• 0 Posts
  • 16 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 19th, 2023

help-circle

  • Welcome!

    There are good Lemmy apps if you don’t have one yet. You can search “for Lemmy” to see most of them (in the Android play store at least). I like Voyager for Lemmy.

    but like cmon, can we have SOME days where we can escape and just enjoy the internet guys?

    You might want to block some keywords then, as there’s also a lot of American politics on Lemmy. You can filter most of it that way.


  • Since the industrial revolution, fossil fuels were the only affordable energy sources that could meet the demand of industrialized countries. Until 5-10 years ago.

    We’re now in a situation where most people can still pretend that climate change isn’t serious, and the fossil fuel lobby is stronger than ever. And yet over 90% of new electricity generation is already renewable, because it has simply become cheaper than coal and gas power in the last years.

    As climate impacts worsen, the pressure to decarbonize will only get larger. The lobbies have been fighting tooth and nail against the energy transition for over 40 years, but they are rapidly loosing ground now in most countries.

    It’s right to be alarmed about climate change, there will be serious long-term impacts, but it seems irrational to be completely fatalistic. Just comparing the battery prices and solar panel prices and ev market with 10 years ago reveals a truly massive shift. And this is just the beginning of the energy transition.


  • 20 years ago you could have said “Well, solar panels might be great for sustainability in theory, but the fossil fuel industry is so overwhelmingly powerful and solar panels so bad and expensive, it’s absolutely futile.”

    Now, over 90% of added power plants are renewable, because there was at least some pressure to implement alternatives, and now they have matured enough to become economically viable on their own.

    I think there are certain parallels to factory farming and plant-based alternatives + cultivated meat. We know that factory farming is very unsustainable, especially in terms of climate impact, resource use and zoonotic diseases (like bird flu and swine flu). These issues become ever more pressing as factory farming continues. We just won’t have a choice at some point but to switch to alternatives that are more sustainable, or everything goes to shit.

    Creating demand for the alternatives funds their R&D and furthers their availability, which in turn leads to better products for lower prices, which makes further adoption much easier. Advancing the alternatives might have a much bigger impact than the mere reduction in meat consumption.

    The more early adopters, the faster new technologies can advance. That’s true for every sustainable industry like solar energy, wind energy, battery storage, electric cars, and also meat alternatives.


  • Most people don’t want Nazis in power again, even ~half of the AfD voters don’t, although some have certainly been radicalized. The AfD is just very successful on social media, because they exploit the dissatisfaction of voters, they are controversial, they don’t present as and are often not perceived as Nazis, and because conservatives helps them with the fear mongering against immigrants. The Cristian democrats try to get the AfD voters back by copying their talking points, not realizing that they make them seem more credible in the process.

    Most social media platforms are also happy to promote right wing populists and extremists because they are good for business, and some are owned by extremists in right wing bubbles too, of course. The EU regulations need to be actually enforced, but the US will do anything they can to stop this.

    Other parties desperately need better social media strategies. For the last few years, the AfD was basically unopposed in many feeds and the polls are the result of that. Gladly the left party has catched up quite a bit in recent months, but the AfD still has the lead online and other parties struggle to adapt.





  • And the good thing is, when demand for (human) leather is higher than supply, people will just breed some more humans, keep them on farms, use their labor and sell their leather. With nothing going to waste, just the beautiful circle of life.

    We’ve gotten quite efficient at doing that so there’s plenty opportunity to have more jobs, make a profit and to provide a product at an affordable price point, at the same time, all with human leather farms. Just have to compromise on welfare and sustainability step by step for more profit, but humans are already really great at ignoring such things when it’s advantageous to them, so most won’t ask any pesky questions anyways. We just have to normalize human leather (from factory farms) and everything will be great.






  • I got really fucking tired of being called fucking stupid for buying meat free alternatives.

    Sorry that you met condescending assholes. Some people just have the urge to feel superior over others for absolutely silly reasons. The rise of meat alternatives is one of the few things that make me optimistic for the future, along with renewable energy, electric cars and heat pumps. Factory farms are so much worse for the environment and animals, of course we should embrace alternatives to the worst option.

    Prices also go down with more competition. There basically wasn’t any market for meat alternatives 10 years ago, now it’s growing quite fast. In 5 years, many of them will likely be cheaper than meat.