I agree with your overall sentiment. I'd never buy or consume foie gras and don't care that it's a "cultural thing".
But your general description of meat production is a bit too simplistic. The main issue with it, for me, is not the very act of taking a life for food. It's about what comes before it. The life the animals have in captivity. There are differences of course, but generally lifestock is held in too little space, too high stocking density, inappropriate bedding, flooring and treatment in case of diseases. It's a matter of cost. One can provide conditions where lifestock is suffering much less, having a good life even, but that means much more cost per pound meat sold. In addition, beginning of life (insemination which can be "natural" or artificial or some kind of in-between rape kind) and end (different ways of taking the life, some gas suffocating the animal causing terrible pain, or bolt-into-brain or) can also provide or prevent different levels of suffering. Again it's a matter of cost.
I personally do eat meat. Not everyday but most days. I do try to ensure that the farmer provided the animals with a good life, as I know most of them personally. Or it's a wild animal, running through the forest until the last moments. Not practical for everybody, and pretty pricey, but avoids the worst.
As you see, suffering is key here. The mere act of taking a life is "natural". (A bolt through the brain is quick and less painful than the long hunt by a pack of wolves or a lion.) It's still a kill, but that's the balance I'm striking personally.
Everyone strikes a balance personally. Myself, being vegan, I still drive a car which kills some bugs. So I have no pretence I'm "fully right".
That said, let's consider dairy. Cows have their babies taken from them right after birth, which entails days of audible suffering from the mums (they cry for days). This happens 4-5 times in their live. The baby is fed formula, the moms milk is taken and sold for profit. That's the suffering you mentioned. That's impossible to avoid when producing dairy at scale.
Yes, it's correct that a majority of larger scale dairy farming today practices this. The usual argument is that it reduces separation stress (since the calf is assumed to be too young to remember and the cow didn't yet get used to having it by its side), but that argument does not have actual scientific evidence.
But it's far from impossible to avoid. There are farms that keep calves with their moms for the first months and this is an active topic of academic research in animal welfare groups around the world, mostly in Europe. There are some drawbacks, like obviously the calf drinks some of the milk that otherwise could be sold, but there are advantages too, like calves growing faster and having better health which could compensate for these effects, but again, this is still being researched.
So, it's not even clear that it's economically better to separate cow and calf right after birth (dairy industry is quite conservative and slow to adopt change.) But even if there is an economic hit, it's not so big and consumers who care could just pay more. It could eventually be included in regulations for dairy farming, and until then, people who care (like you and me) can voluntarily buy milk from farms that practice keeping them together. Apart from being better for the animals, it also shows farmers and regulators that people care and this can work.
I respect you going vegan, but for this particular problem there are solutions and it seems like there are worse things that we do to animals.
> But for example, I live in a housing co-operative, and there the laws really become a pain. Like we wanted to use the CCTV to better enforce treatment of communal areas, but you can't without a police report, etc.
I also live in a housing cooperative and I'm glad these laws exist. They protect me from some neighbors that want to set up CCTV everywhere because somebody once saw a kid in the yard that he didn't recognize so must be a burgler (dark skin tone I might add), and because some neighbors don't fold their cardboard boxes properly in the recycling room. And for that BS I and all neighbors should be put under permanent video surveillance in all common areas on the property? No way, I'm glad the law prohibits that.
> I've lived in many countries, small, large, rich, poor, and I think Ger many is the worst among them to start a business (and also to live, but everyone has their preferences) unless you have a really good reason to be there.
Try India. There was an HN post the other day about a guy who tried to set up some manufacturing and 2 years in he was still far away from all the permits.
One thing the article we are discussing notably lacks is the mention of bribes. Obviously, you'd add, those would be illegal. Haha. True! They are illegal in India too. And in all other countries. But compared to some forms that are (outrageously!) in German, those re a real PITA.
