Kretinsky

Unless you live in the forest, with no identity card and no social security, eating mushrooms and berries, you have transactional relationships with other humans, where you create a profit out of their work. More generally, most of the consumption goods you consume are made in sweatshops in poorer countries, where industries arbitrage health & working regulation to extract more values from workers.

If you live in the US, well you fund wars across the globe to fund your country's prosperity, tied to the hegemonic status of the dollar.

> again, you have no formation and are spewing nonsense. And adding "period" at the end. And you know it too, you're saying yourself that nutrition science is unscientific.

Can we please stop with the authority argument? Ten years ago every nutritionist were telling you that fat was bad. Now carbs are bad. Every specialist repeated like zombies that COVID-19 was going to be apocalyptic if we didn't lock the population and injected everyone with a poorly researched vaccine. It appeared that most of the people affected by those policies weren't at risk, and now we have a massive youth depression/poverty/delayed education problem, notwithstanding the after effects of the "vaccine-that-works-for-3-months-maybe-but-does-not-stop-transmission".

Please refute that meat > plants regarding protein profiles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complete_protein

> I'm unsure what you mean. Do animals have no moral value? When should we care about animals?

Domesticated animals are a product of the man's hands. I don't agree with USA-style factory farming, which is a case of hubris, bad for humans' health, the ecosystem, and creates unnecessary suffering. However, breeding animals for their produce, and killing them for their meat, is totally ok if done in good conditions.

I don't have a dog because I consider that dogs should primarily be used with the intent their breed was created for. Just like goats were bred to produce milk, Border Collies are made to lead herds. That's also when they're the happiest. :-)

You can find many experiments regarding fertility using sponges. Regarding the milk production, sorry I don't know the precise english verbiage. Here is a paper in French regarding the “extended lactation” practice. It's from a professional body, with real-life testimonies: https://vienne.chambre-agriculture.fr/fileadmin/user_upload/...

> Keep in mind the other questions as well, if you please. How long do they live, compared to a life in nature? Don't guess, actually ask him.

Probably much longer, given that they don't have to face predators, and the humans provide food in winter and medications for them.

> Giving birth is indeed a part of life, but forcible insemination is not. Do you think most milk doesn't come from forcible inseminations?

It does come from insemination – extended lactation allows you to reduce insemination. However, goat milk is not an invention of the modern time – you can also let males do their thing with the goats.

> I doubt you've spent much time on real farms, instead of hobby farms.

Thanks to a long experience in cheese making, which sells at a premium, the French can make a living out of small herds. I grew up chasing the semi-wild Charolais beef living the best of their lives in the Morvan's pastures. I happen to have a few friends who make a living out of cattle farming, so it's definitely not a "hobby" for them. Sorry if it's not the case for you, maybe it's a time to rethink your business model?

I'm not a wolf. I'm explaining that animals kill in nature. Omnivore animals do kill, too, even if they could live by being vegetarians. Also, as I told you, I have stated my point already, it's not flexible. It's ok to breed and kill animals for their meat. Useless suffering should be avoided, as it's unnecessary and spoils the produce. This way of thinking would actually improve much better the situation than your overall ban.

Don't believe me? Well, veganism hasn't stopped industrial farming, however organic farming and diverse labels to nudge the consumer gave birth to better practices and an awareness about more sustainable farming. You're putting virtuous farmers out of business, I'm helping them improve their work.

> What do you think an athlete is? So anyone who is slim is not an athlete? Marathon runners are not athletes according to your definition.

F1 drivers' hedge is mainly in the nervous system and their experience. It's stupid to compare them to marathon runners or gymnasts working the olympic rings. Those last one need proteins to build up muscle/heal it, which is hard to get using plants, because plant protein profile has a lower quality than animal produce.

> So you think 17,000 doctors & medical experts are pseudo scientists? https://www.pcrm.org/about-us

Yes, sorry, but I don't respect the authority argument, especially after COVID-19 where all the “experts” told us that by jailing everyone we'd be safer, while hard data from Sweden was showing that it was clearly false.

