Bjorn

That's totally fair, and I knew someone would call me on that bullshit, but I had already typed it up and it is how I feel even if it isn't perfectly relevant to this thread. I was really trying to answer the question of the thread title (Is it wrong to eat meat?), and went off into the weeds a bit. My follow up posts are a lot more nuanced. I probably came off as too aggressive in that first post. Thanks! One thing I want to make clear is I'm no expert, so its possible I'm off on a few places, but I think I've got the general principles right. I haven't worked on a farm for about 16 years, though I do regularly talk to both my father and my father-in-law about this stuff (both farmers, though my dad is retired now). The important takeaway is that resource use and allocation are pretty complex, and that if you just look at a handful of numbers (like water to meat ratio), its very easy to make bad assumptions about how changes in our food economy would actually work. And to further complicate the topic, there are some fascinating discussions to be had about the nature of government subsidies to food production and how that shapes what is available to us in our markets. This is something I get pretty lost on, but the interconnectedness of subsidies, lobbying, food programs, international treaties, food stamps, global markets, etc, is jawdropping and almost invisible to the average consumer. I wish I actually understood it better. I think its difficult to understand the forces that are driving production without getting into that territory though.

Oh man, that layout. I miss the days of having the little paper/cardboard overlay that was made for your keyboard so you could remember what every freaking button did.

Got curious about cannabis farming, as that tickled some part of my memory. Growing consumer grade plants is really water intensive. I don't know about industrial/food grade hemp, it may not take near as much.

I know farmers who would love to be in the business of growing hemp/cannabis. Farmers are ultimately business owners and they would like to maximize the profits from their fields. There's been a quiet, but persistent, push from some land owners about this but its never gone anywhere. Go back a few decades before the war on drugs and the rise of the DEA, there were at least a few farmers out there who had hidden pot fields, planting corn on the outside 50 feet of the field, then pot in the middle. But once they started doing flyovers looking for that, it all stopped. I'm always amused at how farmers are portrayed in media (usually conservative, maybe even uneducated), but the reality is a lot different from that. Something to further complicate my original point. It would actually be possible to restructure where and what we grow to maximize a non-meat economy, like focusing on grains in Kansas and moving grain production over to other crops in places that have the water to support them. But you'd be talking about upending huge chunks of our food production on a national level. So not like that's going to happen.

I also kind of get scatterbrained talking about this subject, because the scale and repercussions of it are almost unfathomable. For basically my entire life, I've been hearing about how the Ogallala Aquifer is going to dry up and a big junk of the great plains are going to become an actual desert. Western Kansas has faced some of the sharpest drops in the water table, resulting in some pretty big changes in farming and irrigation. If you do any reading on water and food production, there's no doubt that meat is crazy wasteful. Like, its insane how much water a pound of beef takes to create. If the conservation efforts on the Aquifer don't work, we could be seeing truly radical shifts in American food production within our lifetime. But I'm pretty sure when I was a kid, people were saying by 2015 western Kansas would be an empty desert, and it hasn't happened (yet). With changes to irrigation over the years here, it radically affects which crops you can grow. Only a few grains are really hardy enough to produce well in the natural environment in the grain belt. So when people talk about how all that grain could just be used to directly feed people instead of cows, something they miss is that we simply don't need to be producing the amount of grain that we do. A big chunk of grain production simply wouldn't need to exist anymore if we were no longer feeding animals. There isn't much else you can grow in some of these places, so those fields aren't taking the place of bell peppers or some other vegetable. You could grow some other crops there, but you'd have to go back to intensive irrigation, which would ultimately end up being a wash in terms of water consumption with the water we already expend on meat production. What would actually happen is that the rural populations of the Midwest would dwindle even more as fewer people would be needed to support pure grain production. You'd have the rural version of Detroit (which is actually already happening, but on a smaller scale). And then when you get into animal production that depends primarily on pasture land and grazing, you're talking about land or regions where any kind of profitable agriculture is nearly impossible and the raising of animals is about the only use for the land. Again, in order to convert that land to usable agriculture space, you're going to have to irrigate the hell out of it, again making the whole water savings from animal production moot. Also, American beef is as far as I know, the single most wasteful of all meats (primarily because the feedlot system has dominated such a large percentage of beef production). Once you're talking about bird or pig production, the amount of water and grain needed drops by as much as 2/3s, so those meats don't have near the waste that beef production does. But if you're reading literature about meat production that is critical of it, a lot of those writers tend to focus on the worst offender without mentioning the economies on other meats. Short story is that the economy of meat production is a lot more complicated than many people realize, and the environmental gains would not be as much as people think while there would also be significant unintended consequences that would be hard to foresee (like even more people flocking to cities to look for work).

