Where’s ‘turning the music off and driving in silence’?

Sockeye salmon are reddish pink. That’s always what I thought the association was.

Its almost entirely made from plants

And like, even if it was dinosaurs, Dirt is also (partially) made from decayed animals. And, oversimplifying, that dirt becomes plants.

And that’s all fine for vegans, because it doesn’t involve exploitation of animals. Like, if you needed to raise and kill animals to use their corpses to grow plants, that’d be animal exploitation.

I dunno, I really don’t get either of them. They just seem like dreadfully boring games. Played like, 6 hours of each, and I just, don’t get the appeal, at all.

Movies and TV are boring. In the past two decades, there’s been a small handful of stuff that’s watchable, but most of the media is like, painfully boring.

You want the one and only environmental problem in our food industry, that is it.

I’m genuinely sorry if that’s the takeaway from my message, as that was not my intent. That was, actually, the vibe I’ve gotten from you; that the primary issue in food production is locality. I think there are dozens and dozens of issues in our global food supply chain, and maybe a third of them are tied to meat production.

But I don’t think all of humanity must give up meat or anything. My main opinion is that meat is over-represented in our diets, especially American diets, and that huge demand for meat has economically incentivized meat production in areas and ways that aren’t sustainable. But I do think meat can be sustainable. The primary issue isn’t meat existing, its meat being over produced.

Much of what you say in your reply is correct, at least in part, so your not wrong that meat could be produced more sustainably. But, also as you say, it mostly isn’t. So, I choose to not eat meat. But I’m not asking you to not, but rather saying that your proposal, of eating exclusively local, isn’t practical for 90% of humans.

But yeah, you’re right, “it’s a sad fact that many states export so much local food, meat, only to import crops from the other side of the country.” That’s 100% correct, and a problem.

But your soy point isn’t really correct. https://ourworldindata.org/soy. While yes, most of animal feeds is soy meal, a byproduct of soy oil production, if you compare the amount of soybean directly consumed by us, its slightly less that then 7% whole soybeans fed directly to animals. So, animals are eating more straight whole soybeans than humans are eating tofu, tempeh, soymilk, etc.

And, on top of that, Soy meal is human edible. Yes, it often does require further refining, but it already is used to make things like Textured Vegetable Protein and Soymilk, since neither need the oil. And, we lose somewhere between 2-5x the energy using that soymeal to feed chickens, and somewhere between 6-25x that energy feeding it to cows.

And to reiterate, I’m not saying to burn down all animal agriculture and make everyone everywhere vegan. I’m saying that I agree with a lot of what you say, about reworking global logistics and agriculture to make all farming more local and more sustainable. And, as a consequence of that, meat production will have to drop. Factory farming is horrible on so many fronts, but it is efficient at pumping out loads of meat. To dismantle that, like you’re proposing, will result in lower global meat production, even if some localities might actually see a rise. Small scale operations are less efficient in terms of total meat production, even if they’re more efficient by most other metrics (all those pesky ‘market externalities’).

Okay, but what if nut allergy :(

Its hard out here, being a vegan allergic to nuts.

Sticky tofu is hands down my favorite. Something like this: https://veganonboard.com/sticky-lemon-tofu/

Soy Curls is honestly my favorite ‘meat replacement’ (though, I’m not too hot on ‘replacing meat’). They work for doing things like mongolian beef, or just lightly frying after marinading for ‘chicken strips’ to top salads or sandwiches. https://thevietvegan.com/vegan-mongolian-beef/

Soups are of course, pretty easy. I like Lentil Chilli, heavy on the seasonings and beans aside from lentils. Minestrone or lemon orzo are both also great. Thai curry or pho are both more work imo, but amazing (though, both broth bases can often have chicken or shrimp in them).

Burgers, and while impossible meat et. al. are fine I guess, they’re a bit pricey. I honestly prefer a good chipotle black bean burger over them 9/10 times. They’re pretty cheap to buy, but also not very hard to make, with most of the ingredients being cheap.

