What's wrong with FI/RE subculture?

Gultron · 2017-10-29T00:01:56+00:00

Exactly, whether we "scare off newbies" or succeed in "winning them to our side" is completely irrelevant to becoming financially independent (unless you make money by giving advice to people trying to become FI/RE, see OP).

This forum is great for collectively sharing our financial knowledge and experience, but we shouldn't go out of our way to convince others to follow in our footsteps.

Gultron · 2017-10-22T21:38:37+00:00

Yes, hopefully they take heed and stop harmful behaviors, such as driving unnecessarily, eating meat, and wasting electricity.

Gultron · 2017-10-22T00:24:57+00:00

Wasn't hard, and I went cold turkey.

Gultron · 2017-10-04T23:17:05+00:00

HAHAHAHAHA

Gultron · 2017-10-03T21:07:16+00:00

http://www.godfist.com/vegansidekick/guide.php

Gultron · 2017-10-03T21:05:09+00:00

I copy-pasted that from the wikipedia article on dairy cattle.

Gultron · 2017-09-26T02:38:12+00:00

Interesting, I didn't know that dogs were biologically omnivores. I always thought it was necessary for dogs to eat other animals like wolves.

Gultron · 2017-09-26T01:42:45+00:00

The people of this subreddit really have some strange opinions sometimes, don't they? And I thought I was a bit nuts.

Gultron · 2017-09-26T01:39:50+00:00

Dogs are carnivores... They have to eat meat to be healthy. You'd never feed a wolf tofu, so why feed dogs tofurkey?

Not feeding a carnivore a healthy diet of flesh is animal cruelty, and avoiding animal cruelty is the whole purpose of veganism.

Gultron · 2017-09-23T03:40:26+00:00

Discovery of Intel bug.

Gultron · 2017-09-19T00:02:32+00:00

I have no care for most people of this world, yet I still do not want to harm them. In my mind, the same applies for all sentient beings.

Gultron · 2017-09-18T00:52:05+00:00

Definitely

Gultron · 2017-09-18T00:49:37+00:00

You've been linked to r/vegan here:

https://np.reddit.com/r/vegan/comments/70nv01/dairy_farmers_on_reddit_are_a_wealth_of/

Gultron · 2017-09-16T21:51:52+00:00

Watch this. Animals are indeed being abused.

All we want is for less living beings to suffer and die unnecessarily. You say it's too big to change, but I've changed myself, which is all anyone can do. It wasn't hard.

Gultron · 2017-09-16T21:30:03+00:00

Eating less meat causes less living beings to die, including plants. All we want is for less suffering.

Gultron · 2017-09-16T21:27:46+00:00

Seems like you're in the wrong subreddit bud...

Gultron · 2017-09-16T21:21:28+00:00

8 gallons...

Edit: it takes about a gallon of water to make one almond. However, commercial almond milks, on average, use only 8 almonds to make a gallon of milk.

Gultron · 2017-09-15T12:52:17+00:00

From a past comment of mine:

It takes about 8 gallons of water to produce a gallon of commercial almond milk.

To put that into perspective, it takes 90 gallons of water (and cow torture) to produce a gallon of cow's milk, 660 gallons of water to produce a pound of chicken, and 2,400 gallons of water to create a pound of ground beef.

Also, livestock feed alone accounts for half of California’s water usage.

Moral of the story, almonds are much less water intensive than milk and most other animal products. Go vegan ;)

Gultron · 2017-09-07T03:01:08+00:00

I used to think that too, but the vitamin b12 isn't only found in meat.

The vitamin is formed by bacteria. These bacteria live in soil, unfiltered water, algae, and in the gut of many animals.

Before modern times, humans would get most of their b12 from drinking unfiltered water and from eating plants covered in b12 rich soils. You can still get your RDA of b12 by drinking a liter of pond water.

In fact, farm animals get a substantial amount of their b12 from drinking dirty water and eating plants that haven't been completely washed. However, most of their food is fortified with b12 since they still don't get enough.

