some animals have small brains and simple thoughts and other animals have complex brains and complex thoughts
No animals have complex thoughts by human standards.
Vegetarianism is about the minimization of cruelty and suffering.
To me it's about trying to apply abstract human concepts to animals who don't even know or care about them. But even if the terms do correctly apply to animals, who is to say that slaughtering does not involve the minimal amount of cruelty and suffering? You are making lots of assumptions about what it's like to be slaughtered, but you could not possibly know the truth.
You're not going to make much of a scientist until you spend years memorizing what's in those textbooks that scientists have written and are able to parrot it back.
Reading textbooks has nothing to do with being a scientist. I don't even know where you'd get that idea? From reading a university curriculum maybe? But even if you're at the university, most of the educators you'll meet there will tell you that having a PHD doesn't make you a good scientist.
Journalists take heed: Your coverage has consequences. All those media outlets who trumpeted the global warming "pause" may now be partly responsible for a documented decrease in Americans' scientific understanding.
Scientific understanding is the ability to apply the scientific method. It is not the ability to parrot back claims scientists have made, or the claims others have made about what scientists have claimed. That's just regular "knowledge".
In recent years, kidney exchanges—in which pairs of living would-be donors and recipients who prove incompatible look for another pair or pairs of donors and recipients who would be compatible for transplants, cutting their wait time—have become more widespread. Although these exchanges have grown rapidly in the U.S. since 2005, they still account for only 9% of live donations and just 3% of all kidney donations, including after-death donations. The relatively minor role of exchanges in total donations isn't an accident, because exchanges are really a form of barter, and barter is always an inefficient way to arrange transactions.
Or you could find a way to make barter more efficient perhaps? It wouldn't really be that hard to set up a "kidney exchange" where a family or relative who is willing to donate but incompatible could put their kidney on the exchange and in return get one that is compatible. It's not exactly rocket-science. It never ceases to amaze me just how far behind the times economists and other so-called experts really are.
It seems like the problem right now is that when we create money we give it to banks to decide what do with it, and they spend it as conservatively as possibly. This problem could be solved largely by making sure money mimics the desired activity better. So what do we want money to do? Ostensibly, the purpose of the free market is to allocate scarce resources as efficiently as possible. So our money model should probably be tied to those scarce resources.
What we really need is a currency that automatically generates a set amount of money for each person. That money should be traded around until it is ultimately used to pay for a natural resource, at which point it would be destroyed. The result would be the most efficient use of natural resources as defined by the will of the population. The troublesome detail is defining the natural resources you have to pay for, and assigning costs to each. You'd have to assess how much of each resource you need, and raise and lower the prices periodically to make sure the right amount of resources are extracted (you'd have to lower the price is there's a shortage caused by too little being extracted, and raise the price is there's a surplus).
The solution, up to this point, has been busy work. Based on my experience, 90% of the work being done today is unnecessary. Almost all of the paperwork being done could be replaced by competent automation (though a lot of it has been replaced incompetently and actually lead to more work), most service sector jobs are entirely unnecessary but provide some convenience to those with money. Many engineering jobs are just repeating work that's been done before (but the information was lost, kept secret, or poorly maintained), a lot of the work that is necessary is done very inefficiently. Basically, the only reason most of us even have jobs is the greed or incompetence of some moneyed person or politician or criminal.
You could make a helicopter light enough and efficient enough to do it (for example see the human powered helicopter). But it would probably crash because of all the wind.
And yet it makes you feel just as full after drinking it. How come so many people here don't seem to get that drinking soda like it's water makes you fat and gives you diabetes?
What *prevents* people from taking advantage of the opportunities in front of them, what *prevents* them from making good choices? Nothing.
There are many reasons people don't make dramatic changes to their lives. Some of them are better than others. For example, a single parent may not be willing to risk taking time off of work to go back to school, or they may not be willing to move for career advancement knowing it will uproot their children as well. Someone who is unemployed living in Detroit who doesn't know anyone in Phoenix might not be willing to move there because if things don't work out they won't have anyone to help them. A most people also simply fear change in general. They're afraid that if anything changes their whole world may fall apart.
