That was the case a few years ago. The industry has developed and already uses alternatives. The fetal serum would have been too expensive for commercial use either way.
We still don't know how expensive the whole process will be though, it will certainly be a luxury item for quite some time, while the current plant-based meat is slowly becoming cheaper than real meat.
That would be great, we can agree on that. The capital only seems to grow more powerful though, but the whole system is also unsustainable and therefore inherently unstable, so we'll see.
I think the changes that will bring down factory farming first will be climate change combined with resource inefficiency increasing the price (we can already see this happening), while plant based alternatives become more normalized, tasty, widely available, and cheaper relative to meat (there has been a lot of progress on these in the last 10 years, at least here in Germany).
An avian flu pandemic also seems likely at some point and would accelerate the transition.
It's not the first time in history where everyday people contribute to a very inhumane industry. These industries are usually not perpetuated by consumers who want to be evil. They are perpetuated by consumers who are somewhere between uninformed and complicit, usually somewhere in between.
I don't think that the average meat eater is a monster. It's very normalized to buy factory farmed products without knowing and thinking about the cruelty that animals had to endure for it.
Many people know that there are instances of cruel treatment, but assume that these are just a few bad apples and that this has nothing to do with the products they buy. This is partly wishful thinking, partly complicit, partly just too abstract in their head to influence buying decisions, to varying degrees.
If someone knew quite a bit about the unimaginable suffering caused by the industry though, and continued funding it without thinking "well, that's not good, it would be better if I would stop contributing to that", then this is malicious behavior. What else could I conclude?
So I would attribute varying responsibility to the consumer, based on how much they know, and on how easy it would be for them to choose alternatives.
Clothes and cars are a bit complicated since they are often essential, and the more ethical options are more expensive so not everyone can afford them. I'd still say those who could buy the more ethical options ought to do so.
Meat and coffee are resource intensive goods with cheaper alternatives which cause way less suffering.
So yes, paying people to mistreat humans without need is cruel. Paying people to brutalize animals to death is cruel too. One logically can't justify the other.
Where have we gone wrong that people always feel the need to argue for putting animals into literal death camps, of all things? I just wish people would strive to make the world a less cruel place for once, but that is just too much to ask for in this society.
There might be a relevant difference in the fact that most animals can run/move away from something that hurt them, and pain might be the necessary evolutionary adaptation to facilitate that. A plant or fungus just has chemical responses, which probably don't rely on being sentient. Our skin most likely produces melanin without being sentient, after all.
I guess the interesting question is whether there are any processes in plants that somehow imply sentience. Afaik science hasn't found a decisive example yet.
I'd say it's wrong to harm other humans because it's extremely likely that they feel pain and emotions in a similar way as I do. Roughly the same applies to chimps, and dogs, and pigs too. Maybe the emotions aren't as complex, but they clearly behave according to the basic ones like joy and fear. The response to pain is basically the same as ours. So harming them without a necessity to do so seems cruel to me.
Even if plants were more conscious than animals, the animals have to be fed with tons of plants to begin with. Eating plants directly minimizes plant and animal deaths.
Have you seen their tabloids and what they write about refugees? Bild is and has always been the largest "traditional media" voice for right wing populism and against left wing politics in Germany.
For climate activists it's very unlikely, but there are people who believe Africans are the issue because of high birth rates, conveniently ignoring that richer countries do the most damage by far.
Billions of ordinary humans still consume much more fossil fuels and meat than the super rich. And that consumption is giving unsustainable industries even more money for lobbying and to stay profitable.
This sense of futility is whats keeping their business model alive as long as possible. It's what's giving them the largest benefit they could possibly hope for. Don't do their lobbying work for them.
If there were no billionaires, our unsustainable consumption would still drive climate change, just a bit slower. Just pointing at them isn't sufficient. We need political and individual action.
The argument also kinda sounds like "well if there are people that literally kill thousands of people, then me hurting a few people in my life doesn't make much of a difference." Which is a quite silly.
Sustainable technologies like public transport, EVs and meat alternatives also need demand to grow, to become normalized, widely accessible and cheaper through scaling. Early adopters have a much larger effect on the overall trajectory than late adopters.
If progressive people just do what's practicable to have a positive impact where they can, that has a large effect. And many already do. We need more of that.
When you use the /init command in claude code, it'll scan your whole project and write a CLAUDE.md, which is basically an overview of the project contents and architecture that it uses as context when responding to queries.
My personal position(belief) is that we are in consciousness.. 'submerged' as it were. Or even a radio wave for it to connect to. along with everything forming this reality. Like interconnected.
