RacfeelBudkind

That's an interesting aside about humans; I didn't know. I think the simplification is justifiable for the explanation in this case, though.

What I'm saying is there's always something wrong with the taste of dairy cheese. Although, it's subtle, and you get used to it if you eat it enough.

> Do you want them to ban bacon ... Where's the line?

There's a factor 30 of leeway on where to draw the line:

> How many cancer cases every year can be attributed to consumption of processed meat and red meat?

> about 34 000 cancer deaths per year worldwide are attributable to diets high in processed meat.

> ...

> about 1 million cancer deaths per year globally due to tobacco smoking

https://www.who.int/news-room/q-a-detail/cancer-carcinogenic...

> Cigarette smoking is responsible for more than 480,000 deaths per year in the United States, including more than 41,000 deaths resulting from secondhand smoke exposure. This is about one in five deaths annually, or 1,300 deaths every day.[1]

> The tobacco industry spends billions of dollars each year on marketing cigarettes.[2]

> Each day, about 1,600 youth try their first cigarette.[2]

> In 2015, nearly 7 in 10 (68.0%) adult cigarette smokers wanted to stop smoking.[1]

> In 2018, more than half (55.1%) adult cigarette smokers had made a quit attempt in the past year.[1]

> In 2018, more than [only] 7 out of every 100 (7.5%) people who tried to quit succeeded.[1]

Smoking legislation isn't about micromanaging the lives of people who fully understand the risk choose to smoke anyway. It's about preventing cigarette manufacturers from preying on those who don't fully understand the risk or didn't when they started, but are now addicted.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/fast...

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/inde...

> A lot of the time I feel like health food is really just a way for manufacturers to cheap out and then sell something at a premium.

Probably, but vegan cheese isn't marketed as health food.

> Margarine is vegan

I wish.

> I totally get ethical vegetarianism, and appreciate that much animal abuse can occur within the dairy industry, but I don't think that's inherent.

It's inherent. Cows, like all mammals, need to have given birth to produce milk. This means dairy cows are impregnated and give birth roughly yearly. It's entirely uneconomical to raise all of the calves, since it would effectively triple or more the cost of producing milk, which is already barely profitable, even with government subsidies. So the calves are killed and sold as veal.

Well, there's no cholesterol at least.

Edit: Also keep in mind that cheese is a processed food too. I think it's somewhat subjective whether oil mixed with starch and yeast is more processed than milk coagulated with an enzyme (rennet, usually from mold), strained, and fermented. Processed food isn't inherently unhealthy, but both cheese and vegan cheese definitely are.

In fact, in the US at least, "Cheese product" nessesarily means it isn't vegan.

Vegan cheese products also tend to be pretty upfront about not actually being cheese too, because they're marketing to people who don't want cheese.

> Sometimes the aftertaste is terrible, sometimes the texture or versatility.

These are both true of dairy cheeses too.

For anyone interested in learning about category theory, this series is very good: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbgaMIhjbmEnaH_LTkxLI...

> But the real question is whether it is a _useful_ modeling language for everything.

Category theory is definitely not useful for modeling everything. However, it's useful for modeling a whole lot. Categories have few axoims, and those they do have align well with how humans break down complex problems, so a lot of systems can be modeled neatly with categories. And category models are useful for proving existence, uniqueness, and notions of "maximum" and "minimum" for their "arrows", which are often useful things people try to prove about systems.

Categories aren't just graphs; they have additional properties, the most important of which is composition (ex. function composition). They can also be thought of as a type algebra, like groups or rings, but again with different properties.

Edit: these extra properties allow you to reason about a wide class of problems when they're represented as categories, not just round trip them from unencoded to encoded to unencoded. For example, Pijul uses a category of patches to model file patching and prove certain properties of the version control system.

> Most of the "open" states aren't any worse off than the ones who went lockdown crazy and in some cases they're actually better off when you look at spread and death.

This could also indicate that states where Covid-19 had a bigger impact responded by enacting stronger mitigations. What makes you prefer your interpretation?

On the other hand Covid-19 would have killed many more people directly if action hadn't been taken to mitigate it's spread. Probably exponentially more people, based on how viruses typically spread.

In other words, the comparison isn't between how many people Covid-19 did kill and how many preventative measures did. It's between how many it would have killed and how many preventative measures did. While there's a lot of uncertainty in how many people Covid-19 would have killed, it's still certainly higher than the preventative measures.