Okay, so just so we’re clear, you are not a good faith actor, then? I’ll go ahead and directly break down why you’re full of shit in that case.

Software development can be a place with employees, it’s not limited to freelance. So I don’t really get your point.

In your previous comment you said, “Can I come to your home and take your PC?”, which implies a single person, doing their own thing - a freelancer. Now you’re moving the goalpost. But okay, whatever. We’re talking about a case where you’re a part of a group of people, providing a product or service together? Then what gives you the right to be a dictator? All members of the group should have an equal stake and ownership of the properties being utilized for whatever is being made, and management of the group should be run in a way that is democratized.

But even in your new scenario, how is the outlandish idea of someone coming to your house to take your pc even in the realm of realistic possibility? If we’re talking about a group of people making software, then realistically all members probably have their own computers, and are using those to make their contributions. In this case the thing at stake is the software product. There’s already precedent for situations like this - it is possible to make an entire software compilation available to the public under one common license, and at the same time make it the case that all code and content contributions are under ownership of each individual making their contributions. Of course this is a case of permissive or copyleft license systems being applied on top of the wider framework of private intellectual property law. I’ll address that more in your next points.

But let’s go even more unrealistic. Let’s say for some weird reason that you are the only one who could afford a PC to work with, in a landscape where private property has been abolished. If we’re talking about a case where you’re a freelancer, no one else has a stake in your PC. Even if you’re using it as a “means of production”, it’s arguable the hardware should still be considered “personal property,” since it blurs a line between something you’re using for work-related activities as well as personal activities, in addition to the fact that no other workers have any kind of stake in it.

But then on the case of groups, then things start to change. As previously mentioned, no, you shouldn’t get exclusive rights to software you didn’t create yourself, as a start. As for the hardware - we already live in a landscape where there are regulatory hurdles you have to jump through in order to start a business. In a system with no private property, you would likely be expected to enter your PC and any other relevant hardware into some kind of property trust before you could even legally start to hire (or otherwise cooperate/collaborate with) other people. In that case, you have already voluntarily made the agreement that what was your PC is no longer just yours anymore. In such a case you would still have a partial ownership of your PC, but every other member of your team - likely under the umbrella of the organization that you would have had to have founded - would also have equal ownership.

And in this highly highly specific case, in which you were either too poor or too negligent as a founder to bother getting a real office to run your organization out of; if people are coming into your house and taking “your” PC, it implies that it’s YOU who has criminally done something to break the social contract that YOU agreed to. In which case, every other stakeholder would be well within their rights to get the disputes settled in the courts of law that would exist in this hypothetical scenario.

Government, and thus, laws, aren’t supposed to be the moral guide. This is not a church.

So people should be allowed to steal, assault others, and kill? Please try to make less sense.

As much as I dislike proprietary software, it’s their right to do so.

It sounds like you’re operating with a complete misunderstanding of what free software is, and why it exists. FOSS is not just another kind of product. It’s not a brand, and it’s not a commodity. It is a fundamental rewiring of the social and legal relationships between people, within the digital landscape. The foundational premise of free software is that when someone provides software to you that does not respect your rights to use, study, copy, modify, and share that software, then what they are doing is establishing an unequal - and thus unjust - power relationship over you. You can see this in practice when an app uses drm to lock you out of features, as well as when companies embed surveillance into virtually all the software we use these days - inevitably becoming direct supporters of oppressive regimes.

So yes, proprietary software is inherently unjust, and it should be supplanted, and abolished.

Moreover, free software and free culture, in my view, is the premier blueprint alternative to private property in tangible form. You should read Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture, because it shows the history of the public domain - our original informational and cultural commons - how Disney built their empire on the foundation of that public domain, and then turned around to use lobbying to effectively kill it.

When you look at the full picture of how a commons often reciprocally allows wealth and abundance for many, and how ventures of private property inevitably drain, restrict, and ultimately kills that wealth and abundance for everyone except those few parasites, it starts to become clear that private property is, in fact, theft.

