The industry cares a lot about its image in general. For instance the beef industry has a dedicated team watching social media for beef related conversations online 24/7
Using checkoff money, NCBA has developed what it has called a “Digital Command Center” – a sophisticated online monitoring system that tracks media outlets and social media for more than 200 beef-related topics. Hosted in Denver in a space that “looks like a military operations center combined with the TV section at an electronics retailer”, according to a recent Cattlemen’s Beef Board mailer sent to ranchers, the command center alerts members of NCBA’s issues management and media relations team whenever stories or online chatter rise above a certain threshold. It’s staffed 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with personnel redundancies built in to make sure someone’s always watching.
This industry is so horrifying that the current state is them trying to hide what they used to say in the open. Some quotes of the past are unthinkable to say aloud today, despite the industry very much still thinking that way
National Hog Farmer 1976
"Forget the pig is an animal. Treat him just like a machine in a factory. Schedule treatments like you would lubrication. Breeding season is the first step in an assembly line. And marketing like the delivery of finished goods"
March 1978’s National Hog Farmer
"The breeding sow should be thought of, and treated as, a valuable piece of machinery whose function is to pump out baby pigs like a sausage machine."
You don't think the industry cares about the impact of photos like this one from the article? 99% of people outside of the industry have no idea of the scale of the industry or that calf hutches even exist
People have a very idealistic view of what goes on in any portion of animal agriculture
One very recent study (Ventura et al., 2016), involving face-to-face interviews with 50 members of the Canadian public that had little or no experience with dairy farming, highlighted zero-grazing and cow-calf separation as particularly contentious for the participants. In fact, attitudes regarding the welfare of cattle on dairy farms, which were initially primarily positive, declined after the participants visited a dairy farm.
The lawsuit is asking the court to order the Trump administration to withdraw the advice and forbid government agencies from using them in any future decisions while they develop new guidelines in compliance with the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA), as has been the longstanding practice.
The previous somewhat more independent commission had reports that encourage more plant-based proteins over animal-based proteins. Not that we'll necessarily get a commission like that
I think there must be some other issue since the original site actually loads without JS, or at least it does for me when I tested it. The archive one doesn't of course
As an aside: not sure this a good comparison because veganism is not about the effects on oneself, it's about the effects from animal agriculture on non-human animals and society
Aside to the aside: vegan BBQ is also quite good as BBQ sauce itself is almost always vegan
Together, poultry slaughtering and processing companies reported more severe injuries to the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) than many industries that are popularly recognized as hazardous, such as sawmills, industrial building construction, and oil and gas well drilling
Infectious diseases originating from animals (zoonotic diseases) have emerged following deforestation from agriculture. Agriculture can reduce its land use through intensification, i.e., improving resource use efficiency. However, intensive management often confines animals and their wastes, which also fosters disease emergence. Therefore, rising demand for animal-sourced foods creates a “trap” of zoonotic disease risks: extensive land use on one hand or intensive animal management on the other
Significantly harder to achieve a ban of all advertising, but I do agree that companies would just skirt a law like this anyway they can. I think what Amsterdam has done is a better model (just banning ads for meat entirely)
Indeed, around 1% of free-range are actually on pasture, but fully pasture-based systems are also significantly worse on resource and land efficiency, so the stats are worse for pasture systems. They also require an increase in the number of chickens
There is really not an at scale way to get there. Production and consumption levels of animal products have to go down
Per capita consumption of animal products have risen significantly over the past few decades. Even if 0 new people were born starting this instance, there will still be large populations for decades to come
Should we just sit around waiting for decades for a population to decrease to eventually happen and let the environment burn in the meantime?
The problem is much more than how things are produced, it's what you produce in the first place. There is no way to do things at scale that does not turn into factory farming or make the environmental impacts even worse. This whole study talks about even some tiny changes making the emissions significantly higher
Per capita production levels and thus consumption levels have to change if we want a better world
Deleted my response before your edit since I misunderstood what you were saying
Per capita consumption of animal products have risen significantly over the past few decades. There is not much getting around that the consumption levels need to change
Even if 0 new people were born starting this instance, there will still be large populations for decades to come
Inflation is actually significantly higher on many animal products, so the gap is almost certainly stronger than that.
Partially because of problems everyone has been warning about that the industry around the world has happily ignored in order to keep growing. For instance, for beef, drought related to climate change has been a big factor. For various different types of meat because of disease which these system help create and spread
And increases to plant prices affect meat more because meat production inherently requires more plants for feed (it takes a lot of feed per farm animal since most of the feed energy is lost)
How can a project realistically tell if a contributor used an open-weight model and self hosted it without it being a de facto ban on AI for anyone not heavily involved in the project?
Open-weight models are still giving up control. For one, all LLM outputs are generally recognized to not be copy writable which undermines copy-left license. Additionally, unlike open source software it's a lot harder to look at what represented in these models. A model can easily be designed to make specific plausible mistake as intentional backdoors, act worse on tasks relevant to an industry a country / maker cares about (like Fable has been designed), etc.