My point is, there are a lot of reasons, good and bad, that people choose stay in poverty. More people would be willing to risk making changes in their lives is society were more forgiving of failure.
Many liberals will tell you that poor people have been bilked out of money by the elite. There is some truth to that, you certainly do see people use their positions of power to get away with running scams, or engaging in risky business practices while keeping the reward for themselves and letting everyone else shoulder the risk. They will tell you this is a natural consequence of capitalism, and that the poor should put their faith in the government to take back what the wealthy have stolen. But in reality much of their power comes from the government, and that kind of scamming is a byproduct of centralized authority.
The solution, then, is for everyone to be willing to shoulder more risk (and the potential for more reward). The wealthy need be willing to provide more opportunities for the poor to be successful, and more willing to work with people who have failed before, and the poor need to be more willing to take those opportunities. If we lived in a society that was a lot more forgiving of failure, you would probably see more of that.
If you wanted 2000 calories a day, you'd need just 1.2 pounds of rice, which will cost you about $0.60. That's why this is not a discussion about calories.
If you just want calories, you're better off eating rice or potatoes than junk food. But people need more than just calories, that's the whole point. Most people who aren't eating healthy are eating too many calories and not eating enough other vitamins and nutrients.
You usually have to cook frozen vegetables longer than fresh ones (which you may not cook at all), and water-soluble nutrients are lost during cooking along with the flavor. But, as fresh vegetables sit around and wait to be eaten, some of the vitamins in them break down (research has shown they they actually lose about half of their vitamins), while frozen vitamins remain intact. So on the balance, frozen vegetables are just as healthy, because they had more vitamins before you cooked them.
If you were to pick a vegetable from your garden and eat it immediately, it would always have more vitamins than if you froze it and cooked it later.
Here is a good explanation that is more official looking than mine.
The problem here is you are blaming poor people and 'welfare' programs on being able to buy shitty food with SNAP.
I wasn't blaming anybody. That said, the people most directly responsible for buying shitty food with food stamps are the people doing it. And the food stamps certainly do make that possible.
Go ahead and see what happens the moment you foot a bill to ban cola purchases with benefits. Oh look, the coca-cola corp just cut all your reelection financing. Oh look, your political competitor just more funding.
Fortunately, since I am not a politician, I do not have this concern. But if I did, I would have to weigh the benefits of getting more conservative voters against the cost of getting less money from Coca Cola. Of course, this would be a slam dunk if liberal voters would pull their heads out of their asses and support welfare reform.
Oh, and many poorer people are going to be pissed about your needs to be frozen and cooked with short shelf life food choices.
Maybe they won't be happy, but at least they won't dying of diabetes!
And even after that, are you going to stop people from buying bags of sugar and flour so they can't 'bake' unhealthy food choices?
No, that would be like banning all guns because some of them are used to commit murder. Only a total nutcase would advocate something like that.
watch how much cash they bring in to buy cigarettes, liquor, or gambling merchandise (lottery/lotto tickets, etc). It's fucking pathetic.
I agree it's pathetic, but you should really do more than simply blame them for it. These types of behaviors are ways people have of coping with a life situation they aren't happy with. While it would be better for them work to change their life situation to something better, if they were going to do that they probably would have done it by now. The bad thing about food stamps is they encourage this kind of coping over healthier behaviors.
But if you are going to take the tough love approach and cut off their food stamps, which I agree must be done, you do still need to make sure there's love in that action. If you treat them like you hate or distain them, you are going to push them further down the path they're already on.
Quart of milk or orange juice cost more than a quart of soda.
Orange juice is actually worse for you than soda, that's why you drink it from a smaller glass. If you buy it from concentrate, it will be about the same price as soda. I am on a budget, so that's what I do. I rarely by soda, but when I do I buy it in fancy glass bottles because it's a treat.
Canned vegetables (high sodium) cost more than frozen.
And they're much worse for you. Again, I'm on a budget so I only buy frozen vegetables.
Where I live, high-fat hamburger is much cheaper than chicken.
I've never seen that, and I would be really surprised if it were true. I buy 3-pound bags of frozen chicken for $5, and 3-pound bags of frozen hamburgers for $10. Maybe the story is a little different if you're buying fresh, but then you probably aren't shopping on a budget anyway.
