Gotta agree with this one. The fundamental issue is that Derek is so obviously right, here. The essence of what makes slavery bad is that it's treating humans like livestock, and that is bad. The reason it is bad is that *it is not good to be treated like livestock,* which obviously holds for sentient mammals other than humans. Even granting all of Zvi's factual stipulations, the abolitionists (and the abolitionist comparisons) are fundamentally in the right here. The certain foreknowledge that Egyptian cotton imports to Britain would cause a collapse in support for the Confederacy doesn't actually change the fact that the only reason to oppose that outcome is basically because you endorse Obvious Evil.
And morality aside, banning lab-grown meat entirely is an innovation-stifler even if the trajectory is predictably to facilitate abolition. Making lab grown meat a superior product such that meat-bans are lest costly requires that one be allowed to sell it.
Factory farming is a moral catastrophe. Even so, I don't think meat should be banned, because I don't like bans in general and as Timothy notes below, Pigouvian taxes (or even just phasing out absurd subsidies) would already move the needle quite a bit. But what should happen is not even the interesting question: a meat ban will not happen in this century. This is a total red herring. There is literally no evidence that anything even remotely resembling a meat ban is ever likely to pass in industrialized nations as we know them. This is ridiculous. People who are freaking out should just spend an hour learning about the state of US animal agriculture and the market for plant-based alternatives and cultivated animal products to be reassured. This is not coming. I repeat, this is not coming. The lab-grown meat bans are not an oversized response to a real threat; they are pure, totally uncut rent-seeking by some of the worst people on earth.
Zvi's point is that if you're coming for my hamburgers and I don't agree with your reasoning, it makes sense for me to take *some* action to try to oppose you, even if this particular action is sort of dumb. You might be right that I'm morally reprehensible, or you might not, but it doesn't change the incentives.
I think we might disagree on sentient. Almost everyone agrees we shouldn't farm apes or dolphins for meat. What about shrimp?
The trouble with said point is that it only makes sense to care about this being the proverbial camel's nose under the tent if you add "....and that's bad" at the end. Even if all parties stipulate that this is, in fact, a path that many on the pro-lab-grown-meat side hope for, you can't disentangle the moral valence from the desirability of the terminal result.
I'm sure that farmed-meat ban advocates would agree that a huge amount of work would need to be done as to both quality and cost before a widespread ban became politically feasible, which is clearly a win-win for all sides regardless of any other action taken (it either reduces the perceived downsides of a ban or even without such a ban substitutes ethical for unethical meat consumption), *unless* you're essentially on team Cruelty is Good, Actually, and even any marginal decrease in meat quality in a future universe where a ban were feasible is categorically unacceptable. Hence the analogy to opposition to Egyptian Cotton: there's not really a non-evil rationale to oppose the further development of substitute goods that make the moral tradeoffs less materially costly by restricting their marketing.
(As to shrimp: I mean, we probably shouldn't farm them either (inter alia because it's horrifically destructive and IMO they don't taste good enough to warrant it and are too much effort to eat) but I'm pretty sure that everyone would agree that arthropods are way lower on the totem pole than vertebrates when it comes to capacity for suffering and attendant welfare import. One issue at a time.)
In a personal note, lab grown meat triggers my disgust reflex much more than factory farming (which also pushes that button). I need to interrogate why that is - I probably have an unrealistic image of what it involves, so maybe some PR and education will help lab meat proponents. (I do love seitan and soy bacon, for what it's worth.)
Whether it's a bad take or not depends heavily on whether his prediction comes true. If we end up in a world with really unhealthy "meat" that is expensive, it's a worse world in many ways. As someone who isn't a vegetarian, I only see very small benefit to lab-cultivated meat. I agree it would be nice for vegans to have an option, and if it were really good and/or really cheap, that's a win win. I agree with Zvi that the most likely outcome is attempts to ban real meat or make it comparatively expensive even if the lab meat is clearly not ready for mass consumption.
It’s a bad take morally and empirically. Morally because Zvi makes light of a moral catastrophe for the sake of marginal aesthetic differences. Empirically because there is no evidence cultured meat would be less healthy than conventional meat, but more importantly it will be a long while until it gets cheaper and any sort of ban is implemented, if ever. And even assuming (implausibly) that it gets exponentially cheaper in the short run, there are good reasons for conventional meat to be more expensive! It generates more externalities and people’s willingness-to-pay for animal welfare friendly products is greater than zero. Anyone who’s spent a few minutes reading about those issues knows why it’s a bad take.
Unless, like me, you don't value animal suffering as even similar to human suffering. Then it's not really a big deal if animals suffer. I don't want animals to suffer, or choose to cause it unnecessarily. I also think worse of people who are willing to cause excess suffering in animals (because it seems to speak to their willingness to be cruel in general, which can harm humans).
Your outlook on life isn't the only one that exists, and people aren't failing to be moral just because they disagree with your morals.
