Pockets of progress can still exist within broader repression. Based on your profile, I’m going to guess you’re from the US? If you want some hope:

US Senate Passes Bill Giving Children the Right to Plant-Based Milks in Public School Lunches and this ended up getting signed into law 9 days ago. It also overturned an 80 year old provision that prohibited plant-milks from being offered without special request from doctor/parent in K-12 school lunches. (Which I never would have thought would get overturned now of all times)

Clean energy is still booming in the U.S. despite Trump’s best efforts. Renewables still are going into place because they are just the cheapest option, and the Trump admin has had a lot of their attempts to target renewables paused in court for now. Not that it’s not impacting it at all (it obviously is), but that it isn’t enough to stop progress entirely

Minnesota’s Most Populous County Implements Plant-Based-By-Default Policy for Official Meetings and Events

NYC Set To Cut All Processed Meat In Schools, Hospitals, And Care Centers and is going to replace them with whole plant-based foods

I can keep going. There is a lot of focus in both traditional and social media about the bad news and very little about good news. But there are people trying and when people try you always have the chance to win

Don’t stop trying

And this is going on during a (one day) state wide general strike in Minnesota

Protests in Minnesota have been going on constantly every day in multiple places, the media is just hardly reporting on it. They are not small either. People have also formed entire network to monitor ICE and make sure that people can respond fast anywhere they go

Voting can stop you from going backwards, but voting alone is not enough. It will not fix the mess we are in by itself. It’s vote and take action not vote or take action. There is absolutely not time to wait for elections. Voting is important, but it has to be done with other action or the country will not survive

Minnesota is also in the middle of general strike today as well. Statewide, for the first time in almost 100 years. Economic power matter, and people are starting to use their leverage there in a real meaningful way

If you’re from England, it’s worth noting that today is also a one-day state-wide general strike in Minnesota. Which is a first for the mainland US in like 80 years. General strikes are generally unheard of to most Americans* with unions being much weaker in the US than they are in most of Europe. It’s pretty significant for a general strike to be occurring over anything anywhere in the United States

* There was a 1998 Puerto Rico general strike, but most Americans aren’t aware of that. The last major American general strike was in 1946

Not all agriculture is equal, animal products are uniquely inefficient

Transitioning to plant-based diets (PBDs) has the potential to reduce diet-related land use by 76%, diet-related greenhouse gas emissions by 49%, eutrophication by 49%, and green and blue water use by 21% and 14%, respectively, whilst garnering substantial health co-benefits

[…]

Plant-based foods have a significantly smaller footprint on the environment than animal-based foods. Even the least sustainable vegetables and cereals cause less environmental harm than the lowest impact meat and dairy products [9].

https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/8/1614/html

This does does not reflect how people ate then. Evidence is growing to suggest that the per-agricultural humans ate mostly plants. It’s just been harder to see until recently because bones and such are easier to spot. For instance here’s one study

Our results unequivocally demonstrate a substantial plant-based component in the diets of these hunter-gatherers. This distinct dietary pattern challenges the prevailing notion of high reliance on animal proteins among pre-agricultural human groups

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-024-02382-z

Eating the current level of meat, dairy, etc. in the west is rather new even within the last hundred years. This new food pyramid is an acceleration of a very recent trend that has had poor health consequences

That difference seems a lot higher than most of the world. Were you looking at price per unit volume or price per whatever the container was? I’d be really surprised if there’s a difference that high

There is also the option of making plant-milks yourself. Price can be a lot cheaper that way by orders of magnitude. (Though may take some experimentation to get good tasting recipes, so don’t necessarily judge off of the first taste)

He’s uh claiming to be “ending the war on saturated fats” so one may want to re-evaluate. The focus on animal proteins (plant proteins get only side mentions) and animal fats is already going against what actual health officals say. For instance from the article:

As it is, Americans are consuming protein in amounts well above the amount that is necessary to sustain health and development," Marie-Pierre St-Onge, a professor at Columbia University Nutrition, told ABC News.

And beans are Lemmy approved

That’s been the term of choice in English for the past 800+ years

In English, the word “milk” has been used to refer to “milk-like plant juices” since 1200 CE.[11]

Plant milks go back much further than most people realize

Almond milk spread throughout Europe during the Middle Ages and was popular in parts of the Middle East. Recipes for almond milk in the Middle East date back to around the 13th century as it was mentioned in Muhammad bin Hasan al-Baghdadi’s cookbook Kitāb al-Ṭabīḫ (كتاب الطبيخ; The Book of Dishes), written in 1226. It was especially popular during Lent.[12][13][14][15] Soy was a plant milk used in China during the 14th century.[3][16] Soy milk use in China is first recorded in 1365.[17] In medieval England, almond milk was used in dishes such as ris alkere (a type of rice pudding)[18] and appears in the recipe collection The Forme of Cury.[19] Coconut milk (and coconut cream) are traditional ingredients in many cuisines such as in South and Southeast Asia, and are often used in curries.[20]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_milk

