[ookdatnog]

The public at large will never be swayed to use less convenient alternatives for ethical reasons. But even so, if a small, dedicated group of people are convinced, they can keep the ethical alternative just alive enough that it remains a somewhat viable alternative.

I don't think vegetarianism will ever be the norm, but there are enough vegetarians to create a market for vegetarian food. This creates options for people who don't want to eat meat for ethical reasons, increasing their freedom to live life the way they want without it being prohibitively inconvenient. A similar argument can be made for desktop Linux or using Firefox.

[TAForObvReasons]

Vegetarianism can be the norm, but for that to happen one of two things must happen: either the cost of meat has to be prohibitively expensive ("the stick") or vegetarian dishes have to be more appealing to the public at large ("the carrot"). Neither of those things have happened yet.

For Firefox to gain market share, either the perceived "cost" of using Chrome has to skyrocket or Firefox has to be superior for a common use case. Ethical arguments attempt to do the former, but imho nothing short of google charging for chrome will increase the cost.

Mozilla needs a killer web app that people want to use. Something like gmail that attracts millions of people, with features added to Firefox (new APIs or whatever) to make the app much more effective.

[AdmiralAsshat]

Firefox for Android allows you to install extensions. Most notably, it allows you to install an adblocker like uBlock Origin.

Chrome for Android does not.

I'd consider that a killer feature.

[Can_Not]

Also Firefox on mobile is already much better.

[sametmax]

> vegetarian dishes have to be more appealing to the public at large

That is just a question of habit and education. If you are used to veggie food, the meat is not appealing to you. Tastes are things we build, not stuff we are born with.

Vegetarianism will not become a norm, if it does, because of one factor only. For such a strong cultural habit, you need several factors. It may happen under a combination of the following:

- meat production is costing too much ressources (land, water, energy, etc) compared to the food it produce - meat production does manage to feed the growing propulation; - mass meat production will revealed to be more and more unhealthy, either by nature, because of the artificial products we use for it, or because of the pollution it causes; - it's effect on global warming will trigger a similar reaction as the one we had about CFC.

I doubt it though. I see more and more people consumming less meat around me, I'm a vegetarian myself, but I can't see a shift happening any time soon.

BTW, morality is a very weak factor. It never stopped people to drink and do something stupid, it never stopped people from bying iphones built by children, and it never made them choose a proper president.

[Grishnakh]

>it never made them choose a proper president.

The election system in the US prevents that from ever happening.

[reitanqild]

> For Firefox to gain market share, either the perceived "cost" of using Chrome has to skyrocket or Firefox has to be superior for a common use case.

It wouldn't hurt either if we nerds, pros, superusers etc etc stopped spreading FUD like "Chrome is way better".

[angry-hacker]

It's not FUD since Firefox does have many flaws. While I don't like Google and Chrome, for an average user it is better to use.

[endemic]

Just curious, why is Chrome better for you? I switched back to Firefox after e10s landed, and tbh they are now functionally equivalent (for me, at least). I now choose Firefox because I find myself more aligned with Mozilla's philosophy, and to promote cross-browser consistency.

[dkuntz2]

Is e10s the default now? I thought you had to enable it yourself, and some extensions weren't huge fans.

[endemic]

I had been using beta/etc. versions. Yeah I've also heard that some extensions don't work within a sandbox, but I'm not really an extensions-type person.

[qplex]

People are far removed from seeing the actual results of their decisions.

Humans are also very good at self deception. Even if you sort of know your beef is butchered, it carries little meaning since you never have to see it happen.

Same goes for Google stealing your data or Apple making pretty phones with slave labor.

Basically pretty much everybody needs to be smacked hard with a stick now and then and told what kind of picture they are really painting.

[icebraining]

Humans are also very good at self deception. Even if you sort of know your beef is butchered, it carries little meaning since you never have to see it happen.

I never understood this argument vis-a-vis butchering, since it implies pastoral farmers are particularly immoral people, unlike "regular" people who would stop their behaviour if only they'd see the results. Is that really your view?