And it’s completely on users that we tolerate that, instead of voting with our money by donating to FOSS. But then again, if you compare how much money you can get from selling proprietary software and from donations on FOSS, it’s clear that FOSS isn’t doing great, cause they haven’t find a way to attract the same volume of money.

Your argument here is based on the loaded assumption of private property as something that’s default and justified, which I already pointed out is wrong. But to address your point about the profitabilty of FOSS, that’s just plain wrong. Sure, many choose to simply give free software away, and try relying on donations. That model only really works when a piece of software becomes widely depended on, critically so, and their struggles for funding gets enough public attention - like the case of GPG.

But that doesn’t mean that’s the only model. Everyone struggles for basic survival in our capitalistic hellscape, but that said, in the case of games for instance, ID used to have a decent model - separate engine and content, open-source the engine after some years. Continue selling the game anyway. Dwarf Fortress did something similar - they started life donation-based, then later built some quality of life improvements and sold the game on Steam - and made tens of millions.

Or the classic example, Red Hat. Their products are completely open-source. They sell it anyway. Some people opt for the free versions, and plenty of people still pay for the official ones - because the continuing support is worth it.

You’re also conflating monetary hoarding, with success of actual use. Sure, Microsoft is one of the richest companies in the world, but Linux is so ubiquitous on servers that it’s fair to say Linux runs the fucking internet. Windows might still dominate the desktop space (a position that is eroding now more than ever btw), and yet Linux’s ubiquity even goes so far as to power Android, which prevented Windows from ever dominating the mobile space (granted Android has problems of it’s own).

This needs to be situated in context too. The existing legal landscape loves private property. Its loves oligarchy. It wants to give every advantage to billionaires. And despite all of that, free software and free culture are probably two of the most successful and enduring lowkey anticapitalist movements in human history. They take private property law, and turn it against itself, creating a whole new commons that can’t be taken away. It is the Brazilian jiu-jitsu of anticapitalism. And it is the story of the Tortoise vs the Hare.

If you support FOSS, then you are already against private property - you just don’t realize it yet.

I don’t know enough about communism to say whether I support it or not, so just being clear that I’m a largely impartial observer here-

I have to ask, if you are actually trying to make your argument in good faith, are you really unable to think of reasonable answers to your own question? Like right off the top of my own head, even in our present society we have different sets of regulations for freelancers than we do for places with employees. A democratized workplace is irrelevant for a business with one worker.

That said, as a free software advocate, the topic of intellectual “property” must be addressed. Since I do think proprietary software is a moral wrong, I would support a world in which open-source is codified into law.

But the problem here is that it sounds like you’re trying to make the, “they’re coming for your toothbrush!” fearmongering in a way that almost sounds plausible, but it really isn’t if you just apply a little common sense.

No one is coming for your toothbrush, and no one is coming for your little gaming pc.

The last thing I want to hear is how great capitalism is - as told by someone that capitalism refers to as capital.

No it isn’t, unless it’s done improperly. What objectively is animal abuse is feeding the ground up body parts of animals to anyone, including other animals.

https://plantbasednews.org/opinion/opinion-piece/plant-based-diets-dogs-cats/

Yes, with an extremely customised, unnatural diet, a cat may survive a vegan diet. They rarely thrive.

They rarely thrive? If you’re going to make a claim, you need to prove it with sources.

But the point is that they’re unable to do so naturally, most cats will not understand why their food isn’t what they’re naturally and instinctually supposed to eat, which causes them stress.

Again, on your claim about cats not understanding why their food is “unnatural”, and particularly about it causing them stress, you need to back up your claims, because it sounds like you’re just making stuff up. In fact here’s a study finding virtually no statistically significant difference in palatability differences for dogs and cats in vegan pet foods vs others.