My point was that meat, to me, is only a tiny bit more wrong than almost every thing else we eat. Hence my note at the top of that first post, I knew I was going to end up not communicating my point terribly well. I also didn't communicate that I have a lot of sympathy for the ethical concerns about meat. For me, those ethical and moral food concerns end up being about fruit, particularly imported fruit, and the damage that industry causes to people and communities in Central and South America.

Man, I mentioned gamergate in passing in a Facebook thread about hypermasculinity and geek culture, and in no time a guy had written an essay about how geeks aren't that way, it's jus the corporate takeover of the geek world that has made it look that way. I've mostly avoided mentioning gg in social media, so that's the first time I've seen the rapid response team go into action.

Please take everything I say in this thread with a grain of salt, as it's probably not a complete thought given the complexity of the question. Just as a frame of reference, I come from a farming family, I've raised animals for slaughter, participated in their slaughter, castrated calves/pigs and grew up hunting and fishing (not for survival, it was a family entertainment, but I do know people whose families did hunt because they needed to in order to survive). There are things I did in my youth that I don't think I could do anymore, it would be too cruel or gross for me now. Are there ethical problems with animal food production? Absolutely. And perhaps at some far off date in the future, we will reach a point where we've decided that killing animals for our pleasure (whether hunting or gastrointestinal) is a thing we as a society don't want to do. I suspect that there are a lot of meat eaters who would not be able to stomach seeing in person what meat production is like. We have the most massive disconnect in human history between food production and food consumption. With that out of the way, and with no insult meant, I find the sometimes moral high horse that vegetarians and vegans get on about the ethics and morals of food production to be kind of surreal. Unless you're raising large portions of your food, you are probably a wiling participant in a worldwide industry that depends on child labor, virtual slave labor, dangerous and disabling work, pollution on a massive scale, the exhaustion of resources, the destruction of local economies, corporate staged takeovers of foreign governments and more human rights violations than I can name. We are all part of that food economy, and being vegan or vegetarian puts someone maybe a single point ahead of meat eaters on an ethical scale of a hundred, where we're in one disgusting pile with each other at the bottom of that scale. To me, focusing on the ethics of animal consumption is just a way of not addressing all the horrors that go on in food production and distribution all over the world to sustain the appetites of the well off. We've got to solve some other, baseline issues before tackling the question of meat. To answer the thread title, it's basically wrong to eat anything. But we've all got to live.

To be fair, the original Zelda had most of those features, and Metroid would have as well if the storage/battery tech would have been finalized before its release. And that all happened within the first year or so of the NES. My understanding at the time was that the only reason more games didn't have those features was the extra cost that went into cartridge production (and probably licensing the tech from Nintendo, since it was a hardware innovation at the time).

I hadn't actually read the "apology", that's a stunning piece of work. I should send this whole thing to the guy who runs Regret the Error. I've followed him for years, and have never seen a retraction or correction like that.

We've been running a mix of T3 and T4 with our mains, but if you're not up to that, we can drop down or run our alts (who aren't quite at 70 yet). We've geared up a bit quicker than is probably normal, as we carry an extra local character with us sometimes, which gets us more legendaries, gems and materials. Our daughter is kind of meh about Diablo, but she plays with us once in awhile, more to play something with us than because she cares about D3. So we've leveled up a few different characters for her just by dragging them around so she can hop on when she wants and play whatever. Also useful if any of her friends are out and want to mess around without having to start a new character.

Zeus, do you know if you can you mix local and online? I think you can. If so, we're on PS4. I don't remember my username off the top of my head, I'll add you next time I'm on. We've seen one of those goblin packs, that was a blast! And then, shortly thereafter, we got our first Vault portal from a lone goblin. Holy shit, walked out of that place with 75 Million gold apiece. We've had a handful of ancient items drop for each of us, definitely an upgrade over regular legendaries. I think I'm only two pieces short of having my Barbarian equipment complete, which is exciting. He's probably not perfectly optimized, but lord is he fun. Got a third Raekor's last night and can infinitely charge now. That's just stupid fun. Probably need to start working on actually leveling up some legendary gems now.

