Edition 507

Stay strong, I really hope you get a job soon, it will be something to focus on, increasing positivity, which is a good thing for mind and body.

I was wondering how many tequila shots were required in prep for this!

You are quite correct sir. We have entered the sixth mass extinction of species in Earths history caused by human population growth. Humans are also one of those species that will go extinct, unless Elon gets us to Mars. The Earth has been through this 5 times before, it will recover, new species will evolve over time and life will continue.

The problem here is that the first world are recycling, using less fossil fuels and also have a negative population growth (bar the USA which has a positive population growth due to third world immigration). The third world that is the culprit of exponential population growth is also the primary contributor of environmental destruction and pollution. 90% of the plastic in our oceans comes from third world countries that have zero regard for the environment. So yes, the bit that you are doing towards sustainability is our duty as custodians of the planet but has absolutely zero effect in reducing global pollution and destruction. Additionally, I put forward to you that being a vegan (on a global scale) would have a monumentally bigger negative impact on the environment than if we maintain the current meat/plant consumption ratio. The logic behind this is that calorie value in plant matter is so low compared to meat that to maintain the current global levels of an adequate nutrition as vegans, 10 times more agricultural output would be needed to produce enough food. There is simply just not enough arable land (or water) in the entire world to be able to meet such an astronomical calorie requirement sourced purely from low yield plant matter. This is just a thumb-suck/guesstimate, I am too lazy to calculate real figures, but just from looking at global stats it may not be a far out hypothesis, so, I think eating meat, like recycling, is my contribution to saving the planet.

Eating meat is not the problem, global population is. Nothing is environmentally sustainable against the onslaught of exponential human population growth!

Need I say "I f**cken told you so, it's just not gonna f**cken happen!"

So glad to hear some positive news Cois.

I was thinking the same thing. He was probably as skinny as ****due to malnutrition and more than likely had an iron deficiency.

To break the Everesting record, choosing the right hill is critical (duh). In my opinion this hill is too short in comparison to the current record holder. This is a significant disadvantage as the current record holder was topping 100 kph on his descents as the descent was 10 times longer. If this chap hits 60 kph before he has to brake to turn around for the next repeat he will be lucky. That is a big speed differential. Multiply this by the number of repeats (197) he has to do compared to the current record holder (53) and you will see he is already at a disadvantage before even starting. Additionally, braking at the bottom of each repeat consumes valuable time, this hill requires 4 times more braking than the record. If he breaks the record on this hill I will be incredibly impressed, particularly with the knowledge that if he chose a more suitable hill he would go even faster!

Ball gag and strap-ons get thru censorship but my post gets deleted! Must have left a bad taste in the moderators and Odinson's mouth

Thinking of you constantly Cois. Get treatment for the depression pls, don't let it get hold of you. Half the battle is a mental battle. Stay strong, positive thought is so powerful.

A melancholic rendition more fitting to the lyrics that the original.

I thought this was quite funny that I get meat adverts while viewing a vegan threat but then I realized that Google is probably analyzing everything I do and knows more about me than my wife, so of course Google knows I am an unrepentant meat eater. Odinson probably gets Kale and Tofu ads

With this kind of genius coding talent you should be working for Google or Facebook If you are going to make improvements and fix bugs then the one thing I noticed is that on the power curve display the curve lines are covered by the estimated values box. Can the box be moved to the right off the graph lines? See screen shot.

Agree on both the fee and the collection.

I have extracted some valid points you have made for further discussion. It is really only the middle to upper class or 'privileged' people that can adopt a vegan diet by choice. The lower class, the underclass and the poverty stricken don't actually give a flying f*ck for the environment, their day to day focus is essentially one of survival. These population strata are also the least educated and least educable. Unfortunately they are also the very humans that are causing the population explosion. So to say that we should eat less meat is very noble but pretty much pointless as the population segment that will hear your message, could afford to do this and is in a position to make this kind of ‘educated’ choice is so small as to be negligible. Secondly, if we eat less meat our calorie intake will have to be supplemented with other foodstuffs. If it is plant based foodstuffs then we will have to eat so much more to equal the calorie dense value of meat. Eating more will mean growing more which means needing more arable land, more water etc. This is going to have a knock on effect on every single component of the food chain. This is not an inconsequential decision. Thirdly, I do concede that the meat industry is not the nicest of industries but it has come about due to our success as humans in breeding and generating wealth. We could ensure that all meat is produced from natural, ethical, organic, sustainable, green and humane sources, but of course that would make meat unaffordable to all but the rich. It would also scale down the meat industry to a fraction of what it is today. So who has the right to place billions of people into a position of potential malnutrition, or to put millions of people out of a job? Lastly, who has the right to determine whose ideals are to be adopted? Who has the right to even decide that someone’s ideals are wrong? Who has the right to impose their ideals on another? Essentially you are manipulating what people can or can’t eat or how they should spend their money. This is fundamentally Orwellian in concept. Odinson are these your rights as a vegan?

