Hacker News Reader

Comment by diydsp | Hacker News Reader

There are 31,557,600 seconds in a year. And every year, 55 * 10^9 animals are killed (in the U.S.). That means at a frequency of 1.743kHz, life is extinguished, day and night. Just image a single wince of pain coming from getting punched unconscious. And then in the semi-hazy state, throat is slit as life grinds to halt, skin is removed. But it doesn't happen just once... it happens so often that if there was a single faint tick of clock each time, it would blur together into a high-pitched whine in the center of the most sensitive portion of hearing (between 1kHz and 4 kHz). 24 hours per day, every day of the year!

dsp@diydsp:~/sim$ bc -l bc 1.07.1 Copyright 1991-1994, 1997, 1998, 2000, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2012-2017 Free Software Foundation, Inc. This is free software with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. For details type `warranty'. 5510^9 ( 3.17*10^-8) 1743.50000000000000000000

View on HN

If you throw this script into your PATH, you can write:

  $ math ‘5510^9 (3.17*10^-8)’
  1743.5000

https://github.com/shawwn/scrap/blob/master/math

It’s a wrapper around bc, but it’s one of my most-used scripts. Doing some quick math in the terminal without opening a repl is nice.

Also consider that in the same time, roughly the same --- or perhaps even more --- number of animals are born.

Wait.. how many?

55 billion animals? only in the US? Jesus

What a macabre calculation, and as poetic as it is, so befitting its own passage in a Harlan Ellison novel, I feel nothing as I read it.

I still like chops.

It's not weird that you like the taste of meat. But being unable to empathize with the sentient animals that we kill so thoughtlessly, and at such a scale, even when you're confronted with that fact in this poetic yet concise fashion is more than a little callous.

Happy thanksgiving!

https://bigthink.com/surprising-science/dissatisfied-with-yo...

Veggies is good

I like to drink tomato juice and pretend it's blood, and eat gumi bears and pretend they're little fetuses, to get all the blood sucking baby eating urges out of my system.

that has me laughing, so very "just after Halloween".

> I feel nothing as I read it.

Honestly, it's a massive win for cultural progress that we have even made the suffering of people with a different skin color intelligible to most people.

Intelligibility of the suffering of other species will probably take a considerably longer amount of time.

When people proudly proclaim that they simply do not care for the suffering of animals, I wonder if they realize that they sound like the millions of people who were on the wrong side of history.

The circle of moral consideration in the Western world started generally with land-owning white men, then (still generally speaking) widened to include white men without land, then women, non-white people, etc. The circle of moral consideration is slowly starting to cover non-human animals, though it will take hundreds of years before they are truly protected.

The folks who say they do not care about animals join the company of everyone who has historically opposed the widening of that circle, the people who stood against granting basic rights and basic consideration to those who enjoy them today.

I'll agree with the thought of "The folks who say they do not care about animals join the company of everyone who has historically opposed the widening of that circle", I do benefit from the status quo.

That being said, it is a huge proposition to proclaim you're on the right side of history, and that others who aren't should either reconsider or live to regret it. Especially when the change you champion will only happen when those that make money from meat no longer do. I'll sooner bet on the grass turning purple.

It has much more to do with people's consumption patterns and ethical norms than it does that people make money from meat.

No matter how much money someone makes from owning a slaughterhouse, they can't make me eat something I don't want to eat.

> Especially when the change you champion will only happen when those that make money from meat no longer do.

We can all think of a couple historical instances of radical social change which necessitated short-term economic sacrifices and paradigm shifts. Yet, the grass isn't purple.

"If I didn't buy those slaves somebody else would. That's just the way the world works kid."

Maybe the circle will expand to include computers; users and programmers of this century will be seen as the unforgivable oppressors and violators of innocent minds for their own profit and convenience.

I don't see value in pandering to hypothetical future moralists. If they one day resurrect my corpse and torture me for eternity as punishment for eating animals, maybe then I'll care. Best case scenario, this comment may provide the same vacant sense of superiority that quotes from dead racists do for us; worst case, society regresses to bigotry and our current social morality is derided as a failed experiment, and you and I will share a cell in the cybernetic hell the 7th Reich make for resurrected wrong-thinkers.

The fact that you see advocating for the widening of the circle of moral consideration as “pandering not hypothetical future moralists” is an embarrassing self burn.

Should the circle be widened to include computers?

I don't think it's so simple. I love animals and will sometimes go out of my way to rescue or assist an insect, but I also have an aggressive side and enjoy eating meat. Veganism makes perfect sense to me, but so does predation.

So did tribal conflict and "mine against yours" on the basis of looks and skin-color. I don't see how this is contrary to my point.

What I mean is that I don't think conflict is due to an inability to appreciate suffering as your first post suggested. It's fully intelligible to most people and in some respects to other animals, but empathy is situational and selective. So I don't think intelligibility is the only factor.

Me too, but I only order lamb when at a sit-down restaurant where I can enjoy it and finish it all. And I default to chicken over red meat because cows are more complex creatures. Delicious though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com