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I talk about the effects of limiting GDP-style growth on our lifestyle with my wife. We burn a lot of carbon and use a lot of resources traveling, but on the ot

I talk about the effects of limiting GDP-style growth on our lifestyle with my wife. We burn a lot of carbon and use a lot of resources traveling, but on the other hand in our day to day life we tend to buy food in bulk at health food stores, try very hard to avoid using plastic, share one fuel efficient car, etc. Our take is that, for the sake of our grandchildren's generation and generations beyond that, that we would be willing to reduce our travel, concentrating more on visiting family and friends rather than international travel. The effect has taken years to become noticeable, but not having network TV in our home so we are not deluged with BUY THIS NOW commercials for stuff we don’t need has helped us to avoid buying stuff we really don’t need. As a society, if we invested more in libraries, public parks, venues for entertainment, science and education, etc. then I think we would be better off than embracing a more material world/life style. Everyone gets to make their own decisions, so for my preferences to be achieved, we would need to stop corporate socializism and make consumers pay the real costs for goods. An example would be to remove the $50b per year water subsidies for the beef industry, and make consumers pay for the approximately 4000 gallons of water required to produce a pound of meat in the grocery store.

luckylion 7y ago
> An example would be to remove the $50b per year water subsidies for the beef industry, and make consumers pay for the approximately 4000 gallons of water required to produce a pound of meat in the grocery store. Isn't that a fancy way of saying "eating meat should be a privilege for the wealthy"? The point of mass production isn't just that it's produced in masses, it's also about being affordable by the masses. Also, would you be willing to not travel around the globe or are you not doing that? Imho traveling is a luxury. It's fine if you do it, but don't tell other people to be sustainable if you do (or did extensively, nobody is worse than the person that lived a life full of sin, converts and immediately tells everybody how amoral they are).
- rtkwe 7y ago
  > Isn't that a fancy way of saying "eating meat should be a privilege for the wealthy"? Kind of, it's a problem of externalized costs beef is only really cheap because the environmental toll of feeding and housing them isn't felt by the purchaser. If the same food and water required to make your steak would be used to feed people directly there would be much less food insecurity in the world for example. Meat is decidedly a food that is a kind of luxury that not everyone can afford already and I'd be sad to eat less of but if it reduced hunger and starvation in the rest of the world I'd consider it a fair take away. Also consider that by being on the internet presumably with some higher education the majority of hackernews readers are already in the to 25-50% of global wealth.
  - luckylion 7y ago
    > Also consider that by being on the internet presumably with some higher education the majority of hackernews readers are already in the to 25-50% of global wealth. I don't mind the idea of not eating meat, I eat meat maybe three times a year and I wouldn't mind not doing that, it's more of a habit of family members to have it on Christmas, not something I care for. I'm kind of allergic to this "we must save the planet, and by we I mean the poor" stuff though. It often comes in the form of "we must save the landscape, we can't have too much dense housing, it doesn't look natural", which typically comes from people who can afford luxurious mansions in the country-side. I get that they don't want other people to live there because it wouldn't be as nice if it was crowded, but I don't like that being turned into "I just want to save the environment". It's right next to "mass tourism is terrible" from people who can pay the premium for individual tourism and just don't want to share their destination with those people.
    - mark_l_watson 7y ago
      I am mostly with you. It is not as much about at a large scale supporting the poor (locally, I donate my time to our local food bank) but being a nation of laws that are fairly applied to corporations, rich, middle class, and poor. Our political and legal frameworks really leave a lot of room for improvement!
  - BlueTemplar 7y ago
    Lol, more like the majority of hackernews readers is likely to be in the top 1% : > $32,400 annual income OR > $770,000 in net worth https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/050615/are-you-top-one-percent-world.asp https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/05061... (Also, I've heard that having at least 1 year of college (or other form of superior education?) meant that one was in the top 1% of world most "educated", but haven't found any sources that would confirm/infirm that...)
    - rtkwe 7y ago
      I wanted to make some allowances for HN readers in poorer countries which I know some do. But yes the overwhelming majority are in the global 1%. My original statement was even broader that just by having internet access and a computer you're in the top but access has been growing so much I'm not as certain.
- ryanmercer 7y ago
