Well it's kinda whataboutism, but I made a similar comment on a video about an environmental crime (a copper mine had dumped an entire lake's worth of toxic sludge into a valley).
The author of the mini documentary said something about how deeply disturbed he was and how he really thought humans were better than this.
I thought that was kind of funny since, yeah the sludge lake is nasty as hell (and if the dam holding it back breaks, it's not gonna be good), but I had to think, maybe he should visit a factory farm for his next video.
That's a far worse horror, and regular folks contribute to it every day without thinking. (I forget the exact number, but something like 80+ billion animals live through that every year.) So I think it should get a little more attention.
(Not vegan, just think we shouldn't be awful towards animals.)
You got it right: around ~70 billion land animals in 2013, 1-2.7 trillion fishes [0] and 25 trillion shrimps [1]
But can you compare:
- a fish that lived 1 year wild then died by pressure or asphyxia in a net during 15 minutes
- a chicken that lived 40 days in a cage
Instead of raw count, the Welfare Footprint Institute [2] propose a framework:
> quantify animal welfare by systematically measuring animals’ affective experiences—specifically, the intensity and duration of their negative (painful) and positive (pleasurable) states […]
in civilized countries, industrially farmed animals live short, uneventful lives devoid of hunger and pain, injury and disease, heat and cold, then die instant, painless deaths. in the wild, the kind of animals we farm rarely get to die of old age - most end up being mauled and eaten alive by predators.
their lives are only bad if you assume they possess adult human level of conscience, which they obviously don't.
I don't know how narrow your definition of "civilized country" is, but a majority of industrially farmed animals do not live the kind of lives you describe. I will link the EU regulation for laying hens for exemple, and maybe it will change your mind as to how farmed animals are treated?
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
A few numbers I personally find telling:
- 550 cm² caged area per hen (roughly 10" by 10")
- Seven hens per cage
- Cages 45 cm tall
- No requirement for ever going outside
I know some animals usually have it better (cattle) but industrially farmed chicken and porks really are miserable, without even going into the levels of stress and disease they go through.
you are aware that even humans, with our much longer lifespan and much higher cognition, can endure living in captivity for years just fine, right? hell, even outside of captivity, a double digit percentage of us doesn't have a single room of living space, and the only outside most of us see is covered with asphalt and concrete.
The issue associated with whataboutism is that it is a deflection strategy. It aims to steer the focus away from the issue at hand. Commonly regarded as intentional manipulation or lack of adherence to social conversation norms.
Isn’t that a good thing sometimes, assuming focus is a limited resource? Shouldn’t problems be addressed in order of importance? Is it whataboutism if I tell someone to stop polishing a wrecked car?
Focus (on a society-wide level) is not so very limited. One of the strengths of our whole society being fragmented into a bunch of distinct organisations, is that they can all go off and solve different problems at the same time.
> Shouldn’t problems be addressed in order of importance?
Most of the really big problems facing society can only be addressed through multi-solving (i.e. something like climate change isn't going to just hang around waiting for us to solve one sub-problem at a time). Not to mention, the solution space is often extremely interconnected - for example, finding alternatives so that society can eat less meat helps address both climate change and the horrors of factory farming at the same time.
I didn’t expect that many sheep, and is there really so little chicken that it’s not even labeled? Obviously each one doesn’t weigh a lot but I expected there to be a lot of them.
I think poultry are excluded by the title ("land mammals"). If they were there, it appears[1] they should be about equivalent to the total biomass of sheep.
I dont understand the purpose of using 40,000 lbs of TNT (0.2 kilotons) that registers as M3.9 quake - what kind of explosive payload is it simulating?
the only thing that comes to mind, is the smallest yield settings of a modern tactical nuke B61-12
I would guess that they want to simulate a percentage of the shock force of a near miss or hit from a (russian, chinese, other equivalent-tech) torpedo or naval mine without actually risking rupturing the hull. So they need a much greater weight of explosives positioned a much further distance away than if they were to actually fire a torpedo at the ship.
Or for general shake and vibration and shock force testing of the entire ship, simulating a combat environment. Unlike the shake/rattle/hydraulic ram rigs which are used to qualify a new airliner design on a structural test article, there's no other way than lots of explosives to shake/vibrate an entire Nimitz, Ford class size aircraft carrier.
I would guess they want a large enough explosion to generate peak acceleration of the entire ship without a local enough explosion to actually damage it. Getting enough separation to make it non-local requires a lot of explosive thanks to the inverse cube law.
If you look at e.g. seismic damage models, peak acceleration is correlated with most of the worst outcomes.