"For 1,135 cats, consideration of 15 behavioural indicators also indicated that diet made little difference to the food-oriented behaviour of the cats studied, except perhaps that cats on vegan diets lick their food less often, and cats on conventional diets leave more food. However, the feline comparison groups (particularly, raw meat n = 54) were relatively small, so inference of differences should be treated with caution.

Although palatability is important, animal welfare also depends on a range of other factors. However, the results from our study, which concur with limited existing studies in this field, do not support views that vegan pet food may have reduced palatability, and thus compromise the welfare of dogs or cats in this manner."

Cats have an instinct to chew on grass for digestive purposes, but that’s about it when it comes to eating plants.

Have you ever had cats and house plants in the same home? They are almost guaranteed to destroy virtually anything you grow, to the point that it’s important for all cat caretakers to learn about which plants are safe to grow around cats. Here’s a cat losing their mind over a purple sweet potato. Here’s one about a cat who loves cucumber. A cat who gets downright aggressive over ciabatta. A compilation of videos of cats who feverishely nom on corn.

Here are the facts. Yes, it is true that cats have adaptations that make them adept hunters of smaller animals. It’s also true that there are a some essential nutrients they can’t make and must get from dietary sources - if we’re counting “natural” sources only, some of those nutrients can only be found from consuming other animals - taurine being a notable example. But if you think cats should only eat what’s natural, does that mean they shouldn’t be fed formulated cat food either? That isn’t natural, they supplement even meat-based ones with synthetic ingredients just like companies do with the vegan-friendly formulations. From an article that goes in depth on the state of the science on plant-based pet foods:

“For those who feel wary about the idea of synthetic supplementation, it is worth noting that meat-based cat foods are also synthetically supplemented with taurine and other essential nutrients. This is because the high temperatures and pressures used during processing can degrade naturally occurring taurine, and other fragile nutrients. Synthetic supplementation is a standard and safe part of pet food formulation and is necessary to meet an animal’s nutritional needs.”

And just prior to that:

“Indeed, to date, three peer-reviewed scientific studies using both large-scale survey and clinical data have found that cats fed nutritionally-sound vegan diets enjoy health benefits as good as or better than those on conventional meat-based diets.”

What all of this highlights is that, far from being “obligate carnivores,” cats are opportunists who will take whatever they can get, and the “obligate” part only holds for situations in wilderness scenarios. The nutrients they need don’t care where they come from, and synthetically supplemented formulations meet their needs just fine.

And I really want to drive the nail in the coffin on your appeal to nature fallacy. Is it natural for cats to be domesticated? Some people go so far as to never allow their cats out of the house. That doesn’t seem natural, but it is safer for those cats. It also reduces those cats destructive impact on the environment. By contrast, surely it’s more natural for people to feed their cats raw diets, resulting in them getting bird flu, right? Like it or not, we have changed cats and dogs forever. That is something we need to think more critically about, because even now we are constantly shaping and reshaping everything they are, and everything they are going to be.

Getting a proper vegan diet for a cat is extremely hard to do and unnecessarily stressful for cats.

I literally just did a search of “vegan cat food” on Amazon and sure enough it had results. Availability might be somewhat less than the more established brands - I’m sure thanks in no small part to people like you who make unfounded kneejerk reactions - but in places where it is available, is it really any harder to just choose one bag of bits over another?

Cat food in most cases already is discarded meat not fit for human consumption. You’re not exactly saving a lot of animals by forcing a cat on an unnatural diet.

While it is true that some of the meat in pet foods comes from waste products, that’s far from the whole story. You are trying to paint a baseless narrative to make it sound like feeding your companion animals other animals is harmless, when it’s really not. From a study on the environmental impacts of diets for dogs and cats:

“If all of these groups transitioned to nutritionally-sound vegan diets, the numbers of terrestrial livestock animals spared from slaughter annually were estimated to be (in billions), in the US: dogs– 1.7, cats– 0.2, humans– 7.8, and globally: dogs– 6.0, cats– 0.9, humans– 71.3. The numbers of aquatic animals killed for food annually are far higher, and the use of nutritionally-sound vegan diets would also save billions of aquatic animals, in all dietary groups.”