  >Isn't that a fancy way of saying "eating meat should be a privilege for the wealthy"? It absolutely should. https://newrepublic.com/article/120915/american-west-drought-being-worsened-livestock-industry https://newrepublic.com/article/120915/american-west-drought... - 90% of of Nevada's cropland is used for hay, 90% of Montana's, 60% of Utah's - 50% of California's water usage goes to livestock feed Etc etc. This is unsustainable, period. This is causing groundwater depletion (and has for decades) that will take centuries (or longer) of rainfall to replenish. You get water contamination, you get monoculture crop for vast swaths of land that negatively impact wild pollinators and soil health, etc etc. I love meat, but it absolutely HAS to be a luxury. My fiance's parents and siblings mostly own livestock. For personal use for a few dozen of them they have a couple hundred acres which does not sustain their animals and requires considerable amounts of purchased feed for a dozenish cows, a couple dozen sheep/rams, a few dozen chickens etc in the heart of Missiouri. Depending on where you are in the world you need 2-25 acres of arable land per cow during the warm seasons to feed themselves. The average grass fed cow will yield about 530lbs of meat at slaughter after 2 years of life. That's 4-50 acres tied up for 2 years to produce 530lbs of meat, less than 3/4 of meat per day. If you switch them to grain you need about 25 pounds per day of dry feed. In the corn belt you can get about 200 bushels per acre. A bushel is about 56 pounds. That gives you 1.13 years for a cow with optimal yield per acre of corn, outside of the corn belt you'll only get about 100 bushels per acre yielding you about 0.61 of a cow's annual requirement per acre. Never mind that cow's digestive systems aren't really designed for corn. There's something like 1.5 billion cows in the world... 20ish gallons of water a day, 25 pounds of dry feed a day... Meat is a luxury man. A luxury.
  - luckylion 7y ago
    > Meat is a luxury man. A luxury. Next up "plants are a luxury, the poor can eat processed insect protein, it's fine and contains all the nutrition they need". I don't have a problem with "let's eat less meat", I just don't like the thinly veiled "fuck the average people, they shouldn't eat meat while I and my buddies will continue to do so thanks to our lavish income".
    - BlueTemplar 7y ago
vonmoltke 7y ago
> An example would be to remove the $50b per year water subsidies for the beef industry Do you have a source for that? Every one I have been able to find indicates that total meat and dairy subsidies are less than that, let alone just water subsidies for the beef industry.
- mark_l_watson 7y ago
  Sorry, that was from memory, reading Diet for a Small Planet. I found one source for $38b for meat and fairly subsidies, but that likely includes things besides water subsidies. I agree that $50b is too high of an estimate.
- ryanmercer 7y ago
  I doubt it's a remotely accurate figure. However, cattle consume a LOT of water. 20~ gallons per head per day is a fairly accurate figure and the US has something like 95 million cows. So with farming and animal husbandry water rights are a big thing. Often water rights will go to farmers/ranchers long before they go to people. So you've got cows, with a conservative estimate, using 500 billion gallons of water a year in the U.S. alone just for drinking. Obviously most of that is coming from natural sources but that has financial impacts on the treated water that ends up pumped to your house/business via pipes. How big is that financial impact? shrugs I highly doubt it's close to 50 billion USD a year though. They definitely do get comparatively obscene amounts of financial benefit though. Water rights, forage disaster, livestock compensation, indemnity payments, feed assistance, general relief, then you have to think about what sort of subsidies the growers get that then gets passed through as a benefit in the price of the feed going to the livestock... Man I love meat, I love love love meat, but I switched to primarily whole food plant based last year. WFPB is far more sustainable as far as water and land, arguably much healthier, requires far less fossil fuel input, and noticeably cheaper (my weekly grocery bill as halved).
  - BlueTemplar 7y ago
    And who knows if that water even comes from renewable sources...
airstrike 7y ago
This view ignores the insurmountable truth that humans want more, and if that means their neighbors get less, so be it. I'm not saying it should our shouldn't be like this, just that it is. You're thinking collectively while your neighbor defects and thinks about themselves first.
- JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
  You can have more than other people without tangibly owning more. Books like The Millionaire Next Door cover this. These millionaires don't own more physical resources, but have brokerage accounts that aren't subject to conspicuous consumption. They may also own a home or car, but it's not a mansion or anything more than a standard commuter vehicle.
  - mark_l_watson 7y ago
    I read the book The Millionaire Next Door over a decade ago. It changed my views on properly handling wealth/assets. Collecting wealth to impress other people is a loser move, but all too common.
- BlueTemplar 7y ago
  "One-upping the neighbors" mindset is certainly a problem - but it maybe can be socially minimized ?
jandrewrogers 7y ago
Marketable water rights in cattle ranching regions are around $0.01 per gallon in many areas last I checked. These are fully priced into the cost of beef because the producers are often literally paying for it. This isn't a hidden subsidy. Clearly the above "subsidy" numbers must have taken some liberties with the truth, or beef would be impossibly expensive at the grocery store. Source: I used to own water rights in cattle country and did deals with beef producers that wanted to use that water for cattle.