In my opinion, the opposite is true: growing up ignorant of how it works is the only reason why they may be shocked when they find out. If it was a common sight, people would be OK with it just like most people growing up in farms are.

[qplex]

The argument does not imply that killing animals for food is wrong, but that it is wrong to disconnect people from that reality and expect them to make moral decisions.

[Bartweiss]

I've always been conflicted on the "don't know how it's made" argument. On one hand, I've known people who learned about farming practices and butchery and were horrified (but most went back to meat after a brief stretch of dissonance). On the other hand, I grew up knowing what butchering an animal involves. It never turned me (or a lot of other people) off of eating those animals.

I think you're right - it's not that ignorance is required, just that the moment of discovery is a bit shocking.

[vixen99]

You're right about self deception but this is a tricky subject. Would you consider worldwide milk production and its products on the same level as your two examples with Google and Apple? Difficult to see how you can get milk without having to handle the question of what to do with male calves. As to butchering, we can know about it and if the 'how' is unacceptable (often is) then we can ensure the law is applied and modified when better solutions are found. Some kind of public access to slaughter houses should be encouraged and people should indeed be acquainted with the raw facts while ensuring they are able to appreciate the consequences of decisions which may be merely emotive feelings decoupled from fact. Both are needed!

[FatalBaboon]

One argument that has good traction lately around me is data privacy. It remains the killer argument of Firefox against Chrome.

What's old is new again.

[Grishnakh]

>Vegetarianism can be the norm, but for that to happen one of two things must happen: either the cost of meat has to be prohibitively expensive ("the stick") or vegetarian dishes have to be more appealing to the public at large ("the carrot"). Neither of those things have happened yet.

That's not really true, about them being appealing. There's several Italian pasta dishes that are quite tasty which I frequently make for myself because they're super-cheap: spaghetti, penne, etc. Pasta plus a tomato-based sauce is totally vegetarian AFAIK, and what kind of weirdo doesn't like spaghetti? (Of course, a lot of people eat it with meat sauce or meatballs, but that's not necessary for the dish.)

There's also macaroni & cheese; lots of people like that.

Of course, the problem with these dishes is that 1) personally I don't want to eat spaghetti or pasta every single night, and I'm probably not alone there, and 2)you don't get much protein this way.

The problem with vegetarianism is that there just aren't a lot of good plant-based protein sources that are actually appealing, and you need this for a balanced diet. Meat is a simple and easy way to get lots of high-quality protein into your diet.

I believe vegetarianism is going to die out in the next century, as artificially-grown meats are developed and commercialized. If you can eat filet-minion-quality beef cheaply and without having to kill a cow to get it, why bother being a vegetarian?

>Mozilla needs a killer web app that people want to use. Something like gmail that attracts millions of people, with features added to Firefox (new APIs or whatever) to make the app much more effective.

The problem with this idea is that it breaks the whole idea of the web, which rests on open standards. Web browsers aren't supposed to be walled gardens that are incompatible with each other, they're all supposed to show web content the same way. We should not be going back to the bad old days of site X needing browser A to work.

The main thing that differentiates browsers is features and extensions. Edge, for instance, is a mostly unusable browser because it doesn't support all the ad-blocking extensions that Chrome and Firefox do. Performance is also a big feature, and Firefox has been lagging there for some time by sticking to having a single process.

Personally I think that Firefox would be fine if they'd stop wasting time and effort on bullshit features like Pocket and work on making it the fastest, most memory-efficient browser possible, which also best supports uBlock Origin and other advanced features. It'd probably also be a good idea if they could support Netflix viewing out-of-the-box the way Chrome does. If they got all that right and working really well, and touted themselves as being "spyware-free", they'd have sufficient marketshare to be relevant and hold their position, which is all they really need to do. They don't need to be #1, they just need to be large and influential enough to keep the others in line and prevent fragmentation of the web like we had in the IE6 days. If 40% of the market wants to be suckers and use Edge and look at copious ads, let them; they don't matter as long as they're not a clear majority.