Thanks GrahamS2, this pretty much supports what I have been saying.

I'm rallying against the untruths of veganism. 1. It is not unethical to eat meat. 2. Veganism is not healthy. 3. Veganism is not better for the environment. These are the three pillars supporting the vegan argument. They are myths. My basic argument is that the massive human population explosion is the root cause of all the problems we are facing today, and not the fact that we eat meat.

I'm not convinced that being vegan is any way more 'green' that meat eaters. The low calorie content of vegan food necessitates them to eat far more of it than regular meat eaters. This means far more of their foodstuffs need to be grown. So vegans need many more extra fields to grow their crops. On the other hand, these extra fields could be used to raise cows, a far more efficient source of calories, not to mention the benefits of the other by-products. For the past 4 decades or so a number of major diseases have been squarely attributed to meat and dairy product consumption. This has been found to be not true, hence Prof. Noakes' diet, Banting and even the new carnivore diet. I can't see how meat has been made aspirational, on the contrary, the health industry has demonized meat. Of course corporate greed does encourage efficiency to a degree, but I would suggest that globalism is by far a bigger factor at play. Efficiency is not going to drive demand whereas the more than doubling of the human population in the past 5 decades certainly will.

I don't think diet choice is the fundamental cause of the increased meat consumption. I think it is more subtle than a conscious bias towards meat consumption. It does not say which country this demand for meat was measured, but let's say it was the USA. Firstly, per capita income in America has risen tremendously since the 60's. So more money to spend on meat. Secondly, the availability of food has just become overwhelming over this time period as well. Fast Food and Take Outs are just everywhere, you can eat 24x7 if you want to, hence the severe obesity problem in America. So combine increased affluence and the availability of food and basically Americans are simply just eating themselves to death. Anyway, if you take 40kg of meat per person per year it works out to be roughly 100g a day. 100g of protein per day is pretty close to Recommended Daily Allowance for most people, so it is certainly not excessive. In 1960 there were about 3 billion people on our planet and in 2013 there were 7 billion. Considering increased affluence, increased overall food consumption and the human population explosion over the past decades, it is no wonder that there is a increased demand for meat, but this is true for all other foodstuffs as well, a prime example being palm oil. All this results in the catastrophic destruction of our planets natural resources.

Factory farming is not a result of our diet choice. It is purely a result of the exponential human population growth which is sadly a result of our evolutionary success. Exponential population growth requires an equivalent exponential food production. This is driving factory farming, this is driving deforestation and natural habitat destruction to make place for large scale industrial farming. This is driving increasing pesticide use and the development of GMO’s. This is driving the need to yield the most food possible from the least resources possible at the least risk possible at the cheapest price possible. This cannot be done with traditional farming and natural food production methods. It cannot be done morally or ethically. It cannot be done in a humane, sustainable, green and organic manner. It cannot be done without driving the food price beyond the means of billions of poor and poverty stricken people. It cannot be done without large scale human starvation and suffering. So we are facing a moral dilemma, be nice to animals or be nice to humans?

In this era of our existence I agree wholeheartedly.

When I say veganism is unnatural it is from a dietary perspective. We are omnivores not herbivores. Being a herbivore (only eating plant material) for a human is as unnatural as a lion being a herbivore or a cow being an carnivore. It is not their natural diet, they would die. Humans have evolved eating meat, and have actually evolved because we ate meat. Our evolutionary success has primarily been attributed to an ancestral diet change to include meat. Consuming highly nutritious and calorie dense meat is what fuelled our rapid evolutionary development compared to our primate cousins. If we had continued to munch on bananas we would still be apes swinging in trees. What this evolution means is that the consumption of meat has become a vital prerequisite for optimum health and development which makes it understandable that a diet excluding meat is nutritionally deficient for our needs, resulting in malnutrition. So veganism is essentially self-imposed malnourishment. We all know that malnutrition results in stunted physical and mental development and dulls physical and mental prowess. I put it to you that veganism is unnatural as it is based purely on an ideological or ethical principle that goes against our natural development and the path that brought us to our current state of human existence.

It is unnatural.