You said that I said:

“Cooking vegan is hard”

False. I said BEING vegan is hard. It is morally correct, but it can be difficult. Later you compare eating cheese to being a sociopath. I’m pretty sure that even sociopaths can feign compassion in public when someone explains how they are having trouble achieving their goals.

You said:

90% of non-vegan recipes can be made vegan by leaving out or substituting non-vegan ingredients.

This is where I know you are not serious. 90%? Please. My mom visited from out of state a few weeks back. At restaurants and her friend’s house where she stayed (she won’t stay with us), she ate: eggs, bacon, buttered toast, coffee, lox and cream cheese on bagels with red onions and capers, oysters, lobster, calamari, moussaka, hummus, baklava, general tso’s chicken, sushi, sashimi, gyoza, chicken tandoori, saag paneer, vegetable pakora, roast beef in aus jus, brussle sprouts with bacon, pepperoni pizza, deviled eggs, macaroni salad, a black and bleu burger with onion rings, and so on. I don’t know how to make eggs and bacon without eggs and bacon. I don’t know how to make lox without fish. I CAN make moussaka with veggie crumbles instead of meat, but I don’t know how to get that eggy quality without the eggs in there. I do make vegan hummus. Baklava without honey? How? Sashimi? How? Gyoza? How? Saag is vegan. Paneer is not. I’ve never been able to make Indian food properly despite repeated tries, so while in theory I could make a Saag without paneer, the reality is it would be awful regardless of the animal content. I have to stick with whatever the restaurant has.

But you’re saying “I pay other people to torture animals for my pleasure and I’m not going to stop”, and we’re supposed to, what, smile and nod and agree how hard it is to not torture animals for pleasure?

Yes to both counts. I am saying, “I pay people to torture animals for me and despite my regrets about that, I am not going to stop until there is another way to get a similar joy-of-food experience.” AND I am saying that YOU should say, “I know it is hard for you to stop paying people to torture animals for you.”

Do you also yell at depressed people for bringing everyone down? Do you think people are unaware of their failings? What sort of juvenile ego tripper gets off on yelling at people during their confessions?

Anyone try meat glue? Transglutaminase? Yes, it is ALSO used to glue small low-quality bits of meat into roasts and such, but in addition to being a glue, it is also used as a thickener. I’m pretty sure all the “Greek yogurt” we’ve seen in the last 20 years are because Transglutaminase was added to regular yogurt (cheap!) rather than the traditional Greek method of straining regular yogurt until the water was halved (expensive!).

Info:

• https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/transglutaminase
• https://www.aceingredients.com/transglutaminase-enzyme-revolutionizing-plantbased-meat.html

sample vegan versions:

• https://www.thecheesemaker.com/tg-pro-veg-enzyme-90-ml/
• https://modernistpantry.com/products/moo-gloo-rm-transglutaminase.html

Maybe I shouldn’t post here because I’m not vegan, but I respect vegans for doing the obviously correct thing. Personally, I don’t have the willpower to do it, but I HAVE tried to reduce my meat consumption. That said, I get annoyed with articles like this for reasons I will describe beneath relevant quotes. I offer these thoughts as a starting point for a better way to nudge omnivores towards less cruel consumption.

Imagine you knew a way to cut your carbon footprint by more than half; it was easy, required no real major sacrifice on your part…

Depending where you live, avoiding meat, eggs, dairy, honey, et cetera is NOT easy and IS a real sacrifice. If you live in California, you can find vegan options everywhere. If you live in Minnesota, Kansas, or various other places, you are effectively saying you will never eat out again, never sample the flavors of your Church potlucks, and bring all your own food to the family reunions. This is a hard social sacrifice to take and will be accompanied by eye rolls and some negative feedback. The authors surely know this, but act like it is nothing. At the very least, the requirement that you never ever eat out again – even when you are sick or worked a double shift and now have to make your own dinner because the closest thing to vegan you can order is a sad meatless, cheeseless pizza is an effort.