The fact that they say that plant-based diet has less fat, which is better, is clearly a misunderstanding of carbs->fat metabolisms. Otherwise, drinking coke wouldn't make you fat. Anyway, we had before the "fat is bad" dogma, now it's "carbs is bad", what comes next?

If you want to know, I ate an almost plant-based diet for a while, full of proteins (lentils + rice, nuts, etc etc), while exercising for endurance and strength 5 days a week. I was logging my data on the ergometer every day. At some point, I started eating meat twice a day, after workout. I suddenly made big gains over the next three weeks, while I was plateauing before. Same workout.

I lost weight, stopped having carbs cravings, got better focus at work and my mood improved. This evidence is worth 100x all the "experts" that you'll find on the internet. It happens that it also meets the experience of millions of athletes across the world - not those cherry-picked by your lobbying group.

> We kill Billions of animals each year. How do you reduce the demand for animal flesh?

Meat isn't an inelastic good. Stringent regulations = lower supply = higher price. I know, I know we aren't yet in a communist economy, so maybe the market will work it out?

> In conclusion, I think we agree on one thing - that animal factory farming is bad and that we should reduce our animal flesh consumption. How do you propose we do that? How would you abolish factory farms?

*animal meat. You can improve factory farms. The Americans are, as always, extreme to suck profit out of everything. You can give more space to animals. You can give access to sunlight and outdoors. You can improve the food. You can have smaller slaughterhouses near the breeding grounds to reduce stress. You can forbid halal/kasher-type of slaughtering. etc etc.

You can also stop subsidizing the exports of low-quality meat the US produces.

- Your link regarding "high performance athletes" isn't really relevant. F1 Racers are not athletes - they have to be as slim as possible to fit in the car body. Also, nothing is told about performance, just random facts about cardiovascular health, something that doesn't affect athletes, as they're already doing a lot of exercise. Last, there is a lot of difference between red meat full of fat and the lean, white meat that most athletes consume. Same with antioxidants, eating meat doesn't prevent you to eat berries on the side.

Ah, and plant-based diets are usually full of carbs, which are metabolized into fat, so their last point is another example of vegan pseudoscience.

- The "happy farm" method could exist by reducing our meat consumption. You can also greatly improve industrial farms if you accept price increases, which is I think a reasonable solution.

- It's virtue signaling. I met so many vegans earning top 5% income lecturing me about global warming and taking planes few times a year for their holidays, I now know the drill quite well. You know what? The best predictor for your CO2 production is your income, which is associated to your consumption level. You want to reduce global warming? Withdraw 80% of your salary in cash and burn it. Stop using a fridge, as well.

- Nutrition is one of the least scientific domains, with theories coming in and out every decade. You can leave solely on a plant-based diet, but there are many drawbacks. It's not like if it was just like changing your shirt's color. Plant proteins profiles are inferior to animal protein profiles. Period.

- Phytoestrogen have a measurable impact on hormone levels. Here is a metastudy by the french food safety body, explaining in length this : https://www.anses.fr/fr/system/files/NUT-Ra-Phytoestrogenes....

- You decide that animals are equal to humans. I decide that it's not the case, which is the common perspective held in western societies since they exist.

- It's elementary. For a protein to be usable by the body, it needs to be complete : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complete_protein and in the right amounts.

Vegetables don't contain complete proteins generally, so you have to eat a diversified, complex array of food to equate animal products. Animal products are complete, and their profile is very close to what the body needs.

Another problem is that “high protein” vegetables usually come with plenty of carbs, or fat in the case of nuts. If you have a high-protein diet because you're a young, active male, you'll end up increasing your caloric intake too much. For instance, in the case of Quinoa, you get 39g of carbs for 8g of lower-quality proteins.

— Meat and diary have the best protein profile, with no bottlenecks. A young man needs between 1 and 2 grams of protein per kg per day, which is very hard to get with a vegan diet, and implies other problems, such as a surcharge of carbs in your diet.

