Also, they’re making your food. Show a little gratitude.

I wouldn’t say “most.” I just think the loudest voices are the assholes, and that applies to every group across all ideologies. That’s not unique to vegans, but so much industry is built on suffering and has deficated time and effort to painting all vegans with the same brush. And it’s not just animal suffering. Every capitalist knows, and fears, that if consumers begin caring about animal rights, human rights are a natural extension.

Three things:

First, people eat meat because it tastes good and is widely available. You can’t make it not taste good, but we can insist on better regulatory requirements that might make meat more expensive or less ubiquitous. Every person seeks validation for the behaviors they choose every day. That’s human nature, and that’s why it’s easy to false equivalences like avocados are worse than beef. People want to believe it because it’s easier than changing. We’re not going to save the planet by changing everybody. People need to be forced to change by law or by circumstance.

Second, this is terrible journalism. The author probably wanted to be a novelist, but nobody wanted to publish a young adult series about a girl who discovers she can talk to farm animals and is whisked away to a private school for animal talkers.

News articles, even editorials, don’t require suspense. You don’t build tension by slowly revealing information. This article is five paragraphs in before they get to anything resembling a point, and it’s several more paragraphs of slowly revealing the findings of the study like a detective walking through the crime scene, discovering new clues along the way.

Third, the author is exactly the sort of smarmy, “told-ya-so” douchebag that carnists assume of all vegans. “… have you considered that vegans are annoying?” Yes. You are very annoying, and it undercuts the points you’re trying to make.

We should be looking at the results of this study and trying to determine how to overcome the daily hurdles people face and disinformation campaigns of the meat industry. Calling people stupid for being fallible in ways all humans are is just mean-spirited and counterproductive.

Hey, I like your optimism, assuming we’ll still be here in a few decades.

FWIW our current understanding of spacetime includes multi-dimensional time, which is why we experience more or less time when we are traveling at high speed or experiencing strong gravitational fields. It’s sort of like moving diagonally across a room, except entirely different.

I came here to say, that’s basically the subplot of Dr Horrible.

It’s not about making money, it’s about taking money… Destroying the status quo, because the status is not quo. The world is a mess and I just need to rule it.

Do vultures do something other than what other birds do? Because most birds regurgitate food for the chicks to eat.

Sure, but you’re equivocating two things that aren’t the same. Until you’ve written infinity 9s, you haven’t written the number yet. Once you do, the number you will have written will be exactly the number 1, because they are exactly the same. The difference between all the nines you could write in one thousand lifetimes and 0.999… is like the difference between a cup of sand and all of spacetime.

Or think of it another way. Forget infinity for a moment. Think of 0.999… as all the nines. All of them contained in the number 1. There’s always one more, right? No, there isn’t, because 1 contains all of them. There are no more nines not included in the number 1. That’s why they are identical.

It is physically equal to 1. Infinity goes on forever, and so there is no physical difference.

It’s not that it makes almost no difference. There is no difference because the values are identical. There is no infinity between the two values.

In a manner of speaking, yes.

See, the church of Scientology cloned Tom years ago, and rolls out a new “stunt double” for each movie to make sure that his productions are done on time. If one Tom falls during a stunt, a new one is released.

Unfortunately, due to a clerical error, the original Tom was mislabelled before being put back in his tank, so it’s unclear which one was the first. This led to several Toms being accidentally left out, allowing this picture to be taken and forcing the church to pretend that they are different people and give them each a fake identity under which to live out their natural lives.

Excelt it isn’t infinitesimally smaller at all. 0.999… is exactly 1, not at all less than 1. That’s the power of infinity. If you wanted to make a wooden board exactly 0.999… m long, you would need to make a board exactly 1 m long (which presents its own challenges).

Coincidentally, but entirely unrelated, nobody ever legally watched any Comedy Central, CMT, or MTV content ever again.

A scientific institute caught on fire. It was developing weapons systems. It was in Russia.

For anyone else like me who had difficulty parsing the headline.

Because humans are inherently selfish and prone to fallacious thinking.

But if I don’t have three particles, 1/3 requires division.

But you could make that same argument for a lot of fractions. 1/3 doesn’t exist because you cannot divide a quantum in three. 0.333 repeating means that eventually you have to divide an indivisible foundational particle in thirds.

I believe you’re mistaken. A Planck length is the minimum length we can extrapolate down before physics gets weird, but that doesn’t mean it is the smallest possible length anything can be.

And an irrational number does exist as a discrete unit, it simply cannot be described as a fraction. Case in point, if you could create a spherical particle that was exactly 1 Planck length across, it would have a circumference of exactly π Planck lengths.

By your logic, such a theoretical particle could not exist because the circumference includes an irrational number in the size of the body.

Right, by my point is that your accuracy and precision are the same whether you are making a 1 meter length object or a π meter length object. Your meter stick is not accurate to the width of a hydrogen atom, either.

But if we accept the precision of our manufacturing capabilities as “close enough,” then it is equally as close to exactly π as it is to exactly 1.

In other words, to say we cannot make an object that is π meters is to say we cannot make an object that is any specific length.

We could make an object that is exactly pi meters long. Make a circle of 1 meter in diameter, and then straighten it out. We would not be able to measure the length more accurately than we can calculate it (that might be the largest understatement ever) but to the tolerance with which we could make a 1 meter diameter circle, you should have the same tolerance to the circumference being pi.

Well, two things. First, this Absolute Space concept was something Newton believed, and even though some people believe his laws of motion disprove Absolute Space, Newton didn’t believe his laws contradicted Absolute Space. He definitely didn’t think his laws concluded that God can’t be real.

But as for your example, the question remains “from where?” Setting two things in motion doesn’t resolve the issue that there is an equal and opposite reaction. It just means now there are two of them. And if we assume that the laws of the universe do not apply outside the universe, we must also presume that there is a space outside of the universe with its own properties and its own laws. And then therefore there must be a space where the two spaces intersect so that one might affect the other. At that intersection, the universe where physics apply would be acting on the external-space where physics don’t apply. If the universe did not affect the external space, it would violate Newton’s laws. If it did, it would violate the laws of the external space.

It’s an unresolvable conflict, or at least it was during Newton’s time. Today, we understand that Newton’s description of physics was accurate on a macro level, roughly describing motion and energy in basic terms. I don’t know if Quantum Physics or Astrophysics can resolve the conflict. It’s not important to me whether or not it is possible for Absolute Space to exist, nor is it important to disprove the possibility of its existence. But I would say that we should follow the science to explore the universe, wherever that leads us. If that means we shed some previously held beliefs, then that’s reality for ya.

It would be comforting to think there exists a divine arbiter and prime creator that wants us to be good and happy, and to imagine we get to hang out with our loved ones when we die. I can understand why so many people want to hold on to those concepts. I just don’t think the universe is that small or unimpressive.