wonderingwanderer

The argument for reducing meat production isn’t about eliminating pastoral settings. Some people want to eliminate 100% of meat consumption, but I don’t think that’s entirely necessary. Eliminating factory farming is necessary though, and the methane produced by that method is entirely unsustainable.

Also, if you’re only eating grain, then yeah it would take a lot of it to meet nutritional requirements. But if you’re eating grains and legumes, then it’s much easier to ensure complete nutrition without any meat products.

It takes 25kg of grain to produce 1 kg of beef. If the land used to produce that grain were instead used to produce grains and legumes for human consumption, it would produce more than enough to end world hunger

I’m curious what data you’ve found that doesn’t support the plant-based movement. Water consumption, the amount of grain it takes to produce a fraction of its weight in meat, methane emissions from factory farming, etc., all point to the need to at the very least reduce the scale at which meat is being produced

That raises another issue which is zoning laws. I addressed that in my other comment too.

Other countries have mixed-use zoning. You can have commercial and residential buildings in the same space. You can even build apartments above restaurants.

In the US, hardly any neighborhood has any businesses within walking distance, and the ones that do usually have a sketchy walk on the side of the road with no sidewalk, and everyone who sees you thinks you’re a junky because “who else would be walking there?”

And then all the businesses are packed into ugly strip malls surrounded by giant parking lots. It’s not an efficient use of space.

In my linked comment, I explained how cultures built around rail systems have mixed-use zoning and less need for parking lots; allowing towns to be built more densely around stations, and contributing to walkability.

Yes, it’s challenging to convert a disperse infrastructure that’s been built around roads and highways into one that’s as efficient and walkable as a rail-based society. I’m not denying that.

I suppose the disconnect is that you’re viewing walkability and railway infrastructure as separate things, and I view them as intrinsically connected. A rail-based infrastructure is inherently more walkable; and a road-based infrastructure is inherently less walkable.

That’s why it needs to be a comprehensive system. Connecting unwalkable cities by long distance, high speed trains wouldn’t be enough to effect the cultural shift necessary, no. But I didn’t say that alone would be enough.

Intercity rail is just one aspect of a comprehensive rail system, which must also include intracity railway infrastructure such as a well-planned metro system. And ideally some local routes that connect outlying suburbs into the main rail network.

All of this is necessary to reduce dependence on automobiles, and to reduce the overall picture to one of its aspects and say that part alone wouldn’t be enough to achieve the goal is honestly not a very good argument.

Edit for context:

I didn’t realize this comment was in a different chain from this one: https://sopuli.xyz/comment/21297827

I don’t think carnists are desperate, they just don’t care. They don’t view it as unethical.

You can try explaining to someone the harms of the meat industry from an environmental standpoint, an animal rights standpoint, a food security standpoint, a worker’s rights standpoint, and some may be amenable with the right amount of convincing.

But trying to bludgeon someone into compliance through shaming and demanding them to change is heavy-handed. And especially when carnists are in the majority, it’s not likely to be effective either

Valid. Although,

contrary to the emphasis of the meme, the more research-supported position is that the primary transportation alternative to cars needs to be walking, not trains

The thing is, rail-based infrastructure encourages walking. If you’re only going a should distance, you walk a few blocks instead of driving. If you’re going further, you walk to the station, and then to your destination.

Walking is not an option over a certain distance. Unless you want to spend all day getting somewhere you could have gone in less than an hour, and a multiple days journey to get places farther.

Walking alone will never replace reliance on cars until there’s a viable alternative, and trains are the best option. Especially if they’re designed efficiently and use renewable energy

Yes, I know that. I’m identifying that as a problem, but I never said a solution would be quick or easy. I’m fairly certain I even said that US infrastructure is built in a way that would make it more difficult, as compared to societies that are built upon rail-based systems.

When did I ever say anything about making cars more expensive? What is it with Lemmy comments and making strawman arguments?

It’s not equal to engineering, but it’s certainly involved in it.

That’s like saying x ≠ x²+3x+b

Of course it’s not equal to it (unless x and b both equal zero)

The connection to science isn’t explicit, but there’s definitely an implicit connection. There’s the engineering it would take to design efficient rail systems and modern locomotives, there’s the calculation of relative emissions cost compared to reliance on automobiles, and all the science on the impacts of those emissions, the calculated benefit of converting infrastructure to rail-based, etc.

It doesn’t out and say it, but anyone with the basic knowledge should be able to draw the connection.

You can get almost anywhere by train in Japan. And anywhere you can’t get by train, you can get by bus. It’s lovely.