Your link shows tofu as a suitable alternative – it's not, as the phytoestrogen content is an endocrine perturbation for men.

— Killing and being killed is normal in the animal world. Animals are often quite cruel, I had a cat when I was young and living in the countryside. I remember seeing him play with mouses and bird that were clearly in pain and about to die.

Anyway, if you live in a rich country, your way of life probably causes a lot of pain to humans, too. You know, the people who have to work 12h/day 6 days a week to make the cheap consumption goods you own. The poor laborers that pick your vegetables for a minimum wage, or even less, and will get an early cancer because of the pesticides' exposure. The business consultants who have to face extreme pressure and insane working time to produce a few % more for the retirees that own their company's stock each year.

This, just like electric cars, gender issues and climate-change advocacy, is mainly just virtue-signaling from affluent people who do not want that society questions their way of life. You just want to constrain others to assert your domination on society, not solve problems. On my own, I will continue to eat french cheese from the farm near my parent's house, where goats come to the farmer to be milked and are in pasture 8 months of the year. This caloric intake allows me to eat fewer vegetables from slave industrial farms from southern Spain.

- In many countries/biotopes, livestock farming is the only type of farming you can do, because the earth is too poor to have something else than pastures. As such, stopping it may be a net-negative in terms of food production.

- Stop thinking that the only way to breed animals is through factory farms. Not everyone is american.

- Meat, and animal products (milk, eggs...) are a much better protein source than any plant-based alternative. Be it natural, or the chemical/GMO trash that is served by new foodtech startups.

Again, just like you find giant pickups only in the US, many countries outside the US eat meat and breed animals responsibly. You should ask for ethical alternatives, rather than a complete abstinence.

Because vegetarianism is mainly a habit of the wealthy in the US, it may even increase the share of industrial farming, as the ethical farmers lose their natural customers with enough spending power to buy their products.

If you want to start eating meat again, I'd recommend you come to France's Morvan to see Charolais cattle in the green pastures, living a semi-wild life away from any stress. Or in the Alps, where the cows spend their summer eating grass and flowers outside, with only a guard dog taking care they don't get lost.

The vague wording and the complexity is here to give the legislator a lot of freedom in the interpretation of the text.

Bear in mind that those “technical” laws aren't written by MPs – they are written by lobbyists and private consultants like McKinsey, in cooperation with high-tier civil servants. Therefore, they usually follow an agenda that may be hidden or dishonest relative to their initial aim.

I'll take an example: you write a law relaxing the legal definition of what “chocolate” is. It happens that the MP in charge of this law has a Cadbury plant in its constituency – by pure chance, of course! The law and the debate will follow talking points about letting chocolate makers innovate and try new recipes. In reality, Cadbury et al. want to cut costs by introducing cheaper ingredients and reducing quality.

Once automatic screening is in place, it's effortless for the government to start repressing political dissent, to spy on the citizen's economic activity, and so on. In many EU countries, such as France, for instance, an authoritarian government would need to vote very few laws to completely shut down dissent : all the legislative weapons have already been voted by well-meaning and deluded MPs.

The European commission is as hypocritical as it can be. Von der Leyen refuses to show the private texts she exchanged with Pfizer' boss, but wants every EU citizen to surrender their private communications. What is next?

Moreover, even at the universal suffrage, “democracy” doesn't mean electing a dictator with no popular oversight every x years.

In the case of the European commission:

- No EU citizen gave them the explicit mandate to enforce chat control

- If the initiative is repelled, and they continue to force freedom-reducing initiatives, they'll face 0 consequences.

- At most, the parliament can do is strike down a law. There is of course a very unbalanced distribution of power – the elected people have no initiative.

- The EC is corrupt: many commissioners cash fat checks from the private sector after their term, with 0 consequences.[0],[1]

- Lobbyism is everywhere. Corporations with unlimited money bribe officials, harass them, and push their agenda. Anyone close to the EU will tell you that it's much worse than you think.

“Democracy” is not the power of the corporations, and citizens, maybe, if we have time for it and if it doesn't eat into our profits.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/15/european-commi...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/jul/10/former-eu-digit...