[jonotime]

In regards to the meat eating arguments:

1. There are no special chemicals or compounds (protein, iron, etc) in meat that can not be found elsewhere.

2. The protein myth is strong in the US, but it is hard to find almost any food that lacks it. Have you ever known someone who was protein deficient, anywhere? It is estimated that 6% of the US is veg and 40% of India is vegetarian. And these people are typically healthier then the rest, not deficient.

3. Speaking of India. You think vegetarian food cant be made to taste good, or is too bland? They have had it mastered for thousands of years. The point is not that Indian food is good, but that vegetarian food is not necessarily bad. Just because you had one bad veggie burger, does not mean there is not great veggie food out there that would appease most of the world.

4. And speaking of taste, taste is not a static condition. Yes, there are some things we have evolved to like, but your taste buds themselves are malleable - not fixed as most people will tell you if you go on a diet for a couple weeks.

[Grishnakh]

>1. There are no special chemicals or compounds (protein, iron, etc) in meat that can not be found elsewhere.

I never said there were. The problem is that they are not easily found elsewhere, in an appealing form, in sufficient density, like they are in meats. If you really love lentils or some crap like that, more power to you. The rest of us think a lot of that stuff is nasty.

>2. The protein myth is strong in the US, but it is hard to find almost any food that lacks it. Have you ever known someone who was protein deficient, anywhere? It is estimated that 6% of the US is veg and 40% of India is vegetarian. And these people are typically healthier then the rest, not deficient.

Wrong. Look at the average height of people from India. Now look at the height of children of Indian parents who immigrate to the US. Compare it to their own families back in India, to eliminate the effects of socioeconomic differences between groups/castes there. There's a huge height difference, and it's because of the readily-available protein in the diet. The kids end up growing much taller than the parents even, and much taller than their cousins back home. I've seen it myself up close. It's not genetics, it's diet: childhood nutrition has a huge effect on height.

So no, it's not a "myth", and yes, lots of people are protein-deficient, it's just not as readily-apparent as people who are visibly malnourished as in truly impoverished places where they're literally starving to death.

And as for American vegetarians, they fall into at least one of two groups (there's a big overlap): 1) people who are already adults, and probably aren't extremely physically active/athletic, so they don't have the high protein needs that growing children do and can take advantage of, and 2) people who are basically religious about their vegetarianism, so they're extremely well educated about what foods contain what, and go to a LOT of trouble to make a balanced diet out of it (whereas the rest of us just throw a little meat into our diet and avoid excess and otherwise don't have to spend a lot of effort or attention on our diets).

>3. Speaking of India. You think vegetarian food cant be made to taste good, or is too bland? They have had it mastered for thousands of years.

Yeah, if you like Indian food. People who didn't grow up with it frequently don't. At least it's not nearly as bad as some southeast Asian foods, like Indonesian, but it's pretty much inedible to western people unless they tone down the spices.

>Just because you had one bad veggie burger, does not mean there is not great veggie food out there that would appease most of the world.

No one's made a good veggie burger, and that's because it's impossible. If they could do it, they would do it, because there'd be a lot of money in such an invention. They all taste like cardboard. The only way you're going to make something taste like real beef is to either use real beef, or chemically or biologically replicate the beef somehow. You're not going to achieve that by growing some readily-available plants and mixing them up somehow; that's like thinking you're going to build a Ferrari out of typical bicycle parts.

>4. And speaking of taste, taste is not a static condition. Yes, there are some things we have evolved to like, but your taste buds themselves are malleable - not fixed as most people will tell you if you go on a diet for a couple weeks.

Basically you're advocating somehow either forcing or convincing entire societies of people to suddenly change their taste preferences. That's not likely to happen. And don't forget, here in many western nations (esp. the US and UK probably), we are exposed to the cuisines of other nations a lot (though sometimes they're heavily modified to sell to Americans--Chinese food is infamous for this). It's not like Americans have never tasted Indian food; we have. There's lots of Indian restaurants here, plus various other exotic cuisines (middles eastern, Ethiopian, etc.). It hasn't caused Americans to all suddenly switch.