I certainly had this feeling too when I had an ego death experience. Though I attribute that more to my mind being formed by evolution around an ego/actor, and when this ego is missing, the subconscious might have to come up with a plausible alternative to keep the brain circuits working/comprehend reality. I even thought in terms of "he" instead of "I" about "myself" (the person), but my consciousness felt like a separate universal "they" in this moment. Neat experience for sure.
But to me it still seems most likely that as life is entirely formed by evolution, and things like instincts, pain, memories, agency, emotions, reasoning, model of the world, personalities etc. have advantages for survival, they are selected for in their most basic forms, get more sophisticated over time and eventually coalesce into what we experience as consciousness.
So to me it seems very very likely that most animals have consciousness, with varying degrees of sophistication regarding those abilities. Some animals might even surpass the sophistication of humans on some of these abilities, if the evolutionary pressure for that was stronger for them than for us.
On plants I'm more sceptical because their behavior doesn't need to be nearly as complex as that of moving animals for survival I believe, it can probably rely much more on "hardcoded" behavior. Although reality loves it's exceptions and complications so who knows.
Vehicle wise we might offer a different experience for a consciousness to know itself.
Yeah that is another view on that I guess.
To live is to consume. And anything we consume has consciousness. We're all 'guilty' of consuming in order to live as a flesh body regardless of what it is we consume.
To me theres still a big difference between harvesting a carrot and cutting the throat of a pig. But all aspects of living have an impact on the environment and animals and humans, to different degrees, of course. So I agree that we're all guilty and that nobody is perfect, and that vegans aren't automatically good people and meat eaters aren't automatically bad people. Some vegans kinda forget that they also ate meat for many years without considering the harms and that they might still do other problematic things too so they really don't have an excuse to look down on people.
of course they loose their shit if you challenge it to any depth like this.
That's a shame, I think it's an interesting argument that opens some questions, so let's challenge it a bit (somewhat ironic given the post, I know, but its just too intriguing).
Your position is basically that humans are the only species that has consciousness, correct?
That means if you take a dog or chimpanzee or whatever and burn it alive, they wouldn't feel a thing in your view because they're not conscious?
Just to make sure we are on the same page.
they speak about consiousness and it's location like it has all been proven. They provide no papers. no proof. just how they feel about consciousness when talking about it.
How do you actually know that humans are definitely the only species that has consciousness and that other species are fundamentally incapable of it?
I'd be very interested in the papers and proof or even just arguments for that.
As I see it, we even have the same fundamental issue with human consciousness. Where are the papers, what is the proof that all humans are conscious, or even just one human? I'm not aware of any hard proof.
You just know you're conscious, and you assume from that that all other humans are too. But you can't actually prove anyone else is conscious.
By your argumentation and standard of evidence, putting humans on factory farms would actually be fine too, as long as we don't have hard proof that they are actually conscious.
But I don't think it works for the following reason:
The argument "other animals are not conscious, therefore their treatment isn't an ethical issue" relies on that definitely being the case. If there's still a chance that they are conscious, it remains an ethical issue. You actually need hard proof.
The counter position "other animals might be conscious, so we must not (potentially) torture them by the millions/billions in case they are" doesn't have that requirement.
The burden of proof lies where do don't give the benefit of the doubt, not where you do.
if they can say consiousness exists with animals: i can say consiousness exists in plants too.
You could say that they might be conscious, sure.
But raising animals takes a lot more animal feed than just eating plants directly, so industrially farmed meat would still be the most unethical choice either way.
We have to eat something, eating plants directly minimizes both animal deaths and plant deaths.
Even if only plants had consciousness and animals didn't, factory farming would be still be the most unethical source of food.
Does that mean that from your perspective, the US shouldn't have attacked and defeated the Nazis in WW2 and should have allowed them to stay in power and do their thing instead?
This kinda seems like preferring to sacrifice the human rights of the innocent, to protect the human rights of their murderers.
Ah yes, the finnish police fined someone for disturbing a political event and this is of course comparable to systematic human rights abuses and massacres like tiananmen square.
Like there are enough troubling developments in the west we could discuss, but instead we get highly misleading RT propaganda stories to whitewash authoritarianism.
Yeah...fuck those people. Some cultures are just worse than others.
Factory farms are still way worse, because of the permanent confinement in cramped cages full of shit, the cruel treatment for their whole lives, and the insane scale. It's like this event happening every second.
Just look at the Dominion documentary and compare it to this. We're the worse culture.
There are newer models that can charge to 80% in 15 min. It will probably take a while until fast chargers are widespread, but this is where things are going.