ETA: Denying meat to people who depend on it for nutrition is a harm that lab grown meat likely will not alleviate. Meat is incredibly useful as compact nutrients and provides a number of nutrients that would be difficult or impossible for much of the world to obtain without it. Just because 1st world rich people can afford to supplement and source a large variety of alternatives doesn't mean that option is available to others. Expensive lab meat, even assuming it provides the same nutrition, isn't going to be a good alternative for the world's poor or likely even the middle class. $4/lb meat is something many families can afford, but $20/lb is not.
Edited: I forgot Zvi thinks it will have the same effect even if it's more expensive. That only works if conventional meat is outright banned or becomes nearly taboo, which for now is just a sci-fi scenario. Just look around for a fraction of a second. It's bonkers.
As for nutrition, the whole point of cultured meat is that it can be indistinguishable (in fact, better through fine tuning, no need for hormones and antibiotics, etc). If it's unaffordable and conventional meat is unavailable and there are no equally healthy alternatives (all huge IFs), then we have a problem. But the problems for now have to do with meat consumption, not sci-fi scenarios.
Finally, no need to value animal welfare as much as human welfare to consider factory farming a moral atrocity. Not even close. But thank you for making your outlook explicit.
Greenpeace are obviously the bad guys, but isn't it very worrying that the Philippino Supreme Court can't see through them. It is a well established democracy with high academic standards for judges, they should understand how bad this is.
> The missile defense systems we built? They work. One should update the general world model accordingly, the government was capable of building such a thing for real. This is relevant both for missile defense and for other capabilities.
Worth noting in this case that arrow is in large part a product of the israeli government, so not clear how much you should conclude about the US government (which in particular has a much harder time recruiting good people).
In particular, Israeli military research has the advantage that they can pick out and conscript the top high school grads each year (conscription is just three years but it often leads to staying on for much longer, especially if you want to go to the elite units). Of the 5-8 people on the international physics Olympiad from my year, 2-4 signed up for nine year weapons engineering programs iirc.
"For those who are instead principled libertarians who genuinely wouldn’t turn this around on a moment’s notice, well, I am sorry that others have ruined this and so many other principled stands."
Just to defend the Vegans/want-to-ban-meat people, it's not necessarily a contradiction to be a libertarian and want to ban meat. Depending on how bad one thinks, factory farming is/how much moral worth animals have.
Personally, I would love a Pigouvian tax on animal products to try to internalize the suffering that is possibly caused (So, probably high taxes on chicken and eggs, low taxes on Beef and dairy). But evaluating how much suffering there is or if there is any at all is a difficult question, of course.
Not to mention these are already super subsidized foods in the US. Removing the subsidies for growing soy, feed corn, and other feed stocks and moving them to actual foods humans eat directly (all the veggies you buy at the store are considered “specialty crops” today, and have no subsidies) would already move the needle heavily, feed an order of magnitude more actual humans (because trophic levels exist), and give meat and dairy it’s true cost. This wouldn’t even be inserting a pigouvian tax (which I would be morally for, but I am also conservative so I would first wait to see what just subsidy removal would do to the demand).
I also think instead of a pigouvian tax, anyone who eats meat should at regular intervals have to kill, dress, and process an animal, as well as spend time hanging out with well cared for pigs / cows / and chickens. If you do all this and still want to consume meat, that’s morally consistent with me and I have no problem with you. If you are unwilling to slaughter the animals you want to eat, you probably have some ethical blind spots you need to work out.
In the olden days, more people grew up on farms and had a closer relationship with farm animals, and with animal slaughter and milk and egg production. I don't think people then avoided eating meat because of their closer involvement with the grittier aspects of animal killing and exploitation.
When you are in a war, you have to kill people or you will be killed. When you aren’t in a war, that same behavior is considered absolutely psychopathic and will get you sentenced to lifetime imprisonment or even death for harming others.
Similarly when you are starving, you eat what you can get. When food is excessive, you can start making ethical choices to move the food production towards more ethical and sustainable meals. And if you think killing animals isn’t a big deal, I recommend you go try it yourself, and go kill and dress a pig or cow and let me know how you felt about it afterwards. It is extremely well documented that slaughterhouse workers have an excess amount of PTSD, depression, PITS, and anxiety from having to do that work. If it wasn’t a big deal (and didn’t have such a high case of debilitating injuries) it would be a much more popular job.
People who used to work on farms didn’t really have a choice to not eat the animals. Luckily for us, that has changed recently, and plenty of people still grow up on farms. I’ve met plenty of them who stop eating meat or at least completely avoid buying meat from CAFOs due to having to slaughter an animal they were close with in the past and feeling horrible guilt and sadness about it. Likewise I’ve met some people who grew up on farms have no issues with it. The number of people who do care is trending up, and the number of people actually willing to pick up a knife and kill animals is at an all time low. Without all the abstractions in the middle taking people away from the violence of their actions, the number of people who wouldn’t eat meat would increase an order of magnitude or more.
I grew up in a family that regularly slaughtered our own home-grown animals, particularly chickens. I also agree about removing subsidies, because I dislike distortions generally and much prefer natural pricing, even if it affects my eating habits.