What's happening, however is that, since the Patriot act, financial freedoms and the right to privacy became a meme. The state and the banking sector has more and more to say about how you spend your money and earn it. Fact is that a totalitarian regime would have to vote very few laws to enforce itself.

Crypto is a backstop against this.

"Vote for those who align your worldviews" in a bipartisan political system is laughable, same as "lobbying". JPMorgan can indeed lobby to protect its interests, regular citizens can't, or have to waste an amount of energy so high, for results so meaningless while doing it that it's useless in the end. Hence, the real citizens are the ones who have access to the system, be them corporations or oligarchs.

But to go back to the original argument, what's the problem here? All of this is virtual and doesn't affect the real world. Unlike the US banking system that needs taxpayer's money to bail itself out every 15 years like clockwork, the crypto space lives on its own.

Truth is, this crackdown is quite beneficial to the ecosystem, as all devs are leaving the US, or will have to. In the end we'll have a much more balanced tech sector, unlike now where the USA imposes its cultural norms and practices on the rest of the world.

Moreover, “regulation” is not a synonym of “good and righteous”, especially in the US, where things are quite shady when you look from the outside. FTX was the dear of the regulators, and ended us as a massive scam. The recurrent crises in the banking sector show that regulation is, frankly, quite useless.

Furthermore, the US has a long history of using “regulation” as a way to do financial repression against its population and other countries. Crypto, among all the scams and dubious projects, is one of the last harbingers of financial freedom in a world that gets darker and darker every day on that aspect.

Don't believe me? Well, the day you'll be on the longer end of the stick, you'll understand.

Who's going to take care of you when you'll be old, either physically or financially? Someone else's kid. Please let me know how this is wrong.

As for Italy, there's almost no childcare, no financial help for parents, no infrastructure for families. Pediatrics are quite expensive, and here people have children at an older age, or don't. As many interesting shops/workshops/industries are struggling to find competent workers and their owners will retire, we'll see a massive wave of value and cultural destruction there in the coming decades.

And given the wet eyes from the 40-something "childfree" women I see daily when they get a smile from my todler, I'm not sure it's all chill and cool. I see rather pain, suffering and cope.

But yeah, ok, don't try to argue man, just keep your convictions.

Even if you're (very) rich and saved for it, the fact that less and less young people are available to create wealth means that the economy becomes inflationary, or has to use immigrants, depleting the other poor countries of their skilled workforce.

Unfortunately, a volontary "child-free" or rather childless, it's not a disease, thanks, is a kind of freeloading. Politically it's very destructive, as people without children don't want to fund infrastructure or services for them, aggravating the problem.

If you want an example, Italy is a great example of a dying society due to the lack of reproduction and the State' disinterest for it.

- The E-id has a lot of tech debt.

- Estonia is very far from being a "high tech country". Bus stops don't tell you the expected wait time, very few businesses are online, it's often complex to interact with the ones that are if you don't use a local bank, as apparently it's too hard to use Stripe. My internet provider doesn't support recurring payments and I can't pay with a credit card.

- Estonian data collection is creepy. For instance, they collected around 10% of the country's inhabitants' dna to make "medecine of the future". In a country where you have to wait > 1 month to get an appointment for a general doctor and where you pay 20% VAT on pharmaceuticals, right.

- Corruption is widespread in some layers of the society. Bribing public servant for school/kindergarten is common (I know many people who did it...). Tallinn's chronic mismanagement is probably due to the fact that town hall officials go work to the companies that deal with the city - Bolt being one of the first that comes to mind. Also, the massive money laundering scheme that got Danske Bank caught was known by every bank in the country, and all took part to it. The country being so small, it's very very easy to corrupt the right people, and it's quite cheap.

- Can we talk about the fact that several government and city officials drive Bolt cabs to make ends meet?

- Estonian tax system is crazy regressive. 20% vat on food! 20% flat income tax! Wtf is wrong with you guys?