I'm living in Germany now, by choice, and it's a lovely country with lovely people. Not everything is perfect, but many of the imperfections contribute to the loveliness. Just like in many other countries, rich and poor.
Agree that bribes should be part of the analysis, but I would do the comparison with the time and cost to accomplish a goal, without judging the method.
If you look at the outrageously high fees and lack of competition (notaries and tax accounts - yes there’s a bunch out there but it’s not the market dictating the fee and no guarantees that they won’t work towards a suboptimal outcome) I don’t really see how bribes are worse. In Germany corruption has just moved up the chain making everything expensive.
Overall it’s a lost opportunity to create wealth, jobs and a competitive advantage, both in India and Germany.
Then there’s the bit about personal preference. I didn’t see anything good in Germany, but happy for you if you do and live there.
> Agree that bribes should be part of the analysis, but I would do the comparison with the time and cost to accomplish a goal, without judging the method.
I'm sure you can get your business quickly off the ground if you are friends with the dictator in a country with an oppressive regime. (Others go to jail but that's less important apparently.)
Thanks for posting this. I now know one more person who I'll make sure to never work for. Such a chaotic, ill-informed and partially self-contradictory mess.
Yes there is some bureaucracy involved. No, not all of this makes sense. (Especially to somebody with only partial language familiarity despite the repeated claims to the contrary, but you are making it obvious that there are quite some deficiencies in your knowledge. Fun fact: A foreigner in the UK also won't know all the English legalese.)
One of the points of all of this is to reduce the risk of something like FTX happening. That's why those guys are in the Bahamas, not in Germany.
Frankly, no. Buildings are burning with people dying inside right now. The situation is an emergency, even if all we've ever managed is ten millennia of triage. That is the default, that is the background. Weigh the risks, sure, but don't act like choosing to do nothing is without cost. We should study asbestos just as much as we need to, as best as we can tell, and no more. In the meantime we need to fireproof all buildings with asbestos.
We did weigh the risks. We did study asbestos. And we as a society made an informed decision that the risk of asbestos outweighed the risk of buildings catching on fire.
I don't understand the point you were trying to make here. Why shouldn't we invest effort to research a technology that might mitigate the 2nd leading cause of death in the developed world?
The author doesn't get his permit stamped and obviously currently has no influence. He'll probably give up, and now the jobs he would have created and imports that would have become local production won't happen. It's not an obvious good vs bad situation here, a corrupt system that allows bribes is gross, but pretending you can just act like you are in a western country with rule of law is ignoring reality.
You got it upside down. Exactly because too many people think like that, this whole corrupt system works. Imagine the whole country refusing to pay bribes. They would disappear tomorrow.
This whole "but this single action won't change anything " attitude may feel rational, and even be (selfishly) rational, but the effect comes through the aggregate. Lots of people in society behaving like that, and you get emergent properties caused by the aggregate of those individual choices. A dangerous (and pretty selfish) path to go in societies.
If everyone who has a problem with the corrupt system opts out, the system will chug along fine. Most people don't care, obviously. The people who make a moral stand will just be poorer and less able to thrive. You are basically suggesting something a lot like being Amish, they refuse to participate and as result they are a cute little subculture that is slowly disappearing.
So you're saying during Jim Crow people should have refused to build factories? I don't follow your point, laws which attack black people are very different from bureaucracies that require bribery to give you permits for your business. I mean both are bad, but they are very different, and Jim Crow is a thousand times worse, both because of it's basic nature and because it was the law of the land and enforced with the full power of the government (vs corruption, which is people sneaking around in violation of the law).
This is what you are doing: "So you think it's ok to just pay it when the police to give you a speeding ticket when you weren't speeding!? That means you are fine with the holocaust!"
At the end of the day you are only playing a game that someone else has made. It can be corrupt, terrible, whatever, but the fact is you can do nothing to stop it, so if you want to get anything done you need to play the game. Your little petty protest does not stop the game from being played, the people who made the game as it is just don't care about your opinions at all.
