I’m honestly baffled by how immigration in Germany is supposed to be a problem. We have a horribly low birth rate. Our retirement security is basically gone because there won’t be enough working people. Retirement homes, hospitals, kindergartens, all these places suffer from a lack of personnel. These jobs are notoriously stressful, have horrible working conditions, and underpay extremely.
The free market has obviously failed to solve this problem. Even with unions and tariffs: An increase of 1€ per hour does a good living not make. Neither are bonuses a long term solution. And even if you made these jobs attractive af: we will still not have enough people choosing them anytime soon. And even if we did, it’s simply still not enough people in the workforce to secure pension for the elderly and generations to come.
And let’s be very real for a second here. Skilled immigration from third countries (i.e. not EU, not talking about third world here) isn’t an easy ride. These high paying job offers of privileged jobs like IT or science are not going away but they are also rather rare. It’s a niche thing compared to the waves of immigration of, well, low paying and often low skilled jobs.
And while I can “understand” if an asshole wants to cut the former, why would you want to cut the latter? Jesus, no one is stealing your job because I doubt you want to work cleaning toilets at McDonald’s. If you want to go wipe asses in retirement homes you’ll find a job stat no matter whether the Ukrainian, Romanian or Syrian girls apply too.
We are literally insanely exploitative of immigrants. We either have a brain drain from countries that immensely need them, or cause them to have a demographic crisis of their own by buffering our birth rates with their people, or we simply give them jobs that pay so little that they hardly survive. All that while doing shit for their integration into society. But they still pay taxes and buy products in the supermarket and ride the tram and everything. We get all the positives and they get all the negatives. Why would you even want to get rid of that if you’re a cunt?
From June 1 to June 11, Israeli forces killed over 800 Palestinians and wounded over 2,400 as they carried out bombardments and raids across Gaza, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) reported. This is an average of over 72 Palestinians killed each day at the hands of Israeli forces....
Bro you are talking about play dough age kids here. Even if they don’t stick the dough in their mouth they most certainly won’t anally wash their hands after every time they play with play dough in a very defined area of the house.
I agree so much with this. Vegans are right, period. It doesn’t matter whether they mind their own business or are annoying about it. It doesn’t matter whether they are preachy because they preach the obviously right thing. They are right.
I’m also not a vegan and I know that I am a hypocrite every time I eat meat or have milk. I would never defend my non-vegan choices. There is absolutely no good reason for me to have steak or milk or eggs. Not in this place and time when alternatives are available everywhere.
I say my kid is speaking Meme. It sounds a bit nicer than terminally online. But then again she’s 2 and that’s her third language. I’m just not so sure I can call it English when she mostly says It Is Wednesday My Dudes, Yeah Boiiii or It’s the Selcuk Turks.
Plus, it’s middle school. These kids don’t really have themselves figured out yet, so constantly parroting popular memes can gain them some acceptance from their peers.
Oh crap by the time our daughter is in middle school these will be boomer memes
I am embarrassed to say I’ve never come to this conclusion myself. But you’re right. It’s as simple as that. Especially since you can get a load of convenience products in a supermarket for $17.
Japan’s fertility rate, which has seen a precipitous fall for many years, has reached another record low as the government ramps up efforts to encourage young people to get married and start families — even launching its own dating app....
I’m sorry to disappoint you there but that’s not how childbirth works, even after the industrial revolution. This here might be a good start to see why a conveyor belt system isn’t feasible with kids
PS: Don’t even get me started on getting hate from gay friends for being bi.
I was friends with a lesbian couple and they told me that both of them made sure the other one was definitely not bi when they started dating because [sic] Bis are the worst you just can’t date them. Your comment reminded me of that. I’m very sorry that you felt so alone for such a long time.
There’s a meme comparing him to Angelina Jolie and while I personally don’t think she’s hot, a vast majority of people do, ergo Steve is objectively and undeniably the most attractive man on earth.
