First, this is a straw man. Nobody is saying that the CDC's guidelines are infallible. They've been widely criticized for botching the Covid-19 crisis.
Second, the difference between CIA, FBI and CDC is that usually when the CDC makes a pronouncement, it is linked to some scientific basis. Unlike the CIA that can claim Iraq has 'weapons of mass destruction' based on vague evidence that nobody - except for a handful of legislators and the president - get to see, one can go and track the science behind a CDC's announcement relatively easily.
Would you have rather waited until hospital capacity was overwhelmed? Spikes in hospitalizations follow - like clockwork - spikes in contagion. By the time hospitals were overrun, that'd mean you'd be looking at another two or three weeks of ever-growing number of people who'd need to be hospitalized in a system that is already at capacity.
I remember hating the idea when the PEP was at first accepted. I hated the thought of refactoring tools breaking, typos leading to empty replacements, etc.
In reality, f-strings work really well and are super elegant. I'm a convert now.
Arguably, the dominant OS nowadays is whatever your phone runs, plus whatever serves the websites you consume. Microsoft Office reigns unchallenged though.
So what you are against is rich people not paying the taxes they are supposed to be paying, not against 'higher taxes'.
I used to think like you, until I realized that the people sinking millions of dollars in every electoral campaign to push candidates friendly to 'lower taxes' are the ones who are already taking advantage of every loophole.
But... that’s actually a product of the industrialization of meat production. It’s like justifying climate change because ‘oh well, we’ve done until now so might as well keep going’.
In reality people are OK with violence against animals because when they think about animal products they just picture a slab of meat they pick up from the freezer at the supermarket. If they realized what feeds the process that ends up in that neatly packaged sirloin, I’m pretty sure they’d have a different reaction than ‘meh’.
(And again, I fish and hunt so it’s not like I’m some bleeding-heart hippie who can’t take violence against animals. I just think that we should all be less cavalier about meat intake, which after all is a very recent phenomenon)
Human beings, by our continued existence, whether you consume animal products or not, have driven the world uninhabitable for a plenty of wildlives. Even if we don't slaugther livestocks anymore, it can hardly be considered an improvement to the wild world
What you are missing is that Bison lived off whatever plants naturally grew in the land, and that their numbers declined and increased with the available food supply. The loss of natural habitat and biodiversity alone should be a cause for concern.
My impression was (again! uninformed!) that pasture-raised cattle basically are living off whatever plants naturally grow on the land. Is that not the case?
Of course it is wrong for factory farmed cattle raised in a shed, and for grain fed to cattle right before slaughter to change their meat, but I thought the bulk of their diet was basically unmanaged wild grasses?
That was, indeed, how cattle used to be raised back in the day, with maybe some grain added to their diet to make up for seasonality of plants (after all, cow eating is a year-round business).
Nowadays, most cattle lives confined in a pen, being fed grass and grains depending on the stage of growth. There’s still some very small farmers using the traditional methodology, but the vast majority of the meat you can buy in a supermarket - even fancy ones like Wholefoods - are the product of mass production.
Let's not overlook the fact that most cows raised in massive farms are fed a horrible diet and most beef based products - even raw beef - are also processed and have additives.
I'm not saying that Beyond Burger is better or worse, but that pretending all beef is healthy is kind of silly.
The cow that you ate today most likely lived its whole life in a cage no much bigger than its body, inside a huge facility reeking of feces and death and ate an atrocious diet, only to be killed at the perfectly calculated time to maximize profit.
I'm a meat eater. Heck, I hunt (and eat what I hunt) and even I can tell you that your argument is ridiculous.
Second, the difference between CIA, FBI and CDC is that usually when the CDC makes a pronouncement, it is linked to some scientific basis. Unlike the CIA that can claim Iraq has 'weapons of mass destruction' based on vague evidence that nobody - except for a handful of legislators and the president - get to see, one can go and track the science behind a CDC's announcement relatively easily.