The structure is engineered to survive a multitude of conventional threats intact. It is testing properties of the design rather than specific weapons per se. Also, these tests are intended to be non-destructive which impacts their design.
Exercises where the US military uses decommissioned aircraft carriers and other large ships as targets are illustrative. They are basically unsinkable. You can hit them with torpedoes, bombs, missiles, etc all day. At the end of the exercise they usually have to send over a specialized demolition crew to actually scuttle the ship. Astonishingly damage resistant.
A nuke would of course do the trick but now you are playing a different game.
People chronically underestimate how difficult it is to get enough conventional explosive on target to sink a major naval vessel, even ignoring the extensive active defenses.
Well, actually, the Argentinians had no trouble delivering high explosives to UK vessels, but they did have a great deal of trouble getting those explosives to sink those vessels ... mostly because their bomb fuzes were incorrectly set or inappropriate for the delivery profile.
But on a more serious note, none of the ships sunk by air attack in the Falklands were large military vessels. The largest vessel sunk was the Atlantic Conveyor, and that was (1) a civilian cargo ship built to civilian levels of durability, and (2) it was carrying a large quantity of ammunition essentially unprotected (unlike how a large warship would carry it). Even then, the missile strike and fire did not sink the ship immediately. For the largest military vessels sunk by air attack, the two Type 42s Sheffield and Coventry were relatively small destroyers (less than half the displacement of either their USN contemporaries the Spruance/Kidd or a modern Arleigh Burke) and again there the Exocet strike and resulting fire did not sink Sheffield immediately either. The smaller Type 21 frigates lost, Antelope and Ardent, were never really meant to survive meaningful damage and yet both remained afloat overnight before sinking. For comparison, the roughly contemporary USN frigates, the Perry-class (larger in displacement than the Type 42s), survived both Exocet (Stark) and mine (Samuel B. Roberts) strikes.
(The General Belgrano was a larger military vessel lost to submarine attack with, but considering that it was a treaty-limited 44-year-old light cruiser operating unprepared for submarine attack, it is hard to draw too many conclusions about modern ship durability from its loss - and her sisters in the Brooklyn class generally survived quite a punishment in WWII.)
The ships sunk in the Falklands War were all less than half the displacement of a typical US Navy destroyer. The sole exception is the Belgrano, which was built in the 1930s!
The ship being tested here is ~25x the size of the largest British ship that was sunk. Generally speaking, there is a super-linear relationship between ship size and the amount of explosive required to sink it. There is mountains of empirical data on this that you are choosing to ignore.
Every military knows this. They are making a tradeoff between size, which makes the target more difficult to destroy and easier to defend, and the number of ships they can build which allows them more flexibility in force projection.
> People chronically underestimate how difficult it is to get enough conventional explosive on target to sink a major naval vessel, even ignoring the extensive active defenses.
American ships, certainly. Russian ships? Oh boy. The Ukrainians, a country with no navy to speak of, sunk the Russian flagship Moskva to widespread memefied acclaim, a bunch of other Black Sea assets and are now taking potshots at the shadow fleet.
I'm guessing with a few more tries to get the right positioning and amount of explosives, those terrorists could blow up US ships as well as the Ukrainians do Russian ones.
Steel in the ocean disappears in a century or two. Look at all the rusticles draping off the wreck of Titanic. Bacteria are eating the metal and making slime.
These are the full-ship shock trials, where they set off progressively closer charges to certify the hull and combat systems survive a near-miss. The tight scheduling and monitoring is largely driven by the marine-mammal mitigation requirements.
This must have maimed thousands of marine mammals.
Wait until you hear about industrialised farming, even mass production of crops are killing plenty of animals…
Is your point that that makes this better?
Well it's kinda whataboutism, but I made a similar comment on a video about an environmental crime (a copper mine had dumped an entire lake's worth of toxic sludge into a valley).
The author of the mini documentary said something about how deeply disturbed he was and how he really thought humans were better than this.
I thought that was kind of funny since, yeah the sludge lake is nasty as hell (and if the dam holding it back breaks, it's not gonna be good), but I had to think, maybe he should visit a factory farm for his next video.
That's a far worse horror, and regular folks contribute to it every day without thinking. (I forget the exact number, but something like 80+ billion animals live through that every year.) So I think it should get a little more attention.
(Not vegan, just think we shouldn't be awful towards animals.)