I feel you, I have ruined a yoghurt dip a couple of weeks ago with too much garlic. Even my husband felt it was overdone and he comes from a family where they just eat raw garlic like a cucumber. But that’s the point, if you want to eat pure garlic you can go eat pure garlic. But you only want a side kick garlic in certain dishes.
“Notably, Chang’s report claims that biological females develop earlier than males do, so requiring girls to enter school at younger ages will create classes in which the two sexes are of more equal maturity as they age. This, the author posits, makes it more likely that those classmates will be attracted to each other, and...
For real man. We were so overworked when both of us had a full time job and no kids. Now we have one kid and one full time job. It is easier, hard in another way but somehow easier. Soon I’ll have to go back to work and I don’t even know how we will survive. We would love to have another kid but we either can’t afford it or we will go insane trying to afford it.
The other part is that stupid part time career pit. Ideally we would both work half jobs, but this will mean none of us can have a well paid job (per hour). But this also means that if my husband is laid off while I am at home, were fucked. Job security is a huge factor in work life balance.
But also, we are the “risky” ones. Most of my friends from school wanted to wait until they are “settled” financially. I don’t have one mom friend from school/university. They are either still settling in their careers or have given up on feeling settled and now have fertility issues.
Just for context, our kid arrived shortly before I turned 30. My friends are in their 30s and 40s. None of them is really “financially secure” since job security is just not a thing anymore.
Thank god a friend warned me about that before I used them. She didn’t know and her twins peed themselves big time the first time they wore it at a beach and she was flabbergasted.
if farm animals were slaughtered in the most humane and painless of ways
This sounds like a juxtaposition to me. You cannot slaughter a healthy animal in a humane way. “Slaughter” excludes “humane”. I’m not a vegan/vegetarian but it seems to me like this idea that if we just raised happy healthy animals and found a way to kill it nicely then eating meat would be ethically ok. We don’t need to eat meat anymore. Any killing of an animal to make it into food is unnecessary and could be avoided. I think it is important that we meat eaters really internalize this. Every time we eat meat we caused absolutely unnecessary suffering for a quick moment of pleasure.
Actually my point is exactly that it isn’t just semantics. If anything, semantics is used to make pretty euphemisms about what is happening. You are ending the life of a sentient being that feels pain and has feelings/emotions, that has family of one kind or another, for no benefit other than your own pleasure. Whether the death is slow or fast, painful or not, anticipated or not, is very secondary.
A bit off topic but I hate that there are discussions on whether or not it is ethical to farm organs from donor pigs. Like, this at least saves a life (or multiple), while eating meat is absolutely unnecessary nowadays but it still happens all the time.
Honestly, culling is besides the point I am making, since the primary goal of culling is not meat production.
There are morally more ambiguous cases (than with slaughter for meat) in which killing an animal can be arguably better than to let it live. Putting down a terminally sick pet is an example. Culling might also be argued, but I would not say that it is “not cruel or even morally ambiguous”.
With culling, my thoughts on it are these. When we refer to culling, we most often talk about culling in farm animal situation. As in, there is a sick animal that has to be culled so that the population doesn’t become infected. Or we kill the male chicks because we cannot raise them to become egg producing hens and keeping a lot of roosters together can cause problems. The killing of farm cows that underproduce is also a form of culling. I would argue that none of these killings would be necessary in the first place if we didn’t have big scale farming (or, for that matter, farming of any kind) of lifestock. My guess is that with
Modern farming is very much none of those things though.
we agree here.
Culling of wild animals is more controversial. As far as I am aware of, hunters are being told how many animals of a certain species and sex they can kill in a hunting season and it is regardes as population control. (Whilst we ofter created conditions in which the population cannot control itself.) Or they get an order from a farmer etc. to kill a chicken ripping wolf. If you have to kill a wolf because it regularly attacks your chicken farm, then the chicken farm is the actual problem, not the wolf. Apart from that, you’ll end up fucking with natural selection. Arguably not very great. But since we can’t just go back to the caves and restore nature the way it was before civilization and so on, some form of culling of wild animals will probably stay necessary for human survival and artifical balance of and artificialized nature - even without farming of lifestock. I would not call this ethical or morally right, but a realistic, awful necessity.
