Browsing social media, it’s apparent that people are quick to point out problems in the world, but what I see less often are suggestions for how to solve them. At best, I see vague ideas that might solve one issue but introduce new ones, which are rarely addressed.
Simply stopping the bad behaviour rarely is a solution in itself. The world is not that simple. Take something like drug addiction. Telling someone to just stop taking drugs is not a solution.
The meat and dairy industry receives vast amounts of subsidies which would be better allocated to plant based food sources. Meat is an inefficient way to feed the general population. I’m vocal about this because of two reasons: animal suffering and climate/pollution.
I’m not naive enough to say we should just cut subsidies to animal farming cold turkey, because I understand people’s livelyhoods depend on it. But I would want to see a progressive public divestment from meat in favour of plant based whole food proteins (not fake/lab meats, those can survive on private investment alone).
At the same time, I’m also vocal about fixing farming. We need to stop destroying nature to grow food. Fortunately the divestment from animal farming will already significantly improve this because it’s more efficient to eat soy directly than to grow soy, feed it to pigs, and then eat the pig. However we need to fix monocultures by moving to regenerative farming and agroforestry.
The soy that’s fed to pigs is almost entirely the byproduct of pressing soy for soybean oil. about 85% of the soybean crop is pressed for oil. if we didn’t feed the byproduct to livestock, it would just be industrial waste.
I’d challenge that. The whole bean is edible by humans. Tofu is literally just the protein of soy beans without the oil and the startch. I’m sure, if we wanted to, we could just make tofu or TVP out of soy meal.
I also just dislike this “it’s a byproduct” argument. It’s like how whey powder is a “byproduct” of of cheese making. It’s not a good argument. We could also do with less soy oil in the world anyway.
but we DO make tofu and tvp. and they have higher profits per pound than animal feed. but we produce far too much soybean oil for the amount of byproduct people want to consume. giving it to livestock makes sense
It makes sense because we don’t eat enough of the soy and TVP. And we also stuff soy oil is tons of shit. I’m not saying it’s an easy problem to solve, but it all comes down to our over-consumption and refusal to do anything even mildly inconvenient. Eat more whole foods and less meat and a lot of that solves itself.
And vertical farms.
My understanding is that vertical farms have yet to prove more efficient except perhaps in land use. It’s been pretty hard to scale.
If lab grown meat becomes cheaper than “real” meat while keeping the taste and texture of it or even improve on that, I can totally see that replacing factory farmed meat rather quickly. It’s like with electric cars; people don’t switch if we force / shame them to do so but they will once those vehicles became better than the dirty alternative.
But my point is that we are keeping meat artificially cheap with lots of subsidies. Meat would be a luxury food if people paid the real cost of it, let alone if we paid the long term costs on the environment. I think maybe your analogy would be better with bicycles than electric cars. Bikes are more versatile and convenient than cars in short distances (10km), but most cities have been and continue being developed as car centric. If we used taxes to improve bike infrastructure, people would feel safer to ride bikes more often.
This exactly. I would say one of the main reasons a lot of people don’t currently drink plant milk is that per unit volume, it tends to be more expensive. This is seemingly starting to even out as the plant milk industry expands, but the most dirt-cheap dairy milk and the most dirty-cheap plant milk are still nowhere near each other on price. I’m willing to bet that if all subsidies were taken away altogether, plant milk would be cheaper, and moreover, if it were flipped in such a way that existing dairy subsidies went to plant milk, it would be game over for dairy milk. Plant milk prices would be through the floor, and dairy milk would be seen as a luxury product. There are a ton of good reasons for this:
- Dairy milk is far worse for the environment than every kind of plant milk by every conceivable metric.
- The dairy industry is one of the most absurdly cruel institutions in the world. (NSFL)
- Plant milk is generally better for you than dairy milk. The downsides to plant milk health-wise are lack of protein (this is only 8g per serving, though, out of the 0.8g/kg/day that you need, and some plant milks are beginning to add protein) and the fortification with D2 instead of fortification with D3. It makes up for this however by generally having more calcium and Vitamin D, the potential to not have any sugar (compare ~8g of the sugar lactose), mono- and polyunsaturated fats without saturated fat and LDL cholesterol, and substantially fewer calories.
- Plant milk takes months to go bad, whereas dairy milk that’s not ultrapasteurized (and therefore dramatically more expensive) takes maybe a couple weeks at most from the date of purchase.
- Plant milk has an enormous amount of variety compared to dairy milk – there are so many types that enumerating them becomes exhausting, and for the most part (not you, rice milk) they’re all good. You can get essentially whatever you want, compared to dairy milk, where you’re basically stuck with that (subjective) weird, slightly sour aftertaste.
your BBC link actually just relies on poore-nemecek 2018, which abuses LCAs and myopically focuses on distilling other studies into discrete metrics without understanding the system holistically. in short, your claim about the environment may be true, but the source that you use to support it is incapable of providing that support.
