JubilantJaguar

More interesting points!

It’s a common justification among carnists that “they’re stupid, actually”

Yep, I've always countered it with the "village idiot" or "disabled" examples, but "small children" is much more effective! Will use that in future.

But you should understand that “checking the origin when possible” and “modest quantities” are…Well, you addressed my points before me.

The "when possible" does undermine my argument but "modest quantities" must count for something and as for "origin" I'm sure you'll agree that in theory free-range chickens can have acceptably pleasant lives. In Europe the highest class (i.e. 3 times more expensive) free-range eggs do come at least come close to the farmyard-idyll idea of chicken farming.

So at that point the putative cruelty concerns mainly the abstract fact of animal exploitation for eggs or the (less abstract) slaughter. As I understand it, this is what distinguishes animal welfare from animal rights. Personally my priority is the former. I don't claim to respect the latter, i.e. an animal's inherent right to life or to be left alone. Although I absolutely respect those who do. Both positions are ethically coherent, as I see it.

Paying to make defenseless, innocent animals’ lives “a living hell.” And I feel at least to some extent like being aware of that makes it worse here.

Yeah, that's fair. At least, there's certainly a paradox here. Because, under the law, for example, you aren't usually held responsible for something you're not aware of. And then people often say that the first stage to solving a problem is to be aware of it - and yet by becoming aware of it you're transformed from an innocent to a hypocrite. Personally, like many people, I can't stand hypocrisy so I choose to self-flagellate when I see it in myself. Rather than channel my insecurity into criticism of non-hypocrites, as many omnivores seem to do. And yet then I risk being sanctimonious as well as a hypocrite. Tricky problem.

I choose to cut off at animals because that makes the line extremely crystal clear and indemnifies me against our creeping series of realizations that “oh, these animals feel pain, actually”.

Some interesting points you made there. Yes, I suppose this dividing line is a pretty rational choice.

Apt is not built with security in mind, at all. The partial sandboxing it does do is trivial to bypass. Adding a repo is basically a RAT Trojan on your computer.

OK. I suppose this is the correct answer.

The least bad option [for Signal] is the unofficial flatpak.

Unless I'm missing something, here we will disagree. Secure or not, FOSS principle-respecting or not, if I'm choosing to install software by X then I'm going to get it straight from X and not involve third-party Y too.

Some thoughtful points here.

what this graphic doesn’t tell you is that it’s overwhelmingly a fish-welfare issue

Absolutely. If we take the common invertebrate-vertebrate threshold, then fish really should be in the graphic. It seems that the alien concept of living underwater just makes it hard for humans to empathize with fish.

If your goal is cutting out the most per-animal suffering, then I estimate it’ll be cows, simply because chickens live much shorter lives and pigs are just raised for meat, thus again having shorter lives. Cows are tortured for years

Interesting take. Not sure I'm convinced, given what I understand about chicken farming. Chickens seem to be like land-fish in that people have really hard time imagining their sentience and therefore considering their welfare. The short life of a meat chicken looks pretty close to hell itself. And those 42 days might well be perceived as more, in the sense that small animals tend to live shorter lives anyway, though I guess that an unfalsifiable hypothesis. And let's not forget the egg-laying chickens, which live for a whole couple of years.

As it happens I personally choose to eat chicken products (in modest quantity, checking their origin where possible) but not large mammals. But that is because I put the environment before even the cruelty question. Hard choices and I'm aware of my (partial) hypocrisy.

If your goal is cutting out the most intelligent animals, then it’ll probably be pigs

Although (probably like you) I'll take any argument if it convinces people, to me this is an irrational one. The classic counter-argument: would we allow a mentally disabled cousin to be tortured because he's got a low IQ? Capacity for suffering has nothing to do with intelligence. Logically it might even be inversely correlated, as Dawkins has speculated: if pain is the signal sent by genes to bodies to "Don't do that again" then it might follow that less intelligent animals need a stronger signal.

If your goal is the amount of animals exploited per kilogram of food, then that likely goes to honey, which similarly has trillions of victims

While this is rationally defensible, personally I get jittery when vegans bring insects into the equation. For two reasons.

