ampersandrew

15% is a significant dent. It’s 15%! Even half of that is significant. And I’d sooner say we transition to encouraging just about any other kind of transit via our city and infrastructure design (efforts are ongoing, so it’s not like no progress has been made) rather than just encouraging everyone to switch to an electric vehicle, but there are all kinds of benefits to restricting vehicle traffic in city centers besides climate change too, probably helping them to sell this policy. It’s still a reduction that helps climate change, but it’s one of those ones like straws and plastic bags that are much easier to legislate even if it’s not the largest reduction that could be made. I guess I just disagree that anything other than the largest slices of the pie are worth putting any focus on, because if it was easy to reduce those large slices of the pie, we’d have done it. Even those large slices can probably be broken up into smaller slices, of which some may be easy to deal with.

15% sounds like a great chunk to reduce.

That’s true, but presumably in a city, the average speed is far lower than that.

The more obvious reason to me is that they’ve got X subscribers, and they think they can make Y more dollars by raising prices for all of them.

They’ve got a fantastic catalogue. But I’ve seen those shows. They’ve only got a few things in the hopper on my radar, and I’ll resubscribe when those come out.

Sure, but if people are moving away from one thing and “hopefully toward” something, I’d hope it’s toward a situation where they don’t need a car at all. I think electric bikes and those electric scooters could be a revolution for transportation in this country, seeing as they’re great for making those less than 3 mile trips that make up half of all trips made by car (and if you expand that out to 6 miles, you’re at almost 70% of trips made by car). So maybe you don’t live in a huge dense city, but if you live within a few miles of everything you need, you could get this super cheap and efficient electric vehicle instead of a car, or at least downsize from a two-car household to a one-car household.

Electric vehicles are better than sticking with internal combustion, but there’s still so much energy wasted in designing infrastructure around everyone getting around by cars in the first place. Everything gets spread further apart to accommodate them on roads and in parking lots, which means you have to travel farther to get where you’re going. Our city designs need to shift toward density way faster than they currently are.

Oh I’m sure the incredibly powerful lobby you are speaking about will be totally fine with a law dictating the way they style and display their packaging.

I don’t care what they’re okay with. They’re okay with passing this BS law as though it’s solving their fictional problem, because the actual problem is that they’re losing money to alternatives people are choosing on purpose.

What I genuinely don’t understand is why vegan products are trying so hard to look like non vegan products?

For the same reason there’s non-alcoholic beer. It’s accepted as a social norm that creates what Warren Buffet would call a “moat” around their business, like the barbecue. If everyone else is eating burgers and hot dogs but you have a moral issue with eating meat, you can still partake. Maybe you hate that so much of our food comes from animals but you really like cheese, so you’ll deal with something that gets 80% of the way there. Beyond and Impossible are two businesses that exist specifically because people care about the burger taste but would love to do so without killing a cow to get there.

Is it important for a bunch of vegetables composition to be called a steak ? If anything I would think a vegan product would want to stand out from standard meat ?

It’s important that they know they’re getting something that approximates a steak, and it stands out by putting the word “vegan” or “plant-based” or “vegetarian” in front of it, but this legislation hurts that.

You won’t convert to veganism people by selling them fake steaks. It doesn’t work.

I don’t think it was ever their business model to get people who wanted a meat steak to buy the veggie version. But it is there for people who want to be vegetarian and would miss being able to eat a steak.

Personally, I have yet to come across that hypothetical package. But if that’s truly your concern, why not make standards around font size instead of the words themselves? There are laws around this kind of thing for lending rates and such to make sure that you’re not tricked into a bad loan with the “fine print”. What I see this law trying to do for the meat industry is to make it seem as though there’s no substitute for the product they offer, even though there is. It’s different, but it’s an alternative that they’d rather brush under the rug.

Just because it’s plant-based doesn’t mean it’s healthy. You can load up a veggie burger with all sorts of stuff that might have other benefits, but it’s not health food. But otherwise, yes, this has lobbies written all over it.

In the first case that you’re replying to, we’re using the modifier “vegetarian” in front of the word steak to note why it’s different than a regular steak. In your example, you’re putting “vegan” in front of steak and lying, because it’s not vegan. How many people are actually getting confused by a vegetarian product made to replace a meat-based one, especially considering the veggie one is likely more expensive? Meanwhile, how much more likely do you think it is that the meat and dairy industries would rather there just not be any perceived alternative to their products at all? Because that one seems far more likely to me. I know nothing of the politics of France, but those industries have tried and are trying the same tactic over here in the US.

Nah, any reduction is good, including social encouragement for others to join you in things like going car-free. Plus, outside of the environmental effects, cars are horrifically unsafe things when used en masse, and every one we take off the road makes our neighbors safer.

They did have an effect on birds though. I think it was almost entirely mitigated by painting one blade black, if memory serves, but it was based on some truth.

I see the narrative a lot that it’s caused by people holding onto housing as an investment, and that might be true, but I’m unconvinced it’s anything more than a supply problem. No doubt what you described about people reluctant to sell in the current market is happening, but if a house is truly only worth $150k, it should sell for $150k, and the person trying to sell it for $400k will keep dropping the price until it reaches what it’s worth as the owner gets impatient and has to pay upkeep on it in the meantime. There are stats for how many homes are sitting vacant, but often times I understand that they capture a snapshot in time of when those homes are between owners or tenants, and what was vacant at snapshot 1 may be a totally different sample than what’s vacant at snapshot 2, even though the number of vacant homes remains similar.

Here’s another thing that may be having an impact, but I have no idea how large: a lot of baby boomers are still living in their “forever homes” that they bought decades ago for families that were much larger before their children moved out. So you have a lot of people with proportionally too much house for what they actually need that, to make this topic a bit more morbid, will start dying off in greater numbers as the years go on and freeing up that housing inventory for families that would need that much space.

Why do you think opportunity cost isn’t coming into play? If you’ve got a house only as an appreciating asset that’s not generating income, you’re losing money compared to just throwing it in the stock market. If they’re just holding it because the value always goes up, that sounds exactly like 08, and the price would have to come down once the bubble pops.

These don’t sound terrible, but aren’t the root causes of the student debt problem still being unaddressed?

• student loans are legally allowed to be usurious (payment plans where your payment isn’t enough to cover interest, and the balance grows)
• you can’t legally default on student loans; they follow you out of bankruptcy

Because that’s a potent cocktail for disaster.