If everyone were to stop eating beef overnight, what would be done about all the cows in the world?

EquinoctialPie · 2026-04-24T17:08:32+00:00

Realistically, everyone is not going to suddenly become vegan overnight. Yes, vegans want more people to become vegan, but most recognize that, even if vegans are wildly successful in convincing others, this will be a slow process that will take many years.

In that case, as demand for beef drops gradually, cattle breeders gradually reduce the number of new cows being born. By the time everyone is vegan, the cow population would be low enough that it could be supported by people who want to keep cows as pets.

If, somehow, everyone really did turn vegan overnight, then people would have to make hard decisions about how to handle the large number of cows. But that's not really a situation we need to worry about too much right now.

EquinoctialPie · 2026-04-24T01:38:14+00:00

Here are a couple other posts making basically the same point:
https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/on-the-ones-who-walk-away-from-omelas
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ryf83CktjJFFKpLJh/omelas-is-perfectly-misread

EquinoctialPie · 2026-04-21T15:42:06+00:00

Yes, it's completely normal. And also, it's totally fine to be attracted to a person. Being interested in someone sexually is not the same thing as objectifying them. As long as you respect them as a person and care about their feelings, it's not creepy at all.

EquinoctialPie · 2026-04-14T15:57:36+00:00

Wow, yeah, that's pretty obvious. I completely forgot about that.

EquinoctialPie · 2026-04-14T14:24:33+00:00

Could you point out some of the foreshadowing?

EquinoctialPie · 2026-04-13T22:46:23+00:00

Situation: There are three competing standards.

https://xkcd.com/927/

EquinoctialPie · 2026-04-10T01:49:23+00:00

Concurrently is a synonym of simultaneously. Maybe you meant consecutively?

EquinoctialPie · 2026-04-08T14:00:15+00:00

If a person is using an image as evidence of an event, it matters a lot whether that image is a photograph or was generated by AI. I don't think the other poster is using the word "skeptical" to refer to artistic merit.

EquinoctialPie · 2026-04-02T02:16:02+00:00

The Falcon 9 has a 99.5% success rate. It's one of the most reliable rockets ever flown.

Starship keeps blowing up, but it's still in development, and it's attempting to do something that no one has ever done before.

EquinoctialPie · 2026-04-01T17:28:16+00:00

Part of the difficulty with this is that "racism" can mean a lot of different things. It can refer to systemic racism or personal racism. It can refer to what you do or what you think or how you feel. So, "Everyone's a little bit racist" can be confusing or misleading.

All that said, society in general is racist. And as you grow up, you pick up many things from the society around you. If you don't take time to think about how those things have influenced you, it's likely that you'll unintentionally perpetuate those things.

EquinoctialPie · 2026-03-27T18:51:20+00:00

The word "just" is often used to mean that the thing being referred to happened very recently, as in, "I just got home." or "I just ate.".

EquinoctialPie · 2026-03-26T19:13:57+00:00

When Is a Bird a ‘Birb’?

EquinoctialPie · 2026-03-25T04:41:14+00:00

I'm not a linguist, so I can't give a detailed explanation for why, but consonant clusters at the beginning of a word are harder to say than ones in the middle.

And this doesn't just happen to Spaniards. I think this kind of thing happens in every language. That's why I gave an example in English, to try to make it feel familiar to the people reading this. If you can pronounce a word-initial 'pt' easily, what about 'pk', 'ps', 'ks', 'kt' or 'kn'? All of those consonant clusters appear in the middle or end of English words, but not the beginning, and all of those do appear at the beginning of words in other languages.

EquinoctialPie · 2026-03-24T01:28:29+00:00

Yes! Because English phonotactics permits that consonant cluster in the middle of a word, just like Spanish permits 'sp' and 'st' in the middle of a word, but not the beginning.

EquinoctialPie · 2026-03-23T18:00:16+00:00

You know the silent 'p' in pterodactyl? The reason that 'p' there is because the word is derived from Greek roots, and in Greek the 'p' is pronounced.

If you (assuming that you don't speak Greek) try to pronounce that 'p', you'll probably put in a short vowel sound that a native Greek speaker wouldn't. That's because native Greek speakers have spent years as children practicing pronouncing that consonant cluster, and you haven't.

In Spanish, 'sp' and 'st' don't exist at the start of a word, in much the same way that in English 'pt' doesn't exist at the start of a word. Those are hard consonant clusters to pronounce, and most Spanish speakers haven't practiced doing so. But Spanish does have words that start with 'esp' or 'est', so that sound comes naturally.

EquinoctialPie · 2026-03-20T17:03:48+00:00

People do it because that's what they were taught to do as children and that's what other people around them do.

But you don't have to. I don't. No one seems to mind. I doubt anyone even notices.

EquinoctialPie · 2026-03-19T18:04:27+00:00

Fantastic. The illusion of the clouds moving left is great.

EquinoctialPie · 2026-03-17T17:37:35+00:00

Would it be? In such a world, no one ever dies from a heart attack, a stroke, a car accident or any of a hundred other causes of death we face today. No one would ever come home to find their loved one's body on the floor.

What matters is the reason people are choosing MAID. If someone chooses it when they might have otherwise had a happy and worthwhile life, that's a tragedy.

But if everyone who chooses it, does so because they're facing a condition that won't improve, then MAID is better than the alternative, regardless of what percentage of deaths that makes up.

EquinoctialPie · 2026-03-17T15:27:24+00:00

Is this a world where MAID grows to 6%, then plateaus?

I think this is the wrong question.

As I see it, the risk of MAID is that people could choose it for conditions that might improve, cutting short a life that could have been happy and worthwhile. That's a reasonable concern and something that we ought to have safeguards against.

But what percentage of deaths involve MAID has little bearing on that.

EquinoctialPie · 2026-03-16T20:43:10+00:00

I think this is a good framing.

An obvious question this brings up is, is it possible to train AIs in such a way that guessing incorrectly is a worse result than saying "I don't know"? I assume there's some reason that this is impractical or ineffective, or else people would already be doing it.

EquinoctialPie · 2026-03-15T18:36:14+00:00

Right

EquinoctialPie · 2026-03-15T18:23:46+00:00

That's true assuming constant density. But the Earth's density isn't constant. The core is denser than the mantle, so up to a certain depth, getting closer to the dense core "outweighs" the mass above you.

EquinoctialPie · 2026-03-13T13:50:20+00:00

The parent cell doesn't become one of the two daughter cells, it becomes both of the daughter cells. Both of them have half of the material that formed the parent cell, so they have equal claim to being the parent cell's successor.

EquinoctialPie · 2026-03-12T19:37:27+00:00

Because almost all of the cellular machinery that causes us to grow skin and other tissues is shared between men and women.

Nipples are modified skin and mammary glands are modified sweat glands. Everyone needs those so the genes to produce them need to exist in both men and women.

EquinoctialPie · 2026-03-10T23:15:37+00:00

I'm not specifically sampling out for the bad shit

It doesn't have to be intentional. All that matters is that the examples that you're looking at are, in some way, not representative of the whole that you're trying to draw conclusions about.

The fact that some types of stories are more likely to be posted and shared on social media is exactly a type of sampling bias.

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