Smoking sucks and I'm glad I've never done it, but I'm worried that this will push even more people to the far right because they will feel patronized as fuck.
Also not sure if a flourishing black market is much better. Seems like an enormous source of income for organized crime which might not be the best thing.
Imo it would be much better to only ban it at places where there are a lot of people and do proper education in schools so that children actually understand why it's a terrible idea.
Seems like the first number is just grid-scale battery storage, while the second includes home batteries, which grew faster in the last years. Grid scale takes more time to get approval, build, connect.
Is it more cruel to kick a dog or to cut its throat?
To be fair, it's culturally very normalized to just buy meat and not think about how the animal was treated at all. But I also think people who are genuinely opposed to animal cruelty would agree that cutting their throats is a very cruel thing to do (aside from the treatment on factory farms).
Meat eaters usually lie somewhere between
The first two aren't animal abusers imo, but the last two are.
Meat production currently increases by about 2-6% per year globally, while plant-based meat alternatives are growing 9-12% per year, though still much smaller in absolute terms for now. If meat alternatives keep dropping in price as production scales and supply chains mature, it might soon have an advantage, especially in emerging markets.
Store brand meat alternatives have already reached the price of their "real" meat counterparts here in Germany in 2025. Some are even a bit cheaper. It will be interesting to see the medium to long term impact of this on the meat market.
Imo it's quite alright if you avoid certain instances and comms where a lot of infighting happens. There's a lot less karma whoring/raging compared to what I've seen back in the reddit days, and plenty of people who can have a reasonable conversation if you're not too confrontational. Bad interactions happen but that's something you'll always see when many people with vastly different opinions are involved.
In that regard farming is a bit similar to road traffic. Some animals, even humans, will inevitably die in road traffic, and our civilization is dependent on it so there's no way around it really. But that doesn't mean it's fine to just run them over on purpose.
Farming is flawed and will always negatively affect nature and animals. But putting animals on cramped factory farms is worse, for both the animals and the environment. It also requires even more farming since farm animals eat tons of feed before they're slaughtered and all that has to be grown too.
Wouldn't you agree that endeavoring to do less harm (eating cloned meat, eating vegan once or twice a week, eating less meat) is better than nothing?
Yes, absolutely. I'm excited for cloned meat because it will make it easier for people to drop the factory farmed stuff.
I'll probably stick to the pea/soy protein based meat alternatives as they are similar enough by now for many categories, but for those who want "real" meat without the suffering, it will be great. I just hope they can make it cheap enough to have a large impact.
Giving money to factory farms by buying their products is not a choice like picking a flavour of ice cream though. It has victims that suffer immensely under the conditions.
If someone beat up their dog every day and someone criticized them for it, you probably wouldn't say that they shouldn't "vilify" the animal abuser and that any attempt to help the victim is just "claiming moral high ground over a choice", I assume?
Like I get that the intention isn't to be cruel when people buy meat, but it does involve very serious animal abuse. That sadly doesn't go away just by looking the other way.
In some respects. The FDP would never subsidize green technologies on such a scale though.
"We have to be open to all technologies, so strategically advancing those that make sense and aren't scams would lead to an evil planned economy!"
I'd like to buy a Fairphone, but the missing IP68 rating is concerning to me. I really don't want to have to worry about my phone dying if I get into a rainstorm for example, especially while traveling.
learn your labels to avoid cruel producers, if you have the luxury buy from local farms
I feel like this is insanely hard to do this right, since the treatment of the animals is never made transparent. Even if you only buy animal products from local farms, how do you know the actual living conditions? You'd have to visit the farms and the slaughterhouses yourself, and even then you wouldn't see all the stuff, like how the workers really treat the animals day to day and which procedures the animals go through, how they are separated after birth and so on. To get a fair, unbiased impression, you'd need to work there for some time, for every farm you buy from.
For food from normal restaurants (which aren't $100 per meal), the employees have no idea where the animal products come from, and if they have to compete with the prices of other restaurants, well, it's all factory farmed anyway or they would already be out of business.
Just buying the plant-based burger or whatever is just so much more practical than trying to be a conscientious meat eater in a world where you're not supposed to ask any questions about how products were made. If you try to get some real transparency, the odds are stacked against you, and the industry will make sure to keep it that way. They'll just push for some labels that make people feel good and that can be used for marketing, but don't actually tell you much, and they know that's good enough for most people.
As with any group, the most unreasonable ones who have a desire to shit on people are often the loudest and get disproportionately more attention.
That's the same dynamic why conservatives think feminists hate men, for example. It doesn't mean it's representative.
Most vegans have been meat eaters for most of their life and didn't went vegan overnight either. Many also recognize that going 100% vegan can seem very daunting to people who have never tried being vegetarian for a week or something like that yet. It certainly seemed daunting to me at first.
I now wish we could stop all factory farming today, but that's not how human psychology works, and it's not how societal change works. Some vegans aren't emotionally able to accept that, but most probably will at some point.
The main struggle for the accessibility of vegan food is having more plant-based options in supermarkets and restaurants, and more people who are trying/choosing the alternatives (when they are available and decent) would go a long way to make it easier for all. So I'd always encourage people to take steps to improve the situation.
The "all or nothing" mentality just creates unnecessary barriers and some people really need to recognize that. People have to be able to take positive steps without feeling the need to make a big commitment.
Are the hundreds of millions of people who live without eating animals secretly reptiloid, or how do you make sense of that?
Der Titel ist etwas ungüstig. Das ist ein Bericht darüber mit welcher Strategie die AfD Arbeiter überzeugt und wie deren Wähler mit Gewerkschaften interagieren. Sehr hörenswert finde ich.
Ich hatte den Eindruck, dass Steinmeier als er meinte dass man die Sprache der Rechtsextremen nicht übernehmen soll, vermutlich auch Politiker gemeint hat. Diplomatisch bzw. vage bleiben muss er so oder so. Aber vielleicht betrachte ich das auch zu wohlwollend.
The animal rights logic is usually the following: Animals have the capacity to suffer and a will to live, therefore they deserve a right to not be harmed or killed needlessly.
No sane person would argue that they should have the right to vote or anything like that, just the basic ones. I feel like there's a lot of confusion about this.
E.g. kicking a dog on a whim violates their right to not be harmed and should be illegal in an ideal world.
It seems like you share the ethical concern. Why wouldn't you be in favor of granting them these two basic rights then?
Maybe your problem is with extending this logic to something like killing a pig for taste pleasure compared to kicking a dog? I'd argue that if you're against the latter, there's no ethical reason to defend or even support the former. Something being culturally ingrained or pleasurable doesn't automatically justify it after all.
Blocking instances
Would you say that people not getting dogs would actually be worse than people getting dogs and slicing their throats at 1-2 years old?
Imo people who care about animals are opposed to people cutting their throat open, instead of supporting it.
The fact that is considered good conditions for the animal, and that systematic violence get twisted into welfare, is such an incredibly grim reality...