Instead of doing ads like this article, the government should maybe work on reducing the sky high preventable disease rates, mental issues in the population, find actual solution for the estonian language problem (as not telling people, "lol just learn Estonian by yourself dude"), stop reducing the spending in education, fund Estonian culture, which is now either a thing for tourists or an source of extractable public funding for the affluent Estonians.

By the way, take care of your monuments - I've seen so many old manors (Mois) falling in ruins, it's a real shame. Maybe that's a better long term investment that another german SUV bought on leasing.

Would you install North Korea's open-source software on your computer?

The general security of the system has been compromised quite a few times already: https://news.err.ee/1608294000/ak-ria-unlikely-to-be-fined-o... Also, there was a case of a massive data leak following the loss of a hard drive in public transportation by a public servant. Maybe having all records online and collected (including citizen's DNA) isn't such a good idea?

> Never heard of anyone having to do this. Sounds like a website specific issue anyway.

My wife has the problem on her windows computer, I have it on a Mac, we found the issue on a forum, so yes it's clearly common.

> Because you can sign binding legal agreements without leaving your home. It's convenient.

I wonder how people can sign such legal agreements elsewhere in the world.

> This sounds like some grade A conspiracy.

That's what the tax agent told my friend. Given that you can use your e-id for payment and customer card, it doesn't sound so complex to understand, many other countries do the same.

> Is this hyperbole? Do you have an example of a public service that is missing?

Public services are way way too underfunded. Having an appointment with a doctor takes way too much time (months if you don't pay). Getting stuff like orthodonthy outside Tallinn is very complex. If you go to the public hospital at night, the urgency services are left to the bare minimum (I experienced this). All expats that had health problems here (including stuff like "birthing") have horror stories to tell - medecine is delivered like in the soviet times. It's no wonder Estonia has a sky-high rate of preventable diseases and mortality: https://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/419457/...

Tallinn's administration is a joke. They don't do urban planning, so zones like Kalamaja get overbuilt, with almost no shops, roads get crowded (or just free-for-all parking spaces with 0 enforcement), they don't plan for schools, and so on. Mismanagement is the norm, and don't get me started on the electric scooter anarchic situation - walking in the street is as stressful as it gets.

Can we talk about the fact that snow and ice isn't removed from the sidewalk, causing several injuries each year?

> I'll assume you mean getting your kid into one by access. Some districts do indeed have long waiting lists. However if you register as soon as your kid is born the problem goes away. The problem usually surfaces when young parents are unaware of the registration waiting list and then later expect to be immediately admitted. That is only possible with 3+ year olds. The waiting lists are real for younger ones.

Please don't bullshit on this one. Yes, you can get a spot in a kindergarten 45 minutes-away from where you leave, or get an allocation (which won't be enough) to put your kid into a private one. However, if you want to be in one near your home, no luck - unless you bribe. I know, many, many people who did it, so think what you want.

Also, "However if you register as soon as your kid is born the problem goes away." - We did it, our kid was 500 places away in the waiting list the day after he was born. So, no, it doesn't go away, because you don't have enough room for all kids. Simple as this.

> Elite schools are like that in every country. Do you think an elite school would remain elite if it had general admission?

Again, typical lie I hear here. The entrance exam is done at 6 years old, but school isn't compulsory before, so it relies on the parent's education and knowledge on how to game it. The exam is quite opaque, as it's not standardized, it's recommended to attend a "prep school" before (the private ones whith the elite school teachers being the best, hehe), and schools are only in Tallinn.

When Public Acts like Private: the failure of Estonia’s school choice mechanism https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.2304/eerj.2014.13.2.... good article about it. You have a mention at the end that "private donations" help.

If you can game easily the system by having insider's info, it's not "elite" any more I'm afraid.

> Are you talking about mom & pop stores? Because the biggest stores like Selver, Prisma, Rimi, Coop, Stockmann not only have an online presence but even do delivery. I think only Maxima doesn't do delivery, but still has an online listing of items.

