Thanks for the recommendation.

Sorry in advance! The morality of meat really interests me.

It seems almost guaranteed that we will look back on factory farming in this fashion. The current system requires significant help from the legal system (banning documentation of the animals’ conditions, excessively prosecuting people who break the rules, looking the other way when farms hire people who will lose their jobs if they rock the boat) just to keep going.

Whether or not meat consumption in general meets the same societal fate seems less certain to me. We don’t view any other animals killing their prey as immoral, and before the industrial agricultural takeover lots of folks lived on farms and raised livestock for slaughter and treated them far better. Groups that lives successfully and sustainably off the land, like the Polynesians who settled Hawaii, raised livestock and fished a renewable amount. That’s been going on for ages and ages. Is it the act of killing a conscious animal we’ll have issue with? Will that sentiment focus on the smart animals like pigs and cows, and leave chickens and fish as acceptable? Will it rule out all animals even though some of them are so dumb that their form of consciousness is unrelatable? What about insect biomass based food? Will it spread to certain plants or fungi as we learn more about their forms of awareness and how they experience the world? Plants sharing knowledge through pheromones and root systems seems quite similar to the level of communication ants and other colony insects have. Where is the line going to be drawn?

From a knowledge standpoint, I simply don’t know enough about nutrition to understand whether or not humans can be ‘maximally healthy’ on a vegetarian or vegan or pescatarian or w/e diet. If we can, sweet! If not, what’s the next move? Lab grown meat seems like it’s just around the corner but then when you listen to a podcast on where they’re at you realize they can’t mimic any of the complex structures that give meat texture; they’re sometimes only 20, 30% meat with the rest being additives; they suck an undetermined but certainly super high amount of energy from the grid just to perform these relatively rudimentary feats. It does make me wonder if having some cows that wander around eating grass and killing one or two of the herd periodically is really worse from a moral standpoint than covering entire ecosystems in solar panels to run the scaled up meat labs. Not to mention how either option seems like there’s no way it can scale to how many people are living on the planet right now!

I certainly don’t envy the next generations. Which is a weird feeling. I don’t think we’re supposed to feel bad for our descendants. I hope they figure out the things that stumped us.

My family is mostly veggie, still eat dairy and some meat on the weekends. No pork because I’m trying to keep pushing the line further towards a place I feel better about. Pigs are just too dang smart for the hellish conditions they’re raised in on U.S. farms. Drawing that line felt hard, pepperoni might be my favorite use case for meat. But I think my kids will grow up just a little further toward the point of outrage we need to be at to save these animals from the madhouse created to feed us.

Sounds like a good point, but claiming that “Words are the least secure way to generate a password 84 characters long” would be pointless.

It’s great that it’s obvious to you. It is. Glad you’re protected on the internet. Unfortunately, if you’re arguing with people who are savvy enough to be on the fediverss yet find it confusing, then there are many less savvy people, let’s say older folks, whom Google will be serving malware links. Is this not a problem? It’s their fault for not being, what, born later?

Okay, this study has absolutely fascinated me. Tried to find the full study but failed, but Gang Chen (MIT professor, primary author) has a 40 minute symposium about it. Piped bot incoming, hopefully: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=B1PbNTYU0GQ

You replied to a fairly accurate summary of the postulated explanation of an observed phenomena by saying it’s literally impossible. Either the study is faking its* data, or the study has real data but you don’t like the way definitions are playing out here. You’re arguing for both, because it’s really important that this study is wrong, because you don’t like it. But it can’t be both. Let’s assume PNAS didn’t publish a completely fraudulent study about a made-up phenomenon.

The thermal heat that is being transferred is what causes evaporation. That’s the historical understanding. Yes? Energy in, energy out. 1:1 ratio, everything is conserved. But it’s evaporating twice as fast as that measured heat transfer explains. 1=2? That’s not right. Saying “it’s just more heat that you can’t measure” doesn’t make any sense, because you’re claiming that 1.0004 = 2. It’s a new process. Yeah, something happened on a molecular level and there was probably heat transfer. But on a completely different scale than the known process of evaporation through actual ‘macro’ heat transfer. So it’s not the fucking same.

Again, the green thing. If evaporation is caused only by previously understood processes of heat transfer—more energy is more heat transfer is more evaporation—then why does a less energetic green light produce more evaporation than a more energetic blue or violent light?

“The researchers tried to duplicate the observed evaporation rate with the same setup but using electricity to heat the material, and no light. Even though the thermal input was the same as in the other test, the amount of water that evaporated never exceeded the thermal limit. However, it did so when the simulated sunlight was on, confirming that light was the cause of the extra evaporation.”

Sorry to steal so much of your time, but if you’re not fucking what’s so damn important

From the abstract: “We interpret these observations by introducing the hypothesis that photons in the visible spectrum can cleave water clusters off surfaces due to large electrical field gradients and quadrupole force on molecular clusters.”

The commenter’s interpretation of the summary was pretty close to the language Chen used.

To be clear, this article is written by an English native speaker who is summarizing a study written in English primarily by a man who’s been at U.S. universities for three decades. Unless you meant it was a bad summary, which I don’t think it was, but that’s opinion.

I hope you lack the time because you’re setting up your own study. This one was set up due to previous observations of rates of evaporation double or greater than those understood to be mathematically possible. Hell of an equipment error. It also observes a difference in the rate of evaporation under different colors of light, with the highest rate of evaporation occurring under green light, which you would probably also deem impossible, since color has nothing to do with it and green isn’t even the most energetic wavelength. An MIT professor, a postdoc, and four others hang their hat on these results, and the reality of this phenomenon. rdyoung disagrees with them in a comments section on an obscure forum. Which source might be more credible?