Oddbean

Thanks for this. Another thing: In 1950, despite "conservative" memes that suggest otherwise, Americans ate less meat, with middle and lower-income families often reserving it for special occasions or certain days of the week. It was much less of a staple then and was relatively higher-priced compared to other foods. One of the main trends since 1950 has been a fall in relative meat prices and a vast increase in meat consumption. Part of this was due to new "preservative" and "processing" techniques.

Meat isn't a political thing, despite how they may portray it as such. In 1950 people were still recovering from the effects of the wars, diet wasn't as much of a priority. The quality of food in general has greatly decreased my very the decades, I would say it is at an all time low because of the mass involvement of corporations more interested in profit rather than quality. I ate predominantly plant based for years. All I can say is you have to try it for yourself, and perhaps listen to some people have discussions and debates on the topic.

Do you think it's possible that the World Health Organization (WHO) is corrupted by big grain / seed oil corporations in addition to big pharma corporations. Whose interest do you think the WHO is looking out for; the simple human or the corporations funding them?

People are pushed into eating meat because the nutritional content of veggies is much lower than it was decades ago. Meat usually packs much more, enabling you to be healthier. The lower relative price of meat is actually bad for business. Its driven by importing, and the effect is that small ranchers go out of business, and the remaining incorporated mega ranches use the worst practices - the worst for animal well-being and the worst for nutrition. Both are caused by government. The government doesn't want regenerative agriculture, which would fix the nutrition crisis as well as restoring the environment, and they use preferential loans (part of interest paid by gov so the farmer pays less) to push farmers into growing certain things and in certain ways. The government wants farmers using pesticides and fertilizer because they are dual purpose technologies - if you can make fertilizers, you can make bombs ; if you can make pesticides, you can make chemical weapons.

I am strongly against the fact that gov has direct point on this. Maby Politicians get incentivised to support big food companies. But then Politicians are only the tool. But the real bad guys are the big companies. And the laws that let them pay politicians without transparency. We need a big wave of transparency laws for democracies to work. How is our voting system free if we do not know who is paying?

I agree we need transparency, but there's no difference between big corp and government. We've had perfect transparency before, and they simply changed the laws and now its all clear as mud - so if we fix the democracy, it'll just happen again. IMO, we just need to abandon this idea of representative assemblies - its predatory on the public and the best thing that can be said about it is that its slow.

Slow often is good. Since what are good rules today probably also are in 1000 years. But I also think that representative democracy could may in this decade becoma obsolete when there are good working evoting systems. Then Democracies should be possible where every person can vote about every single law. So every law has direct legitimacy in majorities.

I've seen a voting system built on bitcoin - forgot the name, though. It looked perfect. I think they said they're trying to get Guatemala to use it. Doing direct voting obsoletes the nation state. There's no good reason for the vote of someone outside of your community to have any bearing on your community. Small communities will have to become fully sovereign - and I'm all for that. No more empires, no more capital cities.

This would be great when all small minigovernments of small groups would start existing. Small communes that selfgovern and interact with other communities freely. But up to now I do not have a concept how they could free themselves from the current nation state, since every piece of land in this earth belongs currently to a nation state.

Easier now than before bitcoin. The nation state has proved over and over that it is incapable of controlling its debt. The reason it can't control its debt is because elected assemblies are inherently corrupt. Legislatures attract the most corrupt people. What are they going to do when the population isnt using their fiat, so they can't use debt to steal from the people? They'll turn on each other. Some will abscond with their ill gotten gains in the form of bitcoin, like African dictators with Swiss bank accounts. That's the moment that any prepared community can renegotiate the terms of their union. That moment will come over and over until all power has been renegotiated back to the local level.