view the rest of the comments
World News
A community for discussing events around the World
Rules:
-
Rule 1: posts have the following requirements:
- Post news articles only
- Video links are NOT articles and will be removed.
- Title must match the article headline
- Not United States Internal News
- Recent (Past 30 Days)
- Screenshots/links to other social media sites (Twitter/X/Facebook/Youtube/reddit, etc.) are explicitly forbidden, as are link shorteners.
-
Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post. The key points in 1-2 paragraphs is allowed (even encouraged!), but large segments of articles posted in the body will result in the post being removed. If you have to stop and think "Is this fair use?", it probably isn't. Archive links, especially the ones created on link submission, are absolutely allowed but those that avoid paywalls are not.
-
Rule 3: Opinions articles, or Articles based on misinformation/propaganda may be removed. Sources that have a Low or Very Low factual reporting rating or MBFC Credibility Rating may be removed.
-
Rule 4: Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, anti-religious, or ableist will be removed. “Ironic” prejudice is just prejudiced.
-
Posts and comments must abide by the lemmy.world terms of service UPDATED AS OF 10/19
-
Rule 5: Keep it civil. It's OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It's NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
-
Rule 6: Memes, spam, other low effort posting, reposts, misinformation, advocating violence, off-topic, trolling, offensive, regarding the moderators or meta in content may be removed at any time.
-
Rule 7: We didn't USED to need a rule about how many posts one could make in a day, then someone posted NINETEEN articles in a single day. Not comments, FULL ARTICLES. If you're posting more than say, 10 or so, consider going outside and touching grass. We reserve the right to limit over-posting so a single user does not dominate the front page.
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
Lemmy World Partners
News !news@lemmy.world
Politics !politics@lemmy.world
World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world
Recommendations
For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/
- Consider including the article’s mediabiasfactcheck.com/ link
And livestock
Livestock is more useful than tobacco and golf courses
Debatable. Depending on the golf course location and management, there could be an argument for them at least providing some space for biodiversity.
Tobacco doesn't produce as much of use, but also doesn't come with the same methane emissions, or slurry runoff.
Which golf course isn't an artificial mix of sand, roads and monoculture full of pesticides? I would guess they also have traps against wildlife that may damage their perfect loan.
I was definitely thinking of a hypothetical golf course; I'm not under any illusions that the vast majority are biodiversity deserts.
We have way more than enough livestock. Humans should be eating less meat.
Sorry for not being clear; that was the point I was trying to make.
Livestock produces high quality nutrients.
Not for the same resource input it doesn't.
Conveniently forget the fact that many vital amino-acids are really hard to get by, without meat in your diet.
Vital eh?
I'd forgotten that I ought to be dead.
Well, I'd advise you to get yourself checked for deficits at least.
Humans can synthesize all amino acids themselves. Any external source is optional, and outside of extreme scenarios like quickly gaining muscle mass nothing you need to think about.
If you do find yourself in the extreme scenario, you will have no problems picking from the huge range of non-meat protein sources.
No they can't synthesize them all, thats sort of the problem. Those that can't be synthesized are the essential amino acids. Most, but not all of these essential acids are easily available in a vegan diet. Those that aren't as available, well, better find a good strategy to get enough of those.
Hm, it seems you are right. Not sure how I didn't know that.
So is my understanding correct in that there are 3 groups of substances: vitamins, minerals, essential amino acids; that you would have a bad time without? Bringing the total to calories, vitamins, minerals, essential amino acids, and water?
In that case I suppose a minimum number of Livestock products are helpful in fulfilling that, though as the increase of supplemented products probably reduces the need, the amino acids can still be chemically synthesized, right?. The main criticism is also the amount, we are consuming (way) more livestock products than needed to fulfill nutritional requirements. Especially meat would still be optional, right?
I don't actually have experience with vegan diets, I've always figured eating little meat would get me most of the way with least of the effort.
Livestock is one of the reasons we can feed everyone...
Quite the reverse in fact! Livestock produces fewer calories and nutrients per square meter than crops.
No it does not. You cannot eat nor consume what livestock does, period. Their entire diet is shit you cannot eat, it's literally roots, and stalks and basically garbage your body cannot use. They also drink non portable water.
On earth we have a land shortage. If you grow animal feed, that could have also been a foodcrop. In terms of land efficiency, meat is an order of magnitude less efficient.
We do not grow crops for just animal feed, the majority of what they consume is waste byproducts from what you are able to consume. It's around 85% of their diet. So unless you have a way to all of a sudden eat stalks or roots or leaves and grass, it's wasted if not feed to livestock.
I'll try to take a more nuanced and in depth look.
As a start, I'm relatively sure the main use of a large chunk of agricultural land is solely food production. A cursory search gives data like this image
from this page.
It's reasonable to assume some of the plant waste of food crops feeds some of the livestock, but if that much land is exclusively used for animals it would seem reasonable we could at least double the human plant food production with a reduced animal portion in that land use.
From a pure energy efficiency perspective animals are around 10%, so if you take half of produced plant calories and use them for animals, that will result in 10x fewer calories of animal products than the other half of the plants. This lines up with the energy spread by end human food product, which seems to be something like this:
By the raw numbers and that coarse approach we expect 75% ⸱ 10% : 25% ≈ 1:3.3, the actual data seems to be slightly worse at 1:4.
So it seems to me we are using something like 25% of the land area to produce 80% of the food, just by not passing it through animals. And if you are right then some of the animal calories are even supplemented with the plant waste of those 25%.
The raw energy approach is actually quite a good approach by now, because we can use technology to transition most things into each other. You can pass plant waste into animals and loose 90% of the energy, or convert cellulose into (digestible) sugar and get the full energy. Or use it for other things that take energy like drug production. Using the plant waste on animals still brings that opportunity cost that means more land is used in other places to get the cellulose for those alternative uses, or to produce sugar the old fashioned way from more dedicated crops.
Traditionally you had land that you could not use for agriculture but could use to graze goats, you had plant material you could not use for anything but feeding animals. Animals were our bioreactors to transform that material or land into usable products. Now we have better chains of use.
The energy approach will finally be complete when we can turn plant material straight into animal products, with methods like lab grown meat or artificial milk, but we are not there yet. When we are, the energy balance of those should be close to that of plants and this entire problem simplifies greatly.
much of the land that is attributed to animal agriculture is grazing land, and is not suitable for growing crops.
much of the waste that is fed to animals does not have a better use, as you are suggesting. for instance, soycake. no one wants to eat that, but it's high protein. giving it to animals conserves resources.
this assumes some sort of centralized economy, instead of letting farmers give wasted apples to their neighbors horses or whatever.