luckylion 7y ago

> An example would be to remove the $50b per year water subsidies for the beef industry, and make consumers pay for the approximately 4000 gallons of water required to produce a pound of meat in the grocery store. Isn't that a fancy way of saying "eating meat should be a privilege for the wealthy"? The point of mass production isn't just that it's produced in masses, it's also about being affordable by the masses. Also, would you be willing to not travel around the globe or are you not doing that? Imho traveling is a luxury. It's fine if you do it, but don't tell other people to be sustainable if you do (or did extensively, nobody is worse than the person that lived a life full of sin, converts and immediately tells everybody how amoral they are).

rtkwe 7y ago
> Isn't that a fancy way of saying "eating meat should be a privilege for the wealthy"? Kind of, it's a problem of externalized costs beef is only really cheap because the environmental toll of feeding and housing them isn't felt by the purchaser. If the same food and water required to make your steak would be used to feed people directly there would be much less food insecurity in the world for example. Meat is decidedly a food that is a kind of luxury that not everyone can afford already and I'd be sad to eat less of but if it reduced hunger and starvation in the rest of the world I'd consider it a fair take away. Also consider that by being on the internet presumably with some higher education the majority of hackernews readers are already in the to 25-50% of global wealth.
- luckylion 7y ago
  > Also consider that by being on the internet presumably with some higher education the majority of hackernews readers are already in the to 25-50% of global wealth. I don't mind the idea of not eating meat, I eat meat maybe three times a year and I wouldn't mind not doing that, it's more of a habit of family members to have it on Christmas, not something I care for. I'm kind of allergic to this "we must save the planet, and by we I mean the poor" stuff though. It often comes in the form of "we must save the landscape, we can't have too much dense housing, it doesn't look natural", which typically comes from people who can afford luxurious mansions in the country-side. I get that they don't want other people to live there because it wouldn't be as nice if it was crowded, but I don't like that being turned into "I just want to save the environment". It's right next to "mass tourism is terrible" from people who can pay the premium for individual tourism and just don't want to share their destination with those people.
  - mark_l_watson 7y ago
    I am mostly with you. It is not as much about at a large scale supporting the poor (locally, I donate my time to our local food bank) but being a nation of laws that are fairly applied to corporations, rich, middle class, and poor. Our political and legal frameworks really leave a lot of room for improvement!
- BlueTemplar 7y ago
  Lol, more like the majority of hackernews readers is likely to be in the top 1% : > $32,400 annual income OR > $770,000 in net worth https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/050615/are-you-top-one-percent-world.asp https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/05061... (Also, I've heard that having at least 1 year of college (or other form of superior education?) meant that one was in the top 1% of world most "educated", but haven't found any sources that would confirm/infirm that...)
  - rtkwe 7y ago
    I wanted to make some allowances for HN readers in poorer countries which I know some do. But yes the overwhelming majority are in the global 1%. My original statement was even broader that just by having internet access and a computer you're in the top but access has been growing so much I'm not as certain.
ryanmercer 7y ago
>Isn't that a fancy way of saying "eating meat should be a privilege for the wealthy"? It absolutely should. https://newrepublic.com/article/120915/american-west-drought-being-worsened-livestock-industry https://newrepublic.com/article/120915/american-west-drought... - 90% of of Nevada's cropland is used for hay, 90% of Montana's, 60% of Utah's - 50% of California's water usage goes to livestock feed Etc etc. This is unsustainable, period. This is causing groundwater depletion (and has for decades) that will take centuries (or longer) of rainfall to replenish. You get water contamination, you get monoculture crop for vast swaths of land that negatively impact wild pollinators and soil health, etc etc. I love meat, but it absolutely HAS to be a luxury. My fiance's parents and siblings mostly own livestock. For personal use for a few dozen of them they have a couple hundred acres which does not sustain their animals and requires considerable amounts of purchased feed for a dozenish cows, a couple dozen sheep/rams, a few dozen chickens etc in the heart of Missiouri. Depending on where you are in the world you need 2-25 acres of arable land per cow during the warm seasons to feed themselves. The average grass fed cow will yield about 530lbs of meat at slaughter after 2 years of life. That's 4-50 acres tied up for 2 years to produce 530lbs of meat, less than 3/4 of meat per day. If you switch them to grain you need about 25 pounds per day of dry feed. In the corn belt you can get about 200 bushels per acre. A bushel is about 56 pounds. That gives you 1.13 years for a cow with optimal yield per acre of corn, outside of the corn belt you'll only get about 100 bushels per acre yielding you about 0.61 of a cow's annual requirement per acre. Never mind that cow's digestive systems aren't really designed for corn. There's something like 1.5 billion cows in the world... 20ish gallons of water a day, 25 pounds of dry feed a day... Meat is a luxury man. A luxury.
- luckylion 7y ago
  > Meat is a luxury man. A luxury. Next up "plants are a luxury, the poor can eat processed insect protein, it's fine and contains all the nutrition they need". I don't have a problem with "let's eat less meat", I just don't like the thinly veiled "fuck the average people, they shouldn't eat meat while I and my buddies will continue to do so thanks to our lavish income".
  - BlueTemplar 7y ago

