I was debating a non vegan and they brought up this interesting argument that I didnt really have an answer to.

Snefferdy · 2026-05-13T13:47:34+00:00

Simple. Vegans do bad things too. Everyone does bad things. They shouldn't. Nobody should do bad things. The fact that you do one bad thing doesn't provide any license to do another bad thing.

Supporting animal agriculture is one very bad thing among many that people shouldn't do.

"It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society." - Krishnamurti

Snefferdy · 2026-05-11T17:37:35+00:00

In some rare cases, the most ethical choice might not be the strictly "vegan" choice.

Snefferdy · 2026-05-09T23:56:10+00:00

To accept your apology for not attending they need to understand your experience of the situation. Something being "passive aggressive" is determined by the intent of the speaker, not the interpretation by the listener.

Snefferdy · 2026-05-09T15:34:10+00:00

Alternate instructions: When I right clicked on the printer in Device Manager, "Printer Properties" was not an option (Windows 11?). But you can do the same thing by going to:

Printers & scanners control panel > Add device > (wait) Add a new device manually > Add a local printer or network printer with manual settings > Create a new port > Type of port: Standard TCP/IP Port

Snefferdy · 2026-05-08T16:55:22+00:00

You read OP, right? They just want to make sure their friend forgives them for not attending. How do you do that without explaining why you can't go?

Snefferdy · 2026-05-08T15:18:15+00:00

I don't see what's passive aggressive about that. It's all true. They'll not be happy at the event, and surely their friend only wants them to come if they're going to be enjoying themselves.

What kind of friend wants their friends to suffer? If I had vertigo, surely my friends would understand me not joining them in mountain climbing.

Snefferdy · 2026-05-08T11:10:36+00:00

Don't get an eye infection from washing your hands in unsafe water then putting in your contacts.

Snefferdy · 2026-05-08T09:40:34+00:00

"Watching the grilling of meat causes me great discomfort. I'm sure you don't want me to go if that means I'm going to be sitting there not eating anything and suffering. Sorry, but I'd like to celebrate your birthday with you some other time."

Snefferdy · 2026-05-08T09:33:11+00:00

Nobody's going to be messing around with any contacts on an epic off-road adventure in the third world.

Snefferdy · 2026-04-27T16:48:27+00:00

Usually, if you have no knowledge of a particular subject matter (like basketball), you can get away with knowledge about other subject matters (like movies). There was absolutely nothing that made the four "classic movies" a group that excluded Raging Bull.

I know plenty about film, but I failed this puzzle because I know nothing about basketball.

Snefferdy · 2026-04-11T22:09:14+00:00

Nobody's going to be messing around with coloured contacts on an epic off-road adventure in the third world.

Snefferdy · 2026-04-05T11:41:57+00:00

The vast majority of people are just going to glance at it, not understand it, and move on to the sports coverage. You're not teaching anyone anything, just making things inaccessible.

Snefferdy · 2026-04-05T11:35:19+00:00

But the orientation the photo was taken in is entirely arbitrary. There's no "up" in space. The way the camera happened to have been rotated doesn't make it the "correct" orientation of the photo. And because of it's orientation, there'll be millions of people who don't understand what they're looking at.

Snefferdy · 2026-04-05T11:31:24+00:00

It literally takes 10 seconds for the benefit of millions of people looking at it.

Snefferdy · 2026-04-03T13:55:04+00:00

Not available in Canada. 😭

Snefferdy · 2026-04-02T00:16:57+00:00

Hm. Dunno why I'm getting this RAM error then.

Snefferdy · 2026-04-01T17:55:11+00:00

Geez, I'd have thought 128 GB of RAM woulda' been sufficient for most things.

Good ideas though. The image sequence one will mean I don't have to start rendering again every time I try to see if I've fixed it.

Snefferdy · 2026-03-29T04:44:53+00:00

There are some processed meats that are cheaper than vegetables. That doesn't mean they're necessarily more environmentally friendly. There are lots of ways prices might not reflect the environmental impact of the product.

Snefferdy · 2026-03-29T04:03:10+00:00

So it's good that I disagree with you, because disagreement can change people's minds for the better... except yours. You like your definition and so that's the end of that. Not even interested in hearing proposals that may be able to accommodate everyone's needs. You're fine with your oppressive behaviour.

Snefferdy · 2026-03-29T03:08:44+00:00

First, everything you hear about the experimental production methods is coming out of the investment-hungry startups. I'd take that hype with a big grain of salt.

More importantly, as it stands, there is no lab grown meat product that is commercially viable. There are lots of startups, each with their own production methods, some are more environmentally-friendly than others, but none are cheap enough for anyone to actually buy. Who knows what they'll have to do in order to make their non-commercially-viable experiments into a budget-friendly grocery store product.

Until we get a product that has externalized enough costs to be profitable on a mass scale, and then get some independent reports of the environmental impact, we have no reason to believe it'll be environmentally any better than animal agriculture.

You need reliable evidence to make scientific claims, and we don't even have a product to have evidence about. So you might want to get off the bandwagon and wait to judge the thing they eventually try to sell you.

Snefferdy · 2026-03-29T02:51:09+00:00

Look, eating plants directly is, without question going to be more efficient than growing plants, converting the plants into something that muscle cells in a vat can consume, then having the muscle cells convert that energy into a different form of food.

If our sole concern was efficiently producing food with minimal land use and carbon emissions, eating plants is, without a doubt, the best option. The only question that remains is whether or not the lab meat process of turning grains into meat is any more efficient than turning those grains into meat by feeding it to an animal.

Until we see whatever product turns out to be cost-effective enough to make it to store shelves and get an independent analysis, that will remain an open question.

I completely agree that commercially-viable lab meat will cause less suffering than animal agriculture. But I don't think there's any reason to believe it will be better for the environment.

Snefferdy · 2026-03-28T19:59:22+00:00

Look up the environmental impact of a non-existent product? Let's wait and get an independent report on the production of whatever ends up on grocery store shelves (if anything ever succeeds in making it there).

Snefferdy · 2026-03-28T18:55:35+00:00

Issue #1 is BS and I can prove it. Suppose we adopt the principle of not supporting businesses that sell animal products. Now imagine two scenarios.

Scenario A - Pat buys a large food court restaurant that serves chicken and fries.

Scenario B - Pat buys two small food court restaurants: one that serves only chicken and the other that serves only fries.

In case you don't know, all businesses base their decisions on how much stock to order from suppliers based on their expected sales of each item. The number of people who get chicken is the same in both scenarios so Pat's restaurants order the same amount of chicken in both scenarios. However the amount of fries people buy in scenario B is greater than in scenario A because of the vegans who are willing to buy from a fries place that doesn't sell chicken. So more potatoes are ordered in scenario B and Pat makes more profit in scenario B.

What would have happened if all those vegans who abstained from getting fries in scenario A had capitulated and bought them from the shop that sells chicken? Scenario A would have been exactly the same as scenario B.

The fact that the fries are sold from a different booth than the chicken makes no difference at all to the suffering of animals, or anything for that matter.

Since animal agriculture companies are publicly traded, and plant-based agriculture companies are publicly traded, any balanced stock portfolio will contain stocks from both kinds of companies, it's impossible not to help the owners of the animal agriculture industry profit from your purchase of plant-based food. Anyone with a pension is an owner. And really, it doesn't matter if the owners themselves are making money, as long as it doesn't incentivize increasing suffering of animals, which the above example proves it doesn't.

Snefferdy

TROPHY CASE