You got it right: around ~70 billion land animals in 2013, 1-2.7 trillion fishes [0] and 25 trillion shrimps [1]
But can you compare: - a fish that lived 1 year wild then died by pressure or asphyxia in a net during 15 minutes - a chicken that lived 40 days in a cage
Instead of raw count, the Welfare Footprint Institute [2] propose a framework:
> quantify animal welfare by systematically measuring animals’ affective experiences—specifically, the intensity and duration of their negative (painful) and positive (pleasurable) states […]
0 https://considerveganism.com/counter/
1 https://rethinkpriorities.org/research-area/shrimp-the-anima...
2 https://welfarefootprint.org/analytical-approach/
in civilized countries, industrially farmed animals live short, uneventful lives devoid of hunger and pain, injury and disease, heat and cold, then die instant, painless deaths. in the wild, the kind of animals we farm rarely get to die of old age - most end up being mauled and eaten alive by predators.
their lives are only bad if you assume they possess adult human level of conscience, which they obviously don't.
I don't know how narrow your definition of "civilized country" is, but a majority of industrially farmed animals do not live the kind of lives you describe. I will link the EU regulation for laying hens for exemple, and maybe it will change your mind as to how farmed animals are treated? https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
A few numbers I personally find telling:
- 550 cm² caged area per hen (roughly 10" by 10")
- Seven hens per cage
- Cages 45 cm tall
- No requirement for ever going outside
I know some animals usually have it better (cattle) but industrially farmed chicken and porks really are miserable, without even going into the levels of stress and disease they go through.
you are aware that even humans, with our much longer lifespan and much higher cognition, can endure living in captivity for years just fine, right? hell, even outside of captivity, a double digit percentage of us doesn't have a single room of living space, and the only outside most of us see is covered with asphalt and concrete.
The issue associated with whataboutism is that it is a deflection strategy. It aims to steer the focus away from the issue at hand. Commonly regarded as intentional manipulation or lack of adherence to social conversation norms.
Isn’t that a good thing sometimes, assuming focus is a limited resource? Shouldn’t problems be addressed in order of importance? Is it whataboutism if I tell someone to stop polishing a wrecked car?
> assuming focus is a limited resource
Focus (on a society-wide level) is not so very limited. One of the strengths of our whole society being fragmented into a bunch of distinct organisations, is that they can all go off and solve different problems at the same time.
> Shouldn’t problems be addressed in order of importance?
Most of the really big problems facing society can only be addressed through multi-solving (i.e. something like climate change isn't going to just hang around waiting for us to solve one sub-problem at a time). Not to mention, the solution space is often extremely interconnected - for example, finding alternatives so that society can eat less meat helps address both climate change and the horrors of factory farming at the same time.
> Is it whataboutism if I tell someone to stop polishing a wrecked car?
Whataboutism would be "why do you worry about your wrecked car, that crackhead down the street also has a wrecked car".
That's just waituntilyouhearaboutism.
And that's thatsjustism!
See also: https://xkcd.com/1338/
I didn’t expect that many sheep, and is there really so little chicken that it’s not even labeled? Obviously each one doesn’t weigh a lot but I expected there to be a lot of them.
I think poultry are excluded by the title ("land mammals"). If they were there, it appears[1] they should be about equivalent to the total biomass of sheep.
[1]: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1711842115
Ah right, totally missed that. Thanks for looking that up!
and those mammals will become a food source for tens of thousands of crustaceans and other creatures.
Circle of life
You could say the same about human deaths…
An explosion that is nourishing to marine life, that is one way to see it.
Apparently the US Navy does these semi-regularly to test the durability of warships
This is almost certainly what it was. Wiki even has a photo of the USS Gerald Ford undergoing blast tests off of Ponce Inlet, and mentions that it registered as a M3.9 quake: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Gerald_R._Ford#Operational...
If I had to guess, this is probably the USS John F. Kennedy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_John_F._Kennedy_(CVN-79)
I dont understand the purpose of using 40,000 lbs of TNT (0.2 kilotons) that registers as M3.9 quake - what kind of explosive payload is it simulating?
the only thing that comes to mind, is the smallest yield settings of a modern tactical nuke B61-12
I would guess that they want to simulate a percentage of the shock force of a near miss or hit from a (russian, chinese, other equivalent-tech) torpedo or naval mine without actually risking rupturing the hull. So they need a much greater weight of explosives positioned a much further distance away than if they were to actually fire a torpedo at the ship.
Or for general shake and vibration and shock force testing of the entire ship, simulating a combat environment. Unlike the shake/rattle/hydraulic ram rigs which are used to qualify a new airliner design on a structural test article, there's no other way than lots of explosives to shake/vibrate an entire Nimitz, Ford class size aircraft carrier.