“People quickly derail the topic,” she said, “and begin talking about other things, such as how they seek to avoid food waste and plastic packaging.”

Of course they do! Who doesn’t try to change the topic when someone is trying to push you into something you don’t want to do?

Cutting out meat entirely was seen as an absurd position – and one only taken by haughty stick-in-the-muds, Ditlevsen explained. “There was a tendency for them to […] scold vegans for being extremists,” she noted.

Well, yeah, when an article suggests that veganism is easy, requires no sacrifice, doesn’t take time to learn new recipes and methods of cooking, intonates that there’s something wrong with trying to talk about other things, and doesn’t then see itself as haughty better-than-thou radicals, then it is time to call that article extremist.

For a lot of people – myself included – veganism is HARD. It would be easier if vegans could sympathize with that. There’s a growing contingent of low-to-no-meat eaters that mostly cook without meat, but have things they aren’t going to give up. For me, I’m not giving up cheese. I can try to get slightly more ethical cheese, but we all know cheese means calves aren’t with their moms. It is cruel. I know. If I’d never had cheese, I’d never start eating it, and I am eagerly anticipating cheese made with lab-grown milk, but for now I know I’m contributing to animal abuse.

If you came up to me and said, “You know CHEESE is ABUSE” I would not be thankful for the information. I would be annoyed that I didn’t have lab-grown cheese yet. I’ve got beyond burgers for my beef cravings, but all the vegan cheeses I’ve tried have failed me (I want something like a St. Andre triple creme).

I used to raise ducks for the eggs. We had freakin’ happy ducks with their own pool, lots of space, and frequent treats. Most of our ducks died of old age, but we did lose some to animal attacks. We ate the remnants where we could. We are back to buying eggs maybe once a month or so, but only eggs from happy chickens we can visit.

If you tell me that isn’t good enough, I have to tell you that sometimes I want eggs.

Heck, sometimes I want fast food and can’t think of a vegan option. In fact, my company had a California/Indian Manager come visit and the first thing I was asking him was if he was vegan or vegetarian because that would matter for getting lunch. He assured us all that he’d have no problem finding lunch and to simply pick a place that could easily seat 12. Stupidly, we listened to him. He IS vegetarian and his only lunch option was off-menu buttered spaghetti because the place that is both close and has big tables is also mostly meat. They only serve spaghetti with meat sauce and the only vegan item is a side salad. The ‘regular’ salad has ham and cheese.

I’ve gone on too long. I’m just saying that the article minimizes the difficulty and encourages an attitude that won’t win anyone over. I hope the lemmy-verse is better than that and maybe we all can encourage more people to minimize animal consumption even if those people aren’t ready to go… cold turkey? You know what I mean. Don’t make Perfect the enemy of Good.

hooray for broody girls! We can’t get mad when they are being such good guardians. :-)

I’ve been sick. My guess is covid, but a home test was negative … but it was also 2 years expired, so I don’t know if that was a valid test or if I did it right. Anyway, I’ve been exceptionally stupid and reactive between bouts of coughing and napping. Feeling a wee bit better now, though.

If you haven’t encountered it yet: bad eggs really do explode. I haven’t seen them explode any distance nor into tiny pieces, but we did have a nest with an egg that was turning color and I didn’t think to remove it. A day or so later, I heard a muffled POP and looked to see the mama with a look of stiff panic as she sat incredibly erect on her nest. I shooed her off and found a horrible , stinky mess. Mama got a bath, we put the whole next in tripled garbage bags, and wrote off the clutch as potentially infected. Mama was not happy.

That can work with ranked choice voting, but we don’t have that. Technically, we CAN vote for anyone over 35 and born in the U.S., but practically, this just splits the vote. This worked for Republicans when George Wallace split the Democratic vote such that Nixon won with 43%, and it worked for democrats when Ross Perot split the Republican vote such that Clinton also won with 43%.

