"New York and Pennsylvania are the leading producers of dairy products, while other states, such as Wisconsin and Iowa, are also significant contributors. Other significant agricultural products include tobacco, rice, and peanuts, which are primarily grown in the South. In the West, states such as California and Wyoming are major producers of beef and sheep, while fish and shellfish are produced in states such as Alaska and Massachusetts.
- California is the biggest farming state in the US, producing more than 400 different crops, including fruits, vegetables, nuts, and dairy products. It is one of the most significant parts of the US agricultural industry, contributing over $50 billion to the national economy each year. The main Crops include oranges, avocados, strawberries, tomatoes, lettuce, and broccoli. The state is also a major producer of nuts, such as almonds and pistachios. California is the top producer of wine grapes in the U.S.
- Iowa is another major farming state, producing many grains, particularly corn and soybeans. It is the largest producer of soybeans in the US and one of the leading producers of corn. Iowa also produces eggs and dairy products. Iowa is the leading producer of corn, soybeans, and eggs in the country. It is also a major producer of beef and dairy products.
- Texas is the leading producer of cotton and cattle in the US, with over three million cattle and over 11 million acres of cotton production. It is also one of the leading producers of sorghum, hay, wheat, and peanuts. The state is also a major producer of beef, dairy, and poultry products.
- Nebraska is home to some of the most productive land in the US. It is a major producer of corn, soybeans and wheat. It also produces hay, grain sorghum, and sunflowers.
- Minnesota is a major producer of corn, soybeans, sugar beets, and wheat. The state is also a major producer of hogs, turkeys, and dairy products.
- Illinois "land of Lincoln" and a major agricultural state. It is a major producer of corn and soybeans, as well as oats, rye, hay, and barley. It also produces fruits and vegetables, as well as livestock such as beef, dairy, and poultry.
- Kansas is a major producer of wheat, sorghum, and hay. Kansas is the leader in wheat production in the US, producing 20.1% of the nation's wheat crop. Other States that contribute are North Dakota (17.2%), Montana (10.8%), Washington (6.7%), and Oklahoma (4.9%).
- North Carolina is a major producer of hogs, turkeys, and chicken. The state also produces sweet potatoes, tobacco, and peanuts."
Okay, we know California is Democratic. What about the rest of them? The impact is going to be on the beef, poultry, egg, dairy and pork producing states. So who, if any, are the Democratic senators from these states?
Iowa - both Republicans.
Texas - both Republicans.
Minnesota - Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith, members of the Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party which by the name should have some agrarian component which might well be interested in a "yes" vote for the EATS act.
Illinois - Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth, Democrats. Durbin has changed his position on farm subsidies, so he might be anti-EATS:
"In January 2005, Durbin changed his longstanding position on sugar tariffs and price supports. After several years of voting to keep sugar quotas and price supports, he now favors abolishing the program. "The sugar program depended on congressmen like me from states that grew corn", Durbin said, referring to the fact that, though they were formerly a single entity, the sugar market and the corn syrup market are now largely separate."
North Carolina - both Republicans.
New York - Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrats. Chuck *might* be persuaded to be pro-EATS:
"In March 2019, Schumer was one of 38 senators to sign a letter to U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue warning that dairy farmers "have continued to face market instability and are struggling to survive the fourth year of sustained low prices" and urging his department to "strongly encourage these farmers to consider the Dairy Margin Coverage program"
As might Kirsten:
"In May 2019, Gillibrand and eight other Democratic senators sent a letter to Agriculture Secretary Perdue where they criticized the USDA for purchasing pork from JBS USA and wrote that it was "counterproductive and contradictory" for companies to receive funding from "U.S. taxpayer dollars intended to help American farmers struggling with this administration's trade policy." The senators requested the department "ensure these commodity purchases are carried out in a manner that most benefits the American farmer’s bottom line—not the business interests of foreign corporations."
Pennsylvania - Bob Casey Jr. and John Fetterman, Democrats. Fetterman has his own troubles and neither of them seem to have any particular positon on agricultural issues.
Wisconsin - Even I have heard of the cheese! A mixed bag, Ron Johnson who is Republican and Tammy Baldwin who is a Democrat. Baldwin again might be cajoled into being pro-EATS as like Gillibrand she signed the letter over buying pork from the Brazilian producer.
I wonder though, if we assume UFOs are doing something we currently think is impossible under the laws of physics, then does that equally open up the possibility of other supernatural phenomena?
Eg, we can't definitively prove that ghosts (or anything else) don't exist. So why do we assume out of hand that ghosts would be a silly explanation? Once we're speculating that the world doesn't work the way we think and the impossible may be possible, how do we estimate the probability of each particular thing that we currently think is impossible?
You have to be more specific about what you mean by "something we currently think is impossible under the laws of physics".
If you mean violating the principle of conservation of energy, then sure, supernatural explanations are on the table.
If you mean doing something that as far as we know can't be done, but there's no particular reason we know of _that_ it can't be done, then no, the response would just be that we need to learn more about what natural law does and doesn't allow.
Aristotle said that it was the nature of terrestrial matter to come to a stop when moving. That turned out to be wrong, but it's not difficult to understand how the mistake was made.
We later revised our idea of what the laws of physics have to say about that kind of situation, without seeing any need for a supernatural agent and, interestingly enough, without changing the conclusions that Aristotle would have given us. We still believe that objects moving along the surface of the earth will naturally come to a stop. We just do with multiple "laws of nature" what Aristotle had wanted to do with one.
I was thinking of something like FTL travel or wormholes. Moving faster than light is fundamentally equivalent to time travel according to our current understanding of relativity, and allows you to violate causality. Giving up our belief in cause and effect is a hard sell; perhaps even harder than giving up our belief in conservation of energy.
Interestingly though, apart from this issue with causality, general relativity actually doesn't forbid objects from moving faster than light if they move through warped space.
We can't prove causality is never violated, but we also can't prove energy is always conserved. We've just always observed these things to be true so far and our entire scientific framework is built on the assumption they're true.
> We can't prove causality is never violated, but we also can't prove energy is always conserved.
True, but the conservation principles are derived from invariance principles of the form "all of the same rules apply in [circumstance X] as in [circumstance Y]". ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether%27s_theorem ) So if you're willing to assume that the laws of physics, whatever they may be, are the same in the past as they are in the future, then you're stuck with conservation of energy.
Wrt causality and wormholes, given the existence of a wormhole I would kind of expect that causality would flow through it just like it flows along every other possible path. But I have no relevant training or knowledge for that statement.
Anyway, it is because violating conservation of energy cannot be done without changing what the laws of nature are that I say it goes into the realm of possibly-supernatural-phenomena. How else would we distinguish "natural" from "supernatural"?
> True, but the conservation principles are derived from invariance principles of the form "all of the same rules apply in [circumstance X] as in [circumstance Y]".
Okay, good point.
> Wrt causality and wormholes, given the existence of a wormhole I would kind of expect that causality would flow through it just like it flows along every other possible path.
As far as I understand, if you just have two fixed wormhole ends, you don't have a causality problem. But if we're talking about an alien race who can do arbitrary FTL travel at will to wherever they want to go, then they can travel through time and violate causality.
I'm agreeing with you that violating conservation of energy goes into the realm of the possibly-supernatural. I'm suggesting if FTL travel implies the ability to violate causality, it's also in the realm the possibly-supernatural.
> As far as I understand, if you just have two fixed wormhole ends, you don't have a causality problem. But if we're talking about an alien race who can do arbitrary FTL travel at will to wherever they want to go, then they can travel through time and violate causality.
Hmmm.
I assume a "violation of causality" involves the flow of information from a particular point in time and space to the same point in space at an earlier time.
It is not immediately obvious to me how teleportation would enable that. I'm willing to believe it could, though. Can you sketch an example?
The general problem I'm encountering while thinking about it is that teleporting always sends you into "the future", a time that is later than whatever you can observe from your starting point. (Because you moved faster than the light that makes observation possible.)
Working through a scenario:
I'm on planet A and you're on planet B. It takes light 100 years to travel from one of us to the other one.
I am watching you through my perfect telescope with infinite resolution. By implication, you lived "sort of 100 years" before me. You can send messages to me, but I can't send messages to you. When you look over towards planet A, you see whatever was going on 200 years before I started watching you.
So we have some points in spacetime:
A-200: visible to you.
A-100: accessible to you, if you teleport.
B-100: your natural home, visible to me.
A+0: my natural home. You can't see or access this.
B+0: accessible to me, if I teleport.
The goal is to send a message from some later point on B to some earlier point on B (the only possibility is from B+0 to B-100), or from some later point on A to some earlier point on A (three possibilities given the points we've named).
I can teleport between A+0 and B+0, and you can teleport between A-100 and B-100. There does not appear to be any way to send a message from the future into the past. You could teleport to A-100, learn something about it, teleport back to B-100, and signal to me through my telescope, but I'm already allowed to know about things that happened in the past of planet A.
---
Now, the difficulty that leaps out at me, for the scenario I just outlined, is that (as far as I understand relativity) there is no point in time on planet B that corresponds to my time and location on planet A, and therefore it isn't really possible to say what time it will be on planet B when I teleport there. I labeled that time "B+0", but that's meaningless.
What that says to me is more that, if we had the capacity to create and use wormholes to arbitrary locations, either they would target random points in time (?!) or the theory of relativity would be empirically false - it really would be possible to say that a particular point in time at some given location corresponded to a particular point in time at some other location.
So, I personally think "violation of causality" via currently understood channels such as high speed travel through curved space, is more probable than "ghosts." It might be a violation of our usual intuitions, but by my understanding it seems to be compatible with our current understanding of how the laws of physics work. And if we view the universe from the outside including the dimension of time, I don't think it's obvious that we should always expect that nothing ever be caused by things which, from certain relativistic perspectives, happened after they did.
But if we grant that ghosts are definitely more improbable than FTL travel, does it imply that if we observe ghosts, that implies that FTL travel is plausible too? I don't think it does. Maybe it would depend on *how* the ghosts turned out to work, and if it somehow turned out that our model of how physics works is completely, from the ground up, wrong, then I guess we'd have to stop believing in the light speed limit, but it's hard to imagine how that could possibly turn out to be consistent with our existing observations.
In general, I think that one part of a model failing should change your probabilities for other things, but it's never going to be as simple as "everything the model says is as unlikely as this thing we just observed is now likely to be true." You have to downgrade your confidence that the model is accurate in predicting what's true or not in the first place, but there are some things which we're confident don't exist specifically because of our confidence in our model, and there are some things where, if our model turned out to be wrong, we'd have to revert to some different, still low, default likelihood of them being true. Saying that they probably don't exist is an antiprediction- very specific things which we don't observe would have to be true for them to be true.
Neither ghosts nor Russell's teapot imply the existence of the other. Ghosts are a complicated thing which we have a lack of good evidence for, and a model that predicts that there's probably no mechanism for them to exist. If that model turns out to be wrong, it doesn't necessarily mean that there *is* a mechanism for them to exist, and it certainly doesn't mean we have evidence for them. If we see FTL travel and infer ghosts, it means that we're treating the existence of ghosts as something that's granted by default, a proposition that's only retracted because the model we have doesn't offer a mechanism for them. But I don't think it makes sense to think about them that way in the first place.
But there is no _a priori_ reason to think that UFO sightings are explained by aliens. Thus, it is much more rational to assume that, whatever they are, they are caused by something that doesn’t violate the laws of physics as we know them.
Like dragons. UFOs are obviously dragons.
“But that’s ridiculous!” NO! It is strictly less ridiculous than the idea that UFOs are aliens. Neither dragons nor aliens-on-Earth are known to exist, but aliens-on-Earth would require new physics, and dragons would not. If you are a good Bayesian rationalist, then you should agree that P(UFOs are dragons) > P(UFOs are aliens).
They have tried to rebrand it as UAP ("aerial phenomena"), but UFOs are firmly established in the popular imagination, and likewise that aliens are the leading explanation. And now with literal government officials publicly testifying about physical artifacts being covered up this confusion is probably stronger than ever. So much for raising the sanity waterline.
We've gotten new physics in the past. It may be true that aliens-on-Earth would require new physics, and dragons-on-Earth wouldn't, but it is not true that the totality of what aliens-on-Earth would require is more surprising than the totality of what dragons-on-Earth would require.