Besides YouTube, I only really used Reddit in the last years. Since the API change I basically switched over to Lemmy. About once a month I browse one of like 3 subreddits for a few minutes, but that's it.
I'm glad I deleted my Facebook account years ago and never really got into Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and all that shit.
That was the case a few years ago. The industry has developed and already uses alternatives. The fetal serum would have been too expensive for commercial use either way.
We still don't know how expensive the whole process will be though, it will certainly be a luxury item for quite some time, while the current plant-based meat is slowly becoming cheaper than real meat.
Slaughterhouses use brutal force to kill animals.
That would be great, we can agree on that. The capital only seems to grow more powerful though, but the whole system is also unsustainable and therefore inherently unstable, so we'll see.
I think the changes that will bring down factory farming first will be climate change combined with resource inefficiency increasing the price (we can already see this happening), while plant based alternatives become more normalized, tasty, widely available, and cheaper relative to meat (there has been a lot of progress on these in the last 10 years, at least here in Germany).
An avian flu pandemic also seems likely at some point and would accelerate the transition.
It's not the first time in history where everyday people contribute to a very inhumane industry. These industries are usually not perpetuated by consumers who want to be evil. They are perpetuated by consumers who are somewhere between uninformed and complicit, usually somewhere in between.
I don't think that the average meat eater is a monster. It's very normalized to buy factory farmed products without knowing and thinking about the cruelty that animals had to endure for it.
Many people know that there are instances of cruel treatment, but assume that these are just a few bad apples and that this has nothing to do with the products they buy. This is partly wishful thinking, partly complicit, partly just too abstract in their head to influence buying decisions, to varying degrees.
If someone knew quite a bit about the unimaginable suffering caused by the industry though, and continued funding it without thinking "well, that's not good, it would be better if I would stop contributing to that", then this is malicious behavior. What else could I conclude?
So I would attribute varying responsibility to the consumer, based on how much they know, and on how easy it would be for them to choose alternatives.
Clothes and cars are a bit complicated since they are often essential, and the more ethical options are more expensive so not everyone can afford them. I'd still say those who could buy the more ethical options ought to do so.
Meat and coffee are resource intensive goods with cheaper alternatives which cause way less suffering.
So yes, paying people to mistreat humans without need is cruel. Paying people to brutalize animals to death is cruel too. One logically can't justify the other.
Where have we gone wrong that people always feel the need to argue for putting animals into literal death camps, of all things? I just wish people would strive to make the world a less cruel place for once, but that is just too much to ask for in this society.
There might be a relevant difference in the fact that most animals can run/move away from something that hurt them, and pain might be the necessary evolutionary adaptation to facilitate that. A plant or fungus just has chemical responses, which probably don't rely on being sentient. Our skin most likely produces melanin without being sentient, after all.
I guess the interesting question is whether there are any processes in plants that somehow imply sentience. Afaik science hasn't found a decisive example yet.
I'd say it's wrong to harm other humans because it's extremely likely that they feel pain and emotions in a similar way as I do. Roughly the same applies to chimps, and dogs, and pigs too. Maybe the emotions aren't as complex, but they clearly behave according to the basic ones like joy and fear. The response to pain is basically the same as ours. So harming them without a necessity to do so seems cruel to me.
Even if plants were more conscious than animals, the animals have to be fed with tons of plants to begin with. Eating plants directly minimizes plant and animal deaths.
Have you seen their tabloids and what they write about refugees? Bild is and has always been the largest "traditional media" voice for right wing populism and against left wing politics in Germany.
It's weird. My first thought was this looks like a video game cutscene character.
For climate activists it's very unlikely, but there are people who believe Africans are the issue because of high birth rates, conveniently ignoring that richer countries do the most damage by far.
Billions of ordinary humans still consume much more fossil fuels and meat than the super rich. And that consumption is giving unsustainable industries even more money for lobbying and to stay profitable.
This sense of futility is whats keeping their business model alive as long as possible. It's what's giving them the largest benefit they could possibly hope for. Don't do their lobbying work for them.
If there were no billionaires, our unsustainable consumption would still drive climate change, just a bit slower. Just pointing at them isn't sufficient. We need political and individual action.
The argument also kinda sounds like "well if there are people that literally kill thousands of people, then me hurting a few people in my life doesn't make much of a difference." Which is a quite silly.
Sustainable technologies like public transport, EVs and meat alternatives also need demand to grow, to become normalized, widely accessible and cheaper through scaling. Early adopters have a much larger effect on the overall trajectory than late adopters.
If progressive people just do what's practicable to have a positive impact where they can, that has a large effect. And many already do. We need more of that.
It's surprising that they seemingly haven't managed to turn grok into a full far right propaganda machine yet, after billions of investment.