Efficient planning could overcome that. A central hub with lines going to every other major hub nearby would be enough to connect all the cities. Then each route can run “express” services that only stop at major stations along the way, and “local” services, which stop at every small station. That way people can travel faster between hubs, while stilling giving access to less populated areas.

A few transcontinental lines for high-speed trains, and some major north-south routes as well, make public transit a viable optipn for long-distance travel.

Each city having its own metro system would make intracity public transit a viable option, reducing the need for cars and therefore reducing traffic congestion, simultaneously making it possible to make neighborhoods more walkable. A few spoke-shaped lines to reach out to surrounding suburbs, and loop-shaped lines to connect the outskirts without having to tranfer at the central hub.

Then all you need is a few well-planned bus routes to connect suburban areas to nearby stations. The only ones this leaves out are rural areas, who would still depend on cars, but that’s a much smaller portion of the population. Eliminating the need for a car in urban and suburban areas would go a long way towards reducing congestion and pollution.

Lots of places already have good public transportation systems, because they were built around the premise of using trains as a main mode of transport. Suburbs are built around train stations. Mixed-use zoning allows for as many residences as possible to be constructed within walking distance of a train station. And since there’s less need for parking lots, they can be built more densely to avoid wasting space.

The car lobby in the USA did a lot of damage, and now it would be costly to convert the infrastructure. But long term, it would be a worthwhile investment.

I don’t think anything in theoretical physics is well-settled fact.

Edit:

After a century of observations and theoretical advances, cosmologists can confidently state that the universe is infinite—or perhaps not. The question remains deeply complex. Current evidence suggests our expanding universe lacks both a center and edge, with the Big Bang occurring everywhere simultaneously rather than from a single point. Recent cosmic microwave background measurements indicate nearly flat geometry, supporting infinite extent theories, though alternative models proposing finite, curved space remain possible.

Yeah, nothing about that says “well-settled fact.” Quite the opposite. Either what you said is disinfo or you need to check your reading comprehension.

I think it’s a logical necessity for the universe to be infinite, at least spatially. In order to be finite, it needs to have something outside of it to set a boundary containing it. But if that were the case, then there must be something beyond it, which means the space contained within that boundary would not be the entirety of the universe.

Whether that space beyond is filled with anything or simply empty until stuff expands into it is a different question. And whether there were multiple other big bangs incomprehensibly far away from the observable universe is another question too. But neither of those possibilities implies that the big bang would have happened at every point in space simultaneously.

Another reason that possibility is untenable is because of heat dissipation. If every point in space exploded simultaneously, not only would there be nowhere for the force to go, but there would be nowhere for the heat to dissipate too, either. The heat would be uniformly distributed throughout space, offering no possibility of cooling down and coalescing into denser states of matter. The pressure would also be infinite, with no gradient. Everything would simply be an ocean of gammawaves, with no room for expansion.

The geometry of explosions says otherwise. An explosion implies expansion outward from a center. If every point in space exploded at once, there would be nowhere for anything to expand, thus creating compressive forces.

You would have to zoom out really really far, beyond the boundaries of the explosion, to see the forces expanding beyond that. And at that point, it’s just the Big Bang, only on a larger scale, and with the singularity being really a vast space seen from a much larger scale.

To illustrate, one speck of C4 explodes in an outward direction, but put a million specks of C4 together into a continuous block, and it still explodes in an outward direction. It’s not a million tiny explosions all taking place within the space of the block.

You could represent time as the distance from center to circumference, although that wouldn’t be as readily comprehensible at a glance. It’s more like the image just shows a chunk out of that sphere

I think the graph shows relative position of the planets from the sun, so the straight line is just a baseline.

Like if you jump up and down on a plane, and the graph just shows you moving a couple of feet up and down rather than including the entire altitude change of the plane itself

More like outward from the center of a sphere

There’s also no reason to believe that expansion isn’t happening in a spheroid pattern. The big bang wouldn’t have been like a blunderbuss, more like a naval mine suspended in the abyss, exploding in all directions.

For that matter, did the big bang ever cease, or has it continued to spew out new energy, and we’re just so inconceivably far out that our entire observable universe is just one small section of a relatively narrow range of distance from the center?

Lastly, if the big bang is like a faucet, what if black holes are like drains in a tub, or in other words wormholes leading back to whatever realm everything came from before being spewed out by the big bang?

Everything in the universe is cyclical; there’s no way something doesn’t complete the circuit, even if it’s just a big crunch.

Never forget.

Also, this year for example i can count the amount of days below 0°C on one hand

I can count the number of days this year on one hand…

For real though, I knew what you meant. I just couldn’t resist the opportunity (after all, there’s only five days a year when this joke might apply)