I’m not sure about the point you’re making with native americans. When I search for native american hunting practices the first thing that pops up is how they hunted bisons and nearly drove them to extinction, which is also the most prominent example I know of. This goes into the territory of the idea of the Noble Native. But I doubt you meant that as an example.
In the abundance of products in the 21st century you can absolutely get all the nutrients you need in excess without touching animal products, let alone meat.
convenience
Not sure how cooking pea protein sausage is less convenient than cooking a pork sausage. There are tons of vegan/vegetarian convenience products in the fridge aisle. Even if there was indeed some very minor convenience to cooking meat (which I am really in the dark about), are you really arguing your minimally bigger convenience is a good enough reason to kill a living being?
cost
In some way I agree with you here, meat is heavily subsidized while vegetables aren’t (at least where I live) and it is a shame. Chicken wings can be cheaper per kg than some kind of vegetables. That’s a systemic problem and needs to be taken care of not by the consumer, but government regulations. But a) you know it is bad quality meat that is on the cheaper side, b) most people aren’t in a position where you have such financial pressure (food stamps etc) where you have to weigh calories per cent, c) vegan/vegetarian diets can still be cheap af as long as you don’t try to do instagrammable kale quinoa brokkoli sprouts smoothies with avocado and chia seed granola or some crap like that. Potato wedges with sour cream are a vegetarian dish. Beans with rice. Noodles and tomato sauce. It doesn’t have to get expensive or complicated.
Come on, you’re better than that. I don’t buy that you actually think this is a valid argument.
This logic would apply if you ate the leftovers of game that was culled for specific reasons like keeping the population of deer or whatever at bay. The meat is already there.
But as long as the meat is produced and the animal killed for the purpose of consumption your argument goes down the drain. While supply and demand economics might not be exactly as we were taught in school, you can’t deny that a demand for meat influences the scale of meat production. Everyone in the production and consumption chain has blood on their hands.
All I am asking for is for people to be aware of that. You can eat meat. But be aware that there is no good reason to.
Native Americans curated bison populations for thousands of years. Idk where you’re getting “almost drove the bison to extinction” from. In 1850, there were between 30 and 60 million bison on the plains. By 1870, there were less than 500 wild bison left. That’s not native American hunting. That’s white genocide. Don’t get it confused. Some plains Indians even claim kinship with the Bison as their spiritual totem.
Yep, I was totally wrong about that. I apologize. I don’t know where I had that info from, I think either school or I was distracted at the point about bison when I listened to Guns Germs and Steel. Anyway, I take that back and you are absolutely right here.
And I’m very sorry about what happened to your people.
But to go back to meat eating, I’m not sure it plays a big role for today. Hunting bison without rifles while living with rather low population density in nature is not the same as farming. I’m not sure whether meat eating was necessary for survival back then, it probably was an important source of nutrients. Plus the sacred aspects, the cultural ones, the actual gratitude, the use of the whole animal… But this is not how we use livestock today at all. And most importantly: we don’t need it. We have an abundance of alternatives.
But again, I don’t ask anyone to quit meat all together. I don’t think it is fair to ask this from individuals and attribute all of the responsibility to them. If we want to decrease meat production and consumption, we need to do this from a regulatory basis. So all I am saying is that we meat eaters should simply be aware of it. That it is neither necessary from a nutritional point of view, nor that any kind of farming and slaughtering can be seen as “humane”. We cause suffering with our choice and keep promoting a system that will always be cruel. You take away babies from their mothers. You raise animals in unnatural conditions. If they are lucky, they end up at the butcher healthy enough so that their short and miserable life will be terminated untimely and with them very likely experiencing existential threat. For nothing more than us having a moment of joy, convenience, pleasure. Their carcass becomes a banality.
That’s one not on you though. There are what I think is called food deserts where there just aren’t a lot of vegetarian options around. But I think that’s changing. Even McDonald’s has a decent vegan/vegetarian menu by now.
