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"I eat meat. Meat is yummy"
What an insightful comment! Here is a ball. Why don't you bounce it?

I'll bite. I eat meat. Meat is yummy. Your body has evolved so that things that are good for you taste yummy. By not eating meat, you are depriving your body of nutrients it needs to survive. Vegetarians and especially vegans have to be careful to supplement their diet with pills or sufficient quantities of specific plants which provide those nutrients. Thus indicating that theirs is the diet which is innately unnatural and unhealthy. You can make an argument against eating too much meat, but that does not translate into an argument for eating no meat at all.

The argument that eating meat is cruel is easy to shoot down too. If your reasoning is based on minimizing the amount of cruelty animals suffer, consider that the fate of nearly every living thing is to be eaten alive. It just happens out of our sight most of the time. But that doesn't mean it doesn't happen. Living to a ripe old age and dying of natural causes (organ failure) is something almost unique to humans and the few animals we adopt as pets. Nearly all wild animals die young, painfully, and frequently with what most people would consider close to the "maximum" amount of suffering possible. In contrast, the way we dispatch domesticated animals for meat is quick, painless, and humane. So you actually reduce the total amount of cruelty suffered by animals by replacing wild animals in the environment with domesticated ones, protect them from predators and disease with our fences and medicines, then dispatch them painlessly when you're ready to slaughter them.

Then there's the argument that meat is too resource-intensive. That the world's human population is growing beyond the land's capability to feed it, so we need to start eating lower on the food chain. Except that's false too. Nearly all of the world's population growth is happening in developing nations. The developed countries (where most meat eating happens) have close to zero population growth; some even have negative population growth (their population is shrinking). So they're clearly able to feed their populations using the land and resources they have. If you want to reduce population growth, the key is to help all countries on the planet become economically developed. Regressing to an agrarian society is actually counterproductive, and will result in even faster population growth.

The only argument for vegetarianism / veganism I've heard which makes sense is the energy intensity one. You can feed the population using less energy per capita if everyone eats plants (even after accounting for supplements to make up nutrients normally obtained from meat). But the entirety of modern civilization is based on being able to generate more energy per capita than in the past. As a nation develops, the percentage of its economic output devoted to food production decreases. Since everyone still must be eating (the same amount of food is being produced per capita), that means the country is producing more energy per capita than before. And that excess energy is being spent on productive tasks other than food production. If there's plenty of excess energy, why not use some of it to raise meat if you want?

Note that if the scientists researching this are able to produce something which tastes like meat but requires less energy to produce than raising animals, I will have no qualms about switching to it. Less energy to produce translates into lower cost, so it'll be a simple economic decision. Contrary to the imaginations of vegetarians / vegans, knowing an animal died to feed you is not a part of the enjoyment from eating meat.

Fossil fuel subsidies by the US run to $200 trillion a year.

How are we managing a $200 trillion subsidy when the entire US GDP is only about $20 trillion? For that matter, $200 trillion exceeds the entire world GDP. http://statisticstimes.com/eco...

http://statisticstimes.com/eco...

https://www.focus-economics.co...

http://www.imf.org/external/da...

China growth 6.5% US growth 2.3%

http://fortune.com/2018/02/23/...
President Trump didn’t quite get the 3% GDP boost he was hoping for in 2017, but at 2.3%, the U.S. economy is chugging along. Meanwhile, India and China soared more than 6%, and overall global growth saw a 2.9% increase.

It's so silly that Java is one of the most used languages for projects of any significant size or scope.

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You're too narrowly focused purely on the technology and not on the bigger picture about how to make money. We don't just do all this programming for our personal amusement. We do it to put food on the table.

Norway has nice standing in the GDP per capita rankings: http://statisticstimes.com/eco...

But, would you agree that this is largely due to oil exports? If oil suddenly became a worthless commodity, would Norway fall to approximately the same place as Sweden in this ranking?

Sorry but there's no way one person should be allowed to acquire so much personal wealth that in the list of the worlds 191 countries by GDP, he individually is the 68th richest.

http://statisticstimes.com/eco...

Using the word "allowed" kind of implies that there should be laws against becoming rich. That's a terrible idea. The real issue is that society has become so tilted in the favor of the rich that individual humans have more wealth than many countries. Don't hate the ultra-rich person, hate the world that created them.

Sorry but there's no way one person should be allowed to acquire so much personal wealth that in the list of the worlds 191 countries by GDP, he individually is the 68th richest.

http://statisticstimes.com/eco...