If we’re going to posit new physics then why not just posit that “UFOs” are *directly* caused by the new physics (ie, they’re something like ball lightning or the aurora borealis)?
Dragons are perhaps an egregiously silly counterproposal, but the overall point remains:
1. There is no evidence that there are aliens on or around Earth.
2. Our current understanding of physics seems to rule out the possibility that there could be.
3. Thus, “UFOs are aliens” is a really really improbable conclusion to jump to based on the very small amount of evidence we have.
I don't believe that UFOs are aliens, but I also don't agree with your point 2. Yes, it would be very expensive and slow to travel between the stars, but it could be done. There's nothing about Project Orion or a generation ship that violates the laws of physics.
I second this opinion. Although I also regard the alien hypothesis as very unlikely, it's one of the few pop culture conspiracy theories that *doesn't* have to violate the laws of physics.
Wickard v. Filburn strikes again... (I recognize that the food production being regulated here does actually involve interstate commerce, making this less egregious than the facts of Wickard itself.)
My understanding is that, due to economies of scale and the structure of the industry, it is very difficult for any large food producer to operate without selling in California, and it's also very difficult to "split" a production operation such that, say, a company could make California groceries in one production chain while making Iowa groceries in another. Thus, the only option is to comply with the stringent State's regulations (could be an "intolerant minority/apathetic majority" situation). If food prices are pushed up, the majority might not stay apathetic for too long. Anyone in the food industry, please correct me if wrong.
What makes this so hard? If California eats (let's say) 10% of the nation's food, why can't producers sell to the remaining 90% of the market, and let California-specific companies sell to California?
It's the same principle as the gunboats opening the markets of East Asia. They CAN, but it's just so cheap (possibly because the costs are paid by someone else) that the attempt to expand is going to happen.
In part because segregating the product stream is nigh-unto impossible economically. Producers don't sell directly to consumers, as a general rule. They sell to a processor, who sells to a packager, who sells to a distributor; at every step they're comingling product from many different producers from very different areas. And much of the documentation doesn't persist--a single sausage may be made of meat from multiple hogs from different farms entirely.
So any tiny "contamination" in a California-bound stream opens the entire distribution network, most of which has no effectual way of looking at the conditions back up the chain, to massive penalties.
You'd basically have to have a completely separate California network from everyone else...at *massive* costs to everyone.
Surely different hot dog producers have "organic" vs. "regular" hot dogs, or beef vs. pork hot dogs, or high-quality vs. low-quality hot dogs, or something like that, and they're able to keep those separate from each other. Why would it be any harder to have "California-compliant" hot dogs as a separate product?
California produces more food than any other US state, and I think (data are complicated, hard to tell) is the largest exporter of food of any state. But like every state, it specializes in certain products and imports the ones that aren't its comparative advantage, which include pork.
If I'm wrong about this and California does regulate its food companies out of business, I think the correct sequence of events is for it to bear the brunt of its own bad policies, suffer, learn, and change them. Just as I would rather if an individual is lazy they fail to make money and have to come up with their own solution, rather than the government mandating work for them.
California has a YEAR WITHOUT MEAT and if its voters aren't happy they can have a referendum to get rid of the meat restrictions law. What's the issue?
You're asking for another axis, so you've doubled the number of bins ("california-organic", "non-ca-organic", "california-nonorganic", "non-ca-nonorganic", etc). It's not rocket science, but it's also a major effort across many businesses that are not highly technological. Sure, industrial factory farms could probably figure it out... but is that the kind of direction you want to push the food supply?
The US economy is a huge powerhouse mostly because it's a single market and there's relatively little customization needed on a per-state basis. The alternative is something like Europe before EUCU. Even post-EUCU, selling across Europe is a pain in the ass.
I think producers just object to being required to have a process on the same level of complexity as sourcing organic ingredients just for one state, with the added fear that if this is okay then they could end up needing to do it for fifty different states.
Now with more substance - organic hot dogs (salad/bread/etc) can not be processed on the same equipment as non organic without a production stopping deep clean between. The higher price charged for the organic product makes this economically possible. Same with allergens and with kosher. The levels of purity required for these (federally mandated) marketing designations are not at all required for, say, changing from beef to pork to mixed meat.
And you miss the real problem - CA can't produce enough food to feed itself. They have to import other state's surplus.
> Same with allergens and with kosher. The levels of purity required for these (federally mandated) marketing designations...
Kosher cannot be a federally mandated marketing designation. The federal government is not even allowed to have an opinion on whether any particular thing is or isn't kosher.
High quality vs low quality only considers the observable facts of the input, so that's neither here nor there.
Organic vs regular is both (a) mostly a lie (those are mostly entirely self-certified and meaningless) and (b) amortizes the much higher cost over the entire country. It also just produces (mostly) a single product per top-level distributor--you don't have the range of organic products that you do non-organic products. The entire "organic" range is comparable to a single entry in the non-organic range.
The cost of setting up a CA-specific *set* of lines (because you'd need just as many lines as the entirety of the non-organic + organic lines, including the entire distribution channels and delivery infrastructure, completely non-comingled at any point) vastly dwarfs the expense of setting up one organic chain that can mostly comingle both before and after a couple key points. And would only be amortizable over 10% of the entire market. You're talking about more than doubling the cost...for 10% of the market *max*. That's absolutely insane.
Organic products command a premium price, which is what makes them viable. California wants cruelty-free meat (with, I presume, the aim of stopping factory farming altogether) and it might well be that the production methods are considered cruel by California standards (e.g. how the cattle or pigs were slaughtered) and, for instance, I don't think they'd like or permit veal, even if it is organic.
From 2017 Irish farm advisory about going organic - it's expensive and time-consuming, so it probably works best for smaller scale operations. For really big stock raising operations, it might not be economically feasible (though I can't say about that):
For organic farming to be profitable a premium price must be achieved for produce sold. While the majority of beef supplied to the market is from steers and heifers, recent markets have emerged for calves (organic veal) and cull cows. Beef farmers interested in organic conversion should speak with other organic farmers, processors and wholesalers about potential markets. Major factory outlets for organic beef are Goodherdsmen, Slaney Meats, ABP and Jennings. Premium prices of 15 to 20% have generally been achievable for organic beef in recent years. According to processors the demand for Irish organic beef will continue to rise, especially in mainland Europe.
Complete an organic conversion plan
This involves a detailed description of management practices on the farm, the changes required on the farm, soil analysis, faecal analysis, livestock housing plan, animal health plan (in consultation with your veterinary surgeon) and land/crop rotation plan. The plan can be drawn up by the farmer alone or in consultation with the farm advisor. Attending a FETAC accredited “Introduction to organic farming course” is an excellent way of learning how to complete the conversion plan.
Provision of quality forage
To maintain farm productivity, stocking rate must be maintained as high as possible. In the absence of artificial nitrogen, white clover may be introduced into pastures to maintain grass production levels. White clover is the ‘engine’ that drives productivity on organic farms and can fix in excess of 100 kg N/ha annually. Red clover can fix in the region of 200 kg N/ha annually and can be a high yielding, high protein feed for wintering animals. Organic concentrates are more expensive than conventional concentrates. Prices for organic rations for ruminants are generally around €500/tonne. Maximising use of grass, using home-grown grain, purchasing grain from other organic producers and having the correct breed and system which matches land type and market specification required can reduce feed costs significantly. Organic straights can be purchased from a variety of organic farmers for between €300 and €350 per tonne with combi-crop mixes of peas and a cereal available for between approximately €380 and €400/tonne.
Regular topping is necessary to maintain grass quality and control weeds particularly in mid-season. High quality silages can also be produced using red clover-grass swards and enough silage should be produced on farm to meet winter feed requirements as it is not permitted to source silage from conventional farmers.
Animal health
Ensuring high animal health and welfare standards is a fundamental ethos of organic principles. The farmer must be aware that the level of stocksmanship required with animals is very high on organic farms. Routine treatment of animals with anthelmintics is prohibited, and a rotational grazing system should be in place to minimise worm burden. If a problem occurs faecal analysis is recommended and the vet must sign off the appropriate treatment on the organic farmer’s record book. Early detection of animal health problems is essential. Remember good animal husbandry is paramount. If an animal is suffering it must be treated and the necessary permission must be sought from the vet. The animal health plan, produced as part of the conversion plan, will deal with mineral deficiencies and vaccination issues.
Animal housing
Many farmers find that the greatest alterations that need to be made at farm level are changes to winter housing. More generous space allowances are required – for cattle the rule of thumb is that 1.0 m2 is required for every 100 kg live weight. All stock must have access to a dry bedded lying area. Up to 50% of this area can be slatted but the rest must be solid floor and not slatted. Conventional straw may be used for bedding."
Certainly, producing specific 'cruelty-free' meat would drive up the price of the final product, and people might then give up eating meat because it's too expensive. Which is the aim of the entire project in the first place, isn't it?
This argument is correct, and was made at greater length and with citations in amicus briefs from small farmers who are already doing exactly this. They argued that the big producers are essentially rent-seeking, trying to overrule democratic laws that disrupt their business model, because they don't want to compete in this new market as many smaller producers are already doing.
Actually, they would need to add two different types - Californian organic and Californian regular. Or rather 4 types because they already have to distinguish between four types along the axis of "organic" and "kosher". Each additional axis doubles the number of options, so just one or two additional,ones can be a big deal.
I disagree with Dobbs on the object level, but I think the justices were right that you can't just pretend the Constitution guarantees a right to abortion when it clearly doesn't.
But, there is not a States rights issue with congressional legislation in this space. The matter is clearly committed to Congress, and the Founders clearly intended to prevent this type of trade balkanization of the USA.
I mean, there obviously is a states' rights issue. This is a right that the states obviously don't have, but that doesn't meant they don't want it. Usually when someone's out there agitating for a right they don't have, we're willing to call that an issue of their rights.
That works on the assumption that they can make up that lost 10% in the remaining market. If they can convince Idahoans and New Englanders to eat more bacon, then they make up for the loss. But if the remainder of the market is already buying as much bacon as they want, then they're going to suffer a loss.
Imagine you lose 10% of your subscribers. Can you 'sell' to the remaining 90% of subscribers? No, because we're already subscribing. So you either have to persuade us to take out a more expensive subscription, or get the people who are reading but not subscribing to subscribe, and both of those are going to take effort: maybe people already subscribing are paying as much as they can afford and won't be willing to pay more, maybe the non-subscribers don't want to subscribe at all.
Or they can just take a loss. Meat companies taking a loss due to a new California law is not some tragedy we need federal intervention to prevent. The market isn't going to collapse.
They don't have to convince New Englanders to eat more meat, they can cater to the hole in the market left by other companies that decide to cater to the California market.
Let's say initially there are 10 equal-sized meat companies, each selling 10% of its products in California and 90% in the other states. As a result of the law, 1 can specialize in catering entirely to the California market, while the other 9 cater to the other states.
Of course this ignores details like transaction costs. But also, I suspect most of the gains from economies of scale are to be had well below the level of 10% of the entire USA market, which allows for more flexible specialization. (E.g. perhaps many of the smaller companies already cater primarily to one state or another. After all, in Hungary we have several domestic meat companies for 10 million people, even though we're part of the EU common market.)
> But if the remainder of the market is already buying as much bacon as they want, then they're going to suffer a loss.
It's always something in between. The price of bacon will drop, people will discover that they weren't buying _quite_ as much bacon as they wanted -- at least, not now that the price is so low -- but the bacon producers still end up with a loss. It's just a smaller loss than it would be if all of the extra bacon had been destroyed.
On a completely unrelated note, I read something a bit ago about Sinead O'Connor (sorry for the lateness of this question) that mentioned, twice, the Church's (or Irish society in general's?) handling of "gay boys and spirited girls". It left me with the distinct impression that "spirited girls" had some specific meaning, but I don't know what it might be. Do you?
I think this is an example of why people are wrong to equate, as they often do, the balance of power between the states and the federal, with the balance of power between different states.
You ask people why every state should have 2 Senators (rather than proportional by population) and the answer usually has something to do with preserving federalism, the idea being that more power to small states vs large states is the same thing as more power to states overall vs the federal government.
But this is an example of where more power to states would mean more power to *big* states, and small states push back *via* the federal government.
Wickard is not relevant to this question. There the issue was whether goods that were neither transported from their place of origin nor sold to a third party were subject to regulation under the commerce clause.
