Spyke

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Is it morally wrong to be non-vegetarian?

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The way I see it is similar. If everyone stopped eating animal products today like turning off a faucet, literal millennia of selective breeding guarantees there will be animal suffering. A better option is to reduce overall consumption while also working towards reversing the changes we've made to the animals to turn them into products. At this time, dairy cows overproduce milk making milking a requirement for the animals health and safety. Poultry is a whole other discussion that isn't quite as environmentally problematic but way more ethically problematic that requires a whole extra level of discussion towards improvement

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Is it morally wrong to be non-vegetarian?

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Coming in quite hot and using a lot of assumptions, my friend

Is there a serious problem with the standard agricultural practices of large dairy farms of systematic forced pregnancy, either destruction of the calf or adding to the birth cycle once old enough, and other layers of mistreatment that should neither be condoned or continued? Absolutely and we should all strive to get the whole process abolished.

That said, most cow breeds overproduce milk for their calfs needs and it is unhealthy for them to stay full at all times. Milking them is a kindness and until we can undo eons of selective breeding, needs must.

I have an endless list of problems with the agricultural world and its practices but the reality is if we all went pure vegan right now, more animals would suffer in preventable ways. Tapering off the demands for the products of big agriculture, especially by forcing the market towards small farms treating the animals with kindness, and working towards reversing the changes we've caused in the breeds that make them more product than animal is the best route to end exploitation of animals.

If you care about animals, shaming people does fuck all. Educating them without assuming malice goes a whole lot farther towards your point of view. Also recognizing that literal millennia of selective breeding will not be undone in a single generation and the process of reversing is slow and fraught with its own challenges that need to be addressed.

Tldr: educate yourself beyond the rhetoric and hanlons razor. Idealism is great for concept but will fail on the reality when put into practice

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Why do two languages get mistaken for one another?

As an English speaker who's dabbled in other Germanic and Latin languages, absolutely. I dislike Dutch specifically because it will either start to read like English or German then fall off the deep end real quick.

Portuguese (at least Brazilian) looks and sounds like a mashup between Spanish and French.

This is kind of to be expected when you look at the history of how these languages evolved. The reason Japanese and Mandarin would be so easily confused is that the writing system was imported from China and there are a lot of words that either still look like the parent words or very similar. The same for the Latin and Germanic languages as well as their related offshoots. The history of invasion, language mixing, adaptations, and standardization has produced languages that are in various levels of mutual understanding.

fantasy

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Sci-fi & fantasy worldbuilding

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The way the arcane ascension series does it, I think, is a good balance. On the surface, the magic just works in its limited scope. Under the hood, the intricacies go deep and allows you to essentially rewrite the magic or reality itself.

Part of the plot is the main character figuring out these underlying mechanisms and the fragility of their entire civilization

 

The way it's written makes me think of jrpgs. Magic use requires the mana to cast it so you have a natural limiting factor. The main character is able to read the underlying code and reprogram it at a certain point

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Why do two languages get mistaken for one another?

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Not on the same level considering the difference in how the Eastern and Western languages are formed.

I'm generalizing a bit here into Western being Germanic or Latin based languages and Eastern being primarily Chinese.

Western languages typically use symbols that represent the component sounds of a language (phonemes) where Eastern languages use symbols for whole words or concepts (morphemes). So you would have a single symbol for house or tree instead of a series of symbols for the words.

This means that the word spelling would change in Western languages as the spoken language changes more rapidly and show a large difference between two closely related languages in their spelling for the same word.

Conversely, in Eastern languages, the spoken language is not as closely tied to the words used. (To translate into English as best I can: The character for house could be pronounced like house, home, building, cave, lean-to, castle, shed, etc depending on where it's being said). So, you'd have, after a few generations, the same character pronounced two very different ways with two different meanings

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What do you do for work?

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Well, it'll have to be thoughtfully arranged. They can't just pop down to Joanns to pick up more so they can't waste it. Sure you can get stuff online but you can't feel if that batch will twist how you want it to. It's just not the same

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Missing the old times

The good/bad news is that the old "I swear to God you bootlickers need a good ass kicking" and "Jesus is ashamed at what you do in his name" styles of country are making a comeback

And for inclusivity, there's a sub genre devoted to the "you tried to end my people but I will not die" style which includes focuses on lgbtqia+, women in general, pagans/wiccans, indigenous groups, other, and various combinations therein

The bog witches, fae creatures, and {unknown description of Appalachian denizens} have been putting out some good stuff

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A sudden epiphany.

For me, it was realizing that while I was smart, the shit level of schooling was more an impediment to me gaining the skills needed to continue excelling and I continue to be surrounded by absolute dipshits wherever I go.

In school, I didn't have to study to pass and there was no real incentive to learn how to. This bit me when it came to university because the lectures didn't cover everything that was to be tested on. Turns out, trying is a skill I never needed until then.

Then, in the workforce, I'm constantly exhausted dealing with people who are at best functionally literate and I have to cater to their understanding of literally everything. No desire to either understand the problem or fix the root cause, just make the thing do what they want right then.