Yeah, given that Estonia has very very few shops in general, I'm talking about the medium-to-smaller ones. Just to recall, Estonia's narrative is that it's a very advanced IT country - in really, it's really not that.

Sorry to break the carefully-chiseled narrative, but I really think Estonia should recognize that a lot of things are wrong, to solve them and have a new start. Maybe Estonians would have a much nicer society, youngsters would stop to leave and mental health problems would decrease a bit.

Please read those articles from the State-sponsored media: https://news.err.ee/1608774058/julianna-jurtsenko-switch-to-...

https://news.err.ee/1608751774/deputy-mayor-language-transit...

Also, there are plans to prevent russian-speaking people to enter politics. This is a problem in places like Narva where 99% of the population speaks Russian. https://news.err.ee/1608778132/ministry-calls-for-assessing-...

The country is divided between Russians and Estonians, and foreigners. Estonian politics revolve around picking on Russians. It's sometimes a bit comical: Estonian schools don't have enough teachers for Estonian speakers, because of lack of planning and funding, and now they want to ban russophone schools. Russophones are forced to "learn the language" (one of the most complex in the world) while being soft-excluded from the society. Anyway, Estonians don't really enjoy speaking with less-than-fluent Estonian speakers and will switch to english or try to make humiliating corrections, so picking the language is quite hard here.

People won't hold the door if you have a kid in the arms, doctors won't be nice to you, there's absolutely no culture of service. You have systematically to send emails, calls, in-person visits to get things done, or get paid. It's not me being nice, every local will tell you the same thing we he stops pumping the "Estonia is nordic" meme (it's not, it's a post soviet society with 0 public services).

Advice: don't go to Estonia. It's no wonder one fifth of the population already left.

The Estonian e-id is a good idea, but very badly implemented, and quite creepy: - You need to install some government software on your computer to use basic services. They ask you to install a browser extension. huh...

- The software UI is really crap. You get error messages in Russian, you have 3 apps for different purposes. You need to dump your cookies before using the e-id online, and it's nowhere said. Using e-id is usually a real pain, as it doesn't work out of the box most of the time.

- It's not needed most of the time. Why do I need to find my e-id, the adapter, my code, just to check my internet provider account? A simple mail/password would have been fine.

- If you're on your phone, you can use a "mobil-id" and use it like this, and pay using your id. Ok, but then, well...there's a disturbing centralization of data. A friend got a tax inspection because his supermarket card was linked to his e-id and he was seemingly spending more than what he was getting paid for his job. Are you OK with the government spying on your spending?

- Estonia has almost no public services. Healthcare is a joke here - you need to wait often more than 3 months to see a specialist, even in Tallinn. Kindergartens are very difficult to access without bribing the administration (you don't need an e-id for this). There's a very opaque "elite school" system, which is geared around gatekeeping the good schools for the elite, while the rest of the population gets sub-par education. So yeah, being able to book a doctor online is interesting only if there are doctors available.

Also, in the rest of the economy, one is forced to admit that web services are really underdeveloped - most shops don't have an online presence. Estonia's very good at PR, but most foreigners there (and some of the local population that lived abroad) will tell you it's mainly bs.

I'm really happy for you that you are entitled with enough time and money to lift/box/muay thai/cardio - I personally have to keep the bank account loaded enough to make ends meet, while I'm not at home helping with the daily chores. I did a lot of sport in the past though, I was a competitive rower in my home country, and I kept a very strong cardio out of it.

Anyway, why not a bit of skin in the game and test your theory about "no physical difference between 40s and 20s"? For instance, by marketing a health insurance in the US, where the premiums are the same for this age category? I hear that it's a good business, so why wouldn't you try? https://www.valuepenguin.com/how-age-affects-health-insuranc...

So yeah, it's better to start having children early than late. It doesn't mean that you'll be crippled in bed because you had them late (aside from the fertility issues).

Also, Hacker News is essentially composed of well-off, western people working in white collar jobs. Of course, those people will have easy and healthy lives; I wouldn't say the same for a mason or a cashier, and those people exist.