I personally like seitan, but I know quite a few other vegetarians don’t, so it might be divisive. BUT, in terms of cheap protein, its damn near rock bottom in price. It is some work to make stuff out of it from scratch, but ‘indian mock duck’ is usually seitan, and can be bought from indian stores if you just want to try it. But seitan works to replace burgers, chicken tenders, steaks, sausage, etc. Tons of recipes out there.

The problem with eating locally, is that it isn’t a viable way to feed humanity. Like, yeah, the more local the better, you aren’t wrong. We all should buy local foods as far as is possible. But the nature of humans living in cities, and many cities being near good trade areas rather than good agriculture areas, means that it just isn’t viable.

If everyone was like you, and bought local near-exclusively, the price of food in most cities and many regions would skyrocket, and unless people stopped, many would starve.

Not to say its a binary; we do ‘overship’ foods, and certainly could (and should!) eat more local foods.

Add to that, that demand for meat (especially beef) means that a lot of animal agriculture requires the shipping of plant feed for that meat; see how the majority of soybean farming (77%) is for animal feed. And, similar to the point above, ‘grass fed’ beef just isn’t possible to do while meeting demand. If we want grass fed animal meat only, a lot of people are going to have to give up meat, or dramatically cut down on meat consumption.

None? I’ve never really understood the appeal of ‘rewatching stuff’. My favorite movie(s) are the LotR ones, and I’ve probably watched it through… three times over my life?

Consuming content illegally is by definition a crime, yes. It also has no effect on your output. A summary or review of that content will not be infringing, it will still be fair use.

That their use is infringing and a crime is your opinion.

“My opinion”? have you read the headline? Its not my opinion that matters, its that of the prosecution in this lawsuit. And this lawsuit indeed alleges that copyright infringement has occurred; it’ll be up to the courts to see if the claim holds water.

I’m definitely not sure that GPT4 or other AI models are copyright infringing or otherwise illegal. But, I think that there’s enough that seems questionable that a lawsuit is valid to do some fact-finding, and honestly, I feel like the law is a few years behind on AI anyway.

But it seem plausible that the AI could be found to be ‘illegally distributing works’, or otherwise have broken IP laws at some point during their training or operation. A lot depends on what kind of agreements were signed over the contents of the training packages, something I frankly know nothing about, and would like to see come to light.

I mean, you can do that, but that’s a crime.

Which is exactly what Sarah Silverman is claiming ChatGPT is doing.

And, beyond a individual crime of a person reading a pirated book, again, we’re talking about ChatGPT and other AI magnifying reach and speed, beyond what an individual person ever could do even if they did nothing but read pirated material all day, not unlike websites like The Pirate Bay. Y’know, how those website constantly get taken down and have to move around the globe to areas where they’re beyond the reach of the law, due to the crimes they’re doing.

I’m not like, anti-piracy or anything. But also, I don’t think companies should be using pirated software, and my big concern about LLMs aren’t really for private use, but for corporate use.

The issue isn’t that people are using others works for ‘derivative’ content.

The issue is that, for a person to ‘derive’ comedy from Sarah Silverman the ‘analogue’ way, you have to get her works legally, be that streaming her comedy specials, or watching movies/shows she’s written for.

With chat GPT and other AI, its been ‘trained’ on her work (and, presumably as many other’s works as possible) once, and now there’s no ‘views’, or even sources given, to those properties.

And like a lot of digital work, its reach and speed is unprecedented. Like, previously, yeah, of course you could still ‘derive’ from people’s works indirectly, like from a friend that watched it and recounted the ‘good bits’, or through general ‘cultural osmosis’. But that was still limited by the speed of humans, and of culture. With AI, it can happen a functionally infinite number of times, nearly instantly.

Is all that to say Silverman is 100% right here? Probably not. But I do think that, the legality of ChatGPT, and other AI that can ‘copy’ artist’s work, is worth questioning. But its a sticky enough issue that I’m genuinely not sure what the best route is. Certainly, I think current AI writing and image generation ought to be ineligible for commercial use until the issue has at least been addressed.