The issue here is whether goods that are undoubtedly traded in interstate commerce -- pork produced in Iowa, sold by Iowans to Californians, and then transported to California -- can be subject to Congressional regulation. I cannot think of a reason why not.
This precisely the sort of market balkanization that the commerce clause was intended to prevent.
For fresh meat products, I don't think there are so many processing steps involved. Just ship the parts of the formerly slightly happier dead animals to California and the parts of the formerly very unhappy dead animals to the rest of the states.
For preserved meat products, if reasonably phrased the CA law would allow trace amounts of otherwise disallowed meat. Then you would not need a second production line, but could just be run your sausage factory on unhappy dead animals for a month and then on slightly less unhappy animals for a week and label these tins as "CA edition".
I think that any distributor who can't handle tracking different inventories and sending different products to different states should try to look for an occupation which does not involve any logistics.
Besides the dual version solution, there are two different possible outcomes:
* If the additional cost is not large, producers might decide to follow CA rules for all of their products. This happened when the EU mandated standardized charging ports for phones (with Apple lagging behind a bit): phone manufacturers decided that the hassle of having a USB-C version of each phone for the EU and a vendor specific connector version for the rest of the world would cost them more than they would gain from selling overpriced cables. Rest of the world, you are welcome.
* They might just decide that CA is not worth it and not sell there. This is the capitalist solution (on a state level).
We know that Scott favors individual communities competing with their laws to attract citizens [0] with a minimum of higher level oversight, roughly like in Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota series. It is very clear that the US government is way more micromanaging than UniGov or Romanova. (Of course, the US also failed to safeguard exit rights for all of her subjects until the 1860s.)
I think EATS is a blatantly pandering to special interests. The good news is that it establishes the need to improve animal welfare on a federal level, and CA is often 5-10 years ahead of the rest of the US, so a similar federal law might happen eventually. Of course, then the factory farms will whine about state rights, at which points I will be playing a sad song for them on the world's smallest violin.
The economy of scale effect and similar considerations in other areas make me generally skeptical of states' rights (as a policy, setting aside constitutional arguments). Sigh. At least California is not trying to mandate 40 Hz or 80 Hz AC power...
> Wickard v. Filburn strikes again... (I recognize that the food production being regulated here does actually involve interstate commerce, making this less egregious than the facts of Wickard itself.)
I don't see... any connection to Wickard v. Filburn. The question for the EATS act is whether Congress can stop California from banning the import of certain products from other states, and that is the very core of the Commerce Clause as originally understood. Giving Congress that power is the entire point of the Commerce Clause.
EATS is so trivially constitutional it wouldn’t go to SCOTUS. Federal government can set product/production standards. Federal preemption precludes states from legislating where the Feds have spoken.
Yeah. And this is the sort of thing the Interstate Commerce clause was *actually* written for--regularizing standards across multiple states and preventing one state from putting impediments to trade in other states.
I think California's rules are pretty dumb, but I'm not sure it's fair to say they are putting impediments to trade in other states. I'm not a lawyer, and I'm willing to believe that current law/precedent would likely rule this as constitutional, but I also _very_ strongly believe that the commerce clause is interpreted far, far, _far_ too broadly (perhaps the most over-broadly ruled clause in the entire constitution, contested only, in the opposite direction, but the under-ruled 4th amendment), and this looks at first blush to be a case where I'd think the same, even if it's less egregious than some other instances.
They're putting barriers to trade *for anyone who wants to have the potential to sell in California*. And that's what matters, IMO. I'd say that the Commerce Clause was intended (in part) to allow the federal government to step in and pre-empt this kind of thing.
California can absolutely require *packaging* differences. Such as a label "does not comply with <proposition whatever>". What they *can't*, in my judgement, do is pretend to fine companies who have no direct connection to California trade linkable by anything in the product itself.
And I'm not going to say that this is *good* legislation, but I think it's fairly squarely in the intended use of the Commerce Clause. And very much within the current jurisprudence on the matter, which I agree with you is wildly over-broad.
If I were California faced with this, I might recognize a new tort enforceable by any individual, to sue and recover on behalf of an animal who suffered unduly during production and slaughter. That seems to fall squarely under state police power and outside of the federal regulatory sphere.
In fact, Gorsuch's controlling opinion in Pork Producers v. Ross explicitly says this:
>If, as petitioners insist, California’s law really does threaten a “massive” disruption of the pork industry—if pig husbandry really does “‘imperatively demand’” a single uniform nationwide rule—they are free to petition Congress to intervene. Under the (wakeful) Commerce Clause, that body enjoys the power to adopt federal legislation that may preempt conflicting state laws. That body is better equipped than this Court to identify and assess all the pertinent economic and political interests at play across the country. And that body is certainly better positioned to claim democratic support for any policy choice it may make. But so far, Congress has declined the producers’ sustained entreaties for new legislation. See Part I, supra (citing failed efforts). And with that history in mind, it is hard not to wonder whether petitioners have ventured here only because winning a majority of a handful of judges may seem easier than marshaling a majority of elected representatives across the street.
Though note that California doesn't produce pork to any noticeable degree. It's very much intentional that all of the compliance burden of the law falls on out-of-state entities.
It's been clear for years that meat/animal welfare is on the negative polarization slope to becoming a full-on culture war issue. I think this is great news, both in the medium and long term, even if in the short term it means the Republicans are going to pass something like the EATS act next time the rural skew of the senate and electoral college help them get close to a trifecta.
Medium-term, 40% vegans vs. 40% anti-vegans yields far less animal killing than 4% vegans vs. 96% non-vegans, even if the anti-vegans try to eat slightly more and more-viciously-tortured meat out of spite. Long-term, I don't buy "moloch always moves left", but farm buildings are a multi-decade investment, so if industrial farmers know that national square-inches-per-hog policy will switch back and forth every time Congress changes hands, they'll have to build to the more stringent welfare standards.
The only challenge is for the animal movement to spur negative polarization enough for some fraction of the Democratic base to care about this issue as intensely as Republican hog farmers care about being allowed to race each other to the bottom of the unethically-produced-pork slide.
Good, good, let the lib-owning flow through you! This kind of hyperbolic, obtuse, and vaguely menacing response is exactly what we need to feed the reciprocal chain of reaction that will drive this issue to the big time.
In the campaign a few years back, Ted Cruz accused his opponent of wanting to make BBQ illegal. At the time this seemed comically absurd. Now I’m starting to think he was ahead of the curve.
The realization that will hit you probably only too late is that the worst things the Republicans have said about the Democrats were toned down because the truth was too implausible.
It's the "ha ha ha of course we're not gonna ban stoves/here's the proposed legislation to ban stoves" all over again. Like this piece in the Architectural Digest which flips from "the government isn't going to ban your stove, silly person" to "well not unless they're the state government":
"The short answer is no. Despite the hysteria stirred up by pundits and politicians who swore that government bureaucrats would pry your gas stove from the wall, the roughly 40% of Americans who own gas stoves have nothing to fear. In fact, a provision in the Inflation Reduction Act specifies that the government will pay you in the form of an $840 rebate should you decide to voluntarily switch from gas to electric.
That’s not to say that certain states and municipalities aren’t planning for a future with far fewer gas stoves. As part of its budgeting process, New York’s state legislature passed a measure this week which aims “to phase out the use of fossil fuels in new buildings.” The legislation would forbid the installation of any gas-powered stoves, furnaces, or propane heating in any new building under seven stories tall by 2026, with similar requirements for taller buildings kicking in by 2029."
So they're not *banning* them, they're just not letting you *install* them, which is totally different from a ban!
>The only challenge is for the animal movement to spur negative polarization enough for some fraction of the Democratic base to care about this issue as intensely as Republican hog farmers care about being allowed to race each other to the bottom of the unethically-produced-pork slide.
In the long-run, it's actually not the hog farmers who care most about this; they can pass the cost on. They're mostly worried about the short-run of potential changeover.
In the long-run, you're up against *meat-eaters*, who want cheap pork for the dinner table and (as consumers) can't pass that cost on to anyone. And that's a huge chunk of the country.
Also, remember that the culture war has negative externalities; moderately-large for now, but extreme in the worst case i.e. civil war. If you do this, and particularly if you or others building on you go the whole hog and use a Democratic trifecta to ban meat, well, that's another straw on the camel, and you've got to take account of that in your utility calculations.
Americans as voters are consistently far more anti-factory-farming than their "revealed preferences" as consumers would suggest—e.g. the Massachusetts version of Prop 12 passed with 78% support, even though only a very small fraction of these consumers truly never bought caged eggs. See Bovay and Sumner, Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics 2018 for two (pro-ag but reasonably objective) economists' takes on this.
Social change always encounters resistance, however badly needed. Ending industrial animal confinement and slaughter—almost certainly the most violent and disutility-producing human endeavor in history—would be worth a lot of friction.
78% support which did not turn out to mean practice, as those voting still consumed the Bad Eggs. I don't think that means much apart from "I want to feel that I am a good person".
There is definitely a position on animal welfare and factory farming and getting changes passed. The EU has managed it. But you won't do it by forcing people without convincing them, and telling them they're murder-torturers if they eat meat and you're going to take away that choice of theirs by fiat.
>Social change always encounters resistance, however badly needed. Ending industrial animal confinement and slaughter—almost certainly the most violent and disutility-producing human endeavor in history—would be worth a lot of friction.
Okay, fine, I will engage you on the main issue.
To get "factory farming is outright disutile" you need all of these:
1) animals have moral worth
2) factory-farmed animals have negative QALY
3) even then the numbers matter; it's not a slam-dunk
Let's take your example of pork.
Assume a person eats 200g pork per day (a steak). A pig produces about 70kg of meat, so that's 1/350 pigs per day or 1.044 pigs per year, each of which lives let's say 9 months (it varies between ~4 months and ~12 months). According to the ACC (https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/11/acc-is-eating-meat-a-net-harm/) food-pig QALY is approximately zero, which makes that calculation simple, but you also need a sow to produce the food-pig (let's say 20 piglets per sow per year; they actually produce more like 25 but I'm assuming some die) and they say sow QALY is strongly negative (let's call it -3*), so your 1 year eating pork requires 0.0522 years of sow = -0.157 pig QALY.
How much are pigs worth? Well, let's take cortical neuron count, Scott likes that one and it's fairly objective. A pig has 2.66% of a human's cortical neuron count, so -0.157 pig QALY = -0.00416 human QALY. This then means that, if abstaining from pork is subjectively worth more than -0.00416 of your quality of life, it is morally preferable to eat factory-farmed pork than no pork. Some people like pork little enough that they shouldn't eat it, and of course nobody's forcing them to. But there are also definitely people who like meat more than that; that's not even 0.5% of your QALY.
You can absolutely be a Singer utilitarian and come out with "factory farming is a net-positive actually". You can argue that it's not as good as free-range farming, but it's not some sort of "this is obviously the worst horror in the world, any counterargument is obvious cope". The depression epidemic is literally worse than the numbers I got there.
*I don't think any form of torture could put me below -3 QALY, so I'm essentially assuming sow stalls are Room 101 here.
I'd take three years of QALY 1 life (my actual current life is probably like QALY 0.6-0.7, but that's neither here nor there) if it also meant getting a year of horrible torture (without long-term effects, obviously, since those are accounted for elsewhere). That's definitionally "horrible torture > -3 QALY/y".
I mean, if you rewired my brain so I was incapable of blocking out the pain or fainting, I could probably go lower than -3, but that's more like ideas of Hell than it is RL torture.
Assigning mammals' suffering coefficient by neuron count has the advantage of "objectivity", but the disadvantage of being neuropsychologically illiterate.
I don't disvalue suffering because I've decided that certain patterns of neural activity are abstractly distasteful to me, but because my own cognitive architecture considers my suffering to be an extremely strong motivator, and for moral consistency I should care about all homologous experiences similarly. Humans' expanded cortices (disproportionately prefrontal, not somatosensory) contribute to our distinctive ability to write poetry about our suffering, but they shouldn't affect the intensity of the sensation of suffering. Supporting this principle, human babies and people like this (https://twitter.com/OGdukeneurosurg/status/1683557994322173954) have much smaller brains than normal adults, but as far as they can report, their experience of suffering is no less intense than mine. So even accepting that factory-reared food pigs, living shoulder to shoulder on painful metal floors with docked tails and earsplitting noise, are util-neutral, and neglecting the negative externalities to humans who live downwind of pig lagoons or get PTSD from working in slaughterhouses, I disagree that it's objectively rational to discount those -1/7 sow QALYs.