And on environmental impacts:

“Considering environmental impacts on land and water use, emissions of GHGs, acidifying and eutrophifying gases, and the use of biocides, very substantial impact reductions were associated with the use of nutritionally-sound vegan diets, in all dietary groups. With respect to land use, for example, if implemented globally such diets would free up land larger than the areas of the following nations: dogs–Saudi Arabia or Mexico, cats–Japan or Germany, humans–Russia–the world’s largest country, combined with India. With respect to water use, such diets would save freshwater volumes greater than all renewable freshwater in the following nations: dogs–Denmark, cats–Jordan, humans–Cuba. With respect to GHGs, such diets would reduce GHGs by amounts greater than all GHG emissions from following nations: dogs–South Africa or the UK, cats–Israel or New Zealand, humans–India or the entire EU.”

If you’re vegan, feed your cat meat. If you don’t want to do that, don’t get a cat.

And what about people who already have animal companions from before they went vegan? And why shouldn’t people consider plantbased formulas for their animals even if they themselves are not vegan? Sorry, but contrary to your belief, the status quo is anything but innocent. And while more research needs to be done to more deeply understand health impacts for other animals, that’s something that can only happen if we push for it.

Plus, as cultivated meats become more available, that will take away every excuse you have. Sorry, but we can all do better, and that’s not just limited to what we ourselves choose to eat. Like it or not, this conversation will not go away, and it will only get louder as evidence continues to get stronger - just as it has for human diets.

And to turn this back on topic, that goes for other animals in captivity as well. Notice that in my original comment I never made any declarations that we should just start feeding plants to predators. That would be irresponsible, obviously. I posed a question, and did so because, just like with dogs and cats, it’s probably the case that a lot of claims about predator nutrition are more assumptions, and less science.

Let that sink in. The thing you are irrationally reacting to is a call for greater scientific understanding. Your entire comment is basically an elaborate appeal to tradition fallacy.

There’s been a handful of studies now, finding that house cats can often (but not always) thrive on a fully plant-based diet as long as it’s properly formulated. Can’t help but wonder how many other animals who we assumed are “obligate carnivores,” maybe, like, aren’t?

Ugh. Looking at the comment sections in posts about religious authoritarians, is about as insufferable as the comment sections in posts asking people to reduce their animal consumption.

The main issue I’ve had is trying to share memes in that format via mms.

I dunno, hearing him talk makes me feel like I’m being cursed.

Almost. Kind of more like:

w̴̝̉A̷̘͋t̸̨̊E̴͖̔ŗ̸͝ ̴̞͗l̵͉̍E̷͉͝f̵͙̄T̸̜̅ ̷̰̀i̷͙̿N̷͙̒ ̸̪͠a̸̪̐ ̵̪̑G̷̥̾l̷̜̑A̶̩͠s̵̟̿S̸̡̍ ̵̠̕o̷̙̓Ṽ̶̬e̴̲̕R̸͈̐ṇ̷͠I̸̝̾g̶̹̐H̶̛̪t̷̞̓ ̴͙̍T̶̜̊a̵̳͌S̵̩̈́t̵͊͜E̸͚̐ś̴̤ ̴̡̆B̸͎̌â̷̞D̶̳͐ ̵͕̌b̴̭͗Ë̵̟́c̵̮̆Ä̷́ͅu̵̹̾S̶̝͛e̷͚̓ ̷̠̆I̸̛̯ť̵̙ ̸͙͗G̶͎͐e̵̞̿T̷̬̕s̵̟̍ ̵̱͌H̸̡̉a̴̟͝Ǘ̸̞n̸̖̅Ṭ̷̎ḙ̴̽D̴̡̓

That peak oil never stopped looming just because we pretend it doesn’t exist. Finite resources are finite.