That said, making vegans process their own food, including washing and cutting up their own carrots or whatever isn't proving anything when it's harder for them to eat. All of us benefit from having someone else help process our foods, and I don't think making meat eaters process animals is really making such a bold statement.
Ah, I think you are misunderstanding me. I am arguing that there is a distortion in the understanding of suffering and violence inherent in meat production because most people have never had to do it, and it would traumatize and disturb many people if they actually understood what is happening every time they want wings / a burger / etc and many would choose not to continue doing the killing of animals once they understood. There’s a reason people won’t stand there and watch films like Dominion depicting the operations of slaughterhouses.
I obviously don’t think everyone should grow, harvest, and clean all of their own food all the time (I do a lot of it myself from seed to table, and it is hard work), but I do think people should grow / raise some food at least do it once, to understand the work and value going into it.
Yes, I do agree about knowing where our food comes from. People who unironically think food comes from a grocery store are failing to understand a key component of all human life, and that can distort their thinking on all kinds of issues.
That seeing meat production would cause many people to want to avoid it doesn't seem like a strong argument to me. Many people seeing childbirth would feel the same, as would many people seeing surgery. I don't think we would want to do away with childbirth and surgery though.
Expensive youth baseball is bad for the same reason expensive youth anything is bad.
Parents with money will try to spend money to improve the relative position of their children by any method available.
When new methods are made available, parental spending increases, increasing the expected cost of having children. I'd guess that the resulting cumulative impact on fertility rates is going to be much more important long-term than considerations about youth physical fitness.
Giving parents more money will never move the needle on fertility if it isn't combined with measures (either regulations or cultural norms) that prevent parents from expending the windfall entirely on attempts to improve their child's position in these Red Queen's Races.
Supposedly this was the secret to Marilyn Monroe's superstardom. In the early days of film, the obvious choices for headliners were successful stage actors. But stage acting requires consistency, being able to deliver the same performance with no mistakes night after night. Monroe instead was high variance, often flubbing her lines and frustrating her experienced stage colleagues. Of course in film all that matters is your best take. No idea if those stories are accurate, but very interesting to see the same thing playing out up a meta level for Taylor Swift and music.
Dragon's Dogma (the original), despite being janky as hell, got some credit for simulating parts of a fantasy world that other games did not. While this isn't great gameplay it sometimes helps with narrative creation. For example, before leaving a town for a three-day journey, you'd need to buy or prepare food, ensure you had supplies like arrows and up-to-date equipment, etc. The fights were still repetitive and mediocre, but lent to the Tolkien-esque "we must make for Bree, take care for the roads are dangerous at night" feel enough to be bearable.
So I was very excited about the second one. Unfortunately, the save system makes it borderline unplayable. Worse, it turns out that with a longer game, those repetitive fights and 3-day journeys go from interesting to routine extremely quickly. Especially when many of the quests are simply "travel to this place you've already been from this this other place you've already been."
The result of the F-35 and our missile defense programs makes me skeptical of all the hand-wringing about our navy that was going around a couple months ago, in terms of us being able to build modern effective ships.
The missile defense programs seem to suffer the same issue as navy stuff - we can build a small number of elite things, but unclear if we can scale it up to mass production. The missile defense is an order of magnitude more expensive than the missiles it's shooting down.
Being an order of magnitude more expensive seems reasonable when you're getting an order of magnitude better results. If you can hit them without them hitting you (as opposed to trading blows and hoping you can hold out longer than they can), that's a shockingly huge advantage.
Or another way to think of it - unimpeded missiles blow up targets that are a lot more than one order of magnitude more valuable than the cost of the missiles.
Canadians noticed they had an issue in 2021 when 30k (highest estimate I've seen) went to protest in front of Parliament hill. In January.
And the gov't responded by calling them extremists and freezing bank accounts of those who directly or indirectly supported the convoy. It was quite effective, unfortunately.
Is anyone surprised that conditions have declined since then?
2. Commander is truly terrible, and has been awful for the competitive ecosystem as WotC makes a lot more money from it than from running a ProTour or anything like it. Still, 2 of the 3 philosophical principles are pretty solid, although I don't think the Ban List adds any credibility to it.
3. In matters pertaining to National Defense, you can generally add large error bars to any "knowledge" you think you have. It is a lot of people's job to create maximum obfuscation. Noah Smith seems to grasp this.
4. I reached a similar conclusion about the film Civil War and have avoided it. TC's take on it was weird, but not weird enough to make me go want to see it. Fall Guy was fun. Challengers is at the top of my "to see" list.
5. Self-driving is definitely underrated thanks (in part) to Elon overselling it for a decade but it is definitely the first (of many) multi-trillion dollar innovations that AI could genuinely catalyze. Hyped to see it grow.
Oh did I not mention Balatro? I'm basically done with it. I have it in Tier 2 on the theory that a small dose of it is cheap and universally fun, but it's not a great high-level game.
OK, I more-or-less agree with that. I just thought it had a hint of genius given the level of fun delivered from "poker hands but roguelike". I think I'm going to try and beat all the challenges, but the final achievement is ultra-grindy and the opposite of what fun means to me.