Second, you have to calculate the *marginal* value to the consumer of eating animal flesh, relative to Beyond Meat or their preferred alternative, not the *absolute* value. I am willing to assert that claiming 1 in 7 of the experiences that make your life worth living derive from eating pork sausages *rather than Beyond sausages* constitutes "obvious cope".
>Supporting this principle, human babies and people like this (https://twitter.com/OGdukeneurosurg/status/1683557994322173954) have much smaller brains than normal adults, but as far as they can report, their experience of suffering is no less intense than mine.
It's literally impossible to study relative intensity of suffering between individuals. All language is suspect because people interpret it relative to their own experience, and revealed preference is useless because you can only get results up to a constant scale factor (multiply all rewards and penalties in a game by 2 and optimal play is identical, so play provides actual zero evidence about whether they've been multiplied by 2 or not). This is a form of the Problem of Other Minds.
And I mean obviously if you bite that bullet and say that *all* suffering of any individual matters equally then you wind up in crazyland because plants and even some bacteria have avoidance behaviours that are clearly analogous to pain. You wind up with "humans are less than a billionth of the worth of the Earth", which is wild and produces all sorts of mad policy prescriptions.
" I am willing to assert that claiming 1 in 7 of the experiences that make your life worth living derive from eating pork sausages *rather than Beyond sausages* constitutes "obvious cope"."
🤷♀️ I haven't ever eaten any of the Beyond brand, and while vegan alternatives are now being produced more plentifully, are more available, and range in price from reasonable to expensive, taste and quality vary.
I couldn't find a price for Beyond sausages online in Ireland, so here's the next best thing: beef burger comparisons. All prices taken from Tesco website (no advertising intended!):
Beyond burgers (made with pea protein): €6.50 for 226g
Bird's Eye burgers (made with pea protein): €3.50 for 200g
Linda McCartney burgers (made with soya protein): €2.30 for 237g
So the Beyond burgers are just under three times as expensive as Linda McCartney. As I said, I've never tried them, so are they 'as good as meat'?
Let's see what the BLOODMOUTH CARNIST burgers stack up as:
Bog-standard 'it's got meat in, don't ask what kind of meat' burger: €0.50 for 56g. That comes out to something like €2.00 for the same weight at the Beyond burgers, but yeah - I'd skip these unless you are on a *severe* budget.
Tesco burgers (stretched out by adding in pea powder etc. with the beef): €2.50 for 397g. Well, they're cheap and probably 'good enough' if you just want something fast in a hurry.
And finally the most expensive ones, Tesco organic beef burgers: €6.20 for 454g
So I can have real meat for the same price as the Beyond pea protein version - €6.50/226g as against €6.20 for 454g, which actually comes out to be twice as cheap for the meat as the fake; Beyond burgers would set me back €13.00 for 454g as against €6.20 for the real meat.
Therefore, unless and until Beyond or other fake burgers become as cheap, and as indistinguishable from the real thing in taste and feel etc., then it's not "obvious cope" if I choose to eat meat for the experiences that make my life worth living.
"even if the anti-vegans try to eat slightly more and more-viciously-tortured meat out of spite."
Well gosh, with an appeal to my better nature like that and a deep, humane understanding of your fellow citizens on display, you have convinced me that the only reason I eat meat is to spite the beautiful natures of the kind, moral, superior vegans, plus I enjoy torture and think it adds a special flavour to the flesh I consume!
If you're interested in empirical research on how subconscious cognitive biases influence meat consumption behavior, Wikipedia has a good albeit slightly outdated summary at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology_of_eating_meat.
If you're interested in proving my point that meat is a scissor issue that reliably elicits tribal self-congratulation and name-calling instead of serious reflection, just carry on, you're doing a great job.
I said it was reasonable to speculate that hypothetical people with an active *anti-vegan* cultural identity might on average be motivated to eat more and lower-welfare meat than regular *non-vegans*, but less than 2.4x as much. If you take that as a personal insult, that's your problem.
What part of "I make a decision to pay 25% less to consume pork raised in conditions so bad that it gives workers PTSD" do you find so funny?
Is it the part where some people think that animals have some consciousness of the brutality of their factory farmed existence? Because the only way you can justify your actions is if (a) you're starving or (b) you truly believe animals have no consciousness.
In that case, I presume you have no issue with punting puppies for fun right? Maybe we can cut off your pet's front legs and then put a bowl of food a few feet in front of them. Watch them struggle to get to it and make bets on whose pet will make it first.
No reason not to, these are animals with no feelings. Either way I'll buy you a new pet after the race so there's no economic loss to you.
" (b) you truly believe animals have no consciousness."
Got it in one, old bean.
"Maybe we can cut off your pet's front legs and then put a bowl of food a few feet in front of them."
Well, funnily enough - I don't keep pets. Because I'm not sentimental about animals, and I don't feel the need to keep a creature locked up inside in an alien environment purely to provide me with snuggles and 'love'. Coincidentally, I've just seen a series of posts about 'putting the cat out' where people are all "my cats are indoor cats" (this is in Ireland, mind you) where the self-righteous rationale for keeping an animal inside 24/7 in a human habitation is that "cats are a threat to native wild life".
Yeah, no shit Sherlock. Cats and dogs are meant to spend most of their time *outdoors*, and part of that is that cats are carnivores and hunt prey. Which means cutesie-wootsie Tiddles has no qualms about being destructive of your equally anthropomorphised fake view of Nature.
I don't think animals have 'feelings'. Food animals are exactly that, and if humans had never domesticated so much as a budgie, they'll still be in the wild as prey species.
Nice try at "ooh you cruel monster who likes punting puppies and torturing beasts", but my withers remain unwrung because I'm not someone who dresses up their selfishness in demanding emotional support from a creature as 'I love the little animals so much, so much!!!!' Oh, and by the bye, I've seen the inside of a slaughterhouse so nice try at grossing me out but you need to try harder, Cholmondley.
But never mind, you can snuggle up with your fur baby and be a cat dad/dog mom and get all the primate grooming needs met by making a lesser animal totally dependent on you for food, shelter, health, and replacing its natural social structure for your needs and wants.
Damn it, I'm even going to quote Lewis on the kind of people who care SO MUCH about their pets:
"But of course animals are often used in a worse fashion. If you need to be needed and if your family, very properly, decline to need you, a pet is the obvious substitute. You can keep it all its life in need of you. You can keep it permanently infantile, reduce it to permanent invalidism, cut it off from all genuine animal well-being, and compensate for this by creating needs for countless little indulgences which only you can grant. The unfortunate creature thus becomes very useful to the rest of the household; it acts as a sump or drain you are too busy spoiling a dog's life to spoil theirs. Dogs are better for this purpose than cats: a monkey, I am told, is best of all. Also it is more like the real thing. To be sure, it's all very bad luck for the animal. But probably it cannot fully realise the wrong you have done it. Better still, you would never know if it did. The most down-trodden human, driven too far, may one day turn and blurt out a terrible truth. Animals can't speak.
Those who say "The more I see of men the better I like dogs", those who find in animals a relief from the demands of human companionship will be well advised to examine their real reasons."
It would be an interesting test study of how powerful alleged memetic viruses actually are. So far neither side of the Culture War has really demanded anything too onerous from less zealous allies of theirs.
Thanks. Regardless, the recent history of American policy on open borders, child labor, abortion access, and voting rights shows that in the real world, it's no safe bet that "reaches consensus among the left side of the culture war" entails "mission inevitably to be accomplished soonish".
I don't know why Yarvisians are so committed to saying this against the evidence (obviously US immigration policy of the foreseeable future is not going to be as economic-migrant-friendly as it was in the 19th century) and I'm not especially interested in finding out. Still, I have to assume it's either a mollifying psy-op or else an attempt to lay the rhetorical groundwork for declaring a state of exception and violently eliminating "threats" that would supposedly be unstoppable otherwise.If it were meant in good faith, surely longtermist neoreactionaries' top priority would be to covertly influence which issues actually reach consensus among vanguard leftist movements!
I'm not going to disavow the label, but I don't think that quite describes me. Yarvin thinks there's a way to stop it (instituting a monarchy). I don't.
An ideology promulgated by the worst elements of the southern white resistance to granting civil rights to Blacks. Names like George Wallace and Strom Thurmond.
No-one believes in states' rights in the absolute sense. States gave up SOME rights when they signed the constitution, the question is which? This is an easy call that they did give up.
Did you read my previous comment? Like I said, nobody is saying that Congress doesn't have the legal right to pass this law, just that it might conflict with some principles of how government ought to be conducted.
But what principle exactly? The federal government preventing individual states putting up trade barriers was a massive reason for the constitution in the first place.
"States' rights" normally means the right for states to regulate their own, internal affairs, not to regulate inter-state affairs. Clearly the latter would devolve into a free-for-all.
I think there are trade barriers which unfairly target out of state products (e.g. tariffs or a higher sales tax on Tennessee whiskey), and there are trade barriers which affect in-state providers and out-of-state providers equally (e.g. banning weed or banning contract killing).
The former obviously need to be avoided lest trade wars happen between the states. And in some cases telling if something unfairly disadvantages another state might not be straightforward. It would also be desirable to force states to allow the transportation of locally banned goods through the state (just seal the container, worked for Lenin).
The very broad way the commerce clause is interpreted instead means that the federal government can regulate anything short of "oral-genital intimacy" (as alluded to in that infamous J. Hoover quote).
A regulation/ban is not a trade barrier, otherwise Colorado could sue Alabama for preventing its weed farmers to sell their most excellent product there (and obtain national legalization with no democratic legitimacy).
Come on, you know it's a specious reasoning and special pleading, you just want to own the libs
A regulation/ban is absolutely a trade barrier. Colorado cannot sue Alabama because the matter is in the purview of Congress. Of course Congress could mandate that Alabama cannot block the sale of marijuana in their state, or alternatively it could forbid all interstate commerce in marijuana. Or something in between (e.g. quality requirements for marijuana in interstate commerce).
There can be no doubt that if Congress enacts a law regulation commerce in an article such as meat, that law will preempt any contrary state laws. It is that simple.
I think it is a good idea for Congress to pass a law on these lines. They need to stop California from spreading its idiocy
I suppose it depends if there are Democrats who represent agricultural constituencies. According to this website:
https://timesagriculture.com/farming-states-in-the-united-states-of-america-complete-overview/
"New York and Pennsylvania are the leading producers of dairy products, while other states, such as Wisconsin and Iowa, are also significant contributors. Other significant agricultural products include tobacco, rice, and peanuts, which are primarily grown in the South. In the West, states such as California and Wyoming are major producers of beef and sheep, while fish and shellfish are produced in states such as Alaska and Massachusetts.
- California is the biggest farming state in the US, producing more than 400 different crops, including fruits, vegetables, nuts, and dairy products. It is one of the most significant parts of the US agricultural industry, contributing over $50 billion to the national economy each year. The main Crops include oranges, avocados, strawberries, tomatoes, lettuce, and broccoli. The state is also a major producer of nuts, such as almonds and pistachios. California is the top producer of wine grapes in the U.S.
- Iowa is another major farming state, producing many grains, particularly corn and soybeans. It is the largest producer of soybeans in the US and one of the leading producers of corn. Iowa also produces eggs and dairy products. Iowa is the leading producer of corn, soybeans, and eggs in the country. It is also a major producer of beef and dairy products.
- Texas is the leading producer of cotton and cattle in the US, with over three million cattle and over 11 million acres of cotton production. It is also one of the leading producers of sorghum, hay, wheat, and peanuts. The state is also a major producer of beef, dairy, and poultry products.
- Nebraska is home to some of the most productive land in the US. It is a major producer of corn, soybeans and wheat. It also produces hay, grain sorghum, and sunflowers.
- Minnesota is a major producer of corn, soybeans, sugar beets, and wheat. The state is also a major producer of hogs, turkeys, and dairy products.
- Illinois "land of Lincoln" and a major agricultural state. It is a major producer of corn and soybeans, as well as oats, rye, hay, and barley. It also produces fruits and vegetables, as well as livestock such as beef, dairy, and poultry.