Our system only allows 2 options. Any ‘3rd’ option is a vote against your best interests. So is not voting. That said, yeah, I’d vote for a replacement.

I just heard Steve Bannon doing that fascist thing where – when confronted with the fact that he said on his radio show that he wanted to see particular heads on spikes – Bannon acted like that was just rhetoric. He didn’t really mean it. Except he knows his followers DO mean it. And he’s still calling for dismantling the government and remaking it into a permanent dictatorship.

So if that is what it means to vote Republican this election, then I’m gonna be a yellow dog democrat about it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Democratic_National_Convention

The 2024 Democratic National Convention … is scheduled to be held August 19 to 22, 2024, at the United Center in Chicago, Illinois.

Keep it up! In fact, if you get criticized, you can point out that you’d rather have a leader you CAN criticize than one that gets treated like a God-ling. Point out that one of the differences in the generic liberal versus conservative thought is the idea that a leader might be flawed but generally good at leading versus the idea that everyone needs to support the leader (or the cause) no matter what – until their transgressions become too extreme and gets them ostracized. Please. Let’s criticize early and be ready to replace them sooner rather than later.

I hear you. A few years back I was rooting for Jeremy Corbin to be Prime Minister and could not understand how the populace didn’t choose him. More than that, I sympathize with people who dislike illegal immigration into their respective countries because, well, I can see how it FEELS like, “We built this country to be good and prosperous, and these folks want what WE built while they never built anything like it for themselves” – but that is a false perception for so many reasons (Was their home a colony or otherwise oppressed? Our ancestors built our countries, but we’re just born to them. Climate change is driving equatorial people to Northen climes – to countries complicit in the climate change that has made their homelands dry and cropless, etc.)

So I don’t have a solution for immigration (which Trump harped on constantly). Fixing the climate might help for the long term, but for the short term it won’t fix that immediate complaint.

I look at U.S. history and I don’t see a strong track record for austerity helping. More the reverse. In The Great Depression, one of the things that seemed to work was letting the government take on debt to give a bunch of people ‘stupid’ jobs so they could put that money into the economy. Of course, that came with stepp progressive tax rates, too. It was much harder to get rich when the highest brackets were up to/over 90% of income. I doubt the current crop of rich people would allow that to happen in the modern world, but I’d vote for it.

I’ve bolded the bits that stood out to me:

Jetflicks, which charged $9.99 per month for the streaming service, generated millions of dollars in subscription revenue and caused “substantial harm to television program copyright owners,” the Justice Department said Thursday.

The group used “sophisticated computer scripts” and software to scour piracy services (including the Pirate Bay and Torrentz) for illegal copies of TV episodes, which they then downloaded and hosted on Jetflicks’ servers, according to federal prosecutors. The men were charged in 2019 with conspiring to violate federal criminal copyright law.

The jury convicted the five men of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement. In addition, the jury convicted Dallmann of two counts of money laundering by concealment and three counts of misdemeanor criminal copyright infringement. Dallmann faces a maximum penalty of 48 years in prison, while Courson, Garcia, Jaurequi and Huber each face a maximum of five years in prison, according to the Justice Department. A sentencing date has not yet been set.

I wish the article told us which crime could lead to which sentence length. Is money laundering punished more or less than copyright infringement?

Back in 2021, indie developer Wolfire filed an antitrust lawsuit against Valve that accused the gaming giant of anti-competitive business practices—including a long-standing habit of taking unfair cuts from game developers on its store. Valve’s 30% fees have come under criticism before—and they are notably high when compared to some other online platforms.

Ouch. I didn’t realize they took such a big cut. On the other hand, authors trying to publish to Amazon’s kindle get hit with commissions from 30%-65% before any other fees, so Steam seems downright reasonable for that particular comparison.