I think your meat point continues to be spot on (heh) as the comments here highlight. Going from “factory farming is bad!” directly to “tax meat consumption” (even non-factory meats?) pretty clearly shows that the concern is that anyone eats meat. There are ways to improve the farming industry, none of which involve taxing meat across the board.
Some yes, others no. Depends on what is being subsidized and how. But that’s not the point. The point is you can’t complain about taxes if you’re fine with subsidies. If you’re opposed to both then I don’t understand your complacency with the state of animal agriculture.
I believe I just stated I have a problem with subsidies. Subsidies are bad and cause distortions and externalities, just like taxes, and I oppose them even if they are subsidizing things I like on that grounds; it has to be shown that they do a lot more harm than good, and most cannot demonstrate that.
What I dislike even more are disingenuous people who intentionally obfuscate their intentions and desire to dictate to others behind a veil of ever shifting claims of their goals and faux rationality.
You and Zvi are being completely paranoid about the prospects of people taking away your steaks. This is disappointing coming from otherwise smart and sane people. This is especially ironic when the issue under discussion is industry lobbies pushing for rent seeking legislation preventing the free market from catering to the preferences of informed meat eaters who’d like to do away with the cruelty and environmental externalities. That some constituencies are considering Pigouvian taxes tells you something about how horrific the industry is; that you and Zvi are worried about premium steaks tells something about you.
For the record, I’m a cultured meat pessimist and skeptic. That’s precisely why I absolutely don’t buy the bizarre fears that Zvi is feeding into.
> Bloomberg is my pick for the most underrated. I have them at or near the top of my list. They do not always get it right, but I feel I can relax when reading there in a way I can’t in most other places
Hm. I also like Bloomberg, but as far as I know they _still_ haven't retracted their 2018 Super Micro story. In fact I see that in 2021 they actually doubled down. The original article was Obvious Nonsense as stated. Even being extremely generous in assuming they meant something more sensible, it was a huge claim which implied the existence of physical objects which should have straightforward to produce and which were never produced. It's hard for me to relax reading Bloomberg as long as these articles remain uncorrected.
> No one gets fired for buying Google, and this must be common knowledge, so marketing got the statement it needed no matter the objections elsewhere.
This should read “sales got the statement” (McKenzie specifically says it was sales who got what they wanted, over the objections of engineering, marketing, etc.)
Re streaming services: I just started listening to the vinyl albums that I bought in high school after completely abandoning the format for about 35 years. And I got hooked on vinyl. I've started listening to new albums on streaming services so I can decide what to buy on vinyl. I'm not one of those people who thinks vinyl sounds better or is warmer or whatever (plus I'm 55, my ears wouldn't be able to tell the difference anyway). I just enjoy vinyl better. It drives me nuts that I can't really explain why.
I bet artists would love more people doing what I'm doing. New vinyl usually cost about $30.
Factorio was created for a very specific audience. Wube never puts it on sale, they never really market it, and they've spent years working obsessively to make it appeal even more to that audience. And from what I understand, Wube has been doing very well.
A game like Slay the Spire, as I understand it, is about adapting your strategy on the fly, based on incomplete information. It's about turning chance opportunities into a plan.
Factorio is a game about managing complexity and growth. For about 5 minutes, it looks like a 2D version of Minecraft. Chop down a tree. Mine some ore. But you immediately automate those first steps, and the automation rapidly grows in scale and complexity. Pretty soon, your early compromises are blocking your growth. Do you accept mediocrity? Do you rebuild part of what you've done? And can you afford the resources to fight off the endless army of bugs tearing through your walls?
If you make good decisions, you'll soon be throwing around millions of crafted items. You'll have a network of trains zipping everywhere. Logistic robots will continually replenish your inventory. You'll design a system to resupply and repair your defenses automatically. And with luck, maybe you'll launch a rocket after 50 or 70 hours.
Factorio is a bit like programming. But it's more like being in charge of technical strategy at a growing company. Can you meet your immediate needs simply and efficiently, while still leaving open a path to grow 10x?
Patio11, however, is playing modded Factorio. Specifically, the notorious "Space Exploration" mod, which requires building an interplanetary logistics network. It's notorious for taking 250-500 hours to beat. Beating it requires a keen sense of priotization and organization. So yeah, a Space Exploration save is probably more complex than some startups.
If all this sounds fascinating, I strongly advise you to run now, and never look back. It's called Cracktorio for a reason.
Awesome roundup as usual, but as you put it with TC, your take on cultivated meat is your worst take.
Gotta agree with this one. The fundamental issue is that Derek is so obviously right, here. The essence of what makes slavery bad is that it's treating humans like livestock, and that is bad. The reason it is bad is that *it is not good to be treated like livestock,* which obviously holds for sentient mammals other than humans. Even granting all of Zvi's factual stipulations, the abolitionists (and the abolitionist comparisons) are fundamentally in the right here. The certain foreknowledge that Egyptian cotton imports to Britain would cause a collapse in support for the Confederacy doesn't actually change the fact that the only reason to oppose that outcome is basically because you endorse Obvious Evil.