Animal agriculture is a massive contributor to some of the largest problems in the world

It’s at least ~15-17% of climate emissions and is enough to make us miss climate targets on its own even if fossil fuels are immediately stopped

~73% of the world’s antibiotics go to animal agriculture, leading to antibiotic resistance diseases. It’s directly attributed to at least 50% of all zoonetic diseases since 1940

It’s one the most dangerous and exploitative industries to work in. There are multiple human right watch reports on working conditions in just the US (“When We’re Dead and Buried, Our Bones Will Keep Hurting” and Blood, Sweat, and Fear). And this is not limited to the US, here’s just a handful of reporting from The Guardian Revealed: exploitation of meat plant workers rife across UK and Europe, ‘The whole system is rotten’: life inside Europe’s meat industry

The rates of factory farming globally are far higher than most people think. It’s around 74% of all globally farmed land animals, and 90% of total global farmed land and marine animals. It’s around ~99% for the US. The number of animals slaughtered each year is immense at ~80 billion land animals / year, >100 total animals per year. The sheer number of individuals who go through that makes the level of suffering hard to parallel

And that’s just some of the harm the industry does, but I don’t want to ramble too long without talking about how to go about solving this

There is more we as individuals can do here than we can for 90% of other issues. With the laws of supply and demand, simply reducing our collective demand makes the industry smaller. That’s doable at the induvidal level: simply reducing (and ideally eliminating) our individual meat, dairy, etc. consumption can have a real impact. This is more achievable than people think. For instance, Germany has seen a 12% decline in per capita meat consumption over the last ~10 years. We don’t need wait for any institutions to make changes before that can work by doing collective action

There are also some systemic changes we can push for in the near-medium future to help make that happen faster. For instance, just making plant-based foods the default tends to increase plant-based consumption by several orders of magnitude. NYC hospitals implemented plant-based defaults and made their plant-based consumption rate go up to 51% of meals and reduced the average cost of a meal by 59 cents. If that sounds interesting to anyone there are campaigns with real successes to get more institutions and companies to implement those. There groups like the Better Food Foundation, Greener By Default, the Plant Based Treaty is running a Related Campaign, No Milk Tax which has gotten hundreds of chains to drop their plant milk up charge, among others

Can we bring back talking about beans all the time on Lemmy? Asking for a friend who love beans (aka me)

https://archive.is/oYVuY for the paywall

Unfortunately that’s not enough to solve the disease problem. The biggest problem is that the production and consumption levels are high for meat, dairy, etc. There’s a good paper which talks about animal agriculture having a “disease trap” of sorts. (The infectious disease trap of animal agriculture)

The gist is that if you operate with intensified animal agriculture, there’s the obvious disease risk with tons of creatures close together. However, if you try to do less intensive production, you increase land usage significantly which increases deforestation and thus zoonetic disease risk by exposing more wild animals to human populations

The main way out is to move away from the industry and towards the direction of plant-based diets which take up less land and don’t have the crowding issues

Wiki article for anyone curious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ventilation_shutdown

Because the 13th amendment has an explicit exception for prison slave labor baked into it. It’s not an accidental addition, and it wasn’t unnoticed either (it was very quickly used especially in the South after the 13th amendment was ratified)

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Some states have recently change their state constitutions to prohibit that within the state, but it’s still legal federally and in the vast majority of states

From the above article

The program has also been accused of being less than voluntary, as numerous firsthand accounts of being coerced or forced to work against their will have emerged from people detained inside ICE facilities. Allegations against the agency range from officers threatening retaliation if detainees refuse to work, to detainees receiving insufficient amounts of food and having to work to make money to buy additional food at the commissary.

Don’t worry, there’s fears it might get worse

As detention numbers creep upward, some advocates are worried that detainees could be compelled to work to fill gaps in the workforce of some of the most dangerous jobs in the country, including on factory farms and in slaughterhouses. “Over the last decade or so, ICE has been contracting with private organizations to run their detention centers, very much like prisons have been doing. Those private companies have been making detainees work for $1 a day,” Amal Bouhabib, senior staff attorney with the legal advocacy organization FarmSTAND, tells Sentient.

To be clear, there is no evidence this is happening right now in ICE detention centers, but advocates are worried this could change.

The meat, dairy, etc. industry already uses prison slave labor in various parts

https://sentientmedia.org/people-in-ice-detention-forced-to-work/

Trump has already threatened school lunches earlier this year. In Maine, he tried to pull funding from the entire state over some bs around trans people. Maine’s governor told him to his face that she’d see him in court over it. Then a little bit later, he settled in court and gave back the funding without attaching any strings

Have you tried just compiling it with fewer threads? Would almost certainly reduce the RAM usage, and might even make the compile go faster if it you’re needing to swap that heavily