My brother lived with our grandmother, and I think they were mostly lazy - didn’t like to cook / shop for groceries. Neither one of them really got health problems from that, though my brother did gain a bit of weight.

Great grandmother (reportedly, never met her in person) was mean spirited and feisty to the end.

Nothing happens in isolation… Producing a little less meat shouldn’t cause additional harm, but shutting down a lot of meat production all at once would cause a lot of harm - starting with people who make their living both directly and indirectly from the industry, and if you shut down enough of it all at once you’d be disrupting enough of the supply chain that even people who just consume the food are going to run into problems.

We should strive to do better, but avoid arguments like “STOP ALL X NOW!” - it’s overreaching, and would be counterproductive if you actually achieved it.

I wish everybody would get more “precise with their language” instead of running around spouting “zero harm” “absolutely no suffering” and such things, because people who say that often enough start to really believe it - instead of having a second of thought.

Define harm. If a pig is born and raised by a meatpacking operation, there’s a pig that would never have been born without the meatpacking operation - if it is raised and slaughtered humanely (which they aren’t, these days), is it harmed? If people are starving due to shutdown of all inhumane meatpacking operations, have we reduced overall harm?

And here’s the hard to reconcile thing: if everybody did their absolute best effort, investing 5 hours a week in the family or local cooperative chicken farm to get their eggs, and nobody bought mass produced eggs anymore, salmonella and other disease deaths would skyrocket. Not that everybody who raises chickens for the eggs gets salmonella, just that modern rates are so low - a return to individual farming would see them rise 10x, maybe 100x - even with conscientious chicken ranchers.

Now, get real about how much effort most people would actually put in on personal chicken-egg operations if they had no mass produced options and you’re looking at 1000x increases…

It’s some better, not a lot if you research most of the sources for those packages that say “freeroaming.” The only way the minimum standard for “freeroaming” labeling looks good (and, face it, no profitable operation does more than the minimum required) is by comparison with the factory hell-houses.

no living creature is harmed in the process.

Everything annihilated by aerial spraying, and the creatures (including farm workers) dying of cancer from non-lethal doses, would beg to differ.

This was food waste with a glaze.

You mean BBQ sandwiches? I worked at a Rax (like Arbys, with a salad bar) - the meat scraps and leftovers were thrown in a tub, covered in sauce, stuck in the cooler and sold as BBQ for the next day or so.

My grandmother ate Wendys daily, as her only meal of the day, for 20+ years, she lived to 99. She’s unusual (and she also controlled her calorie intake so she didn’t become overweight.)

Your mileage will most likely vary, that stuff isn’t healthy. Oh, by the way, her mother chewed tobacco to age 96 and lived to 98 - also not typical.

This reminds me of the “Big Gulp” 64oz of soda for 0.99 days - basically when sugar was replaced with HFCS and the price of soda syrup fell through the floor.

We’ve been automating factory production of chicken and pork for a while now, gotta sell it somewhere.

most people just go with ill-fitting off-the-shelf industrial goods instead.

The age of Amazon has made it so much worse… even poor people went to clothing stores and tried stuff on before buying it.

Now, if you don’t want to pay triple, you get it from mail order and just hope it fits - yeah you can return it if it doesn’t fit, but how much hassle is that, if it’s “close enough” people generally don’t bother, whereas if you were in the store you’d get the right size within a minute or two before buying it.

Resisting workers are unproductive, and annoying - you can see their perspective, right?

Mdme Antoinette, Mdme Antoinette, the peasants are revolting!

When have they not been?

And what people are excited is the idea of replacing all non-pleasant work.

So, when do I get an AI to navigate the phone-tree for me (kind of like the advocate in Jupiter Ascending)?

Oh, c’mon - have you EVER tried managing people? They’re a pain in the ass: expensive, unpredictable, needy beyond just the money they demand. Of course dimwit managers would rather outsource their people jobs to a service company wherever and whenever they can, let the service company do all that messy people-management.

What they’re missing is: those outsourcing service providers, even the ones providing AI “workers”, are themselves made possible by, staffed with: people. Your outsourcing bills are ultimately paying for: people. Once they become dependent upon these outsourced service providers, guess what? Their billing rates will go up and up and up right up to the point that it’s almost tempting to stop paying the service provider and just: hire their own people to do the work.

Worth the time to read: https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-03-18-asbestos-in-the-walls-government-by-spicy-autocomplete-ff437603809c

Well, really, it’s wage slavery. Work is all you have, and the pay you get is not enough to give you any freedom from the work.

As you say, you don’t have enough time / energy to go look for another job - such places also intimidate the workforce and arbitrarily fire workers who might signal that they are looking for another job (such firing probably being a favor in the long run, but not if you starve to death in the meantime…)

Ben & Jerry had it right with a 5:1 ratio. No person in a company’s time is “worth” more than 5x the value of another person’s time. Some incentive to develop skills, advance in your role, recognition of better performance, sure. At 5x, that should be enough to recognize your investment in yourself and your skills and your commitment to the company vs some guy who just shows up to push a broom. It wasn’t so out of line with “reality” when they did it in the 1980s, but today it just doesn’t work - the US is stratifying into classes/castes like the ones India is trying to abolish, just without explicit labels. The US system is based on how many digits are in your annual income figure: 4, 5, 6, 7, more?

UBI would go a long way toward rectifying all of this. Let business do what they will, provide every citizen with enough money to live, instead of 0 + whatever they can squeeze out of the bureacrazy by “demonstrating need.” If “illegals” can earn enough to live better here than elsewhere without any UBI, let them - if they get into financial trouble, give them assistance getting back to where they came from - otherwise: live and let live. At the very least, businesses would have to improve working conditions - otherwise the workers would just stay home until they find a better deal elsewhere. I can tell you from experience in the disabled community: people want work, they want to get out and have their value to society acknowledged with a paycheck - they also like to be able to buy shiny things. The current welfare system is a big bureaucratic stick hanging over their head threatening to beat them with benefit cancellation if they do get out and earn a little money.

On the surface I agree - what’s being shown at top headlines, etc. But the PRC wasn’t as TACO as 2025 USA.

Its random and arbitrary enforced.

A direction the US is moving towards…

It was practiced in the Chinese tech sector for a while, then made illegal by their courts - but it is still practiced in private firms there due to lax enforcement.

Now you’re being rational, looking at the big picture. Anyone promoting 996 is, first, using it for shock value, and second, promoting a: me first, me always, me only. perspective on what’s desirable - for the company owners. Workers? Meh, they bought trickle down once, why not try that again? /s

I hope it doesn’t spread outside of China, and I hope it ends (in practice) there soon.

“Although the Chinese Supreme People’s Court ruled 996 illegal in 2021, the practice remains a de facto standard in many private companies due to lax labor law enforcement.”