And morality aside, banning lab-grown meat entirely is an innovation-stifler even if the trajectory is predictably to facilitate abolition. Making lab grown meat a superior product such that meat-bans are lest costly requires that one be allowed to sell it.
Factory farming is a moral catastrophe. Even so, I don't think meat should be banned, because I don't like bans in general and as Timothy notes below, Pigouvian taxes (or even just phasing out absurd subsidies) would already move the needle quite a bit. But what should happen is not even the interesting question: a meat ban will not happen in this century. This is a total red herring. There is literally no evidence that anything even remotely resembling a meat ban is ever likely to pass in industrialized nations as we know them. This is ridiculous. People who are freaking out should just spend an hour learning about the state of US animal agriculture and the market for plant-based alternatives and cultivated animal products to be reassured. This is not coming. I repeat, this is not coming. The lab-grown meat bans are not an oversized response to a real threat; they are pure, totally uncut rent-seeking by some of the worst people on earth.
Imagine any politician who has enough ambition to even imagine himself campaigning in Iowa coming out in favor of a meat ban.
They’re taking your steaks away!!!!!!!!!!
Zvi's point is that if you're coming for my hamburgers and I don't agree with your reasoning, it makes sense for me to take *some* action to try to oppose you, even if this particular action is sort of dumb. You might be right that I'm morally reprehensible, or you might not, but it doesn't change the incentives.
I think we might disagree on sentient. Almost everyone agrees we shouldn't farm apes or dolphins for meat. What about shrimp?
The trouble with said point is that it only makes sense to care about this being the proverbial camel's nose under the tent if you add "....and that's bad" at the end. Even if all parties stipulate that this is, in fact, a path that many on the pro-lab-grown-meat side hope for, you can't disentangle the moral valence from the desirability of the terminal result.
I'm sure that farmed-meat ban advocates would agree that a huge amount of work would need to be done as to both quality and cost before a widespread ban became politically feasible, which is clearly a win-win for all sides regardless of any other action taken (it either reduces the perceived downsides of a ban or even without such a ban substitutes ethical for unethical meat consumption), *unless* you're essentially on team Cruelty is Good, Actually, and even any marginal decrease in meat quality in a future universe where a ban were feasible is categorically unacceptable. Hence the analogy to opposition to Egyptian Cotton: there's not really a non-evil rationale to oppose the further development of substitute goods that make the moral tradeoffs less materially costly by restricting their marketing.
(As to shrimp: I mean, we probably shouldn't farm them either (inter alia because it's horrifically destructive and IMO they don't taste good enough to warrant it and are too much effort to eat) but I'm pretty sure that everyone would agree that arthropods are way lower on the totem pole than vertebrates when it comes to capacity for suffering and attendant welfare import. One issue at a time.)
Well put.
In a personal note, lab grown meat triggers my disgust reflex much more than factory farming (which also pushes that button). I need to interrogate why that is - I probably have an unrealistic image of what it involves, so maybe some PR and education will help lab meat proponents. (I do love seitan and soy bacon, for what it's worth.)
Whether it's a bad take or not depends heavily on whether his prediction comes true. If we end up in a world with really unhealthy "meat" that is expensive, it's a worse world in many ways. As someone who isn't a vegetarian, I only see very small benefit to lab-cultivated meat. I agree it would be nice for vegans to have an option, and if it were really good and/or really cheap, that's a win win. I agree with Zvi that the most likely outcome is attempts to ban real meat or make it comparatively expensive even if the lab meat is clearly not ready for mass consumption.
It’s a bad take morally and empirically. Morally because Zvi makes light of a moral catastrophe for the sake of marginal aesthetic differences. Empirically because there is no evidence cultured meat would be less healthy than conventional meat, but more importantly it will be a long while until it gets cheaper and any sort of ban is implemented, if ever. And even assuming (implausibly) that it gets exponentially cheaper in the short run, there are good reasons for conventional meat to be more expensive! It generates more externalities and people’s willingness-to-pay for animal welfare friendly products is greater than zero. Anyone who’s spent a few minutes reading about those issues knows why it’s a bad take.
Unless, like me, you don't value animal suffering as even similar to human suffering. Then it's not really a big deal if animals suffer. I don't want animals to suffer, or choose to cause it unnecessarily. I also think worse of people who are willing to cause excess suffering in animals (because it seems to speak to their willingness to be cruel in general, which can harm humans).
Your outlook on life isn't the only one that exists, and people aren't failing to be moral just because they disagree with your morals.
ETA: Denying meat to people who depend on it for nutrition is a harm that lab grown meat likely will not alleviate. Meat is incredibly useful as compact nutrients and provides a number of nutrients that would be difficult or impossible for much of the world to obtain without it. Just because 1st world rich people can afford to supplement and source a large variety of alternatives doesn't mean that option is available to others. Expensive lab meat, even assuming it provides the same nutrition, isn't going to be a good alternative for the world's poor or likely even the middle class. $4/lb meat is something many families can afford, but $20/lb is not.
Edited: I forgot Zvi thinks it will have the same effect even if it's more expensive. That only works if conventional meat is outright banned or becomes nearly taboo, which for now is just a sci-fi scenario. Just look around for a fraction of a second. It's bonkers.