I partially retract my earlier complaint. The lady informed me that CK also has a premium line that's $28 a pair. I'm just slumming it with their mid-range and didn't know a higher tier of luxury boxer briefs existed. I still think that's crazy for a single pair of underwear though.

Also something she has considered, and may ultimately do. She's going to talk to her boss for sure about learning some of the other duties she doesn't already know so that she'll be ready for a promotion if/when that happens. She had a meeting this afternoon with her adviser and another person about academic probation and her schedule for Spring. She got home from the meeting and you could physically see how much more relaxed she was, after being a ball of nervous/anxious energy all week. It went really well, they restructured her class schedule with the goal of getting her out of academic probation by focusing on classes similar to the ones she has done the best with in the past, but are still credits that move her towards a degree. This was a new adviser for her. The previous ones she's had (at the 4 year and her first one at the new college) all presented the options she had as a dyslexic kid, but didn't seem to care very much. The adviser today was someone really knowledgeable about what was available and seemed to understand what she would need much, much better.

Oh yeah, I agree, that just still seems super expensive. I've tried a few brands, and settled on Calvin Klein, as they're just hands down the most comfortable pair I've worn. I think I can usually get them for about $10 a pair or less. MeUndies would have to be considerably more comfortable to justify double the price, and even if that were possible, I'm not sure I would want to know. Cause if they were twice as comfy, I'd probably want to start wearing them.

I was kind of excited about the MeUndies advert, until I went to their site. Unless I'm super dumb, they want $20-$24 per pair. Da fuq? I mean, I even buy some fairly nice undies as it is, but that's still like 3 times the price of buying a premium brand at retail.

I fully identify with Chris' take on multiplayer games. I like the idea of them, but the older I got, the harder and harder it is for me to want to play them, like even for an hour. Having other people depend on me is just too much stress.

Yeah, she's made some basic stuff, and was really into modding a couple of years ago, though she actually preferred the technical side as she felt more comfortable doing that than trying to come up with the creative elements to flesh out a game. Ultimately the stuff she was doing wasn't terribly advanced though, I don't want to oversell her skills. Oh, I totally agree with you. The mature, rational adult side of me knows it is probably the safest and wisest option. And we've talked about it. But I haven't really wanted to push too much any one direction, just advise and support what she wants to do.

Vapin' with Famous does sound like a spinoff cast thought.

Okay, both the lady and I have really warmed up to the endgame content in D3. The set bonuses, unique properties on legendaries and legendary gems can pretty radically change your playstyle compared to how its played before that point. A sizable patch came out yesterday. Only played for a bit last night, but liked the few changes I saw. Act I hub in adventure mode is now usable (jeweler and enchanter moved up by blacksmith). New goblins are cool. For PS4/X1 players, all the Season 1 and 2 legendary items are just available as drops now, since we don't get seasons.

There are definitely courses or paths that would be easier for her, she's just had a hard time giving up on something related to her original goal. Like a lot of kids, she dreams about making video games. Of course. She started off in computer science, and the math kicked her ass. She switched to a hybrid degree, a business degree with a focus on tech/science. It had less overall math, but still kicked her ass. Now she's in an interactive media program at the 2 year college (combination of several media skills, basically). All the science, math and tech stuff has really limited some of the testing or grading options that would have been present in other degrees. She's going to back off all the tech/computer stuff this semester and just take some basic business administration courses (which the business stuff about a year ago is some of the best work she did, in terms of grades). She works for a guy who owns a small business with 4 or 5 locations in our area, and he's mentioned that he'd be interested in promoting her to be the manager of one of his stores. She practically runs the one she's at now, and she's only part time. She would have to go full time though to be the store manager, and she's worried she'd just end up being done with school. She really wants a degree and education, but she's coming to terms that she's going to need a decent job eventually and solid business experience can't hurt.

Thanks guys, I appreciate your thoughts. I was super frustrated yesterday, really needed to vent. We talked about it more last night, she's going to go back in today and talk to her adviser about some different classes and options, maybe even change direction again, give it one more semester and if she's still struggling this hard, maybe take a break.