ image than the environment.

Last year, Tyson Foods — America’s largest meat processor — began selling beef marketed as “climate-friendly.” The company claims that by getting some of its suppliers to graze their cattle and grow the animals’ feed crops in a more sustainable manner, it’s reduced the carbon footprint of some of its beef by 10 percent.

But Tyson has repeatedly declined to share data with Vox and other news outlets that could prove its claim.

Beef is the worst food for the climate. Got it. Sadly, plant-based meat substitutes are losing market share (see graph p. 36 of Good Food Institute PDF). Personally, I like fake meat and it happens that tonight we’re having Beyond Burgers for dinner (sorry for the product plug, but they work for me – though I know some people prefer Impossible or other brands, and some people don’t like any of them).

Using global averages, beef’s carbon footprint per 100 grams of protein is about 7 times that of pork, 9 times that of poultry, 25 times that of tofu and plant-based meat, and more than 60 times that of beans and lentils.

I was interested in the benefits of regenerative farming being very questionable, and any stats should be viewed suspiciously unless/until we have a verifiable measuring standard AND see data over the span of years per given acreage – because any increase in carbon capture is likely to fall off over time.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has made it clear that the world needs negative emissions technologies — approaches that can pull carbon out of the atmosphere, as regenerative agriculture supposedly does — to avoid catastrophic global warming. But the research doesn’t bear out the claims many of regenerative agriculture’s proponents make, as there’s still significant doubt and uncertainty around the potential for farmland to store a lot of carbon.

“The science is clear that, while some mitigation can be achieved by improving meat and dairy production, climate-neutral or zero-emissions meat and dairy is not a possibility in the foreseeable future,” said Hayek, the New York University environmental studies professor, speaking about net-zero claims in animal agriculture broadly, not the WWF report specifically.

EDF and the Nature Conservancy are also founding members of the Food and Agriculture Climate Alliance, a coalition of meat, dairy, and agricultural trade groups, many of which lobby aggressively to block environmental policy. But the alliance is a vehicle for their other goal on Capitol Hill: ramping up subsidies for regenerative agriculture and technological solutions. It’s similar to how the fossil fuel industry lobbies to both block climate regulations and subsidize carbon capture.

Money shuts up the World Wildlife Foundation, Sierra Club, and so on.

“If you can’t get the Sierra Club to [support a methane tax], how the fuck are you going to get anyone else in society to do that?”

Some politicians paint calls to stop pollution from factory farms and eat more plant-based meals as anti-farmer, a potent charge given both farming’s close association with America’s national mythos and the disproportionate political power that rural states hold.

If we can’t change ourselves in the environmental community, then how would we expect to change the general population?”

Many environmentalists have come to criticize individual action as ineffectual and naive. The burden to mitigate climate change and pollution falls on politicians and corporations, they argue, not the average person.

I agree with the last bit, but realize that at least a third of the U.S. will remove any politician painted as ‘anti-meat’. That is, a politician might try to argue that our tax dollars shouldn’t give hand-outs to Tyson or the like, but the attack ads against will say, “He wants you to stop eating meat, so he’s working to bankrupt our ranchers.”

The idea that environmentalists shouldn’t try to influence how people eat “is a win for industry … It’s their script,” said Jacquet, the University of Miami professor. Environmentalists who repeat this, she added, have “become sock puppets for industry, and they don’t even mean to be.”

Well, the public IS hearing that message from various places despite the fact that it’s a message too many people are unwilling to hear. I don’t require Environmental groups to be in-your-face about it. Let the data speak for itself.

A 2023 analysis published in the journal One Earth found that, from 2014 to 2020, the US meat industry received about 800 times more government funding than did meat and dairy alternatives.

A lot can be done to tip the scale in the other direction, and in ways unlikely to spur political backlash.

I didn’t find the examples they list to be very encouraging, but they do exist. They describe how Denmark is doing some neat stuff.

“It needs to be a political liability to choose false solutions over effective climate policies,” said Jennifer Molidor, a senior food campaigner at the Center for Biological Diversity.

That’s the hard part! :-) Near the end there are some examples of where stuff is working and suggests a public awareness campaign would help. No more pictures of happy cows on green grass, but instead images of the barren land of holding pens stretching out in all directions. Show people the reality instead of the mythos and ask them to make it an issue with their local politicians.

ducks will focus less on your hard work and more on the bugs

I wish someone had told my ducks that! They ate most of my garden. We had to fence it in to keep the ducks out. They even killed off the stuff they didn’t want – like strawberries – if it came up early in the spring and offered the possibility of being a tasty green.
A tiny bit of green would emerge and they'd be all: Duck#1: (bites plant) Ew! Duck#2: (bites plant) Yuk! Duck#3: (bites plant) Bleah! Duck#4: What were you guys eating? I want some. This would repeat each day for several days until spring brought everything to life.

A low allergenic dog would probably thrill your kid, and even if it didn’t, I’m betting the adults in the house would quickly fall in love. I’d avoid Schnauzers because they are harder to train (they’re smart enough, but will test whether they should actually listen to you or not – whereas Basenjis are hard to train because they aren’t that bright). Wheatens and other similar terriers are likely to have similar stubbornness issues. Maybe an Irish Water Dog or Lagotto Romagnolo? I don’t know those breeds but I see them listed as low-allergy. I hate to link to reddit, but their LR sub says they really are pretty safe.