As for nutrition, the whole point of cultured meat is that it can be indistinguishable (in fact, better through fine tuning, no need for hormones and antibiotics, etc). If it's unaffordable and conventional meat is unavailable and there are no equally healthy alternatives (all huge IFs), then we have a problem. But the problems for now have to do with meat consumption, not sci-fi scenarios.
Finally, no need to value animal welfare as much as human welfare to consider factory farming a moral atrocity. Not even close. But thank you for making your outlook explicit.
Greenpeace are obviously the bad guys, but isn't it very worrying that the Philippino Supreme Court can't see through them. It is a well established democracy with high academic standards for judges, they should understand how bad this is.
> The missile defense systems we built? They work. One should update the general world model accordingly, the government was capable of building such a thing for real. This is relevant both for missile defense and for other capabilities.
Worth noting in this case that arrow is in large part a product of the israeli government, so not clear how much you should conclude about the US government (which in particular has a much harder time recruiting good people).
In particular, Israeli military research has the advantage that they can pick out and conscript the top high school grads each year (conscription is just three years but it often leads to staying on for much longer, especially if you want to go to the elite units). Of the 5-8 people on the international physics Olympiad from my year, 2-4 signed up for nine year weapons engineering programs iirc.
"For those who are instead principled libertarians who genuinely wouldn’t turn this around on a moment’s notice, well, I am sorry that others have ruined this and so many other principled stands."
Just to defend the Vegans/want-to-ban-meat people, it's not necessarily a contradiction to be a libertarian and want to ban meat. Depending on how bad one thinks, factory farming is/how much moral worth animals have.
Personally, I would love a Pigouvian tax on animal products to try to internalize the suffering that is possibly caused (So, probably high taxes on chicken and eggs, low taxes on Beef and dairy). But evaluating how much suffering there is or if there is any at all is a difficult question, of course.
Not to mention these are already super subsidized foods in the US. Removing the subsidies for growing soy, feed corn, and other feed stocks and moving them to actual foods humans eat directly (all the veggies you buy at the store are considered “specialty crops” today, and have no subsidies) would already move the needle heavily, feed an order of magnitude more actual humans (because trophic levels exist), and give meat and dairy it’s true cost. This wouldn’t even be inserting a pigouvian tax (which I would be morally for, but I am also conservative so I would first wait to see what just subsidy removal would do to the demand).
I also think instead of a pigouvian tax, anyone who eats meat should at regular intervals have to kill, dress, and process an animal, as well as spend time hanging out with well cared for pigs / cows / and chickens. If you do all this and still want to consume meat, that’s morally consistent with me and I have no problem with you. If you are unwilling to slaughter the animals you want to eat, you probably have some ethical blind spots you need to work out.
In the olden days, more people grew up on farms and had a closer relationship with farm animals, and with animal slaughter and milk and egg production. I don't think people then avoided eating meat because of their closer involvement with the grittier aspects of animal killing and exploitation.
When you are in a war, you have to kill people or you will be killed. When you aren’t in a war, that same behavior is considered absolutely psychopathic and will get you sentenced to lifetime imprisonment or even death for harming others.
Similarly when you are starving, you eat what you can get. When food is excessive, you can start making ethical choices to move the food production towards more ethical and sustainable meals. And if you think killing animals isn’t a big deal, I recommend you go try it yourself, and go kill and dress a pig or cow and let me know how you felt about it afterwards. It is extremely well documented that slaughterhouse workers have an excess amount of PTSD, depression, PITS, and anxiety from having to do that work. If it wasn’t a big deal (and didn’t have such a high case of debilitating injuries) it would be a much more popular job.
People who used to work on farms didn’t really have a choice to not eat the animals. Luckily for us, that has changed recently, and plenty of people still grow up on farms. I’ve met plenty of them who stop eating meat or at least completely avoid buying meat from CAFOs due to having to slaughter an animal they were close with in the past and feeling horrible guilt and sadness about it. Likewise I’ve met some people who grew up on farms have no issues with it. The number of people who do care is trending up, and the number of people actually willing to pick up a knife and kill animals is at an all time low. Without all the abstractions in the middle taking people away from the violence of their actions, the number of people who wouldn’t eat meat would increase an order of magnitude or more.
I grew up in a family that regularly slaughtered our own home-grown animals, particularly chickens. I also agree about removing subsidies, because I dislike distortions generally and much prefer natural pricing, even if it affects my eating habits.
That said, making vegans process their own food, including washing and cutting up their own carrots or whatever isn't proving anything when it's harder for them to eat. All of us benefit from having someone else help process our foods, and I don't think making meat eaters process animals is really making such a bold statement.
Ah, I think you are misunderstanding me. I am arguing that there is a distortion in the understanding of suffering and violence inherent in meat production because most people have never had to do it, and it would traumatize and disturb many people if they actually understood what is happening every time they want wings / a burger / etc and many would choose not to continue doing the killing of animals once they understood. There’s a reason people won’t stand there and watch films like Dominion depicting the operations of slaughterhouses.
