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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Fix the system, make a new system, buy discerningly. Have a garden if you can and advocate for more of them if you want. Fight against monoculture, irresponsible fertilizer and pesticide use, copyright abuse, and more. None of that is an irreplacable part of growing food at a large and efficient scale.

    By the way, I’m curious about the Haber-Bosch figure. Isn’t that the process that allows us to easily make fertilizer, and greatly increase productivity? It seems like that 5% is doing much more heavy lifting than, for example, the ~20% from cow burps.














  • In these conversations I always get to an impasse because yeah, capitalism is very flawed and produces many horrible outcomes. But communism has failed to work at all (as far as I know). Last I spoke to a communist as passerby was asking for what my conversation partner thought was a example of true communism, to which the answer was “the very start of the Russian revolution”. I won’t pretend to be the most informed about history, and I know that there has been much interference from capitalist countries, but if communism were so clearly a better system would it not have stably worked at least once? I’m having a hard time understanding why that’s a better goal than the countries that seem to reign in capitalism with at least some success.



  • As horrible as those people are, it’s not like they’re just belching carbon dioxide into the atmosphere for fun. They’re fulfilling demand. That 40% wouldn’t disappear just by spreading ownership of the factories to more people. That’s not to say that individual action is the only thing that works. Regulations need to be put in place to curb emissions, incentives should reward producers for investing & transitioning to more sustainable practices, and yes, monopolies need to get split up.

    But the fact remains that some products are just bad for the environment. As as long as people continue buying those products they’ll keep being produced. And when animal agriculture accounts for about as many emissions as the entire transportation industry, this seems like one of the easier steps to make.

    The “my actions won’t end this problem so I don’t need to do anything” mentality never comes up in any other field (politeness, crimes, social change, voting). Yeah, choosing to never hold open doors for others wouldn’t noticeably affect the global rate, but I doubt you’d use that logic to justify being rude.