[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?