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Comment by agumonkey | Hacker News Reader

Recently I do feel a global feeling of tiredness. The things we held as progress don't work, abundance feels void it seems now. Jobs aren't giving you a lot of money and even if so, it can't bring you much; we're all very high in material comfort. What we lack is appreciation and sharing.

Maybe people will enjoy farming more, and doing things more because what we used to avoid to pursue ~higher jobs is now seen as both healthy and joyful activities that aren't so stupid when compared to the mass of idiotic ~jobs we're seeing these days.

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I feels ya.

A few years ago, I got pretty worked up about my state killing an entire wolf pack, just to protect some cows. So I got involved. I learned a lot.

Ranchers are people too. I really loved these people. It was just one bad apple, deliberate repeat offender, causing all the problems. Everyone else was totally onboard towards creating a better future.

Ranching is unsustainable. And they (the families) know it.

Skipping to the end... My predictions:

#1 Laboratory meat will largely eliminate factory farming. It will completely upend our (Western) agricultural economy. Huge reduction in feed grains, pesticides, fertilizers, etc. Massive improvement in waste management. It can't happen soon enough. My uneducated guess is 10-20 year transition. All us tree huggers should work to expedite.

#2 To continue, ranchers will need to go up market. Artisan, bespoke meat.

#3 We will pay ranchers to restore habitat. This will make up for their loss of income from selling meat. And hopefully keep families working the land.

"How to fight desertification and reverse climate change" https://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_green_the_worl...

#4 Trend towards direct micromanagement of animals (wild and domesticated) and habitat will continue. GPS tags, drones, IoT for soil monitoring & management, satellite imagery, adapt to weather predictions, etc. Even more so than my grandfather's day, future farmers and ranchers will be high tech entrepreneurs, knowledgable in tech, business, accounting / finance.

In conclusion: I know our current situation is bleak. There is a way forward, out of this mess. Keep the faith.

"#1 laboratory meat will largely eliminate factory farming. [..] All us tree huggers should work to expedite."

Any suggestion about how to help here? For instance, is there any organization where we can send money for pushing for this outcome?

The environmental reasons alone should be enough to invest in this.

The Good Food Institute is working on exactly that:

https://www.gfi.org/donate

They are a non-profit that are advocating and researching clean meat and plant-based alternatives. I recommend this 75 minute interview with it's director if you want to understand why is it such an important and effective cause:

https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/bruce-friedrich-good...

I'm still looking. Please tell us if you find something.

My 1/2 baked notion is to meet with family ranchers, start talking about active management, build alliances with some tree huggers, enlist the help of their (likely conservative) legislators (state and federal). Maybe start in Wyoming. The messaging would be terrific. Maybe enough to blunt the counter attacks from Big Ag.

My other 1/2 baked notion is to enlist the Tim Ferriss types (health nuts, earliest adopters), pitch vat meat as a veganism meets paleo paradox buster, better than current protein sources (eg whey), create demand from the top-down.

Be warned about Allan savory, I liked his talk a lot, but it seems he's selling snake oil procedures (a few people tried to rebuke him online, I'm not knowledgeable enough to know who's right but it made me shift my stance nonetheless).

And about meat, some cultures enjoy eating way less meat, surely we could reduce the quantity, so that farmers can go back to simpler ways, and probably enjoy a lot more quality too.

True. I do remain skeptical. I just really hope he's right.

The opposition feels like concern trolling. I've been in Allan Savory's position a few times. For instance, a local newspaper called me "a sweaty paranoid kook" in the late 2000s. Today, all we can talk about is election integrity.

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." Mahatma Gandhi

I promise you that if Savory is debunked, I'll update my position accordingly.

The articles were pretty clear on that his methods were never working. I have nothing against him I really liked his theory at first.

I am looking forward to the day we have high quality artificial meat, but how many jobs will that cost? Most farms (even not meat farms will produce feed for other animals), a big part of shipping and mostly everybody who works in meat packaging.

With automatic cars and factory meat, that will do a huge number on non coastal areas of the US. We need to take that into account for the planning process as well.

Consumerism was always a lie. The idea of working more in order to earn more in order to buy more stuff to purportedly make us happier. Insofar as it did, it came with a terrible cost.

I agree that consumerism doesn't work, but what would most anti-consumerist advocates/thinkers describe as the opposite of consumerism?

It seems to me that at least certain aspects of consumerism work. Labor saving appliances like washing machines, slow cookers, microwaves, and vacuums make life much easier and less stressful. Media like TV, movies, and video games seem to provide legitimate entertainment.

I'm not trying to setup a straw man that anti-consumerist are saying we need to go back to the stone age. I'm just not sure where a society/philosophical movement should draw the line.

What makes the most sense to me would be to return to quality goods over mass production (e.g. emphasis on permaculture, the ability to repair goods, opposition to planned obsolescence, etc.) combined with emphasis of gratitude and a balanced approach to minimalism. However, I'm not sure if this approach is available to people who are not well of financially.

Here's I approach this, I was born at peak happy consumerism in a western society. It look weird to see how it backfires, and why people did that. But some book report how people may starve at times in the US. And when you starve and it's long and tiresome to go between places .. The idea of abundance seems like the obvious path. The problem comes from becoming blind and chasing our own tails. We need to fast.

One of the issues here is the division between government action, collective action and individual action; while most people group the first two together, the divide is meaningful as soon as the government can be said to be operating independently of the people; for me, this has always been the case in Western liberal democracy. The methods for which the obvious path can be achieved are still confused.

One idea frequently suggested is that people as individuals ought to reduce the amount of consumption, but does this address the fundamental qualitative issues in the system of production? Even if the scale can be achieved, what will be the meaningful permanent change?

Another response is that reducing the amount of consumption is wrong headed: it's targeting an effect rather than the cause. But in my opinion, the worst solution to this problem is the one which insists on a form of government action. Laws can be changed, but they can also be changed back, and in every country the laws are decided by capital (the structure and abstraction, not "big business"). So this also raises the issue of whether what is profitable is good, but that question has an easy answer: it's not.

My ideas are fairly radical (and very radical by HN standards), in the sense that I think there is a fundamental factor in this mode of production, abstract labour to be specific (which Peter Hudis makes a convincing argument for, rather than property, money, "greed" etc. for instance), which is a cause of overproduction, the qualitative aspects of work in industrial capitalism and much misallocation (judged in human standards rather than economic standards).

I like to blame it on the people. They're not the source of pollution/production but they keep being lazy and immaturely wasteful.

By abstract labour you mean like overly specific high rate tasks instead of craftmanship ?

Laziness and wastefulness are qualities produced by the surroundings, that is to say, in a culture in which abundance is possible, items mean less, as does their disposal. I don't think they are innate human qualities, at least, not fully. The question is to what extent the capitalist mode of production instills these attitudes and thoughts through ideology.

By abstract labour I mean the property of labour as valuable in an economy rather than as the concrete action of producing useful items. A related term is commodification, which transforms purely useful items into commodities by making them comparable (i.e bestowing the property of abstract labour). Abstract labour is what makes a coat and 20 yards of linen comparable and tradeable, and as a consequence of this, money is the general equivalent form for trading.

The focus on high rate tasks instead of craftsmanship ties into the (again related) concept of alienation of labour, which is more obvious in late capitalism.

When exactly in human history did people live in an Utopia of happiness? Misery and suffering has always been prevalent for the majority of the human species.

But do you agree that it (a utopia of happiness) might be something worth striving for?