- Kansas is a major producer of wheat, sorghum, and hay. Kansas is the leader in wheat production in the US, producing 20.1% of the nation's wheat crop. Other States that contribute are North Dakota (17.2%), Montana (10.8%), Washington (6.7%), and Oklahoma (4.9%).
- North Carolina is a major producer of hogs, turkeys, and chicken. The state also produces sweet potatoes, tobacco, and peanuts."
Okay, we know California is Democratic. What about the rest of them? The impact is going to be on the beef, poultry, egg, dairy and pork producing states. So who, if any, are the Democratic senators from these states?
Iowa - both Republicans.
Texas - both Republicans.
Minnesota - Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith, members of the Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party which by the name should have some agrarian component which might well be interested in a "yes" vote for the EATS act.
Illinois - Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth, Democrats. Durbin has changed his position on farm subsidies, so he might be anti-EATS:
"In January 2005, Durbin changed his longstanding position on sugar tariffs and price supports. After several years of voting to keep sugar quotas and price supports, he now favors abolishing the program. "The sugar program depended on congressmen like me from states that grew corn", Durbin said, referring to the fact that, though they were formerly a single entity, the sugar market and the corn syrup market are now largely separate."
North Carolina - both Republicans.
New York - Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrats. Chuck *might* be persuaded to be pro-EATS:
"In March 2019, Schumer was one of 38 senators to sign a letter to U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue warning that dairy farmers "have continued to face market instability and are struggling to survive the fourth year of sustained low prices" and urging his department to "strongly encourage these farmers to consider the Dairy Margin Coverage program"
As might Kirsten:
"In May 2019, Gillibrand and eight other Democratic senators sent a letter to Agriculture Secretary Perdue where they criticized the USDA for purchasing pork from JBS USA and wrote that it was "counterproductive and contradictory" for companies to receive funding from "U.S. taxpayer dollars intended to help American farmers struggling with this administration's trade policy." The senators requested the department "ensure these commodity purchases are carried out in a manner that most benefits the American farmer’s bottom line—not the business interests of foreign corporations."
Pennsylvania - Bob Casey Jr. and John Fetterman, Democrats. Fetterman has his own troubles and neither of them seem to have any particular positon on agricultural issues.
Wisconsin - Even I have heard of the cheese! A mixed bag, Ron Johnson who is Republican and Tammy Baldwin who is a Democrat. Baldwin again might be cajoled into being pro-EATS as like Gillibrand she signed the letter over buying pork from the Brazilian producer.
Wyoming - both Republicans.
It's amusing that even atheist Jews apparently can't perform this role.
I wonder though, if we assume UFOs are doing something we currently think is impossible under the laws of physics, then does that equally open up the possibility of other supernatural phenomena?
Eg, we can't definitively prove that ghosts (or anything else) don't exist. So why do we assume out of hand that ghosts would be a silly explanation? Once we're speculating that the world doesn't work the way we think and the impossible may be possible, how do we estimate the probability of each particular thing that we currently think is impossible?
You have to be more specific about what you mean by "something we currently think is impossible under the laws of physics".
If you mean violating the principle of conservation of energy, then sure, supernatural explanations are on the table.
If you mean doing something that as far as we know can't be done, but there's no particular reason we know of _that_ it can't be done, then no, the response would just be that we need to learn more about what natural law does and doesn't allow.
Aristotle said that it was the nature of terrestrial matter to come to a stop when moving. That turned out to be wrong, but it's not difficult to understand how the mistake was made.
We later revised our idea of what the laws of physics have to say about that kind of situation, without seeing any need for a supernatural agent and, interestingly enough, without changing the conclusions that Aristotle would have given us. We still believe that objects moving along the surface of the earth will naturally come to a stop. We just do with multiple "laws of nature" what Aristotle had wanted to do with one.
I was thinking of something like FTL travel or wormholes. Moving faster than light is fundamentally equivalent to time travel according to our current understanding of relativity, and allows you to violate causality. Giving up our belief in cause and effect is a hard sell; perhaps even harder than giving up our belief in conservation of energy.
Interestingly though, apart from this issue with causality, general relativity actually doesn't forbid objects from moving faster than light if they move through warped space.
We can't prove causality is never violated, but we also can't prove energy is always conserved. We've just always observed these things to be true so far and our entire scientific framework is built on the assumption they're true.
> We can't prove causality is never violated, but we also can't prove energy is always conserved.
True, but the conservation principles are derived from invariance principles of the form "all of the same rules apply in [circumstance X] as in [circumstance Y]". ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether%27s_theorem ) So if you're willing to assume that the laws of physics, whatever they may be, are the same in the past as they are in the future, then you're stuck with conservation of energy.
Wrt causality and wormholes, given the existence of a wormhole I would kind of expect that causality would flow through it just like it flows along every other possible path. But I have no relevant training or knowledge for that statement.
Anyway, it is because violating conservation of energy cannot be done without changing what the laws of nature are that I say it goes into the realm of possibly-supernatural-phenomena. How else would we distinguish "natural" from "supernatural"?
> True, but the conservation principles are derived from invariance principles of the form "all of the same rules apply in [circumstance X] as in [circumstance Y]".
Okay, good point.
> Wrt causality and wormholes, given the existence of a wormhole I would kind of expect that causality would flow through it just like it flows along every other possible path.
As far as I understand, if you just have two fixed wormhole ends, you don't have a causality problem. But if we're talking about an alien race who can do arbitrary FTL travel at will to wherever they want to go, then they can travel through time and violate causality.
I'm agreeing with you that violating conservation of energy goes into the realm of the possibly-supernatural. I'm suggesting if FTL travel implies the ability to violate causality, it's also in the realm the possibly-supernatural.
> As far as I understand, if you just have two fixed wormhole ends, you don't have a causality problem. But if we're talking about an alien race who can do arbitrary FTL travel at will to wherever they want to go, then they can travel through time and violate causality.
Hmmm.
I assume a "violation of causality" involves the flow of information from a particular point in time and space to the same point in space at an earlier time.
It is not immediately obvious to me how teleportation would enable that. I'm willing to believe it could, though. Can you sketch an example?
The general problem I'm encountering while thinking about it is that teleporting always sends you into "the future", a time that is later than whatever you can observe from your starting point. (Because you moved faster than the light that makes observation possible.)
Working through a scenario:
I'm on planet A and you're on planet B. It takes light 100 years to travel from one of us to the other one.
I am watching you through my perfect telescope with infinite resolution. By implication, you lived "sort of 100 years" before me. You can send messages to me, but I can't send messages to you. When you look over towards planet A, you see whatever was going on 200 years before I started watching you.
So we have some points in spacetime:
A-200: visible to you.
A-100: accessible to you, if you teleport.
B-100: your natural home, visible to me.
A+0: my natural home. You can't see or access this.
B+0: accessible to me, if I teleport.
The goal is to send a message from some later point on B to some earlier point on B (the only possibility is from B+0 to B-100), or from some later point on A to some earlier point on A (three possibilities given the points we've named).
I can teleport between A+0 and B+0, and you can teleport between A-100 and B-100. There does not appear to be any way to send a message from the future into the past. You could teleport to A-100, learn something about it, teleport back to B-100, and signal to me through my telescope, but I'm already allowed to know about things that happened in the past of planet A.
---
Now, the difficulty that leaps out at me, for the scenario I just outlined, is that (as far as I understand relativity) there is no point in time on planet B that corresponds to my time and location on planet A, and therefore it isn't really possible to say what time it will be on planet B when I teleport there. I labeled that time "B+0", but that's meaningless.
What that says to me is more that, if we had the capacity to create and use wormholes to arbitrary locations, either they would target random points in time (?!) or the theory of relativity would be empirically false - it really would be possible to say that a particular point in time at some given location corresponded to a particular point in time at some other location.
So, I personally think "violation of causality" via currently understood channels such as high speed travel through curved space, is more probable than "ghosts." It might be a violation of our usual intuitions, but by my understanding it seems to be compatible with our current understanding of how the laws of physics work. And if we view the universe from the outside including the dimension of time, I don't think it's obvious that we should always expect that nothing ever be caused by things which, from certain relativistic perspectives, happened after they did.
But if we grant that ghosts are definitely more improbable than FTL travel, does it imply that if we observe ghosts, that implies that FTL travel is plausible too? I don't think it does. Maybe it would depend on *how* the ghosts turned out to work, and if it somehow turned out that our model of how physics works is completely, from the ground up, wrong, then I guess we'd have to stop believing in the light speed limit, but it's hard to imagine how that could possibly turn out to be consistent with our existing observations.
In general, I think that one part of a model failing should change your probabilities for other things, but it's never going to be as simple as "everything the model says is as unlikely as this thing we just observed is now likely to be true." You have to downgrade your confidence that the model is accurate in predicting what's true or not in the first place, but there are some things which we're confident don't exist specifically because of our confidence in our model, and there are some things where, if our model turned out to be wrong, we'd have to revert to some different, still low, default likelihood of them being true. Saying that they probably don't exist is an antiprediction- very specific things which we don't observe would have to be true for them to be true.
Neither ghosts nor Russell's teapot imply the existence of the other. Ghosts are a complicated thing which we have a lack of good evidence for, and a model that predicts that there's probably no mechanism for them to exist. If that model turns out to be wrong, it doesn't necessarily mean that there *is* a mechanism for them to exist, and it certainly doesn't mean we have evidence for them. If we see FTL travel and infer ghosts, it means that we're treating the existence of ghosts as something that's granted by default, a proposition that's only retracted because the model we have doesn't offer a mechanism for them. But I don't think it makes sense to think about them that way in the first place.
But there is no _a priori_ reason to think that UFO sightings are explained by aliens. Thus, it is much more rational to assume that, whatever they are, they are caused by something that doesn’t violate the laws of physics as we know them.
Like dragons. UFOs are obviously dragons.
“But that’s ridiculous!” NO! It is strictly less ridiculous than the idea that UFOs are aliens. Neither dragons nor aliens-on-Earth are known to exist, but aliens-on-Earth would require new physics, and dragons would not. If you are a good Bayesian rationalist, then you should agree that P(UFOs are dragons) > P(UFOs are aliens).
They have tried to rebrand it as UAP ("aerial phenomena"), but UFOs are firmly established in the popular imagination, and likewise that aliens are the leading explanation. And now with literal government officials publicly testifying about physical artifacts being covered up this confusion is probably stronger than ever. So much for raising the sanity waterline.
We've gotten new physics in the past. It may be true that aliens-on-Earth would require new physics, and dragons-on-Earth wouldn't, but it is not true that the totality of what aliens-on-Earth would require is more surprising than the totality of what dragons-on-Earth would require.
If we’re going to posit new physics then why not just posit that “UFOs” are *directly* caused by the new physics (ie, they’re something like ball lightning or the aurora borealis)?
Dragons are perhaps an egregiously silly counterproposal, but the overall point remains:
1. There is no evidence that there are aliens on or around Earth.
2. Our current understanding of physics seems to rule out the possibility that there could be.
3. Thus, “UFOs are aliens” is a really really improbable conclusion to jump to based on the very small amount of evidence we have.
I don't believe that UFOs are aliens, but I also don't agree with your point 2. Yes, it would be very expensive and slow to travel between the stars, but it could be done. There's nothing about Project Orion or a generation ship that violates the laws of physics.
I second this opinion. Although I also regard the alien hypothesis as very unlikely, it's one of the few pop culture conspiracy theories that *doesn't* have to violate the laws of physics.
EATS Act may or may not be wise policy, but it doesn't look like a states' rights violation, just a straightforward use of the Commerce Clause.
Wickard v. Filburn strikes again... (I recognize that the food production being regulated here does actually involve interstate commerce, making this less egregious than the facts of Wickard itself.)
My understanding is that, due to economies of scale and the structure of the industry, it is very difficult for any large food producer to operate without selling in California, and it's also very difficult to "split" a production operation such that, say, a company could make California groceries in one production chain while making Iowa groceries in another. Thus, the only option is to comply with the stringent State's regulations (could be an "intolerant minority/apathetic majority" situation). If food prices are pushed up, the majority might not stay apathetic for too long. Anyone in the food industry, please correct me if wrong.
What makes this so hard? If California eats (let's say) 10% of the nation's food, why can't producers sell to the remaining 90% of the market, and let California-specific companies sell to California?