Step away from the emotional argument for a bit and simply consider the logistics. There is no evil in profiting from the cycle of life. Do you also believe herding to be cruel and unnatural? What about other animal product harvesting, like bee keeping or silkworm cultivation? Is it ethically dubious to mine limestone because the ancient crustaceans couldn’t consent?
These are good questions. I’m not too sure about bee keeping or silk production since I don’t know exactly how their products are being harvested and what happens to the insects during this. With herding, it’s not the herding I have a problem with but what it is done for. I would not say we are profiting from the cycle of life if we kill a cow. The premature separation of cow and calf to gain more milk is another thing. If we just got milk by pumping a “breastfeeding” cow (as you might have guessed English is not my first language) and otherwise let it be - go for it. I wouldn’t see anything wrong with that. But this isn’t how it works, and you are very right that profit is to blame.
In my mind, the real problem is cruelty for profit. It should not be profitable to treat animals cruel, and that can only change with legislation. The system is too easy to abuse, and humans will almost always make pick the easy option over anything else.
I agree with this absolutelty.
Maybe if we found a way to go back to eating meat on very rare occasions, eating mostly game that was hunted for other reasons than meat or something alike, we could find a balance with it as a product for consumption.
I mean, would you want to be reborn as a cow on a free range organic farm? Where you are still being inseminated without ever having seen a bull or knowing what’s going on. Where you give birth to a baby that you still will be separated from before it’s time. Where your kid will have a similar destiny as you. If it even makes it to adulthood. Most likely it will be killed and eaten while you are still being pumped. Where your life is ended by a machine and your body sold to people who toss half of you in the trash because they cooked too big of a portion. Like, yeah, maybe you get to keep your horns and see some grass once in a while and your cage is slightly bigger than the low class conventional farming cows but at the end of the day it is still a miserable life.
How well do you think a plant based diet is going to work on a glacier?
Fwiw, I enjoyed the paragraph that led to that sentence, it was beautifully written. Just so that there are no misunderstandings: I’m not necessarily for a plant based diet under any circumstances. There are people with metabolic diseases that might need to eat more animal products for their health. Or nomadic cultures, indigenous tribes with hunter gatherer societies, and also people on glaciers.
And this is actually exactly why I do have a guilty conscience when I personally consume meat (and again, I am a huge hypocrite, I do eat meat!). I don’t need to. There is a time and place where hunting and killing and slaughtering and herding are necessary for survival, but it is not in my life. I can buy a B12 supplement that will last me a year for like 10€, probably less. I can choose from a huge variety of plant milk alternatives in every supermarket. Let’s not kid ourselves, nothing I eat is “natural”. It’s not natural to get a huge watermelon or a cloned banana or refrigerated milk in tetra packs and avocado from the other side of the world. If I drink carbonated soda or an energy drink that tastes like gummi bears then I can also not claim that supplements are “unnatural” and not what nature intended. Nothing I do is natural. I wake up by an electricity powered alarm clock. But with all of that privilege, advancement, technology and detachment I am supposed to somehow justify cruel animal farming and killing?
Let’s say yes. I mean I think it would be healthier and just as convenient to just get an apple and a bun than a burger to be honest. The question is how much of a pro argument this is. It’s about as good as “wearing fur looks pretty so we should keep killing tigers for it”.
At this point I really am unsure whether you are just trolling since this is not rocket science.
“Directly impacts” or “contributes to” would be more fitting but weren’t you the one talking about semantics?
if there are three blue pigs in the world, and i kill all three and send them to the butcher shop, when someone buys that pork or bacon or ham, how do we kill more blue pigs? it’s impossible. so we can see that even if people lack free will and there is some economic theory that actually showed some causal link where consumption causes production (which is impossible), then we can see that consumption still can’t actually cause later production in even this one case, but probably many others.
This is an absolutely unfitting hypothetical because you just rotted out that animal. Have you seen Futurama? The episode about popplers would be more fitting. But ok, I’ll roll with the pigs.
You discovered an island with 10 grown blue pigs. You killed two and brought the meat home. You are trying to sell it. Three things can happen.
People are disgusted and don’t buy it from you.
