[HN Gopher] The Culture of Whales
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The Culture of Whales
Author : pseudolus
Score : 83 points
Date : 2021-04-20 12:36 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.npr.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.npr.org)
| cratermoon wrote:
| Thalassophobia warning
| bserge wrote:
| Oh, I thought this was about the people who spend thousands of
| dollars in games.
|
| Ridiculous that these creatures are still being hunted. Just,
| why?
| stock_toaster wrote:
| Based on the title, I expected an article about the habits of
| super wealthy gamblers, and was pleasantly surprised to find out
| it is about actual whales. Nice.
| tartoran wrote:
| I hear you, I thought the same. Are you trading by any chance?
| Your handle suggests so. I see those whales as massive
| concentrations of wealth whose action is directly seen on the
| charts, e.g when they buy/sell the stock price rises/drops with
| them
| stock_toaster wrote:
| I agree. In most industries (finance, mobile gaming,
| gambling) where "Whales" are common, their presence certainly
| leads companies competing for their attention (read: money)
| to very perverse incentives.
| [deleted]
| frumper wrote:
| Nature really is wonderful is so many ways. The harvesting of
| ocean life really seems to be one of the things the world has
| made great strides towards better management in the past 100
| years, yet there seems to be so many pressing issues.
| jorts wrote:
| Ocean wildlife stock has dropped dramatically in the last 100
| years and continues to drop as we scrape everything we can out
| of it. The future looks bleak in this regard.
| ska wrote:
| > has made great strides towards better management in the past
| 100 years,
|
| This really doesn't seem to be true. In particular, things are
| much worse for most fisheries over the last 25 years.
| frumper wrote:
| They are worse recently, but some good things were done in
| the 20th century. Fisheries have been overfished for much of
| human civilization and we have recovered some of those. We
| are better at enforcing regulations and willing to enact new
| ones, though doubtless there are still problems.
|
| Whaling protections have been put in place and despite
| several offenders the situation is better than it was 100-200
| years ago.
| WORMS_EAT_WORMS wrote:
| Fun facts:
|
| - Over a thousand whales are killed each year despite it being
| ruled illegal "for profit" 35 years ago.
|
| - The biggest offenders are supposedly Japan, Iceland, and Norway
| who believe they have rights for different objective reasons.
|
| - Whale oil, blubber, and cartilage is used for various
| supplement or sometimes the meat is consumed via traditional
| dishes.
|
| - To kill whales, you use an exploding harpoon that can take a
| half hour to kill. Sometimes multiple shots are needed.
|
| People are cruel. The bar for how we treat life and choose which
| animals can die makes no sense whatsoever.
|
| More: https://us.whales.org/our-4-goals/stop-whaling/
| bserge wrote:
| Humans will kill anything, often for stupid reasons. Really
| parasitic behaviour tbh.
| dang wrote:
| This doesn't have anything directly to do with the specific
| topic, which is the _culture_ of whales. Please don 't take HN
| threads on generic tangents.
|
| On HN we're interested in diffs [1], what's specifically
| interesting about an article. Generic tangents suck threads
| away from that into the gravitational field of the nearest
| large topic, sort of like a spaceship flying too close to a
| black hole [2]. The generic topics are larger, more popular,
| and much more repetitive [3]. Repetition is bad for curiosity
| [4], and curiosity is what we're optimizing for here [5].
| Typically the generic themes are also more sensational and
| inflammatory, which is doubly not what we're looking for.
|
| It's super tempting for threads to hop into the next-adjacent
| generic orbit and often they do this repeatedly. Once a
| discussion reaches "People are cruel", that's a good example of
| a black hole. No light is going to come out of such a thread.
|
| [1]
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
|
| [2]
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
|
| [3]
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
|
| [4]
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
|
| [5]
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
|
| p.s. None of this is to say that the generic themes are
| unimportant. They're frequently far _more_ important. But a
| site like this needs to stick to what it 's for. Also, we like
| whales.
| WORMS_EAT_WORMS wrote:
| Fair enough, thanks for added perspective.
| [deleted]
| yboris wrote:
| To follow up with that, we are exceptionally cruel through our
| factory farms (CAFO) which subject animals to conditions that
| would put you into federal jail for years if you did it to a
| dog.
|
| I strongly encourage everyone to consume less meat (because
| individual actions matter - the market is responsive/elastic
| and fewer animals will experience torture in the future if you
| purchase less animal products).
| bollu wrote:
| I don't believe that my individual choice actually matters;
| What do I read to change my opinion?
| lasfter wrote:
| I'm usually of the same mind, but this is one scenario
| where individual action actually can help. For example,
| driving less won't significantly affect climate change even
| if most people do it, since the biggest contributors are
| industrial processes.
|
| On the other hand, nearly all of the animal cruelty from
| factory farms stems from people buying meat from them. So
| if most people eat less meat, then factory farms actually
| will suffer.
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| Any introduction to chaos theory should change your mind,
| but it convinces you that your actions have consequences at
| the cost of never being sure what they are.
| yboris wrote:
| There are people who have tried to investigate this
| thoroughly. My understanding is that there is a direct
| correlation between your actions an the supply.
|
| > "If someone gives up 1 lb of chicken, total consumption
| falls by 0.76lb in expectation."
|
| https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fZp6Fpowmd5a8Lu2w
| /...
|
| Directly: https://reducing-suffering.org/comments-on-
| compassion-by-the...
|
| The mechanism is simple: if the stores are 100% responsive
| to your demand, your purchase directly affects supply. If
| they are not 100% perfect, they still have a mechanism
| through which they buy in bulk. So, roughly speaking, you
| might have a 1% chance of triggering a batch order for an
| extra 100 lbs when you purchase 1 lb of meat. And the same
| goes up the supply chain.
| agumonkey wrote:
| We need to find a compensating activity so people don't think
| about eating. It can be a double win, less consumption and
| more social activity / bond.
| OnlyOneCannolo wrote:
| I'm lucky to be able to get almost all of my meat from local,
| pasture-only sources (no feeder lots or anything like that).
| There are alternatives to abstaining from meat. The more we
| support them, the more widely available they will become.
| yboris wrote:
| Given that > 99% of all meat consumed in the US comes from
| factory farms, it is currently not feasible for the vast
| majority of the US population to do what you are lucky to
| be able to do.
|
| It's great to hear there are still farms that care about
| animal welfare, but it's a challenge with a race-to-the-
| bottom where profits are inversely proportional with animal
| welfare.
|
| Specifically, there is a greater incentive to make
| consumers think that the animals have good welfare, than to
| actually implement the better welfare. Unless we have
| mandatory web-cameras on all factories, you're just going
| on trust of people (who have all the immense financial
| incentives to lie).
| OnlyOneCannolo wrote:
| I'm saying that if you ever have the choice to support
| ethical options or abstain completely, don't feel bad
| about supporting.
|
| I hope they continue to grow, that more people become
| more conscientious, and that regulations improve.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| Unless you're Michael Vick, in which case the NFL gives him a
| high paying job, i've noticed and heard countless people
| remark seems conspicuous.
| jgwil2 wrote:
| He spent 21 months in federal prison.
| zeeshanqureshi wrote:
| Whales are fascinating animals.
|
| On a somewhat related side note I absolutely love how the Ondes
| Martenot can sometimes sound like whales underwater.
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