It's the same principle as the gunboats opening the markets of East Asia. They CAN, but it's just so cheap (possibly because the costs are paid by someone else) that the attempt to expand is going to happen.
In part because segregating the product stream is nigh-unto impossible economically. Producers don't sell directly to consumers, as a general rule. They sell to a processor, who sells to a packager, who sells to a distributor; at every step they're comingling product from many different producers from very different areas. And much of the documentation doesn't persist--a single sausage may be made of meat from multiple hogs from different farms entirely.
So any tiny "contamination" in a California-bound stream opens the entire distribution network, most of which has no effectual way of looking at the conditions back up the chain, to massive penalties.
You'd basically have to have a completely separate California network from everyone else...at *massive* costs to everyone.
Surely different hot dog producers have "organic" vs. "regular" hot dogs, or beef vs. pork hot dogs, or high-quality vs. low-quality hot dogs, or something like that, and they're able to keep those separate from each other. Why would it be any harder to have "California-compliant" hot dogs as a separate product?
Why doesn't CA have sufficient food producers to feed itself? Because it regulates the companies out of business.
Scott, this is where your idea of what should be is getting in the way of what is fair/legal.
California produces more food than any other US state, and I think (data are complicated, hard to tell) is the largest exporter of food of any state. But like every state, it specializes in certain products and imports the ones that aren't its comparative advantage, which include pork.
If I'm wrong about this and California does regulate its food companies out of business, I think the correct sequence of events is for it to bear the brunt of its own bad policies, suffer, learn, and change them. Just as I would rather if an individual is lazy they fail to make money and have to come up with their own solution, rather than the government mandating work for them.
Isn't that really California's problem?
California has a YEAR WITHOUT MEAT and if its voters aren't happy they can have a referendum to get rid of the meat restrictions law. What's the issue?
You're asking for another axis, so you've doubled the number of bins ("california-organic", "non-ca-organic", "california-nonorganic", "non-ca-nonorganic", etc). It's not rocket science, but it's also a major effort across many businesses that are not highly technological. Sure, industrial factory farms could probably figure it out... but is that the kind of direction you want to push the food supply?
The US economy is a huge powerhouse mostly because it's a single market and there's relatively little customization needed on a per-state basis. The alternative is something like Europe before EUCU. Even post-EUCU, selling across Europe is a pain in the ass.
I think producers just object to being required to have a process on the same level of complexity as sourcing organic ingredients just for one state, with the added fear that if this is okay then they could end up needing to do it for fifty different states.
Now with more substance - organic hot dogs (salad/bread/etc) can not be processed on the same equipment as non organic without a production stopping deep clean between. The higher price charged for the organic product makes this economically possible. Same with allergens and with kosher. The levels of purity required for these (federally mandated) marketing designations are not at all required for, say, changing from beef to pork to mixed meat.
And you miss the real problem - CA can't produce enough food to feed itself. They have to import other state's surplus.
> Same with allergens and with kosher. The levels of purity required for these (federally mandated) marketing designations...
Kosher cannot be a federally mandated marketing designation. The federal government is not even allowed to have an opinion on whether any particular thing is or isn't kosher.
High quality vs low quality only considers the observable facts of the input, so that's neither here nor there.
Organic vs regular is both (a) mostly a lie (those are mostly entirely self-certified and meaningless) and (b) amortizes the much higher cost over the entire country. It also just produces (mostly) a single product per top-level distributor--you don't have the range of organic products that you do non-organic products. The entire "organic" range is comparable to a single entry in the non-organic range.
The cost of setting up a CA-specific *set* of lines (because you'd need just as many lines as the entirety of the non-organic + organic lines, including the entire distribution channels and delivery infrastructure, completely non-comingled at any point) vastly dwarfs the expense of setting up one organic chain that can mostly comingle both before and after a couple key points. And would only be amortizable over 10% of the entire market. You're talking about more than doubling the cost...for 10% of the market *max*. That's absolutely insane.
Organic products command a premium price, which is what makes them viable. California wants cruelty-free meat (with, I presume, the aim of stopping factory farming altogether) and it might well be that the production methods are considered cruel by California standards (e.g. how the cattle or pigs were slaughtered) and, for instance, I don't think they'd like or permit veal, even if it is organic.
From 2017 Irish farm advisory about going organic - it's expensive and time-consuming, so it probably works best for smaller scale operations. For really big stock raising operations, it might not be economically feasible (though I can't say about that):
https://www.teagasc.ie/media/website/publications/2017/1-Organic-beef-production-in-Ireland-structure-and-steps-to-successful-conversion.pdf
"Assess the market
For organic farming to be profitable a premium price must be achieved for produce sold. While the majority of beef supplied to the market is from steers and heifers, recent markets have emerged for calves (organic veal) and cull cows. Beef farmers interested in organic conversion should speak with other organic farmers, processors and wholesalers about potential markets. Major factory outlets for organic beef are Goodherdsmen, Slaney Meats, ABP and Jennings. Premium prices of 15 to 20% have generally been achievable for organic beef in recent years. According to processors the demand for Irish organic beef will continue to rise, especially in mainland Europe.
Complete an organic conversion plan
This involves a detailed description of management practices on the farm, the changes required on the farm, soil analysis, faecal analysis, livestock housing plan, animal health plan (in consultation with your veterinary surgeon) and land/crop rotation plan. The plan can be drawn up by the farmer alone or in consultation with the farm advisor. Attending a FETAC accredited “Introduction to organic farming course” is an excellent way of learning how to complete the conversion plan.
Provision of quality forage
To maintain farm productivity, stocking rate must be maintained as high as possible. In the absence of artificial nitrogen, white clover may be introduced into pastures to maintain grass production levels. White clover is the ‘engine’ that drives productivity on organic farms and can fix in excess of 100 kg N/ha annually. Red clover can fix in the region of 200 kg N/ha annually and can be a high yielding, high protein feed for wintering animals. Organic concentrates are more expensive than conventional concentrates. Prices for organic rations for ruminants are generally around €500/tonne. Maximising use of grass, using home-grown grain, purchasing grain from other organic producers and having the correct breed and system which matches land type and market specification required can reduce feed costs significantly. Organic straights can be purchased from a variety of organic farmers for between €300 and €350 per tonne with combi-crop mixes of peas and a cereal available for between approximately €380 and €400/tonne.
Regular topping is necessary to maintain grass quality and control weeds particularly in mid-season. High quality silages can also be produced using red clover-grass swards and enough silage should be produced on farm to meet winter feed requirements as it is not permitted to source silage from conventional farmers.
Animal health
Ensuring high animal health and welfare standards is a fundamental ethos of organic principles. The farmer must be aware that the level of stocksmanship required with animals is very high on organic farms. Routine treatment of animals with anthelmintics is prohibited, and a rotational grazing system should be in place to minimise worm burden. If a problem occurs faecal analysis is recommended and the vet must sign off the appropriate treatment on the organic farmer’s record book. Early detection of animal health problems is essential. Remember good animal husbandry is paramount. If an animal is suffering it must be treated and the necessary permission must be sought from the vet. The animal health plan, produced as part of the conversion plan, will deal with mineral deficiencies and vaccination issues.
Animal housing
Many farmers find that the greatest alterations that need to be made at farm level are changes to winter housing. More generous space allowances are required – for cattle the rule of thumb is that 1.0 m2 is required for every 100 kg live weight. All stock must have access to a dry bedded lying area. Up to 50% of this area can be slatted but the rest must be solid floor and not slatted. Conventional straw may be used for bedding."
Certainly, producing specific 'cruelty-free' meat would drive up the price of the final product, and people might then give up eating meat because it's too expensive. Which is the aim of the entire project in the first place, isn't it?
This argument is correct, and was made at greater length and with citations in amicus briefs from small farmers who are already doing exactly this. They argued that the big producers are essentially rent-seeking, trying to overrule democratic laws that disrupt their business model, because they don't want to compete in this new market as many smaller producers are already doing.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/21/21-468/233586/20220815212509809_IndFarmers_Ross_Amicus%20Document%20August%2015%202022%20EFile.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/21/21-468/233586/20220815212509809_IndFarmers_Ross_Amicus%20Document%20August%2015%202022%20EFile.pdf
Actually, they would need to add two different types - Californian organic and Californian regular. Or rather 4 types because they already have to distinguish between four types along the axis of "organic" and "kosher". Each additional axis doubles the number of options, so just one or two additional,ones can be a big deal.
As I said above, This precisely the sort of market balkanization that the commerce clause was intended to prevent.
I think congress should move swiftly to stop California from spreading this kind of busybody idiocy.
"This seems like a clear states’ rights violation to me."
At what point did you turn into George Wallace?
You must have been thrilled with the Dobbs decision.
See https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic-communitarianism/ for what I think pretty naturally cashes out as a states rights argument.
I disagree with Dobbs on the object level, but I think the justices were right that you can't just pretend the Constitution guarantees a right to abortion when it clearly doesn't.
Sorry, just being snippy.
But, there is not a States rights issue with congressional legislation in this space. The matter is clearly committed to Congress, and the Founders clearly intended to prevent this type of trade balkanization of the USA.
I mean, there obviously is a states' rights issue. This is a right that the states obviously don't have, but that doesn't meant they don't want it. Usually when someone's out there agitating for a right they don't have, we're willing to call that an issue of their rights.
"You must have been thrilled with the Dobbs decision."
Everyone who had an honest appraisal of the Constitution agreed with Dobbs.
That works on the assumption that they can make up that lost 10% in the remaining market. If they can convince Idahoans and New Englanders to eat more bacon, then they make up for the loss. But if the remainder of the market is already buying as much bacon as they want, then they're going to suffer a loss.
Imagine you lose 10% of your subscribers. Can you 'sell' to the remaining 90% of subscribers? No, because we're already subscribing. So you either have to persuade us to take out a more expensive subscription, or get the people who are reading but not subscribing to subscribe, and both of those are going to take effort: maybe people already subscribing are paying as much as they can afford and won't be willing to pay more, maybe the non-subscribers don't want to subscribe at all.
Or they can just take a loss. Meat companies taking a loss due to a new California law is not some tragedy we need federal intervention to prevent. The market isn't going to collapse.
They don't have to convince New Englanders to eat more meat, they can cater to the hole in the market left by other companies that decide to cater to the California market.
Let's say initially there are 10 equal-sized meat companies, each selling 10% of its products in California and 90% in the other states. As a result of the law, 1 can specialize in catering entirely to the California market, while the other 9 cater to the other states.
Of course this ignores details like transaction costs. But also, I suspect most of the gains from economies of scale are to be had well below the level of 10% of the entire USA market, which allows for more flexible specialization. (E.g. perhaps many of the smaller companies already cater primarily to one state or another. After all, in Hungary we have several domestic meat companies for 10 million people, even though we're part of the EU common market.)
> But if the remainder of the market is already buying as much bacon as they want, then they're going to suffer a loss.
It's always something in between. The price of bacon will drop, people will discover that they weren't buying _quite_ as much bacon as they wanted -- at least, not now that the price is so low -- but the bacon producers still end up with a loss. It's just a smaller loss than it would be if all of the extra bacon had been destroyed.
On a completely unrelated note, I read something a bit ago about Sinead O'Connor (sorry for the lateness of this question) that mentioned, twice, the Church's (or Irish society in general's?) handling of "gay boys and spirited girls". It left me with the distinct impression that "spirited girls" had some specific meaning, but I don't know what it might be. Do you?
This is exactly the question Taleb answers in this essay https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15
I think this is an example of why people are wrong to equate, as they often do, the balance of power between the states and the federal, with the balance of power between different states.
You ask people why every state should have 2 Senators (rather than proportional by population) and the answer usually has something to do with preserving federalism, the idea being that more power to small states vs large states is the same thing as more power to states overall vs the federal government.
But this is an example of where more power to states would mean more power to *big* states, and small states push back *via* the federal government.
Wickard is not relevant to this question. There the issue was whether goods that were neither transported from their place of origin nor sold to a third party were subject to regulation under the commerce clause.
The issue here is whether goods that are undoubtedly traded in interstate commerce -- pork produced in Iowa, sold by Iowans to Californians, and then transported to California -- can be subject to Congressional regulation. I cannot think of a reason why not.
This precisely the sort of market balkanization that the commerce clause was intended to prevent.