I obviously don’t think everyone should grow, harvest, and clean all of their own food all the time (I do a lot of it myself from seed to table, and it is hard work), but I do think people should grow / raise some food at least do it once, to understand the work and value going into it.
Yes, I do agree about knowing where our food comes from. People who unironically think food comes from a grocery store are failing to understand a key component of all human life, and that can distort their thinking on all kinds of issues.
That seeing meat production would cause many people to want to avoid it doesn't seem like a strong argument to me. Many people seeing childbirth would feel the same, as would many people seeing surgery. I don't think we would want to do away with childbirth and surgery though.
Canada exit fee tweet is basically false: https://www.yahoo.com/news/users-spread-unfounded-claims-impending-163724801.html
I came here to say this. I'm a Canadian CPA and follow both tax and politics quite closely, and this was the first I ever heard of it.
Expensive youth baseball is bad for the same reason expensive youth anything is bad.
Parents with money will try to spend money to improve the relative position of their children by any method available.
When new methods are made available, parental spending increases, increasing the expected cost of having children. I'd guess that the resulting cumulative impact on fertility rates is going to be much more important long-term than considerations about youth physical fitness.
Giving parents more money will never move the needle on fertility if it isn't combined with measures (either regulations or cultural norms) that prevent parents from expending the windfall entirely on attempts to improve their child's position in these Red Queen's Races.
Childrens' Sports Expenditures as Swaziland Funereal Rites.
Re: Taylor Swift and high variance art
Supposedly this was the secret to Marilyn Monroe's superstardom. In the early days of film, the obvious choices for headliners were successful stage actors. But stage acting requires consistency, being able to deliver the same performance with no mistakes night after night. Monroe instead was high variance, often flubbing her lines and frustrating her experienced stage colleagues. Of course in film all that matters is your best take. No idea if those stories are accurate, but very interesting to see the same thing playing out up a meta level for Taylor Swift and music.
Dragon's Dogma (the original), despite being janky as hell, got some credit for simulating parts of a fantasy world that other games did not. While this isn't great gameplay it sometimes helps with narrative creation. For example, before leaving a town for a three-day journey, you'd need to buy or prepare food, ensure you had supplies like arrows and up-to-date equipment, etc. The fights were still repetitive and mediocre, but lent to the Tolkien-esque "we must make for Bree, take care for the roads are dangerous at night" feel enough to be bearable.
So I was very excited about the second one. Unfortunately, the save system makes it borderline unplayable. Worse, it turns out that with a longer game, those repetitive fights and 3-day journeys go from interesting to routine extremely quickly. Especially when many of the quests are simply "travel to this place you've already been from this this other place you've already been."
Yeah, that all checks. If I'd known that I wouldn't have bought it, as that is not an experience I was looking to have in any case.
The result of the F-35 and our missile defense programs makes me skeptical of all the hand-wringing about our navy that was going around a couple months ago, in terms of us being able to build modern effective ships.
Also, the Star Control 2 sequel kickstarter link is broken, here it is - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pistolshrimp/free-stars-children-of-infinity
The missile defense programs seem to suffer the same issue as navy stuff - we can build a small number of elite things, but unclear if we can scale it up to mass production. The missile defense is an order of magnitude more expensive than the missiles it's shooting down.
Being an order of magnitude more expensive seems reasonable when you're getting an order of magnitude better results. If you can hit them without them hitting you (as opposed to trading blows and hoping you can hold out longer than they can), that's a shockingly huge advantage.
Or another way to think of it - unimpeded missiles blow up targets that are a lot more than one order of magnitude more valuable than the cost of the missiles.
Yes, but if our adversaries can outproduce us on mass production of drones and dumb bombs and we can't or won't hit back, we'll still end up losing.
Canadians noticed they had an issue in 2021 when 30k (highest estimate I've seen) went to protest in front of Parliament hill. In January.
And the gov't responded by calling them extremists and freezing bank accounts of those who directly or indirectly supported the convoy. It was quite effective, unfortunately.
Is anyone surprised that conditions have declined since then?
Misc. thoughts-
1. Still no Balatro on the gaming round-up?
2. Commander is truly terrible, and has been awful for the competitive ecosystem as WotC makes a lot more money from it than from running a ProTour or anything like it. Still, 2 of the 3 philosophical principles are pretty solid, although I don't think the Ban List adds any credibility to it.
3. In matters pertaining to National Defense, you can generally add large error bars to any "knowledge" you think you have. It is a lot of people's job to create maximum obfuscation. Noah Smith seems to grasp this.
4. I reached a similar conclusion about the film Civil War and have avoided it. TC's take on it was weird, but not weird enough to make me go want to see it. Fall Guy was fun. Challengers is at the top of my "to see" list.
5. Self-driving is definitely underrated thanks (in part) to Elon overselling it for a decade but it is definitely the first (of many) multi-trillion dollar innovations that AI could genuinely catalyze. Hyped to see it grow.
Great post!
Oh did I not mention Balatro? I'm basically done with it. I have it in Tier 2 on the theory that a small dose of it is cheap and universally fun, but it's not a great high-level game.