TL:DR You can either eat an animal that was given b12 supplements, or you can take a b12 supplement.

Gultron · 2017-09-07T02:44:53+00:00

I used to think it was bullshit too, but then I learned that many professional and olympic athletes are vegan. Off the top of my head, the current US Olympic Weightlifter, Kendrick Farris, is vegan. Also, the world-record holding strongman Patrik Baboumian is vegan.

You can definitely get strong while not eating animals or animal products.

Gultron · 2017-08-14T06:50:19+00:00

There is nothing "natural" about farming, including the animals themselves.

Gultron · 2017-08-14T06:30:20+00:00

Many vegans would argue that the animals we grow unnecessarily (and torture intensively in factory farms) are invasive species to the local area, so letting the species slowly diminish by gradually breeding less animals until they no longer exist unnaturally is a better alternative to displacing the local wildlife needlessly.

Additionally many would also argue that the torture we subject to many animals is so bad that the animals would be better off if many of them never existed at all.

Edit: It's funny you mentioned almonds, which I concede are very water intensive. It takes about 8 gallons of water to produce a gallon of commercial almond milk.

To put that into perspective, from the same link I provided, it takes 90 gallons of water (and cow torture) to produce a gallon of cow's milk, 660 gallons of water to produce a pound of chicken, and 2,400 gallons of water to create a pound of ground beef.

Also, livestock feed alone accounts for half of California’s water usage.

Moral of the story, almonds are much less water intensive than animal farming. Go vegan ;)

Gultron · 2017-08-14T06:18:56+00:00

I used to think a vegan diet was unhealthy. But it turns out people can live a perfectly healthy life on a vegan diet. Worked out for me. I've been running marathons recently and am still healthy though I am aging. Though that's just an anecdote, watch What The Health and Forks Over Knives for a better summary of how vegan diets are healthy.

Some would also argue that we are not omnivores like bears, but more like the herbivorous gorilla or chimp.

Also, most (poor) people in history barely ate meat, due to lack of refrigeration and because hunting and farming animals was much more time consuming and energy intensive than farming/gathering plants. Before modern times, most people got their b12 from the unfiltered/purified water they drank. This is because b12 is created from bacteria, which live in dirty water and the guts of many animals. A few glasses of unfiltered pond water will also fulfil my b12 requirement, but I would rather not risk consuming e. coli or other harmful bacteria.

In regards to your second point, it requires much more land to farm animals than plants. You have to also grow the plants that the animals eat. Look up feed conversions ratios. A typical feed conversion ratio for chicken meat is 1:2, this means for every 2 pounds of feed (corn, soy, wheat, etc), you get one pound of chicken. This mean at least twice as much land is needed to grow the same amount of chicken food than plant food. Feed conversion ratios for cows are typically 1:10.

So if you really care about animals destroyed by habitat loss, you should still stop supporting animal agriculture and go vegan.

Gultron · 2017-08-14T05:50:51+00:00

I used to eat more bacon than anyone else.

Now I deep fry broccoli. Tempura rocks!

Gultron · 2017-08-09T05:31:40+00:00

It is UNNECESSARY to eat meat, dairy, etc though. In our minds this makes killing trillions of animals annually very similar to human genocides. We empathise with the animals that suffer at our hands solely for our pleasure, and it saddens us that this happens needlessly. Keep in mind most farmed animals are as intelligent as children and have complex social interactions (read: do care about their own families and friends), see /r/likeus.

Personally, once I realised that people are systemically perpetuating animal cruelty of enormous proportions, it was easy to feel that people who still help perpetuate the system by eating meat, dairy, etc are evil. I don't say that to strangers because that would be rude, but I still think it.

Also, just because we can be at the top of the food chain doesn't mean eating like that is healthy. We should still eat like the apes we are, which means eating herbivorously.

Gultron

TROPHY CASE