Okay, link to the academic paper refuting it. Or is your source just a shitty, Z-tier disinformation outlet called “Farmers Against Misinformation”? “your claim about the environment may be true” 💀 Don’t muddy the waters here: it is true. This was the only error noted in the paper, and the erratum correcting it still comports with the authors’ original findings that dairy is abysmal for the environment when compared with the alternatives.
Is your entire purpose on Lemmy to spread anti-vegan, pro-animal agriculture disinformation?
link to the academic paper refuting it.
seems like an appeal to authority, but i encourage you and anyone interested to look into how LCAs were abused, and how much cottonseed is weighed in the water use and land use of dairy milk, despite cotton being grown for textiles.
I’m sorry, I’ve read the paper, seen absolutely nothing wrong with it (and seemingly neither have other experts in the field, as I’ve yet to see any peer-reviewed rebuttal of its findings), and definitely trust an expert on food sustainability from Oxford and an agroecology expert from Agroscope as well as their publicly available and well-reasoned findings compared to some rando on the Internet who just whines with zero elaboration that LCAs are “abused” and can’t seem to figure out that they could’ve said all this in one comment instead of four.
I bet Poore and Nemecek would’ve figured out how to use the “edit” button. (And yes, I did link to the correct article, as the only attempt I could find to debunk this paper was from, again, a disinformation outlet whose lies are explored in that AFP article.)
Or is your source just a shitty, Z-tier disinformation outlet called “Farmers Against Misinformation”
your link doesn’t seem to align with anything i’ve said. are you sure you used the right link?
Is your entire purpose on Lemmy to spread anti-vegan, pro-animal agriculture disinformation?
this reads like pigeonholing. my “purpose” is to keep conversations honest and challenge bad science and reasoning.
the authors’ original findings that dairy is abysmal for the environment when compared with the alternatives
cannot be substantiated with the methodology used in this metastudy.
cold turkey
Mmmm, I love cold turkey sandwiches after Thanksgiving
I meant cold tofurky sorry.
The only solution to car traffic is building viable alternatives to driving. Alternatives also bring many environmental and societal benefits.
If we are realistic enough to put the fight against further global warming on a wartime basis, then we can operate things on a wartime basis. Which means planning things so that everything is focussed on winning the war. For example gasoline rationing would encourage people to plan their use of gasoline for maximum efficiency. It means people can get only as much as they can justify.
Rationing was used in the US during WW2. To see what that meant, read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationing_in_the_United_States
That’s rather vague “solution”
What are the alternatives?
Fast & frequent public transport, safe cycling infrastructure, footpaths, just putting things closer together to reduce the need for transport
Is the issue here traffic or cars?
Because for traffic I can see how working public transit would atleast ease of the issue, but for the anti-car sentiment I often see here I don’t view public transit as a solution. Not to every car owner atleast.
Cars are not inherently bad, they are being utilized poorly. In dense urban areas, private cars are the worst option in terms of efficiency. However, currently in many cities it’s also the best due to city planning. This ought to change by investing into better infrastructure. In rural areas I see cars as the best option as it’s cheap and efficient there.
What’s the difference?
Anti car doesn’t mean completely banning cars. Nobody is saying to replace ambulances with bus trips. There’s obviously a need and cars would be much more effective for those things if the roads weren’t clogged with people who don’t have a need.
That solution will still require the fat lazy selfish car drivers to choose to sacrifice a little of their personal comfort for the sake of the common good.
Yes, the alternatives need to exist, but there also has to be cultural change. Driving a private car in a city is antisocial. It’s exactly analagous to smoking in a restaurant or office and we need to begin to see it that way.
Clarification for the benefit of downvoters (easier to downvote than make a counter-argument, right?): The solution that I propose is clear: get private cars off the streets of cities by whatever means necessary. The detail is almost unimportant. Private cars, especially ones with combustion engines, are a scourge across the world. They are what make our cities unlivable. In any big city (at least outside North America) most people get around by public transport. Cars are almost never a necessity, people buy them for reasons of status and convenience. In cities they’re effectively a tool used by rich people to immiserate poor people.
Fix the electoral college by either abolishing it entirely (personal choice) or fixing the house to properly represent the population such that the senate doesn’t cause an oversized share of electoral reps. The Wyoming Rule is one option.
We could also just go back to something like one rep per 100,000 population in a state, which would in turn make the house have 3,000 members. This sounds wild until you realize Parliament in the U.K. has 650 members… representing a population roughly 1/5 ours.