I worry that whatever you choose, your son will be dissatisfied. Maybe your kid is different, but most the kids I’ve known wanted a pet they could bond with. They’ve wanted a pet that was interested in what the kid does, that silently listened to the kid expressing their issues, and that offered things to do, like: “feed me”, “pet me”, or “play!”

Rabbits might work, but they might be too interested in one another. Even if they weren’t forbidden, you’d run into the same issue with social birds like cockatiels. The only pets I can think of that give kids the attention a kid craves are the animals that have lived with humans for hundred if not thousands of years. Basically: dogs and cats. After that you get into cows, pigs, chickens, goats, and the like. Goats are wicked smart, but the males stink to high heaven unless neutered young. If you raise geese from goslings, they will love you forever and ask for cuddles whenever they see you – but they have to stay outside and do make a mess. Someone else might correct me, but I doubt you want a pig – partially just because they end up getting so big (I’m told there’s no such thing as a teacup pig).

If the only issue with dogs is allergies, you could consider a low-allergenic breed. Dogs are simply the ideal pet for people with the time and space for them. They’ve lived with humans nearly forever and do all the stuff a young boy wants from a pet. Cats require less attention and can be caring and affectionate if they want to, but that depends on the particular cat. I’ve had turtles, ferrets, parrots, fish, and lots of other animals as pets and only the parrots and ferrets held a candle to dogs and cats. Fish-wise, I found the most exciting to be South American Cichlids – but mostly because I had a Green Terror who fell in love with a Blue Acara overnight such that the two of them tried to kill everything in the tank in the span of 10 hours. I got them their own tank where they raised many babies.

Could you fix a mistake I made? Near the bottom I inadvertently typed ‘Munich’ instead of the correct ‘Berlin’ games for when the Nazi salute was allowed. Source is Wikipedia and you can see there it clearly say ‘Berlin’. I was just reading too many Olympic details and didn’t even notice I typed the wrong city/game.

Thank you for posting this! I was sad and frustrated to hear he was arrested, but I didn’t think there was anything I could do about it. Maybe signing a petition isn’t much, but it is a start, and it feels probable that people with the means to do so might get organized to show up in person to offer support. If I was richer and younger, I’d love to take a pro-environmental vacation to Greenland.

Thank you both. You are both very considerate. I stumbled on one detail and then went down a rabbit hole of different aspects about that Olympic moment and wanted to share. I’m glad to see people are as interested as I was.

Thank you for cross posting :-)

I’m also not an expert, but that was my thought, too.

More than that, even if a tail is undamaged, including it is not giving useful imformation because tail size can vary out of proportion to the main body and is pretty standard for other animals as well. For example, no one is measuring a horse to include the tail length, nor a dog, cat, and generally not a bird, either.

That said, I expect an news story about alligators on the golf course or catching invasive snakes to measure the whole body for the NEWS story and let the experts worry about the booper2pooper length in their own space.

Honestly, I would rather she flip on this issue than have her replace Lina Khan as the Chair of the Federal Trade Commission.

Why is Harris flipping? To pick up swing voters. Senator Fetterman (D-PA) did the same thing to get elected in that important swing state. I remember seeing his debate against a carpetbagging Dr. Oz and despite being barely coherent after his stroke, Fetterman made the point repeatedly that he supported fracking. And he won.

As of 2021, the last time a major poll was conducted, not only did a majority of Pennsylvanians want to see more regulation of the fracking industry, but a majority actually wanted to “end” fracking in the state (25 percent wanted it done “as soon as possible,” and 30 percent favored a gradual transition).

So why is Harris reversing her position on fracking if Pennsylvanians want it gone? One reason may be that many of the voters who oppose fracking (for example: the 79 percent of Democrats who want fracking to end) will vote for her either way. The people the party is anxious about winning, on the other hand, might be the ones who’d be turned off by a proposed ban. For example, 43 percent of independents in the 2021 poll said fracking should not end or be phased out.

I think there’s more to it than that. Republicans are going to run ads saying she’s against it so her team will want to say those ads are lies, so they can’t be trusted on anything. That is: flipping position on one issue lets her discount multi-vector attacks on many things.

More than that, she’s better be using this as a way to get money for her campaign. It would almost be a shame if she didn’t at least get support from Big Oil for flipping.

Why would this matter less than the FTC chair? Because Harris is getting monied pressure to replace Khan and Khan is doing an amazing job and getting actual change whereas it is unlikely that an anti-fracking stance would change anything. Given the current members of Congress, they are not going to ban or limit fracking right now, so Harris isn’t going to get that sort of law through. More importantly, the Supreme Court royally screwed us over last month by reversing the Chevron Doctrine so the EPA is hamstrung until/unless Chevron is restored OR congress writes new protection laws – and that’s not going to happen with this Congress, either. That means any Executive order on cleaning up fracking won’t work because the enforcement agencies are now toothless.

It sucks, but I understand the decision.

I knew about the police getting access, but I missed that home insurance companies were checking properties with drones. I guess I don’t mind them spending their own money to send their own drones to verify properties they insure, but I agree that using MY camera that I bought to get info or sell MY data is at least unethical and ought to be illegal. It should be required that they get my explicit consent to that sort of thing for each instance of data collection or sale.

Who? The Senators? I think they’re genuinely interested in stopping the practice (obviously it also gets them good press, possibly even votes, but they coulda probably got cash if they did nothing).

I think the car companies are just trying to make money anywhere they can.

IMO, all voting should be on paper so that a hand recount can be done if the machines are questioned.

Myst can be a bit esoteric, especially the older versions.

Did they rewrite it in later ports? Also curious as to where you stand on Zork.