When you use the /init command in claude code, it'll scan your whole project and write a CLAUDE.md, which is basically an overview of the project contents and architecture that it uses as context when responding to queries.
I certainly had this feeling too when I had an ego death experience. Though I attribute that more to my mind being formed by evolution around an ego/actor, and when this ego is missing, the subconscious might have to come up with a plausible alternative to keep the brain circuits working/comprehend reality. I even thought in terms of "he" instead of "I" about "myself" (the person), but my consciousness felt like a separate universal "they" in this moment. Neat experience for sure.
But to me it still seems most likely that as life is entirely formed by evolution, and things like instincts, pain, memories, agency, emotions, reasoning, model of the world, personalities etc. have advantages for survival, they are selected for in their most basic forms, get more sophisticated over time and eventually coalesce into what we experience as consciousness.
So to me it seems very very likely that most animals have consciousness, with varying degrees of sophistication regarding those abilities. Some animals might even surpass the sophistication of humans on some of these abilities, if the evolutionary pressure for that was stronger for them than for us.
On plants I'm more sceptical because their behavior doesn't need to be nearly as complex as that of moving animals for survival I believe, it can probably rely much more on "hardcoded" behavior. Although reality loves it's exceptions and complications so who knows.
Yeah that is another view on that I guess.
To me theres still a big difference between harvesting a carrot and cutting the throat of a pig. But all aspects of living have an impact on the environment and animals and humans, to different degrees, of course. So I agree that we're all guilty and that nobody is perfect, and that vegans aren't automatically good people and meat eaters aren't automatically bad people. Some vegans kinda forget that they also ate meat for many years without considering the harms and that they might still do other problematic things too so they really don't have an excuse to look down on people.
That's a shame, I think it's an interesting argument that opens some questions, so let's challenge it a bit (somewhat ironic given the post, I know, but its just too intriguing).
Your position is basically that humans are the only species that has consciousness, correct? That means if you take a dog or chimpanzee or whatever and burn it alive, they wouldn't feel a thing in your view because they're not conscious? Just to make sure we are on the same page.
How do you actually know that humans are definitely the only species that has consciousness and that other species are fundamentally incapable of it? I'd be very interested in the papers and proof or even just arguments for that.
As I see it, we even have the same fundamental issue with human consciousness. Where are the papers, what is the proof that all humans are conscious, or even just one human? I'm not aware of any hard proof.
You just know you're conscious, and you assume from that that all other humans are too. But you can't actually prove anyone else is conscious.
By your argumentation and standard of evidence, putting humans on factory farms would actually be fine too, as long as we don't have hard proof that they are actually conscious.
But I don't think it works for the following reason:
The argument "other animals are not conscious, therefore their treatment isn't an ethical issue" relies on that definitely being the case. If there's still a chance that they are conscious, it remains an ethical issue. You actually need hard proof.
The counter position "other animals might be conscious, so we must not (potentially) torture them by the millions/billions in case they are" doesn't have that requirement.
The burden of proof lies where do don't give the benefit of the doubt, not where you do.
You could say that they might be conscious, sure. But raising animals takes a lot more animal feed than just eating plants directly, so industrially farmed meat would still be the most unethical choice either way.
We have to eat something, eating plants directly minimizes both animal deaths and plant deaths.
Even if only plants had consciousness and animals didn't, factory farming would be still be the most unethical source of food.
Does that mean that from your perspective, the US shouldn't have attacked and defeated the Nazis in WW2 and should have allowed them to stay in power and do their thing instead?
This kinda seems like preferring to sacrifice the human rights of the innocent, to protect the human rights of their murderers.
Ah yes, the finnish police fined someone for disturbing a political event and this is of course comparable to systematic human rights abuses and massacres like tiananmen square.
Like there are enough troubling developments in the west we could discuss, but instead we get highly misleading RT propaganda stories to whitewash authoritarianism.
Factory farms are still way worse, because of the permanent confinement in cramped cages full of shit, the cruel treatment for their whole lives, and the insane scale. It's like this event happening every second.
Just look at the Dominion documentary and compare it to this. We're the worse culture.
There are newer models that can charge to 80% in 15 min. It will probably take a while until fast chargers are widespread, but this is where things are going.
I just don't understand why such companies can still sell in the EU after such severe safety violations.
Besides YouTube, I only really used Reddit in the last years. Since the API change I basically switched over to Lemmy. About once a month I browse one of like 3 subreddits for a few minutes, but that's it.
I'm glad I deleted my Facebook account years ago and never really got into Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and all that shit.
So basically just YouTube now.