OK, I more-or-less agree with that. I just thought it had a hint of genius given the level of fun delivered from "poker hands but roguelike". I think I'm going to try and beat all the challenges, but the final achievement is ultra-grindy and the opposite of what fun means to me.
I think your meat point continues to be spot on (heh) as the comments here highlight. Going from “factory farming is bad!” directly to “tax meat consumption” (even non-factory meats?) pretty clearly shows that the concern is that anyone eats meat. There are ways to improve the farming industry, none of which involve taxing meat across the board.
Animal ag is heavily subsidized. Subsidies are negative taxes. Do you like seeing your tax dollars at work to sustain massive externalities?
All agriculture is massively subsidized. Do you have problems with all those other subsidies, too?
I do, on the grounds they are subsidies and cause massive distortions and externalities.
Some yes, others no. Depends on what is being subsidized and how. But that’s not the point. The point is you can’t complain about taxes if you’re fine with subsidies. If you’re opposed to both then I don’t understand your complacency with the state of animal agriculture.
I believe I just stated I have a problem with subsidies. Subsidies are bad and cause distortions and externalities, just like taxes, and I oppose them even if they are subsidizing things I like on that grounds; it has to be shown that they do a lot more harm than good, and most cannot demonstrate that.
What I dislike even more are disingenuous people who intentionally obfuscate their intentions and desire to dictate to others behind a veil of ever shifting claims of their goals and faux rationality.
You and Zvi are being completely paranoid about the prospects of people taking away your steaks. This is disappointing coming from otherwise smart and sane people. This is especially ironic when the issue under discussion is industry lobbies pushing for rent seeking legislation preventing the free market from catering to the preferences of informed meat eaters who’d like to do away with the cruelty and environmental externalities. That some constituencies are considering Pigouvian taxes tells you something about how horrific the industry is; that you and Zvi are worried about premium steaks tells something about you.
For the record, I’m a cultured meat pessimist and skeptic. That’s precisely why I absolutely don’t buy the bizarre fears that Zvi is feeding into.
> Bloomberg is my pick for the most underrated. I have them at or near the top of my list. They do not always get it right, but I feel I can relax when reading there in a way I can’t in most other places
Hm. I also like Bloomberg, but as far as I know they _still_ haven't retracted their 2018 Super Micro story. In fact I see that in 2021 they actually doubled down. The original article was Obvious Nonsense as stated. Even being extremely generous in assuming they meant something more sensible, it was a huge claim which implied the existence of physical objects which should have straightforward to produce and which were never produced. It's hard for me to relax reading Bloomberg as long as these articles remain uncorrected.
> No one gets fired for buying Google, and this must be common knowledge, so marketing got the statement it needed no matter the objections elsewhere.
This should read “sales got the statement” (McKenzie specifically says it was sales who got what they wanted, over the objections of engineering, marketing, etc.)
Yep, typo.
Re streaming services: I just started listening to the vinyl albums that I bought in high school after completely abandoning the format for about 35 years. And I got hooked on vinyl. I've started listening to new albums on streaming services so I can decide what to buy on vinyl. I'm not one of those people who thinks vinyl sounds better or is warmer or whatever (plus I'm 55, my ears wouldn't be able to tell the difference anyway). I just enjoy vinyl better. It drives me nuts that I can't really explain why.
I bet artists would love more people doing what I'm doing. New vinyl usually cost about $30.
The benefit of vinyl is that is selects for albums that are good all the way through.
Factorio was created for a very specific audience. Wube never puts it on sale, they never really market it, and they've spent years working obsessively to make it appeal even more to that audience. And from what I understand, Wube has been doing very well.
A game like Slay the Spire, as I understand it, is about adapting your strategy on the fly, based on incomplete information. It's about turning chance opportunities into a plan.
Factorio is a game about managing complexity and growth. For about 5 minutes, it looks like a 2D version of Minecraft. Chop down a tree. Mine some ore. But you immediately automate those first steps, and the automation rapidly grows in scale and complexity. Pretty soon, your early compromises are blocking your growth. Do you accept mediocrity? Do you rebuild part of what you've done? And can you afford the resources to fight off the endless army of bugs tearing through your walls?
If you make good decisions, you'll soon be throwing around millions of crafted items. You'll have a network of trains zipping everywhere. Logistic robots will continually replenish your inventory. You'll design a system to resupply and repair your defenses automatically. And with luck, maybe you'll launch a rocket after 50 or 70 hours.
Factorio is a bit like programming. But it's more like being in charge of technical strategy at a growing company. Can you meet your immediate needs simply and efficiently, while still leaving open a path to grow 10x?
Patio11, however, is playing modded Factorio. Specifically, the notorious "Space Exploration" mod, which requires building an interplanetary logistics network. It's notorious for taking 250-500 hours to beat. Beating it requires a keen sense of priotization and organization. So yeah, a Space Exploration save is probably more complex than some startups.
If all this sounds fascinating, I strongly advise you to run now, and never look back. It's called Cracktorio for a reason.