That is a common misconception. The costs are generally lower both in real world and modeling. Local or seasonal has less to do with it. Things like rice, tofu, beans, lentils, etc are generally cheaper. Things like beyond meat are only pricier because of R&D costs and economies of scale. Even still those have reached parity in a number of countries
Evidence from studies published between 2000 and 2025 indicates that whole-food PBDs [plant-based diets] are generally associated with lower food expenditures than omnivorous diets across diverse geographic contexts
Based on primary data (n = 1040) collected through an online survey, representative of the Portuguese population, through logistic regressions, it was possible to conclude that plant-based consumers, particularly vegan, are associated with lower food expenditures compared to omnivorous consumers. In fact, plant-based consumers are shown to spend less than all other consumers assessed
For a savory crepe that'd probably work. For a sweet one I'd assume a neutral oil would be more ideal
The industry cares a lot about its image in general. For instance the beef industry has a dedicated team watching social media for beef related conversations online 24/7
Inside big beef’s climate messaging machine: confuse, defend and downplay
This industry is so horrifying that the current state is them trying to hide what they used to say in the open. Some quotes of the past are unthinkable to say aloud today, despite the industry very much still thinking that way
National Hog Farmer 1976
March 1978’s National Hog Farmer
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2022/08/forget-they-are-an-animal
You don't think the industry cares about the impact of photos like this one from the article? 99% of people outside of the industry have no idea of the scale of the industry or that calf hutches even exist
People have a very idealistic view of what goes on in any portion of animal agriculture
https://www.journalofdairyscience.org/article/S0022-0302(17)30193-5/fulltext
The previous somewhat more independent commission had reports that encourage more plant-based proteins over animal-based proteins. Not that we'll necessarily get a commission like that
Can try other archives to see the site. Original site seems to load without Javascript for me (not archive.is) so I am not sure what the issue is
https://ghostarchive.org/archive/ZF2td
https://megalodon.jp/2026-0821-2054-09/https://www.greenqueen.com.hk:443/us-dietary-guidelines-trump-administration-lawsuit-meat-dairy-influence/
I think there must be some other issue since the original site actually loads without JS, or at least it does for me when I tested it. The archive one doesn't of course
As an aside: not sure this a good comparison because veganism is not about the effects on oneself, it's about the effects from animal agriculture on non-human animals and society
Aside to the aside: vegan BBQ is also quite good as BBQ sauce itself is almost always vegan
Huh, strange it loads for me
Can try looking at an archived of it instead https://archive.is/MtYYw
The meat, dairy, etc. industry are horrifying all around the world. Some countries are just better at playing it down than others
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/18/uk-has-more-than-1000-livestock-mega-farms-investigation-reveals
Both for the non-human animals as well as the workers
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/28/revealed-exploitation-of-meat-plant-workers-rife-across-uk-and-europe
https://www.hrw.org/report/2019/09/04/when-were-dead-and-buried-our-bones-will-keep-hurting/workers-rights-under-threat
Related: The infectious disease trap of animal agriculture
Significantly harder to achieve a ban of all advertising, but I do agree that companies would just skirt a law like this anyway they can. I think what Amsterdam has done is a better model (just banning ads for meat entirely)
Indeed, around 1% of free-range are actually on pasture, but fully pasture-based systems are also significantly worse on resource and land efficiency, so the stats are worse for pasture systems. They also require an increase in the number of chickens
There is really not an at scale way to get there. Production and consumption levels of animal products have to go down
Copying my comment from earlier in this thread:
Per capita consumption of animal products have risen significantly over the past few decades. Even if 0 new people were born starting this instance, there will still be large populations for decades to come
Should we just sit around waiting for decades for a population to decrease to eventually happen and let the environment burn in the meantime?
The problem is much more than how things are produced, it's what you produce in the first place. There is no way to do things at scale that does not turn into factory farming or make the environmental impacts even worse. This whole study talks about even some tiny changes making the emissions significantly higher
Per capita production levels and thus consumption levels have to change if we want a better world
Deleted my response before your edit since I misunderstood what you were saying
Per capita consumption of animal products have risen significantly over the past few decades. There is not much getting around that the consumption levels need to change
Even if 0 new people were born starting this instance, there will still be large populations for decades to come
Inflation is actually significantly higher on many animal products, so the gap is almost certainly stronger than that.
Partially because of problems everyone has been warning about that the industry around the world has happily ignored in order to keep growing. For instance, for beef, drought related to climate change has been a big factor. For various different types of meat because of disease which these system help create and spread
And increases to plant prices affect meat more because meat production inherently requires more plants for feed (it takes a lot of feed per farm animal since most of the feed energy is lost)
How can a project realistically tell if a contributor used an open-weight model and self hosted it without it being a de facto ban on AI for anyone not heavily involved in the project?
Open-weight models are still giving up control. For one, all LLM outputs are generally recognized to not be copy writable which undermines copy-left license. Additionally, unlike open source software it's a lot harder to look at what represented in these models. A model can easily be designed to make specific plausible mistake as intentional backdoors, act worse on tasks relevant to an industry a country / maker cares about (like Fable has been designed), etc.
So why help by giving training data and give a unnerving lever of control of open source projects to a handful of companies?
That is a common misconception. The costs are generally lower both in real world and modeling. Local or seasonal has less to do with it. Things like rice, tofu, beans, lentils, etc are generally cheaper. Things like beyond meat are only pricier because of R&D costs and economies of scale. Even still those have reached parity in a number of countries
https://www.academia.edu/3067-1345/3/1/10.20935/AcadNutr8137#sec7-Acad.Nutri.-3-319439
For some specific studies
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2021-11-11-sustainable-eating-cheaper-and-healthier-oxford-study
For some studies looking at spending around the world
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0921800915301488?via=ihub [US]
https://agrifoodecon.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40100-022-00224-9