Why abstain from meat?

Chicken production factories base how much chicken to produce on demand. They calculate demand based on the number of chickens bought. Because of this, there is a point at which the scale does indeed tip.

...Their entire business model is based on consumers buying chickens. You are a consumer. If you don't buy a chicken, their market shrinks.

Fair point, instead of lives saved, then, let's call it "chickens killed".

 

Why wouldn't one person be a tipping point? That makes no sense at all! The tipping point isn't approximated.. it's calculated.

 

Everybody buying that piece of meat has equivalent weight on the scale.

 

Well you do have an actual impact... Try to see it as a gathered impact together with everyone else. The meat consumtion industry is a heap of sand where you are a sand corn.

 

My girlfriend is a vegetarian but we have chickens, I also hunt. I only buy meat if I can kill it and that in my opinion is the ideal way to consume meat. Dear populations need to be controlled in my state so regardless of your views on hunting it is necessary. I hunt for sport and sustenance not sport. My girlfriend is a vegetarian not for any huge reasoning but I myself eat a majority vegetarian diet anyway. We have a big garden in the summer and really enjoy trying to eat as much as we can cultivate/gather ourselves.

 

I refer to my original point:

If you have a 50/50 chance of saving 2 lives versus none, over a large enough sample, it averages out to be 1 life every time.

 

I like to think of it as me doing my bit. It seems to be a growing thing, veganism, and it's becoming easier and easier everyday.

One person might not make a huge difference, but from one grows many. The industries themselves seem to be suffering losses due to decreased demand where I live here in the UK, which proves the gradual one by ones are gaining momentum.

 

If you had to only watch one of them just watch the McDougall one; yes it's incredibly boring, but in the long run you'd benefit from the knowledge in general.

So, generally speaking, what i'd actually encourage you to do first is simply go vegetarian, most people that jump straight into a vegan diet (depending on the cleanliness of their previous diet) might actually get sick, also known as a 'healing crisis' or akin to a/the Jarisch–Herxheimer reaction. Also, transitioning from one to the next is much easier after you've gotten the hang of vegetarianism, but if you insist, then by all means go for it.

The only other thing to really keep in mind is simply put in the effort and force yourself to change your dietary habit (meaning things you may have eaten on a regular basis that you can't anymore).

 

I don't understand what's difficult about this. Lottery tickets don't "average out" because the goal is to generate excess funds for the government. That's why people call the lottery a tax on the mathematically illiterate. Meat production, on the other hand, like the production of any other commodity, is finely tuned to fit each market. You don't have a 1 in 10 billion chance of affecting anything, depending on where you live, you probably have a 1 in a few thousand chance of affecting change. You might be surprised to learn how much meat you consume over your lifetime.

Odds cancel out. It's very simple math.

 

How did you arrive at those numbers?

 

Ah, that's interesting. Where did you get these numbers?

 

One of my google results tells me that the Earth is a weird sort of "time cube" (Time Cube), do you have any specific reliable links?

 

So...the same principle that I originally mentioned applies? If meat producers produce chickens by lots of 1000, then each consumer has a 1/1000 chance of saving 1000 chickens?

 

So per my previous post, if you have a 1/50,00 chance of saving 50,000 chickens...........have you ever done fraction cancellation?

 

I don't know if you understand unit cancellation. If you have a 1/10 chance, it's the same as a 100/1000 chance...agreed?

 

I think you've been misreading my posts.

As a toy example, if every chicken you buy has a 1/1000 chance of affecting how many chickens are shipped out, then you have a 1 out of 1000 chance of affecting the supply....but if you happen to be that 1 out of 1000, you prevent 1000 chickens from being shipped out. On average, if you have a 1/1000 chance of success, and you have a 1000/1 rate of return....those cancel out. If you like, I can explain the math further.

 

If we use your example, then yes, on average, over a large enough sample size, yes, you'll break even.

Where are you getting your odds of millions/tens of thousands? How familiar are you with the chicken industry and how they determine how much to ship?

 

There's no point in arguing with him... He has made up his mind and clearly lacks in mathematical knowledge.

 

I guess so...though it's a little weird that mathematical education has dropped so low? When I was in school in Ireland, 10% of 100 was 10, 10% of 1000 was 100, and so on...

 

This is an extremely unrealistic and overly simplified argument.

Let's say a farmer rears the chickens, and then sells them to a wholesaler who on-sells to a retailer, or the farmer otherwise supplies directly to the retailer. You have an impact on the retailer side, not the farmer side. Thus, you would be reducing the revenue of the store by one chickens worth. Alternatively, you are increasing the stores waste by 1 chicken. The retailer is unlikely to sell every single chicken it purchases. Some chickens will be stolen, some chickens will be of poor quality, some chickens will sit on the shelf and exceed their use-by date, and be trashed. You not purchasing one chicken is highly unlikely to exert a 1/1000 chance of reducing the rearing of 1000 chickens.

Let us say your store purchases 10000 chickens per week for consumers. It allocates 4% of those chickens to waste/theft. That means it expects to sell 9,600 chickens. Let us assume it purchases each of these chickens for $10, and sells them for $20, with operating expenses of $5. In total, a 25% margin.

Lets assume the 2% of chickens allocated to waste/theft didn't form part of the operating expenses. The maximum revenue the store could get from those chickens is $200,000/week, with a $50,000 profit on 25% margin. Only expecting to sell 9,600 chickens however, its real revenue is reduced to $192,000, with a profit of $48,000.

Let us assume that the 4% of figure changes slightly from week to week (sometimes there may be more waste/theft, and sometimes less). Let us assume a normal distribution, with 9,600 chickens sold per week being the mean with a SD of 50 chickens. I will run some analysis of what 10 weeks of revenues/net profits are for this store, and to summarise the parameters:

Mean: 9,600
SD: 50




Now, tell me how you think you no longer buying 1 chicken a week is going to be detected by the store when the range of chickens they sold was 97 (Week 10 - Week 1). Your protest falls within their expected variance. It is an immaterial difference. Even if it did make a difference, all the store would do was buy less chickens from the wholesaler/farmer. It does not follow automatically that from a reduced order from one store (of thousands) that therefore the farmer will necessarily cut the supply of chickens (because the farmer would have a natural variance too).

I agree that every one counts, and that if thousands of people protested a small difference may be made, but to say that every individual has a 1/1000 chance of affecting chicken production rates is a huge oversimplification and ignores the complexities of reality. Even my brief analysis was an oversimplificaiton.

Notes: In hindsight probably only very large stores would sell 10,000 chickens/week. Nevertheless, it makes no difference how many chickens the store sells, since ultimately they demand chickens from the farmer, and if the store sells fewew chickens, they demand fewew chickens from the farmer, so even if you make a proportionally greater difference in a smaller store, that smaller store wields proportionally less buying power than a large store. This also ignores retailers vertically integrated with primary producers. Also, the market is not perfectly efficient.