This is probably a fool’s errand, because it’s all or nothing, making it inherently unstable. If we ever get within striking distance of having enough states to cross the threshold, the law will be fought tooth and nail to prevent passage, and this battle would continue in perpetuity in every remotely purple state that has the NPVIC law in place, trying to get enough overturned to stop it.
Maybe it accomplishes something useful simply by bringing the conversation about reform to the forefront? But as an actual solution I’m completely skeptical, as much as I like the idea.
Perhaps more realistic: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cube_root_law
Truth in advertising laws. Make it illegal to lie, mislead, or deceive in advertising. And I mean criminal, like jail time for the CEO, or they can specify an executive that must sign off on all ads if they like. That person takes the fall. And who decides if an ad breaks the law. A jury, or something more streamlined but still made up of regular Americans who decide.
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The two-party system. Regardless of where you live, if it’s under a two-party system, you probably agree that it sucks.
Assuming we’re starting from “choose one” single-winner elections, you need to first switch your elections to Approval Voting. This would make it always safe to vote for your favorite candidate, and the full support for every losing candidate would be reflected in the vote totals. This will weaken the two party system, but no single-winner system can dismantle it.
After that, switch as many single-winner elections to multi-winner as you can (like city council or a legislative district) and use Sequential Proportional Approval Voting to award seats. This will enable minor party candidates to get into office after the major ones, and the seat totals will look a lot closer to the vote totals.
A few places already use approval (Fargo and St. Louis) and a few places are just begging for SPAV (Cincinnati City council).
The answer to the majority of problems the world is facing is community - we need to rebuild real physical communities, participate in them, and nourish them. We can do this by simply getting more involved in existing ones, staring from things as simple as local gardening groups, litter picking/beach tidy groups, community celebrations, local markets, etc. We need to hold on to, strengthen and rebuild arts groups and help local arts and music scenes to grow.
We can all participate on some level in some aspect of physical community building, and it will enrich us in a way social media never can. (Put on a gig, attend an arts show, donate to a community group, talk to neighbours, support the vulnerable). I believe people feel so isolated and depressed by the way greed has ruined the web, jobs, the economy, etc.that the time is right for many more people to start investing time and effort in real communities.
We need to build and grow communities in a local, regional, national and international spirit. We need to learn how to share, and how to get rid of greed and selfishness in ourselves and in our societies - participating in and building welcoming, non discriminating communities is the path towards this. We need to remove competition in education, arts and science (and ultimately economy), and focus on cooperation and improving things out of the joy of helping yourself and others. Communities can bring this about, and digital communities (as opposed to competitive social media) can support this, too.
Ideally, we want to grow communities in a way where people start thinking first “how does this help my community?” - especially when looking at political and business decisions. We need to feel something positive to stand up for (not old fashioned ideas of ‘country’ or political groups) - we simply need mutually supportive groups (communities) that fight power, greed and selfishness to defend people, animals and nature.
Somewhat relevant plugs:
On education reform: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-one-thing-that-should-be-taught-in-school-that-isnt-already/answer/Harri-K-Hiltunen
On digital community: https://www.quora.com/Who-invented-the-modern-computer-look-and-feel/answer/Harri-K-Hiltunen (the sick, sad history of computer-aided collaboration)
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Fuck me too then. I’d be curious to hear how you imagine somebody like me would be able to find customers for my business if I wasn’t allowed to drop flyers onto people’s mailboxes.
I know how those marketing chicks look like, I volunteer as tribute for your plan.
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There are bigger problems that I agree need to be solved but I’m not personally that verbal about them. But the one I complain about the most has got to be potholes.
In the UK farmers are responsible for maintaining the hedgerows between the road and their fields so I feel like they should also be responsible for filling in the potholes caused by their heavy machinery and the cow shit left behind when they’re moving cattle.
You want a realistic solution or a “if I had one wish” solution?
If every US Republican were to die of a heart attack right now, that would probably be the single greatest thing that could happen to our planet right now.
The dangers of artificial general intelligence (humans becoming even worse thinkers, dystopia, takeover) could be avoided by turning towards human collaborative intelligence augmentation.
A slow burn. Humanity is slowly wiping itself out. If this is a Q humanity test then we have failed. We need a Picard/Riker/Data/LaForge combo
I probably whine the most about the lack of transit options in my city.
Proposed solution: Take intra-city transportation out of the control of the county, so it is run by the city instead. The county can run the buses from the suburbs, or not. We can extend the streetcar, increase bus frequency, all the stuff the city wants, that keeps getting slapped down by the county commissioners, because the suburbs don’t want buses.
