I don't really understand all the hate/cynicism towards vegan leather. Like yeah obviously plastic is bad for the environment, but raising cows and dumping thousands of tons of chromium into rural waterways for the tanning process aren't good either. Leather is actually far worse for the environment by some metrics.

Plus there's the fact that most leather is sealed with plastic/acrylic to increase its longevity anyway, unless you're buying something wicked expensive.

Let's suppose that you actually genuinely care about reducing the amount of plant suffering in the world. If this is the case, surely you would be vegan, because 3/4 of our total agricultural land is used to grow plants to support animal agriculture. (Since grass feels pain just like soybeans do, this includes pasture land.) So far fewer plants would be killed if everyone was vegan.

Of course, you don't actually live your life in a manner consistent with believing plants feel pain. I don't think anyone would think twice about swerving into some flowers to avoid a dog in the street for fear of causing suffering to the flowers.

I agree that Israel bad, but can someone explain what the war crime is here? I'm not asking as a gotcha, just confused

Yes. No animal was intentionally harmed or killed to be turned into oil. This puts it in the same category as foraged deer antlers or cicada wings, or I guess compost where you found a squirrel carcass and added it to the pile.

You could argue that animals are harmed by the process of extracting and burning fossil fuels, and thus it's not vegan. But this isn't very convincing to me, since that's a secondary effect and not necessary to the process of consuming fossil fuels. (Or at least not necessary in the same way that killing chickens is necessary in order to make chicken sandwiches, for example.) And if you start worrying about a big web of consequences of your actions, then it seems like you're mostly just adding stress to your life without actually making the world a better place.

There are plenty of other spaces where vegans can respond to "plants feel pain" and "but what about lions" a million times a day, but that gets old pretty quick. The goal is to have a space where vegans can just interact amongst themselves, which necessarily requires some degree of gatekeeping

This isn't true for the vast majority of commercial honey unfortunately. If you're buying it from the supermarket, or any producer that operates at even medium scale, they'll clip the wings of the queen so that the hive is unable to leave even if they want to.

So cute!

Call me a radical communist hippie but I think these animals shouldn't be skinned alive, anally electrocuted, and gas chambered just so people can wear fur coats

That's ok, totally understandable. Just read the comment again

In regards to Signal, this is largely not true. Sealed sender has been signal's metadata hiding protection for like 6 years or something. The only information signal has is your phone number, your account creation time, and the last time you contacted their servers.

They also have a server implementation on github, so it seems to be open source to me. (I could be missing something though)

You are right though, that it uses centralized servers and requires a phone number, which are sticking points for a lot of people.

"Waives" instead of "waves"

ee cummings?

This doesn't really make sense to me, what do you mean? Client-side you do different computation for sealed sender delivery/receipt. What's your normal standard of trust that a hosted, open source project is running the same code that they've made public?

I think if they store any metadata that we don't know about, the lie runs very very deep, like to conspiracy theory levels that don't really make sense for a registered nonprofit: https://signal.org/bigbrother/

Tyson foods. They raise, torture, and kill 40 million animals per week. There's probably no other entity in the history of our planet that's responsible for more total suffering.

Imo "backyard eggs" are really small potatoes, especially when like 98% of eggs globally come from factory farms. But even in that case, egg-laying hens are basically bred to suffer. They lay an egg every 1-2 days, compared to like once a month in the wild, which takes a huge amount of energy and nutrients. And we've bred them to produce eggs too big for their bodies, so that even when they're treated really well, the vast majority of hens have bone fractures.

That's why animal sanctuaries will usually either feed the eggs back to the hens, or give them medication to stop them from laying at all.

Of course, this is on top of the fact that 100% of egg-laying hen breeders, everywhere, kill the males shortly after birth because they can't lay eggs. See this for more information.

"No it isn't"

"Yes it is"

Argument won, great job 👍

I'll just say one last time: none of this information ever leaves your client device, so even if signal wanted to know the phone number of a message sender, or which group chats you're in, they have no access to this because it all never leaves your phone. As long as you're running the correct client code, the server can be arbitrarily malicious, and it doesnt matter.

Have a great day

Right, this is a very common mindset to have. There are two things to think about that come to mind for me:

First is that (almost) everyone thinks factory farming is bad, but around 75% of all land animals in animal agriculture are factory farmed. In the US, it's around 99.7%. In particular it's a very safe bet that if you eat a random chicken, while they were alive they were in abject misery.

Second is I think animals have an inherent right to life that we shouldn't infringe upon. I wouldn't suddenly think it's ok if someone shot and instantly killed a dog, even if they were loved their entire life and only had "one bad day." It also wouldn't make it ok if someone ate the dog afterwards, because that doesn't really matter to the dog. All animals want to live, and killing them unnecessarily is wrong.

For real I don't really understand all the hate PETA gets. I think the most you can accuse them of is not being strategic in their messaging, and doing some pretty dumb stunts over the years. Everyone I've ever met who's involved with PETA has seemed like genuinely a good person who's trying to help animals.

Of course there's also the "PETA kills pets" stuff, but if you do one google search you'll see this is astroturfed lies/exaggerations from the meat industry, so I don't pay that any mind.

I bought a class 1.111B domain from the .xyz registrar: 6 to 9 digits followed by .xyz, so you can use your phone number. They sell them for $1/year, and $1/year for whois privacy. So I paid $20 to have my domain for the next decade :)

I mean I think bees are harmed in the production of honey, it's just that most people don't care about bee welfare. Commercially they're bred by crushing the male to extract semen, and any operation above hobby scale will clip the wings of the queen so that the hive can't escape.

Then you necessarily need to replace their ideal food source with something that is nutritionally much worse for them (basically sugar water), and then hope that they survive on that long enough to make more honey for us to take.