From where I’m sitting, though, I’ve plenty of complicated feelings. Steam might be the best option out there, but monopolies aren’t great for anybody—at the same time, business is business.

Steam’s absurd efficiency could be a product of merciless penny-pinching from indie devs, but it’s just as likely we’re watching a well-oiled machine continue to belch out cash in an expected fashion.

Is it really a monopoly with everyone from EA to GoG delivering games? I guess it is dominant enough to count. I have a hard time complaining when employees are getting good pay and I’ve continued to get good service from them. It might get scarey if/when Gabe steps down, but this all feels pretty fair for now.

Crawford said that legislators had heard from NASA, which expressed concern about the bill’s impact on programs to develop alternative proteins for astronauts. An amendment to the bill will address that problem, Crawford said, allowing an exemption for research purposes.

Opponents of the ban have said governments shouldn’t interfere with a nascent industry because of unfounded fears over safety concerns.

The carve-out for NASA doesn’t make this bill any better. The bill is obviously stifling.

That said, I really do want some extra checks that whatever agar-like substrate meat is grown in does not leech excessive quantities of hormones (think: rBST) or other chemicals into the packaged product. I would happily eat lab-grown meat, but I want to know that it is well tested for safety.

NOTE: I just downloaded the game and on my first attempted launch, it complained that the port it wanted was not open. My only option was to close the game. I ran netstat and did not see the port listed, so I tried again. THAT time, it complained about my older video card :-/ The warning is clunky and there’s a typo, too (within -> withing). It says (if I transcribed accurately):

You are using an: NVIDIA GEOFORCE GTX 1080. This video card is currently not recognized withing the recommended specs. We only support a limited amount of NVIDIA GTX graphics cards, all NVIDIA RTX graphics cards or all AMD RX graphics cards since the local AI requires a lot of performance.

So please note that the game might not work properly. Refer to the Steam guide for more information.

When I closed that warning, the game loaded.

@aihorde@lemmy.dbzer0.com draw for me a queue of very British ants

style: victorianpunk

I’m thinking the ruling HAS to lead to conversations and demands to change the law. Yes, there’s a religious right that wants women barefoot and pregnant, but this ruling is going to prevent rich white religious women from getting pregnant. They’re going to complain.

Tonight’s “Alex Wagner” show on MSNBC had guest Michelle Goldberg hypothesizing that even ultra-conservative Alabama politicians are probably going to back off this ruling. She supposed they might decide embryos don’t count as a people unless they are attached to a uterus in a particular way … but the rich white religious wives might still have a problem with that limit when such embryos spontaneously fail later on in the pregnancy and everyone is back to being a murderer. Of course, those women are unlikely to realize how likely that is until it happens to each one of them individually (if it happens to someone else, that other person is obviously a ‘bad’ person or it would not have happened – so the only one who can be ‘good’ and still miscarry is oneself).

So how do we get the courts out of our bodies?

When trying to bring this sort of thing up with a mixed group of people, I use the term “Republican low-wage policies” to describe a whole set of policies, and now I’m going to have to add forced-births to the list. Decades ago, it was just an insistence on denying citizenship to migrant farm workers to suppress wages, then add to that ‘no child left behind’ making it harder to teach more to students that could achieve more, then the whole home-school/charter-school movement where funds that used to go to public schools getting split and diluted, and so on.

And yes, I can see how it’d be hard to get sterilized without the health care and career to provide and pay for it.

Wait: didn’t the price of labor drop when the majority of women stopped staying home and started full time employment? As I understand it, decreasing the workforce raises wages, which should keep factories from moving in.

Further, if you’re going to put restrictions on me when I am or MIGHT be pregnant, I’ve got a massive incentive to get sterilized before I have to worry about that.

Ooooh. I didn’t consider if frozen kids are considered ‘alive’. If they are frozen for 4 years, and you pay to keep them frozen for that time, does that mean you’d only have to worry about 14 more years of child support?