“Give us what we want or we’ll shit in the pool and ruin it for everybody.”

I knew this day would come but nonetheless I was not prepared for it…

You seem to assume I’m arguing in favor of vegan cats.

Whether or not a cat can thrive on a vegan diet is irrelevant to me as I don’t own a cat nor do I advise people on how to feed their cats. However, I do have a bias (as we all do) that tells me there is likely more nuance (which you did allude to in your original reply) than the general absolutist sentiment against the idea.

That bias is informed by half-a-lifetime of experience maintaining a loosely plant-based diet myself and witnessing first-hand the fierce compulsion people have to push their uneducated opinions at the mere mention of a plant-based diet. In my experience, there are few other things that can so reliably stir people into a vitriolic frenzy than the suggestion of a plant-based diet.

And to back up that bias, I now have my first negative comment after almost a year on Lemmy :⁠-⁠)

Frankly, you may as well be pulling all that out of your ass since the information you just provided is as good as useless without any reliable sources backing it up (and don’t bother providing any, I’m not here to educate myself on cat diet requirements. If I cared, I would ask a qualified professional not a Lemmy user).

I’m just calling out the hypocrisy in this whole controversy. People do a quick Google search, read “obligate carnivore” in the title of some document and act as if they’ve got a college degree on the subject.

Who knew that so many Lemmy users were experts in the science of dietary nutrition?

These corporate media companies are all the same and are a blight upon our society.

We need more people like you! Thanks for helping us move forward.

I’m jealous! I’d love to do all those things to my house. Unfortunately, I’m priced out of homeownership in my area. So I rent and all the money I’d otherwise be spending on climate-friendly upgrades are instead financing my landlord’s wealth accumulation.

Lol, as a programmer who uses generative AI myself, I would genuinely love to see them try.

It’s without a doubt motivated by their own loss of revenue but a consumer friendly take is still commendable

My dad was recently telling me a story from back in the 90s when he worked in a rural Wisconsin town close to the Illinois border and his co-workers would “joke” about shooting at cars with Illinois license plates. It’s crazy to me just how long the right has had a culture of sharing fantasies about being violent towards the left. It’s no wonder that the vast majority of mass shooters turn out to be far right nut jobs, they’ve been raised in a culture that glorifies violence against people they disagree with.

I think you run into the same problem with airports though. Regional airports in smaller cities are often prohibitively expensive to fly in and out of. When I fly home, I fly to the nearest major metropolitan area and then drive two and a half hours to my destination rather than pay hundreds more to fly to my hometown’s regional airport. That doesn’t sound much different from the problem you’re describing with a high speed rail network.

The cost of high speed rail travel will come down with increased utilization since the scale of cost for adding extra seats is a lot flatter than it is for air travel. Travel times by land are always going to be longer than by air but there’s plenty of room to optimize the systems we currently have.

Beyond that, convenience and sustainability are diametrically opposed and if we want to continue to live in symbiosis with our environment then we’re going to have to make some sacrifices to the convenience we now take for granted and that is directly harming our environment.

That’s fair, and please note that I mentioned air travel has its place in intercontinental travel in my previous comment. The whole point I’m trying to make is that domestic flights between areas that could support high speed land travel infrastructure are wasteful.

Also trains in the US suck. Much slower, and almost comparable in price to air travel.

It doesn’t have to be that way, many other countries have solved those issues. But because we’ve leaned so heavily on air travel to get us to places only a few hours away by land there hasn’t been any incentive to innovate or invest in other forms of long-distance mass transit.

Are you saying a high speed train to your destination wouldn’t also solve that problem? It would likely end up being cheaper to travel via rail considering the lower costs of maintenance and fuel, meaning further accessibility than we have today with our dependence on air travel.

I’m not so sure that is a positive. Airplanes are huge emission drivers and our dependence on the convenience of air travel has caused us to cease investment and innovation in other more efficient and environmentally friendly methods of travel.

No doubt there’d be a lot more support for high speed rails if airplanes weren’t as accessible. IMO airplanes should only really be used for intercontinental travel.

Airliner ticket prices used to be regulated. So when all airlines had to charge the same price, they had to find other ways to be competitive in order to bring in customers. Deregulation in the 70s brought ticket costs down but that means ticket cost is now the primary point of competition between airlines and amenities now come at a steep premium.

ED is a bitch

As if the Republican party isn’t already screaming that message loud and proud on the daily

I think that’s an unfair assessment based on negative stereotypes and only really serves to legitimatize the behavior you’re referring to.