JubilantJaguar @ JubilantJaguar @lemmy.world

European. Contrarian liberal. Insufferable green. History graduate. **I nev

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2 yr. ago

This rather thin article has been discussed elsewhere. The basic argument boils down to, "Natural landscapes need humans on hand to manage them". I don't question the good faith of the authors but personally I'm finding it hard to take that premise seriously. With time, nature will regenerate without our help. And yes, on a planet of 8 billion humans and still rising, less people is always going to be better, period.

on Windows they keep waking up when nobody asks for it

Good to hear.

found only in New Zealand

And only just, given the massacre by rats and cats and possums. The few remaining kakapo are all confined to islands off the mainline and watched over individually. This species is above all a major conservation test case.

See the last 10 minutes of episode 1 of Attenborough's Life of Birds (it's been shared online) for a great introduction.

That's helpful. These estimates do tend to vary a bit depending on assumptions (type of plane or car, what occupancy etc). The 2t I quoted was slightly high. My point was that there's no other way to emit 1 tonne in 6 hours.

Apart from the methane problem, all livestock farming takes, by definition, a massive amount more land than arable farming to produce the same amount of food. On a stressed planet of 9 billion people, there simply is not enough land to feed everyone with red meat.

First, well done for taking it seriously and doing your bit.

The point of the post (I think) is simply to illustrate that certain actions are much, much more important than others. Anecdotally, there are still plenty of people out there who believe that, say, turning off a couple of (low-energy) lights, or "recycling" a plastic bag, are somehow major good deeds that allow them to kick their feet up and celebrate with a steak. There's still way too much ignorance about all this, IMO.

In reality (as you seem to understand), some gestures are far more important than others. Ditching red meat (and dairy) really is a big deal. Everyone who claims to care about this problem should at least consider doing it.

This is a nice articulation of nihilism.

The paradox being that the attitude is both justified and... certain to only make the problem worse.

lasts much longer which is important as a single household

This is an often-overlooked argument for veganism. If you plan carefully, you literally don't need a fridge.

Roughly true, but you're eliding a very, very problematic activity into "travel": aviation.

Per kilometer, flying is pretty carbon intensive (about the same as driving - basically: the extra efficiency of being packed into a tin can is offset by exponentially higher wind resistance at high speed). The problem is that airplanes allow you to burn up massive distances really quickly.

A single transatlantic flight will blow a 2-ton1-ton hole in your personal carbon footprint. That's 10-20% of an average European's annual footprint - or 100% a very large chunk of a sustainable annual footprint. For anyone who flies more than once a year (i.e. likely a bunch of people here), cutting down on flying is likely to be the single biggest thing you can do for the climate.

in places like France and Japan

This is completely wrong.

You talk exclusively about Japan, so even if your anecdata is representative, then my point is not "completely" wrong. Let's begin by using language correctly.

Pretty convincing arguments. Thanx.

Tells you that you can take your social media back from big tech then casually recommends Bluesky. Gimme a break.

I generally agree but I still feel it's important to keep some perspective. Bluesky is not the solution but it's definitely progress compared to existing corporate platforms (because it has real fundamental differences - several articles posted here went into detail about this).

IMO the best argument against Bluesky is that it will suck up the oxygen for other, better, solutions. That's a fair theory but it seems to me that there's plenty of market share to go round right now. Everyone is still on the evil corporate platforms.

RSS still exists and it’s still beautiful.

Agree, I use it every day.

I'll be honest, a quick review of this thread did not clearly reveal who was downvoting who for what. My position, and this other person's, is that downvoting opinions is bad manners and toxic to healthy discussion. If there was genuinely harmful advice there, then OK, downvote away.

(Obviously these days the word "harmful" is thrown around liberally so this probably just puts us back to square one.)

Freedom of speech as an absolute

Of course it's not absolute, where did I say otherwise? Straw man.

paradox of tolerance

This just feels like a fancy reference deployed to back up intolerance.

Exactly my point. The virtual equivalent of taping someone's mouth shut because you happen not to agree with what they say.

Their original staff was a bunch of pretty serious journalists sourced from the BBC.

Similar to: chough

It's a type of bird but good luck knowing how to pronounce it. Ahh, English.

A few years ago I considered learning Greek. Abandoned the plan because Greek has the triple whammy:

• quite a hard language, with tricky grammar and different alphabet (phonetics easy tho)
• only spoken in one small country - not very useful (tho good for general culture - 6% of English lexicon comes from Greek)
• the locals all speak English (coz tourism) so you'll have trouble getting a chance to progress

So: good luck.

Rigth - and downvotes fixes it? This is lunacy and detrimental to discussion/sharing.

Thank you. But anecdotally, it seems there are few of us who think this. I still don't understand why.