Password security and password manager howto should be an essential part of education. But then again if that happened, schools would probably teach how to use some proprietary cloud-based app with built-in datamining, because lobbying. It would only be a matter of time before everyone would find out the company was storing everyone’s passwords in plaintext after they all leaked.

Date sugar kind of dissolves, but it’s also high fiber, so it has a thickening effect. Unfortunately when it comes to sweeteners, the only ways to really keep them healthy is to make sure they’re combined with a source of fiber and antioxidants, to blunt blood sugar spikes and prevent inflammation. Natural low calorie sweeteners like Stevia might be an option, but it’s not clear what their health impacts may or may not be either.

I’ve never seen a chocolate bar that can truly be called healthy. See this comment for details on why. While it is possible to make a healthy chocolate-flavored treat, It’s not possible to make a healthy true chocolate bar.

I think you’re right, it’s not possible without modifying the product so much that it can no longer be considered a true chocolate bar. I was going to post another comment in this thread about how I would make a chocolate bar. The sugar isn’t even the hard part - the thing that makes sugar harmful is when it’s 1) refined away from a whole-food source, 2) consumed in excess, and 3) part of a diet that is high in both sugar and fat, and low in other nutrients like fiber and phytonutrients. The first issue can be solved by using date sugar as the sweetener, which is just whole pulverized dates. Molasses (in small amounts) could also play a role.

The bigger problem is the cocoa butter itself. That stuff is really high in saturated fats, and chocolate cannot be considered chocolate without it’s inclusion. If I were to prioritize health over adhering to a standard, I would use either some kind of nut butter as a replacement (ideally one high in omega 3, like walnut butter), or a healthier oil like canola oil. Hmm, maybe avocado could be a good choice.

At this point I think it starts to run into stability issues, so an emulsifier of some sort would be desirable. I wouldn’t want to use industrial products like lecithins, so maybe something like chickpea flower. But then at this point we’re gone so far from chocolate bar that we’re probably talking about something that would be closer to a brownie texture.

Another thing I found in looking into this is that there are two main forms of cocoa powder/solids. The one used in chocolate bars uses a so-called “Dutch process” which leads to a product that is lower in flavanoid/polyphenol content. The other kind of cocoa, usually sold as “natural cocoa powder” has higher acidity, so a more sour taste. It requires either more sugar to taste good, is generally preferred more in baked goods, or in some cases will include an alkaline ingredient to neutralize the acidity.

So in pursuing health I end up removing literally every ingredient that makes a chocolate bar what it is. I guess I’m just finding out that I don’t like chocolate bars after all. XD

It’d be interesting to experiment with these lines of thought and see what comes out…

What a stupid opinion to block someone over

I dunno, I’ve yet to see a chocolate bar product that actually gets everything right. I think that it’s entirely possible to make a chocolate bar that is not only every bit as much candy as any other, but is completely health-promoting as well. The bar here is really just the status quo.

Milk chocolate is ruined chocolate.

Edit: I’ll elaborate. The primary health benefit of chocolate is the high antioxidant levels. So if a chocolate producer wants their product to lean on the health-promoting side, the last thing they want to do is include an ingredient that eliminates the primary benefit that a thing is known for. Dairy literally acts as an antinutrient in this sense, blocking the absorption of antioxidants in chocolate. It’s been shown to do this to coffee, tea, and berries as well.

Soy milk would be a relatively better choice, but then again, like dairy, soy is one of the most common allergens. So I would argue oat milk would be the best choice for “milk” chocolate.

This. There are defined criteria as to what a real cult is, and once you have any familiarity with that, you realize that 99% of what people call “cultlike” is really just culture.

Yikes, ice cream is one of the worst things you could be eating, super high calorie density and extremely high fat content. Here is a far better ice cream alternative that can be made at home.