• Where's the line? If the welfare of ants is an issue, then what about sponges, corals - plants? I'm not being facetious. Though I agree it's absolutely plausible, it's not definitively proven that invertebrates with primitive nervous systems can suffer - the fact that insects have been observed continuing to feed while themselves being eaten always springs to mind. In any case, the line between animals and other kingdoms seems to me fairly arbitrary in a tree of life where everything is related. For me the issue should be capacity for suffering, not the issue of whether or not something is an "animal". If that means plants and bacteria, so be it, but we're not there yet.
• If insects are to be protected, then the prospects become dimmer for cheap protein to nourish 10 billion humans and keep us from destroying what's left of our environment. Of course, we could all become vegan and that would solve everything. But in the real world we're entering a realm of very hard choices here.

Terrible choice of name for the initiative. It sounds like a campaign to end Roman bloodsports.

By definition an email server is not under your control, so the question of whether or not it runs FOSS is a bit moot and in any case impossible to verify.

In terms of privacy-respecting email hosting, Proton, Posteo, and Mailbox all spring to mind.

Disturbing. It really shows how the animal-welfare issue is overwhelmingly a chicken-welfare issue.

Let's not forget that if one is concerned about welfare, then logically one should focus more on the life of the animal than the final slaughter. Chicken slaughter in particular is a pretty unpleasant and haphazard affair (as I understand it, the electric stun bath doesn't work reliably) but surely those 42 days of life beforehand were, cumulatively, much worse than the quick and grisly bit at the end.

Perhaps one exception to that might be the pigs, which are now overwhelmingly subject to carbon-monoxide gas stunning. Which apparently doesn't work and results routinely in terrible suffering. All hidden neatly away in the gas chamber so that no humans need see it and it can be denied by the slaughterhouses. That we continue to allow this particular atrocity makes me seethe with rage.

Looks great, well done.

Personally, the deb-related annoyance that I have encountered most often in recent years is that there is an APT repo but I have to jump thru hoops to add it. An example is signal-desktop, where the handy one-click installation goes like this:

# 1. Install our official public software signing key:
wget -O- https://updates.signal.org/desktop/apt/keys.asc | gpg --dearmor > signal-desktop-keyring.gpg
cat signal-desktop-keyring.gpg | sudo tee /usr/share/keyrings/signal-desktop-keyring.gpg > /dev/null

# 2. Add our repository to your list of repositories:
echo 'deb [arch=amd64 signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/signal-desktop-keyring.gpg] https://updates.signal.org/desktop/apt xenial main' |\
  sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/signal-xenial.list

# 3. Update your package database and install Signal:
sudo apt update && sudo apt install signal-desktop

Why does Debian-Ubuntu not provide a simple command for this? Yes there is add-apt-repository but for some reason it doesn't deal with keys. I've had to deal with this PITA on multiple occasions, what's up with this?

Sure, but in that case the default encryption could easily be switched off for multiple-drive setups. Basically, the default setting is what's important.

Ha! Just checked and it turns out this is the exact line that's already in my screenshot script. Which apparently I pilfered without trying very hard to understand - as usual! Can confirm it works great.

Well, this is certainly one way to goose the participation on Lemmy.

This is a good question. Phone numbers are increasingly used as de-facto ID numbers, everywhere in the world. That's because, unlike email, they cost money, and in most jurisdictions you can't even get one anymore without presenting real ID. So: if you have a second phone number, you can effectively have a second persona for any site or app that requires phone-number ID. Seriously, at this rate, it's going to be all of them.

IMO the best use-case for this is to quarantine your contact list. That is, keep a separate number for social networks and messaging. The number you give to your in-person contacts will be instantly shared with all their cloud services, whether you like it or not. This is what allows Big Tech to triangulate and discover exactly who you know and therefore who you are. If the cloud services cannot trace a number back to any phone ID in their own books, then they can't do much with it and you will remain at least something of a mystery to them.

My email provider kept blocking my DeltaChat-created messages, and indeed locking me out of my account for them. Presumably because the encrypted gobbledygook looks likes spam. The open nature of email really is its Achilles heel, unfortunately.