For fresh meat products, I don't think there are so many processing steps involved. Just ship the parts of the formerly slightly happier dead animals to California and the parts of the formerly very unhappy dead animals to the rest of the states.
For preserved meat products, if reasonably phrased the CA law would allow trace amounts of otherwise disallowed meat. Then you would not need a second production line, but could just be run your sausage factory on unhappy dead animals for a month and then on slightly less unhappy animals for a week and label these tins as "CA edition".
I think that any distributor who can't handle tracking different inventories and sending different products to different states should try to look for an occupation which does not involve any logistics.
Besides the dual version solution, there are two different possible outcomes:
* If the additional cost is not large, producers might decide to follow CA rules for all of their products. This happened when the EU mandated standardized charging ports for phones (with Apple lagging behind a bit): phone manufacturers decided that the hassle of having a USB-C version of each phone for the EU and a vendor specific connector version for the rest of the world would cost them more than they would gain from selling overpriced cables. Rest of the world, you are welcome.
* They might just decide that CA is not worth it and not sell there. This is the capitalist solution (on a state level).
We know that Scott favors individual communities competing with their laws to attract citizens [0] with a minimum of higher level oversight, roughly like in Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota series. It is very clear that the US government is way more micromanaging than UniGov or Romanova. (Of course, the US also failed to safeguard exit rights for all of her subjects until the 1860s.)
I think EATS is a blatantly pandering to special interests. The good news is that it establishes the need to improve animal welfare on a federal level, and CA is often 5-10 years ahead of the rest of the US, so a similar federal law might happen eventually. Of course, then the factory farms will whine about state rights, at which points I will be playing a sad song for them on the world's smallest violin.
[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic-communitarianism/
The economy of scale effect and similar considerations in other areas make me generally skeptical of states' rights (as a policy, setting aside constitutional arguments). Sigh. At least California is not trying to mandate 40 Hz or 80 Hz AC power...
> Wickard v. Filburn strikes again... (I recognize that the food production being regulated here does actually involve interstate commerce, making this less egregious than the facts of Wickard itself.)
I don't see... any connection to Wickard v. Filburn. The question for the EATS act is whether Congress can stop California from banning the import of certain products from other states, and that is the very core of the Commerce Clause as originally understood. Giving Congress that power is the entire point of the Commerce Clause.
EATS is so trivially constitutional it wouldn’t go to SCOTUS. Federal government can set product/production standards. Federal preemption precludes states from legislating where the Feds have spoken.
Indeed.
Yeah. And this is the sort of thing the Interstate Commerce clause was *actually* written for--regularizing standards across multiple states and preventing one state from putting impediments to trade in other states.
I think California's rules are pretty dumb, but I'm not sure it's fair to say they are putting impediments to trade in other states. I'm not a lawyer, and I'm willing to believe that current law/precedent would likely rule this as constitutional, but I also _very_ strongly believe that the commerce clause is interpreted far, far, _far_ too broadly (perhaps the most over-broadly ruled clause in the entire constitution, contested only, in the opposite direction, but the under-ruled 4th amendment), and this looks at first blush to be a case where I'd think the same, even if it's less egregious than some other instances.
They're putting barriers to trade *for anyone who wants to have the potential to sell in California*. And that's what matters, IMO. I'd say that the Commerce Clause was intended (in part) to allow the federal government to step in and pre-empt this kind of thing.
California can absolutely require *packaging* differences. Such as a label "does not comply with <proposition whatever>". What they *can't*, in my judgement, do is pretend to fine companies who have no direct connection to California trade linkable by anything in the product itself.
And I'm not going to say that this is *good* legislation, but I think it's fairly squarely in the intended use of the Commerce Clause. And very much within the current jurisprudence on the matter, which I agree with you is wildly over-broad.
If I were California faced with this, I might recognize a new tort enforceable by any individual, to sue and recover on behalf of an animal who suffered unduly during production and slaughter. That seems to fall squarely under state police power and outside of the federal regulatory sphere.
In fact, Gorsuch's controlling opinion in Pork Producers v. Ross explicitly says this:
>If, as petitioners insist, California’s law really does threaten a “massive” disruption of the pork industry—if pig husbandry really does “‘imperatively demand’” a single uniform nationwide rule—they are free to petition Congress to intervene. Under the (wakeful) Commerce Clause, that body enjoys the power to adopt federal legislation that may preempt conflicting state laws. That body is better equipped than this Court to identify and assess all the pertinent economic and political interests at play across the country. And that body is certainly better positioned to claim democratic support for any policy choice it may make. But so far, Congress has declined the producers’ sustained entreaties for new legislation. See Part I, supra (citing failed efforts). And with that history in mind, it is hard not to wonder whether petitioners have ventured here only because winning a majority of a handful of judges may seem easier than marshaling a majority of elected representatives across the street.
Yeah. How is what California is doing qualitatively different from putting a tariff on out-of-state meat?
Because it's applying precisely the same standard to in-state meat.
Fair enough.
Though note that California doesn't produce pork to any noticeable degree. It's very much intentional that all of the compliance burden of the law falls on out-of-state entities.
It's been clear for years that meat/animal welfare is on the negative polarization slope to becoming a full-on culture war issue. I think this is great news, both in the medium and long term, even if in the short term it means the Republicans are going to pass something like the EATS act next time the rural skew of the senate and electoral college help them get close to a trifecta.
Medium-term, 40% vegans vs. 40% anti-vegans yields far less animal killing than 4% vegans vs. 96% non-vegans, even if the anti-vegans try to eat slightly more and more-viciously-tortured meat out of spite. Long-term, I don't buy "moloch always moves left", but farm buildings are a multi-decade investment, so if industrial farmers know that national square-inches-per-hog policy will switch back and forth every time Congress changes hands, they'll have to build to the more stringent welfare standards.
The only challenge is for the animal movement to spur negative polarization enough for some fraction of the Democratic base to care about this issue as intensely as Republican hog farmers care about being allowed to race each other to the bottom of the unethically-produced-pork slide.
Good, good, let the lib-owning flow through you! This kind of hyperbolic, obtuse, and vaguely menacing response is exactly what we need to feed the reciprocal chain of reaction that will drive this issue to the big time.
Save an animal - eat a vegan! 😁
Technically, most vegans (except for the odd sentient AI perhaps) are also animals.
In the campaign a few years back, Ted Cruz accused his opponent of wanting to make BBQ illegal. At the time this seemed comically absurd. Now I’m starting to think he was ahead of the curve.
The realization that will hit you probably only too late is that the worst things the Republicans have said about the Democrats were toned down because the truth was too implausible.
It's the "ha ha ha of course we're not gonna ban stoves/here's the proposed legislation to ban stoves" all over again. Like this piece in the Architectural Digest which flips from "the government isn't going to ban your stove, silly person" to "well not unless they're the state government":
https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/whats-going-on-with-the-gas-stove-ban
"The short answer is no. Despite the hysteria stirred up by pundits and politicians who swore that government bureaucrats would pry your gas stove from the wall, the roughly 40% of Americans who own gas stoves have nothing to fear. In fact, a provision in the Inflation Reduction Act specifies that the government will pay you in the form of an $840 rebate should you decide to voluntarily switch from gas to electric.
That’s not to say that certain states and municipalities aren’t planning for a future with far fewer gas stoves. As part of its budgeting process, New York’s state legislature passed a measure this week which aims “to phase out the use of fossil fuels in new buildings.” The legislation would forbid the installation of any gas-powered stoves, furnaces, or propane heating in any new building under seven stories tall by 2026, with similar requirements for taller buildings kicking in by 2029."
So they're not *banning* them, they're just not letting you *install* them, which is totally different from a ban!
>The only challenge is for the animal movement to spur negative polarization enough for some fraction of the Democratic base to care about this issue as intensely as Republican hog farmers care about being allowed to race each other to the bottom of the unethically-produced-pork slide.
In the long-run, it's actually not the hog farmers who care most about this; they can pass the cost on. They're mostly worried about the short-run of potential changeover.
In the long-run, you're up against *meat-eaters*, who want cheap pork for the dinner table and (as consumers) can't pass that cost on to anyone. And that's a huge chunk of the country.
Also, remember that the culture war has negative externalities; moderately-large for now, but extreme in the worst case i.e. civil war. If you do this, and particularly if you or others building on you go the whole hog and use a Democratic trifecta to ban meat, well, that's another straw on the camel, and you've got to take account of that in your utility calculations.
Americans as voters are consistently far more anti-factory-farming than their "revealed preferences" as consumers would suggest—e.g. the Massachusetts version of Prop 12 passed with 78% support, even though only a very small fraction of these consumers truly never bought caged eggs. See Bovay and Sumner, Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics 2018 for two (pro-ag but reasonably objective) economists' takes on this.
Social change always encounters resistance, however badly needed. Ending industrial animal confinement and slaughter—almost certainly the most violent and disutility-producing human endeavor in history—would be worth a lot of friction.
78% support which did not turn out to mean practice, as those voting still consumed the Bad Eggs. I don't think that means much apart from "I want to feel that I am a good person".
There is definitely a position on animal welfare and factory farming and getting changes passed. The EU has managed it. But you won't do it by forcing people without convincing them, and telling them they're murder-torturers if they eat meat and you're going to take away that choice of theirs by fiat.
>Social change always encounters resistance, however badly needed. Ending industrial animal confinement and slaughter—almost certainly the most violent and disutility-producing human endeavor in history—would be worth a lot of friction.
Okay, fine, I will engage you on the main issue.
To get "factory farming is outright disutile" you need all of these:
1) animals have moral worth
2) factory-farmed animals have negative QALY
3) even then the numbers matter; it's not a slam-dunk
Let's take your example of pork.
Assume a person eats 200g pork per day (a steak). A pig produces about 70kg of meat, so that's 1/350 pigs per day or 1.044 pigs per year, each of which lives let's say 9 months (it varies between ~4 months and ~12 months). According to the ACC (https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/11/acc-is-eating-meat-a-net-harm/) food-pig QALY is approximately zero, which makes that calculation simple, but you also need a sow to produce the food-pig (let's say 20 piglets per sow per year; they actually produce more like 25 but I'm assuming some die) and they say sow QALY is strongly negative (let's call it -3*), so your 1 year eating pork requires 0.0522 years of sow = -0.157 pig QALY.
How much are pigs worth? Well, let's take cortical neuron count, Scott likes that one and it's fairly objective. A pig has 2.66% of a human's cortical neuron count, so -0.157 pig QALY = -0.00416 human QALY. This then means that, if abstaining from pork is subjectively worth more than -0.00416 of your quality of life, it is morally preferable to eat factory-farmed pork than no pork. Some people like pork little enough that they shouldn't eat it, and of course nobody's forcing them to. But there are also definitely people who like meat more than that; that's not even 0.5% of your QALY.
You can absolutely be a Singer utilitarian and come out with "factory farming is a net-positive actually". You can argue that it's not as good as free-range farming, but it's not some sort of "this is obviously the worst horror in the world, any counterargument is obvious cope". The depression epidemic is literally worse than the numbers I got there.
*I don't think any form of torture could put me below -3 QALY, so I'm essentially assuming sow stalls are Room 101 here.
>*I don't think any form of torture could put me below -3 QALY
Instantaneously, or cumulatively? You don't think it's possible for you to experience -3 QALY over say a year under any form of torture?
-3 QALY per year is what I meant, yes.
I'd take three years of QALY 1 life (my actual current life is probably like QALY 0.6-0.7, but that's neither here nor there) if it also meant getting a year of horrible torture (without long-term effects, obviously, since those are accounted for elsewhere). That's definitionally "horrible torture > -3 QALY/y".
I mean, if you rewired my brain so I was incapable of blocking out the pain or fainting, I could probably go lower than -3, but that's more like ideas of Hell than it is RL torture.
Assigning mammals' suffering coefficient by neuron count has the advantage of "objectivity", but the disadvantage of being neuropsychologically illiterate.