I know a disabled veteran who is diabetic. He can't afford to eat the meals the VA nutritionist recommends.
I'd have to know more about this to unpack it, but my own experience is that buying frozen food is much cheaper than anything else except for rice, beans, and flower. Nutritionally, there is no reason to pick fresh food over frozen food.
Healthy food costs less than shitty food. Some examples:
A gallon of water costs less than a gallon of soda. A pound of frozen vegetables costs less than a pound candy. A pound of chicken costs less than a pound of hamburger. A dozen eggs costs less than a dozen candy eggs. A pound of potatoes costs less than a pound of potato-chips.
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It probably means you are overcooking them.
He should have just explained that he wanted to read his texts without being shot.
You're willing to go as far as talking to people? You sound pretty dedicated to the cause. . .
No animals have complex thoughts by human standards.
To me it's about trying to apply abstract human concepts to animals who don't even know or care about them. But even if the terms do correctly apply to animals, who is to say that slaughtering does not involve the minimal amount of cruelty and suffering? You are making lots of assumptions about what it's like to be slaughtered, but you could not possibly know the truth.
Reading textbooks has nothing to do with being a scientist. I don't even know where you'd get that idea? From reading a university curriculum maybe? But even if you're at the university, most of the educators you'll meet there will tell you that having a PHD doesn't make you a good scientist.
Scientific understanding is the ability to apply the scientific method. It is not the ability to parrot back claims scientists have made, or the claims others have made about what scientists have claimed. That's just regular "knowledge".
Or you could find a way to make barter more efficient perhaps? It wouldn't really be that hard to set up a "kidney exchange" where a family or relative who is willing to donate but incompatible could put their kidney on the exchange and in return get one that is compatible. It's not exactly rocket-science. It never ceases to amaze me just how far behind the times economists and other so-called experts really are.
This is a crazy idea, but here goes:
It seems like the problem right now is that when we create money we give it to banks to decide what do with it, and they spend it as conservatively as possibly. This problem could be solved largely by making sure money mimics the desired activity better. So what do we want money to do? Ostensibly, the purpose of the free market is to allocate scarce resources as efficiently as possible. So our money model should probably be tied to those scarce resources.
What we really need is a currency that automatically generates a set amount of money for each person. That money should be traded around until it is ultimately used to pay for a natural resource, at which point it would be destroyed. The result would be the most efficient use of natural resources as defined by the will of the population. The troublesome detail is defining the natural resources you have to pay for, and assigning costs to each. You'd have to assess how much of each resource you need, and raise and lower the prices periodically to make sure the right amount of resources are extracted (you'd have to lower the price is there's a shortage caused by too little being extracted, and raise the price is there's a surplus).
The solution, up to this point, has been busy work. Based on my experience, 90% of the work being done today is unnecessary. Almost all of the paperwork being done could be replaced by competent automation (though a lot of it has been replaced incompetently and actually lead to more work), most service sector jobs are entirely unnecessary but provide some convenience to those with money. Many engineering jobs are just repeating work that's been done before (but the information was lost, kept secret, or poorly maintained), a lot of the work that is necessary is done very inefficiently. Basically, the only reason most of us even have jobs is the greed or incompetence of some moneyed person or politician or criminal.
You could make a helicopter light enough and efficient enough to do it (for example see the human powered helicopter). But it would probably crash because of all the wind.
There's still a lot to be worried about on the human side of that equation.
Just because a movie was made with CGI doesn't mean a lot of people didn't have to do a lot of work to make it.
And yet it makes you feel just as full after drinking it. How come so many people here don't seem to get that drinking soda like it's water makes you fat and gives you diabetes?
There are many reasons people don't make dramatic changes to their lives. Some of them are better than others. For example, a single parent may not be willing to risk taking time off of work to go back to school, or they may not be willing to move for career advancement knowing it will uproot their children as well. Someone who is unemployed living in Detroit who doesn't know anyone in Phoenix might not be willing to move there because if things don't work out they won't have anyone to help them. A most people also simply fear change in general. They're afraid that if anything changes their whole world may fall apart.
My point is, there are a lot of reasons, good and bad, that people choose stay in poverty. More people would be willing to risk making changes in their lives is society were more forgiving of failure.