People buy it from you and give you feedback that they hated it and would not buy it again.
People buy it and give you feedback that it’s amazing and they want more of it.
So far, two animals have died. In which of the three scenarios do you think more animals will be killed in the future?
Ok, listen, don’t get it the wrong way, but I think we should stop this back and forth. I’m completely lost in what you are trying to argue here and what your actual point is. No offense, I just think we completely miss each other in our logic. Because I am sure you are a smart person but I don’t see how any of this is connected to my first comment, any of my theses, and to me we are just arguing over some semantics and who’s right over a question that doesn’t exist. So I call it quits here. I’m on vacation as of today and this is getting exhausting for no good reason or goal.
I remember a native English speaker correcting my pronunciation of meme to maymay back in like 2015 and I felt so ashamed for pronouncing it meem back then… I didn’t have friends who were into memes yet and was very insecure. I think about her often.
When I was in Mallorca when I was 12 I literally didn’t hear a word of Spanish over the course of the 2 week holiday. Ok, granted, I spent 1 week in the hotel room sick and watching One Piece on TV (also in German) but I’d say a whole week in Playa de Mallorca and only hearing perfect German was wild.
Almost as wild as when I opened that plastic bell pepper in a souvenir shop and there was a dildo inside. Like, why. Why would you want to have sex with a bell pepper. Why did they have red ones and green ones but no yellow ones.
Absolutely agree. Mallorca has so much to offer apart from Palma, and it’s a disgrace how they massacred that city (and island). I am happy there are protests now.
I remember back then (it must have been like 2003) it was offered to my parents at a travel agency. I even remembered how they called home to ask my sister and me whether we would like to go since they knew we both were kinda anti Mallorca (since we then also didn’t know about the beauty of the other parts). We still agreed because it was a really cheap deal and we were like lower middle class back then, so a good deal’s a good deal. I’m still grateful because I would have never travelled to that tourist place by myself, and I would have never been scarred for life by that dildo. I think it was the first time I saw a sex toy in real life. There were still some really cool memories and moments, and even having diarrhea and watching One Piece for a week was pretty chill.
On the topic of t-shirts, I found a kid’s shirt saying “sample text” under the drawing of a cat at a flea market yesterday. Not too related to what you mentioned, but I hail that shirt so much and needed to share.
It’s grey and looks very cheap, like Kik style, with some glitter. It was actually a free clothing swap so it didn’t cost anything. My two year old likes cats right now so it has a lot of potential to become her favorite shirt. It gives me “precise dwarf bravery” vibes but by now these companies produce them on purpose. I am cherishing this shirt because I found it in the wild and it is very obviously an actual mistake. Especially since it’s a toddler shirt.
The only thing that I don’t like about that shirt is that it doesn’t come in my size.
I’m not sure if your colleague wore the shirt as a joke or in all seriousness. I kind of hope the latter, simply because its genuity would save the cringe.
It’s been a while since I graduated but I think it was something like that: there is a molecule in soy that can be metabolized and then binds to estrogen receptors. However, there are two different receptors that, when activated, will have different signaling cascades and effects. That soy molecule binds to one of them. But only about 50% of people (I think the study was done in menopausal women) metabolize that molecule to the active, estrogen-receptor binding molecule. The others don’t and soy has absolutely no effect on them. For those who do metabolize it, it can have an effect on some estrogen-regulated pathways, but it is not “estrogen” and cannot substitute it.
DUBAI, May 19 (Reuters) - A helicopter carrying Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and his foreign minister crashed on Sunday as it was crossing mountain terrain in heavy fog, an Iranian official told Reuters, and rescuers were struggling to reach the site of the incident....
To be honest, conscription aside, I think a gap year of civil service would be a good idea. It gives you a break from school - university - work, you don’t feel like you lost time since everyone has to do it, and you get into a mindset outside of your preplanned route, which might do you good.
Maybe it is going to be solved by a brilliant political activist or leader. Jokes aside, of course it won’t be a couple of people who will magically solve something. Strong leaders will however ease the cause by promoting issues best.