I don't disvalue suffering because I've decided that certain patterns of neural activity are abstractly distasteful to me, but because my own cognitive architecture considers my suffering to be an extremely strong motivator, and for moral consistency I should care about all homologous experiences similarly. Humans' expanded cortices (disproportionately prefrontal, not somatosensory) contribute to our distinctive ability to write poetry about our suffering, but they shouldn't affect the intensity of the sensation of suffering. Supporting this principle, human babies and people like this (https://twitter.com/OGdukeneurosurg/status/1683557994322173954) have much smaller brains than normal adults, but as far as they can report, their experience of suffering is no less intense than mine. So even accepting that factory-reared food pigs, living shoulder to shoulder on painful metal floors with docked tails and earsplitting noise, are util-neutral, and neglecting the negative externalities to humans who live downwind of pig lagoons or get PTSD from working in slaughterhouses, I disagree that it's objectively rational to discount those -1/7 sow QALYs.
Second, you have to calculate the *marginal* value to the consumer of eating animal flesh, relative to Beyond Meat or their preferred alternative, not the *absolute* value. I am willing to assert that claiming 1 in 7 of the experiences that make your life worth living derive from eating pork sausages *rather than Beyond sausages* constitutes "obvious cope".
>Supporting this principle, human babies and people like this (https://twitter.com/OGdukeneurosurg/status/1683557994322173954) have much smaller brains than normal adults, but as far as they can report, their experience of suffering is no less intense than mine.
It's literally impossible to study relative intensity of suffering between individuals. All language is suspect because people interpret it relative to their own experience, and revealed preference is useless because you can only get results up to a constant scale factor (multiply all rewards and penalties in a game by 2 and optimal play is identical, so play provides actual zero evidence about whether they've been multiplied by 2 or not). This is a form of the Problem of Other Minds.
And I mean obviously if you bite that bullet and say that *all* suffering of any individual matters equally then you wind up in crazyland because plants and even some bacteria have avoidance behaviours that are clearly analogous to pain. You wind up with "humans are less than a billionth of the worth of the Earth", which is wild and produces all sorts of mad policy prescriptions.
" I am willing to assert that claiming 1 in 7 of the experiences that make your life worth living derive from eating pork sausages *rather than Beyond sausages* constitutes "obvious cope"."
🤷♀️ I haven't ever eaten any of the Beyond brand, and while vegan alternatives are now being produced more plentifully, are more available, and range in price from reasonable to expensive, taste and quality vary.
I couldn't find a price for Beyond sausages online in Ireland, so here's the next best thing: beef burger comparisons. All prices taken from Tesco website (no advertising intended!):
Beyond burgers (made with pea protein): €6.50 for 226g
Bird's Eye burgers (made with pea protein): €3.50 for 200g
Linda McCartney burgers (made with soya protein): €2.30 for 237g
So the Beyond burgers are just under three times as expensive as Linda McCartney. As I said, I've never tried them, so are they 'as good as meat'?
Let's see what the BLOODMOUTH CARNIST burgers stack up as:
Bog-standard 'it's got meat in, don't ask what kind of meat' burger: €0.50 for 56g. That comes out to something like €2.00 for the same weight at the Beyond burgers, but yeah - I'd skip these unless you are on a *severe* budget.
Tesco burgers (stretched out by adding in pea powder etc. with the beef): €2.50 for 397g. Well, they're cheap and probably 'good enough' if you just want something fast in a hurry.
Tesco Aberdeen Angus burgers (better quality, 99% beef); €3.75 for 454g
And finally the most expensive ones, Tesco organic beef burgers: €6.20 for 454g
So I can have real meat for the same price as the Beyond pea protein version - €6.50/226g as against €6.20 for 454g, which actually comes out to be twice as cheap for the meat as the fake; Beyond burgers would set me back €13.00 for 454g as against €6.20 for the real meat.
Therefore, unless and until Beyond or other fake burgers become as cheap, and as indistinguishable from the real thing in taste and feel etc., then it's not "obvious cope" if I choose to eat meat for the experiences that make my life worth living.
"even if the anti-vegans try to eat slightly more and more-viciously-tortured meat out of spite."
Well gosh, with an appeal to my better nature like that and a deep, humane understanding of your fellow citizens on display, you have convinced me that the only reason I eat meat is to spite the beautiful natures of the kind, moral, superior vegans, plus I enjoy torture and think it adds a special flavour to the flesh I consume!
Or maybe not?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eviyEJRZX30
Come, my fellow BLOOD MOUTH CARNISTS, let's all sing along!
"Kitchen aromas aren't very homely
It's not comforting, cheery or kind
It's sizzling blood and the unholy stench of murder
It's not natural, normal or kind
The flesh you so fancifully fry
The meat in your mouth
As you savour the flavour of murder
No, no, no, it is murder
No, no, no, it is murder"
If you're interested in empirical research on how subconscious cognitive biases influence meat consumption behavior, Wikipedia has a good albeit slightly outdated summary at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology_of_eating_meat.
If you're interested in proving my point that meat is a scissor issue that reliably elicits tribal self-congratulation and name-calling instead of serious reflection, just carry on, you're doing a great job.
So true, organoid, I am motivated solely by spite. Spite and malice and rancour and animosity.
That's why I accused vegans of "trying to eat slightly more and more-viciously-tortured produce out of spite"
Oh, wait...
I said it was reasonable to speculate that hypothetical people with an active *anti-vegan* cultural identity might on average be motivated to eat more and lower-welfare meat than regular *non-vegans*, but less than 2.4x as much. If you take that as a personal insult, that's your problem.
Ah, so these hypothetical anti-vegans are just spherical cows and don't exist in reality.
So your argument is all theoretical and doesn't mean anything in practice. Good to know!
What part of "I make a decision to pay 25% less to consume pork raised in conditions so bad that it gives workers PTSD" do you find so funny?
Is it the part where some people think that animals have some consciousness of the brutality of their factory farmed existence? Because the only way you can justify your actions is if (a) you're starving or (b) you truly believe animals have no consciousness.
In that case, I presume you have no issue with punting puppies for fun right? Maybe we can cut off your pet's front legs and then put a bowl of food a few feet in front of them. Watch them struggle to get to it and make bets on whose pet will make it first.
No reason not to, these are animals with no feelings. Either way I'll buy you a new pet after the race so there's no economic loss to you.
" (b) you truly believe animals have no consciousness."
Got it in one, old bean.
"Maybe we can cut off your pet's front legs and then put a bowl of food a few feet in front of them."
Well, funnily enough - I don't keep pets. Because I'm not sentimental about animals, and I don't feel the need to keep a creature locked up inside in an alien environment purely to provide me with snuggles and 'love'. Coincidentally, I've just seen a series of posts about 'putting the cat out' where people are all "my cats are indoor cats" (this is in Ireland, mind you) where the self-righteous rationale for keeping an animal inside 24/7 in a human habitation is that "cats are a threat to native wild life".
Yeah, no shit Sherlock. Cats and dogs are meant to spend most of their time *outdoors*, and part of that is that cats are carnivores and hunt prey. Which means cutesie-wootsie Tiddles has no qualms about being destructive of your equally anthropomorphised fake view of Nature.
I don't think animals have 'feelings'. Food animals are exactly that, and if humans had never domesticated so much as a budgie, they'll still be in the wild as prey species.
Nice try at "ooh you cruel monster who likes punting puppies and torturing beasts", but my withers remain unwrung because I'm not someone who dresses up their selfishness in demanding emotional support from a creature as 'I love the little animals so much, so much!!!!' Oh, and by the bye, I've seen the inside of a slaughterhouse so nice try at grossing me out but you need to try harder, Cholmondley.
But never mind, you can snuggle up with your fur baby and be a cat dad/dog mom and get all the primate grooming needs met by making a lesser animal totally dependent on you for food, shelter, health, and replacing its natural social structure for your needs and wants.
Damn it, I'm even going to quote Lewis on the kind of people who care SO MUCH about their pets:
"But of course animals are often used in a worse fashion. If you need to be needed and if your family, very properly, decline to need you, a pet is the obvious substitute. You can keep it all its life in need of you. You can keep it permanently infantile, reduce it to permanent invalidism, cut it off from all genuine animal well-being, and compensate for this by creating needs for countless little indulgences which only you can grant. The unfortunate creature thus becomes very useful to the rest of the household; it acts as a sump or drain you are too busy spoiling a dog's life to spoil theirs. Dogs are better for this purpose than cats: a monkey, I am told, is best of all. Also it is more like the real thing. To be sure, it's all very bad luck for the animal. But probably it cannot fully realise the wrong you have done it. Better still, you would never know if it did. The most down-trodden human, driven too far, may one day turn and blurt out a terrible truth. Animals can't speak.
Those who say "The more I see of men the better I like dogs", those who find in animals a relief from the demands of human companionship will be well advised to examine their real reasons."
It would be an interesting test study of how powerful alleged memetic viruses actually are. So far neither side of the Culture War has really demanded anything too onerous from less zealous allies of theirs.
The expression is usually "Cthulhu swims only left."
Thanks. Regardless, the recent history of American policy on open borders, child labor, abortion access, and voting rights shows that in the real world, it's no safe bet that "reaches consensus among the left side of the culture war" entails "mission inevitably to be accomplished soonish".
You're blowing those ephemeral and insignificant changes way out of proportion. As inexorable as the march of time, the Left WILL win.
I don't know why Yarvisians are so committed to saying this against the evidence (obviously US immigration policy of the foreseeable future is not going to be as economic-migrant-friendly as it was in the 19th century) and I'm not especially interested in finding out. Still, I have to assume it's either a mollifying psy-op or else an attempt to lay the rhetorical groundwork for declaring a state of exception and violently eliminating "threats" that would supposedly be unstoppable otherwise.If it were meant in good faith, surely longtermist neoreactionaries' top priority would be to covertly influence which issues actually reach consensus among vanguard leftist movements!
I'm not going to disavow the label, but I don't think that quite describes me. Yarvin thinks there's a way to stop it (instituting a monarchy). I don't.
I'm pretty sure Scott was talking about "states' rights" in the sense of the ideological principle, not the legalistic one.
An ideology promulgated by the worst elements of the southern white resistance to granting civil rights to Blacks. Names like George Wallace and Strom Thurmond.
So California is racist? Well, if you say so!
Deeply
The state that just failed its massive push to get rid of the prohibition on differential treatment of its subjects by race?
You could argue that California isn't racist because that prohibition is still in place, though it is mostly honored in the breach.
But what do you think California wants to be doing?
No-one believes in states' rights in the absolute sense. States gave up SOME rights when they signed the constitution, the question is which? This is an easy call that they did give up.
Did you read my previous comment? Like I said, nobody is saying that Congress doesn't have the legal right to pass this law, just that it might conflict with some principles of how government ought to be conducted.
But what principle exactly? The federal government preventing individual states putting up trade barriers was a massive reason for the constitution in the first place.
"States' rights" normally means the right for states to regulate their own, internal affairs, not to regulate inter-state affairs. Clearly the latter would devolve into a free-for-all.
I think there are trade barriers which unfairly target out of state products (e.g. tariffs or a higher sales tax on Tennessee whiskey), and there are trade barriers which affect in-state providers and out-of-state providers equally (e.g. banning weed or banning contract killing).
The former obviously need to be avoided lest trade wars happen between the states. And in some cases telling if something unfairly disadvantages another state might not be straightforward. It would also be desirable to force states to allow the transportation of locally banned goods through the state (just seal the container, worked for Lenin).
The very broad way the commerce clause is interpreted instead means that the federal government can regulate anything short of "oral-genital intimacy" (as alluded to in that infamous J. Hoover quote).
A regulation/ban is not a trade barrier, otherwise Colorado could sue Alabama for preventing its weed farmers to sell their most excellent product there (and obtain national legalization with no democratic legitimacy).
Come on, you know it's a specious reasoning and special pleading, you just want to own the libs
A regulation/ban is absolutely a trade barrier. Colorado cannot sue Alabama because the matter is in the purview of Congress. Of course Congress could mandate that Alabama cannot block the sale of marijuana in their state, or alternatively it could forbid all interstate commerce in marijuana. Or something in between (e.g. quality requirements for marijuana in interstate commerce).
Correct. The exact question presented to the court was whether the the commerce clause preempted California's action law in the absence of active regulation by Congress. This is the doctrine of the Dormant Commerce Clause. https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/article-1/section-8/clause-3/overview-of-dormant-commerce-clause
There can be no doubt that if Congress enacts a law regulation commerce in an article such as meat, that law will preempt any contrary state laws. It is that simple.
I think it is a good idea for Congress to pass a law on these lines. They need to stop California from spreading its idiocy