Many liberals will tell you that poor people have been bilked out of money by the elite. There is some truth to that, you certainly do see people use their positions of power to get away with running scams, or engaging in risky business practices while keeping the reward for themselves and letting everyone else shoulder the risk. They will tell you this is a natural consequence of capitalism, and that the poor should put their faith in the government to take back what the wealthy have stolen. But in reality much of their power comes from the government, and that kind of scamming is a byproduct of centralized authority.
The solution, then, is for everyone to be willing to shoulder more risk (and the potential for more reward). The wealthy need be willing to provide more opportunities for the poor to be successful, and more willing to work with people who have failed before, and the poor need to be more willing to take those opportunities. If we lived in a society that was a lot more forgiving of failure, you would probably see more of that.
And if you live in a climate where you can produce fresh produce all year round.
Are you sure you meant to reply to my post? It's just an equation followed by an inequality. Also, are you threatening me?! You don't even know me!
If you wanted 2000 calories a day, you'd need just 1.2 pounds of rice, which will cost you about $0.60. That's why this is not a discussion about calories.
If you just want calories, you're better off eating rice or potatoes than junk food. But people need more than just calories, that's the whole point. Most people who aren't eating healthy are eating too many calories and not eating enough other vitamins and nutrients.
You usually have to cook frozen vegetables longer than fresh ones (which you may not cook at all), and water-soluble nutrients are lost during cooking along with the flavor. But, as fresh vegetables sit around and wait to be eaten, some of the vitamins in them break down (research has shown they they actually lose about half of their vitamins), while frozen vitamins remain intact. So on the balance, frozen vegetables are just as healthy, because they had more vitamins before you cooked them.
If you were to pick a vegetable from your garden and eat it immediately, it would always have more vitamins than if you froze it and cooked it later.
Here is a good explanation that is more official looking than mine.
I wasn't blaming anybody. That said, the people most directly responsible for buying shitty food with food stamps are the people doing it. And the food stamps certainly do make that possible.
Fortunately, since I am not a politician, I do not have this concern. But if I did, I would have to weigh the benefits of getting more conservative voters against the cost of getting less money from Coca Cola. Of course, this would be a slam dunk if liberal voters would pull their heads out of their asses and support welfare reform.
Maybe they won't be happy, but at least they won't dying of diabetes!
No, that would be like banning all guns because some of them are used to commit murder. Only a total nutcase would advocate something like that.
I agree it's pathetic, but you should really do more than simply blame them for it. These types of behaviors are ways people have of coping with a life situation they aren't happy with. While it would be better for them work to change their life situation to something better, if they were going to do that they probably would have done it by now. The bad thing about food stamps is they encourage this kind of coping over healthier behaviors.
But if you are going to take the tough love approach and cut off their food stamps, which I agree must be done, you do still need to make sure there's love in that action. If you treat them like you hate or distain them, you are going to push them further down the path they're already on.
Orange juice is actually worse for you than soda, that's why you drink it from a smaller glass. If you buy it from concentrate, it will be about the same price as soda. I am on a budget, so that's what I do. I rarely by soda, but when I do I buy it in fancy glass bottles because it's a treat.
And they're much worse for you. Again, I'm on a budget so I only buy frozen vegetables.
I've never seen that, and I would be really surprised if it were true. I buy 3-pound bags of frozen chicken for $5, and 3-pound bags of frozen hamburgers for $10. Maybe the story is a little different if you're buying fresh, but then you probably aren't shopping on a budget anyway.
I'd have to know more about this to unpack it, but my own experience is that buying frozen food is much cheaper than anything else except for rice, beans, and flower. Nutritionally, there is no reason to pick fresh food over frozen food.
Healthy food costs less than shitty food. Some examples:
A gallon of water costs less than a gallon of soda.
A pound of frozen vegetables costs less than a pound candy.
A pound of chicken costs less than a pound of hamburger.
A dozen eggs costs less than a dozen candy eggs.
A pound of potatoes costs less than a pound of potato-chips.
This is all anecdotal, of course.
$2 billion/year x 10 years = $20 billion > $15 billion
Lying in court has always been a crime.