That reminds me of the girl who was standing in line outside to register for her wedding date in St. Petersburg from 8 pm to 10 am the next morning without moving. It was mid January, day temperatures were at -22°C, and she wore nylon tights and no hat through all of that. I don’t even know how she stayed alive.
YES God yes. Sometimes I specifically crave frozen pizza and no delivery pizza or restaurant pizza would fulfill the desire. It can be the other way around, too, I might crave delivery or restaurant pizza. But mostly, if I want pizza, I want the frozen stuff. It’s good. It doesn’t overdo the cheese/fat or toppings, the size is better, it is more predictable, the crust is must better. There’s just something about frozen pizza. 9 out of 10 times I prefer it.
It really depends on what kind of crust you like. I hate crust and delivery always comes with huge crusts. Tk pizza has a thin, crispy crust, so I can eat it easily.
Thank you for the tip, but tbh I don’t want the big crust to be that crispy, then it is just a big dry piece of bread squeaking on my teeth. A soft crust I could kind of swallow but ugh just crust in itself is awful. Usually around here the crust is rather crispy to begin with. I just end up not eating it most of the time.
‘Crime is out of hand’: how young people turned to far right in east German city (www.theguardian.com)
Germans under 25 gave the AfD 16% of their vote in the European elections, with particular support in the east...
“Complete Dehumanization”: Israel Killed Over 800 Palestinians in 11 Days (truthout.org)
From June 1 to June 11, Israeli forces killed over 800 Palestinians and wounded over 2,400 as they carried out bombardments and raids across Gaza, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) reported. This is an average of over 72 Palestinians killed each day at the hands of Israeli forces....
Missing cold pizza (lemmy.world)
"Gluten Free" has officially gone too far. (lemmy.world)
Bonus: Gluten-free play-dough!...
Rule (i.imgur.com)
pov rule (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
deleted_by_author
‘We’re in 1938 now’: Putin’s war in Ukraine and lessons from history (www.theguardian.com)
Interesting article that talks about the similarities between now and 1938, and the sort of lessons we can learn from history.
Japan’s births just fell to a new record low. Tokyo hopes a dating app can turn that around (www.cnn.com)
Japan’s fertility rate, which has seen a precipitous fall for many years, has reached another record low as the government ramps up efforts to encourage young people to get married and start families — even launching its own dating app....
progress rule (lemmy.world)
Calves are almost always separated from their mothers rule
Standard rule
There's no such thing as too much garlic (i.ibb.co)
How to fix Korea's birthrate? Put girls in school earlier, controversial report argues (koreajoongangdaily.joins.com)
“Notably, Chang’s report claims that biological females develop earlier than males do, so requiring girls to enter school at younger ages will create classes in which the two sexes are of more equal maturity as they age. This, the author posits, makes it more likely that those classmates will be attracted to each other, and...
Actual Diaperule (lemmy.world)
CO2 Gas Chamber Rule (i.imgur.com)
Spy Cams Reveal the Grim Reality of Slaughterhouse Gas Chambers
Reference rule (sh.itjust.works)
Spanish town bans penis suits and sex dolls from stag and hen dos (www.theguardian.com)
Even the fish are turning soy 🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯 I couldn't even edge my skibdi to this one (lemmy.world)
Button Rule (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
Would you press it?
Helicopter carrying Iran's President Raisi crashes, search under way (www.reuters.com)
DUBAI, May 19 (Reuters) - A helicopter carrying Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and his foreign minister crashed on Sunday as it was crossing mountain terrain in heavy fog, an Iranian official told Reuters, and rescuers were struggling to reach the site of the incident....
cheugy af (sh.itjust.works)
Germany may introduce conscription for all 18-year-olds (www.telegraph.co.uk)
Says a lot about society (sh.itjust.works)
Kennedys rule (i.ibb.co)
‘I am starting to panic about my child’s future’: climate scientists wary of starting families (www.theguardian.com)
A fifth of female climate scientists who responded to Guardian survey said they had opted to have no or fewer children...
That's Life (lemmy.today)
Day one and done (lemmy.world)