Quick takes

Does anyone know whether there's a way to buy cultivated (lab-grown) meat now? I've always wanted to host a cultivated meat barbecue and invite my omnivorous friends, but I have not been able to find any cultivated meat that's currently commercially available.

The Straw and the Camel's back I recently had a colleague complain that oat milk was a 'luxury' that the work coffee machines didn't need. And this tiny little comment kind of broke me. I feel like I am so careful not to judge or lecture everyone around me for their insanely massive moral failings around animal welfare, or donating - yet apparently people can't even just let me have my suffering-free milk in peace.  Which prompted me to re-evaluate something I hadn't really thought about in a long time - being EA (or EA-adjacent or however people wanna identify) is just really hard sometimes. I used to be more actively advocatey about things, but it can be exhausting, and at some point I just kinda stopped. But now I feel very motivated to figure out how to start being a lil more vocal again, because it turns out that pretending like I don't have strong opinions on these things is also exhausting! Which is all to get to the point of: there are a lot of posts on here about EA being hard, and how to talk about EA, and reading those posts helps get a feeling of support but knowing this doesn't magically make it all easier. I am just really grateful for this awesome community, and want to just normalise a bit more to share when it gets hard because thats ok. We are doing a hard thing.  (Note: while this one colleague clearly pushed my buttons, further reflection got me very happy that clearly a bunch of other people had been advocating to get the oat milk at LUMC and I'm very happy they exist and that they succeeded)  

I have been disappointed by the support some EAs have expressed for recent activist actions at Ridglan Farms. I share others’ outrage at the outcome of the state animal cruelty investigation, which found serious animal cruelty law violations but led to a settlement that still permits Ridglan to sell beagles through July and to continue in-house experimentation. But I personally think the tactics used in the recent open rescues, including property damage and forced entry to remove animals, violate reasonable moral bounds on what actions are permissible in response to the belief that a serious harm is occurring. My views here stem from contractualist views of democratic legitimacy and from concerns about the non-universalizability of principles that justify lawbreaking, though I think a purely act utilitarian calculus also supports them. Regarding universalizability, in a society where many people believe that different forms of irreparable harm are occurring (e.g. viewing abortion as murder, climate change as destroying the sacredness of the natural world, immigration as ending western civilization), I worry that moral principles that allow for significant lawbreaking when one believes that irreparable harm is occurring could easily lead to great damage if broadly followed (consider for example what it would be like to live in a country where hundreds of activists were regularly smashing their way into abortion clinics, energy companies, and refugee assistance nonprofits with sledgehammers and crowbars). Regarding the legitimacy of the law, I think reasonable contractualist views can give us obligations to follow the law when the processes by which the law is determined are legitimate, and that democracies with universal suffrage qualify as such (even granting that certain groups such as animals and future generations are impossible to enfranchise).[1] Therefore, I think that if we are trying to make decisions under moral uncertainty and give meaningful credences to

The UK is set to pass a law that bans the sale of tobacco to anyone born after 2008. Once the king signs it into law, the UK will become the second country in the world to introduce a generational smoking ban, after the Maldives did so last November. (New Zealand also considered such a ban a few years ago, but did not go through with it.) 

Hey all, I'm $500 away from our minimum goal on Manifund (4 days left). Would appreciate anyone who helps out! The project is a subscription app where our members fund cool nature & animal welfare projects through voting. The Manifund is to help seed our funding pool so our members can start voting on projects sooner than later. A lot more info at the link below --ben https://manifund.org/projects/nohotdoglove-fund-cool-nature--animal-projects-with-others

Coal and nuclear electricity generation kill a significant number of fish through water intake systems. This matters for evaluating the impact of any new electricity load. Most thermal power plants (coal, nuclear, and to a lesser extent gas) draw large volumes of water from rivers and lakes for cooling. This causes two underappreciated harms to fish: Impingement — fish get trapped against water intake filters and die. Entrainment — eggs, larvae, and small fish are pulled through pumps and heat exchangers, killing them. A single coal plant in Ohio (Bay Shore coal plant) killed roughly 46 million fish and 2.2 billion fish eggs and larvae in 2005–06. Some thermal plants use evaporative cooling while others return the water to the source warmer than it was drawn. This thermal pollution stresses aquatic life in two compounding ways: elevated temperatures reduce dissolved oxygen levels while simultaneously increasing organisms' metabolic oxygen demand. Even small temperature increases can cause declines in bottom-dwelling species, and organisms in already-warm environments are especially vulnerable. Impingement and entrainment don’t affect fish population levels because many of them would have died young anyway, other things like pollution have a much greater effect, and “only” ~10% of the wild population died due to the coal plant in the above case of the Ohio Bay Shore coal plant and Maumee River. It's also unclear what the net effect on wild-animal suffering is when comparing death in a water intake to death by natural causes. And as electricity generation shifts from thermal plants toward renewables, these specific harms should diminish. From an EA perspective, this seems worth flagging for anyone working on wild animal welfare or assessing the environmental footprint of new electricity load like compute scaling. The fish mortality numbers are large in absolute terms even if they seem unlikely to cause population-loss, and this externality rarely features in dis

I went to jail yesterday in Wisconsin. I helped rescue 23 beagles in a large mass open rescue against a factory farm, Ridglan Farms, near Madison. We were trying to push the police to act on documented animal cruelty at Ridglan. Instead they arrested me and 26 other activists. I wrote a blog post about why I did it.. Excerpt: More info and stories from Wayne Hsiung: https://blog.simpleheart.org/p/im-in-jail-for-rescuing-dogs-its If you're in the DC area, I'll be sharing more about my experience at Revolutionists' Night, an animal welfare meetup, this Thursday. Reach out for an invite. [Edited to add:] I believe there is a lawful basis for this action and I intend to fight any attempted prosecution in court! I'm not advocating any illegal activity, of course.

Researchers simulate an entire fly brain on a laptop. Is a human brain next? What is the implication of this for EA thinking? Does the fly that purely exists in the computer warrant moral consideration, and could we increase the overall welfare of the world by making millions of these simulations with ideal fruit-fly conditions?    They fully copied the brain of the fly, so from my understanding it should also feel pleasure and pain in theory, I think this poses a real conundrum for EA morality.