vonmoltke 7y ago

> An example would be to remove the $50b per year water subsidies for the beef industry Do you have a source for that? Every one I have been able to find indicates that total meat and dairy subsidies are less than that, let alone just water subsidies for the beef industry.

mark_l_watson 7y ago
Sorry, that was from memory, reading Diet for a Small Planet. I found one source for $38b for meat and fairly subsidies, but that likely includes things besides water subsidies. I agree that $50b is too high of an estimate.
ryanmercer 7y ago
I doubt it's a remotely accurate figure. However, cattle consume a LOT of water. 20~ gallons per head per day is a fairly accurate figure and the US has something like 95 million cows. So with farming and animal husbandry water rights are a big thing. Often water rights will go to farmers/ranchers long before they go to people. So you've got cows, with a conservative estimate, using 500 billion gallons of water a year in the U.S. alone just for drinking. Obviously most of that is coming from natural sources but that has financial impacts on the treated water that ends up pumped to your house/business via pipes. How big is that financial impact? shrugs I highly doubt it's close to 50 billion USD a year though. They definitely do get comparatively obscene amounts of financial benefit though. Water rights, forage disaster, livestock compensation, indemnity payments, feed assistance, general relief, then you have to think about what sort of subsidies the growers get that then gets passed through as a benefit in the price of the feed going to the livestock... Man I love meat, I love love love meat, but I switched to primarily whole food plant based last year. WFPB is far more sustainable as far as water and land, arguably much healthier, requires far less fossil fuel input, and noticeably cheaper (my weekly grocery bill as halved).
- BlueTemplar 7y ago
  And who knows if that water even comes from renewable sources...

airstrike 7y ago

This view ignores the insurmountable truth that humans want more, and if that means their neighbors get less, so be it. I'm not saying it should our shouldn't be like this, just that it is. You're thinking collectively while your neighbor defects and thinks about themselves first.

JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
You can have more than other people without tangibly owning more. Books like The Millionaire Next Door cover this. These millionaires don't own more physical resources, but have brokerage accounts that aren't subject to conspicuous consumption. They may also own a home or car, but it's not a mansion or anything more than a standard commuter vehicle.
- mark_l_watson 7y ago
  I read the book The Millionaire Next Door over a decade ago. It changed my views on properly handling wealth/assets. Collecting wealth to impress other people is a loser move, but all too common.
BlueTemplar 7y ago
"One-upping the neighbors" mindset is certainly a problem - but it maybe can be socially minimized ?

jandrewrogers 7y ago

Marketable water rights in cattle ranching regions are around $0.01 per gallon in many areas last I checked. These are fully priced into the cost of beef because the producers are often literally paying for it. This isn't a hidden subsidy. Clearly the above "subsidy" numbers must have taken some liberties with the truth, or beef would be impossibly expensive at the grocery store. Source: I used to own water rights in cattle country and did deals with beef producers that wanted to use that water for cattle.