I would guess they want a large enough explosion to generate peak acceleration of the entire ship without a local enough explosion to actually damage it. Getting enough separation to make it non-local requires a lot of explosive thanks to the inverse cube law.
If you look at e.g. seismic damage models, peak acceleration is correlated with most of the worst outcomes.
The structure is engineered to survive a multitude of conventional threats intact. It is testing properties of the design rather than specific weapons per se. Also, these tests are intended to be non-destructive which impacts their design.
Exercises where the US military uses decommissioned aircraft carriers and other large ships as targets are illustrative. They are basically unsinkable. You can hit them with torpedoes, bombs, missiles, etc all day. At the end of the exercise they usually have to send over a specialized demolition crew to actually scuttle the ship. Astonishingly damage resistant.
A nuke would of course do the trick but now you are playing a different game.
People chronically underestimate how difficult it is to get enough conventional explosive on target to sink a major naval vessel, even ignoring the extensive active defenses.
Falklands war shows otherwise.
> Falklands war shows otherwise.
Well, actually, the Argentinians had no trouble delivering high explosives to UK vessels, but they did have a great deal of trouble getting those explosives to sink those vessels ... mostly because their bomb fuzes were incorrectly set or inappropriate for the delivery profile.
But on a more serious note, none of the ships sunk by air attack in the Falklands were large military vessels. The largest vessel sunk was the Atlantic Conveyor, and that was (1) a civilian cargo ship built to civilian levels of durability, and (2) it was carrying a large quantity of ammunition essentially unprotected (unlike how a large warship would carry it). Even then, the missile strike and fire did not sink the ship immediately. For the largest military vessels sunk by air attack, the two Type 42s Sheffield and Coventry were relatively small destroyers (less than half the displacement of either their USN contemporaries the Spruance/Kidd or a modern Arleigh Burke) and again there the Exocet strike and resulting fire did not sink Sheffield immediately either. The smaller Type 21 frigates lost, Antelope and Ardent, were never really meant to survive meaningful damage and yet both remained afloat overnight before sinking. For comparison, the roughly contemporary USN frigates, the Perry-class (larger in displacement than the Type 42s), survived both Exocet (Stark) and mine (Samuel B. Roberts) strikes.
(The General Belgrano was a larger military vessel lost to submarine attack with, but considering that it was a treaty-limited 44-year-old light cruiser operating unprepared for submarine attack, it is hard to draw too many conclusions about modern ship durability from its loss - and her sisters in the Brooklyn class generally survived quite a punishment in WWII.)
How so?
The ships sunk in the Falklands War were all less than half the displacement of a typical US Navy destroyer. The sole exception is the Belgrano, which was built in the 1930s!
The ship being tested here is ~25x the size of the largest British ship that was sunk. Generally speaking, there is a super-linear relationship between ship size and the amount of explosive required to sink it. There is mountains of empirical data on this that you are choosing to ignore.
Every military knows this. They are making a tradeoff between size, which makes the target more difficult to destroy and easier to defend, and the number of ships they can build which allows them more flexibility in force projection.
I mean, we've all seen Battleship (2012), right? ;)
Burning aluminum.
> People chronically underestimate how difficult it is to get enough conventional explosive on target to sink a major naval vessel, even ignoring the extensive active defenses.
American ships, certainly. Russian ships? Oh boy. The Ukrainians, a country with no navy to speak of, sunk the Russian flagship Moskva to widespread memefied acclaim, a bunch of other Black Sea assets and are now taking potshots at the shadow fleet.
Well, there was that small incident that nearly sunk that ship: https://www.fbi.gov/history/cases-and-criminals/uss-cole-bom...
I'm guessing with a few more tries to get the right positioning and amount of explosives, those terrorists could blow up US ships as well as the Ukrainians do Russian ones.
0.018 kilotons. Order of magnitude smaller at minimum.
Does it need to be the direct analog of any specific weapon, to be a useful test?
They also periodically use live munitions on decommissioned ships, sinking them, for the purposes of validating all sorts of stuff.
https://www.pacaf.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/452930...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Juneau_(LPD-10)
So, tactical ocean trash?
Almost every decom’d vessel that gets blown up for RIMPAC is turned into an artificial reef.
Steel in the ocean disappears in a century or two. Look at all the rusticles draping off the wreck of Titanic. Bacteria are eating the metal and making slime.
These are the full-ship shock trials, where they set off progressively closer charges to certify the hull and combat systems survive a near-miss. The tight scheduling and monitoring is largely driven by the marine-mammal mitigation requirements.