[jonotime]

I was not specifically addressing you. I was just laying out some of the dated arguments about why humans need meat. But anyway, you are saying in many ways how YOU personally dont like lentils and veggie burgers. I already addressed this in 4.

I am not mandating that Indian food replace everything else. I am saying there is plenty of good cuisine out there that does not include flesh. Like you said we are brought up eating meat in the US. This is nothing more then a cultural tradition, not a requirement. While vegetarianism is not necessarily free or easy for everyone, it is very accessible. It is lazy to continually blindly support an industry based on violence (or argue for it in your case).

You like its "easily packed density", but somehow hundreds of millions of vegetarians manage to survive. Hm.

And, like you said there are more people eating less meat which is an indication of this cultural change. Speaking of impossible vegetarian burgers, what you say cannot exist already does. In fact it is even called Impossible. I have tasted one. To me they are disgusting. But that is because they actually taste like flesh. These were designed for meat eaters, not vegetarians. Of the people I tried it with, only the meat eaters had any appreciation for it. http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/06/21/482322571/sil...

[ionised]

Me, I hate spaghetti.

I won't eat white pasta (or white rice/bread) in general.

[shaftway]

> what kind of weirdo doesn't like spaghetti?

Type 2 Diabetics?

[ajbetteridge]

"the carrot"

I see what you did there.

[Razengan]

> The public at large will never be swayed to use less convenient alternatives for ethical reasons.

There have been countless practices which were once the convenient norm but are now seen as archaic or barbaric, at least in some parts of the world;

Slavery, serfdom, monarchies, dowry, arranged marriage, virgin sacrifices, involuntary circumcision, blood feuds, war crimes, excessive pollution... I'm sure the transition period in each of those cases was anything but convenient, and in some places it's still nigh impossible to convince people to stop these practices.

I think it's not so much "swaying" the public at large but continuing to provide sufficient education to them, and the technology to ease the transition, then at some point the transition just happens on its own. Of course the inverse is also possible and people sometimes revert to old and worse practices.

[asveikau]

> Slavery, serfdom, monarchies, dowry, arranged marriage, virgin sacrifices, involuntary circumcision, blood feuds, war crimes, excessive pollution...

To be clear, we are comparing all this to using chrome and having browser homogeny?

[Razengan]

I found that amusing while writing it too :P but the comment I replied to brought up vegetarianism and seemed to be making a general point about ethics vs. convenience.

[asveikau]

I think it illustrates that people can disagree with what constitutes unethical actions - the higher the requirement that everybody agree on what is unethical, the more heinous the crime has to be. So most of us will agree on the items in your list, but eating meat or using Chrome will be harder to get consensus on.

[patates]

> involuntary circumcision

I'm a theological non-cognitivist, coming from a Muslim family. Putting involuntary at the front does not make circumcisions which had the consent of an underage kid OK. I'm very sensitive about this, and while I love my parents, I still feel violated because of their decision.

Just wanted to share. No offense or anything taken from your comment of course.

[jonotime]

OP here.

Funny how this conversation sided into vegetarianism. Because I am one who sides with the moral issues - as a vegan, Firefox, Linux user. I represent the ones mentioned here who will go the extra mile, which is typically the harder route to do what is right, not what is easiest.

However, I dont think this route is for everyone. And I think legitimate competition between browser features is key. I do use both browsers, but only when necessary with Chrome (Chromecast and Netflix, some Google products like Photos). However I think there is not a concrete answer which browser is a better user experience. And these things change over time. Yes, when Chrome came out it was a great fast experience (mostly because there were no addons and there was no cruft in the beginning), but Firefox overtook it in the benchmarks several times since. Its been back and forth.

These reputations are strong, but dangerous. I'm a developer and still come up against the "Java is slow" argument. I'm no fan of Java, but I find it to be anything but slow these days. Yes, back in the early applet days it had a bad name and decades later it cant shake that reputation. This is technology! Things change fast. Dont get stuck in the fud.

[sabujp]

googlers need more kale in their diet