@HighlandLawyer @cstross @Menhit @feorag

Yeah. I knew that, sorry, the ambiguousness of the English language was just briefly funny to me.

@VoxDei @cstross @Menhit @feorag Sure, the ambiguities of the English language are a never-ending source of amusement (and a regular source of income for lawyers).
Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/191/

@HighlandLawyer @VoxDei @cstross @Menhit @feorag that's one of the reasons why I stopped learning some stuff at work. they would have put me into a team with other people who knew that stuff.

it happened to me before. now I check better what trainings I actually do.

@HighlandLawyer @VoxDei @cstross @Menhit @feorag Having an optimized language sounds nice until you realize that honestly the little imperfections and ambiguities add soul. Lojban is lowkey soulless.

I'm not even talking about the Sisyphean task of getting an IAL actually adopted. That's why i think English is the one most likely to become the "Human Language". Sure, Mandarin has more speakers but they're all in China. English is almost everywhere. That's a huge asset for language spread.

@HighlandLawyer @VoxDei @Menhit @feorag Yeah: idiots who don't realize that non-human species need an appropriately non-human diet.

(While we were in the cat cafe we got to see an 11:30am swarm as the cats headed for the back room in response to one of their minders opening a door and slipping inside. Presumably it was elevenses o'clock!)

@cstross @HighlandLawyer There's a difference between a cat in the wild and a house cat, though. The latter can eat things that no cat could possibly find in the wild, like cat food designed by humans to contain all the necessary nutrients from sources that no cat ever dreamed of. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/sep/13/cats-may-get-health-benefits-from-vegan-diet-study-suggests

@stveje @cstross That's not a carnivore v vegan argument though, it's an organic v synthesised diet argument.
In theory humans (and any other animal) could be kept going indefinitely through feeding an exact balance of all necessary nutrients via a canula, but is that a "solution to unhealthy eating"?

@HighlandLawyer You said a vegan cat would be a dead cat, which I refuted. I'm not sure what argument you're trying to make now, but it seems irrelevant to the original point.

@stveje Mind you don't fall into that well, actually.
To me a diet which requires synthetic supplements (ie medication) to remain alive is not a diet. Humans can (with effort) live healthily on a diet absent any animal products without synthetic supplements; cats cannot. Therefore by my understanding of "vegan", cats cannot be vegan. If your definition of "vegan" is different, logically your conclusion may differ.

@HighlandLawyer Fair enough.

@HighlandLawyer @stveje You're describing Total Parenteral Nutrition. Used in clinical environments for patients who are ill enough that their digestive system is non-functional. It's expensive, unpleasant, and requires serious attention to sterility and infection control because the patient must be hooked up to an i/v line for 10-16 hours a day, 5-7 days a week. Beats dying, though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parenteral_nutrition

@stveje @HighlandLawyer Or tuna.

If you believe in any kind of anthropomorphic god, the fact that house cats universally adore tuna is clear proof that your god has a sense of humour.

@cstross @stveje @HighlandLawyer
My last cat hated tuna, put some in her bowl and she’d sniff and recoil, backing away from it. Then we’d give it to our sheepdog, who loved it.

@HighlandLawyer @VoxDei @cstross @Menhit @feorag though now I'm wondering how much taurine supplement (and presumably other supplements) a cat would need.

(I hope nobody works this out, as I am sure there are some crunchy types who would want to put their obligate-carnivore pets on a vegan diet)