Factory farming considered worse than weapons research? Unless it refers to a specific kind of farming of which I'm not aware, I think the author led their own views cloud their judgement.
Good point. It is possible that weapons research has positive externalities and a deterrence factor.
The lack of any armed forces on this list is somewhat surprising - although definitely not all armed forces roles would belong.
Agriculture and the systems built around it in much of the world has serious problems for the world and it's future.
This wasn't a bad list. However, one factor I'd consider is the individual role's role and options.
For instance, I've read (I think it was in "Fast food nation") that factory farms in the US are often staffed by people who are not legally permitted to work or reside in the US and who are at constant risk. They generally don't have much education or options, and have no recourse if they are mistreated on the job or denied pay. I'd also be disinclined to hold a burger flipper at macky d's responsible for, well, macky d's.
A patent troll, on the other hand, is a well educated person, almost certainly a US citizen or someone with legal rights and options, who had every opportunity to choose a different path in life, and indeed still does.
By the way, there's this job where you collect vast amounts of personal information about people, who may be unaware or only semi-aware of what is being collected, and then using sophisticated machine learning to get them to click on ads... where does that fall in the spectrum of harmful jobs?
Do you think you suffer when you click on an ad you think is relevant to you? I don't think internet ads do me much harm, especially well targeted ones I want to click on.
If you don't consider the absence of your own (or your loved ones') privacy as "harm", then perhaps the job of inducing such an absence of privacy wouldn't be considered "harmful" by your standards. By my standards, however, that is considered "harmful" - maybe not physically, but certainly psychologically.
Do you not consider the eating of a Big Mac harmful for the eater just because the eater felt said Big Mac to be relevant to him/her?
Have you considered that a targetted add is much weaker signal than a non-targetted one? A non-targetted add is presumably more costly, thus signifying higher confidence of the maker in the value of the product.
Only factory farming of animals is on there, and given the suffering of the animals involved I think it's a complete no-brainer that it overall does harm.
In the repeated game of life, you can end up ahead if, by forswearing extreme cruelty toward others even when it's locally "efficient", you significantly reduce the probability of others behaving so cruelly toward you. This is a major reason civilization exists at all.
It is not unreasonable to believe that someone who is used to being exceptionally cruel to animals, when it is not terribly expensive to avoid that cruelty, will on average be more willing than usual to be cruel towards other humans. "Avoid hurting beings that can experience pain" is arguably a more compelling Schelling point to organize 21st century civilization around than "avoid hurting other humans, but do whatever the hell you want to other species". I disagree with Wiblin about this being a "no-brainer", but I mostly agree with his final judgment of the desirability of phasing out this type of factory farming.
It's completely wrong to say that anyone would go hungry because we stopped farming meat. The market would easily adjust and provide other foods at a lower cost.
Exactly! If you don't see the political agenda behind this one, you are blind. But I was doomed to be down voted when I made the comment above anyways given the demographics on hackernews.
>Rick Santorum has accused universities of "indoctrination" and "killing religion".
The universities are heavily in the business of indoctrination. That's why millennials are so much more pro gay marriage and anti free speech than their elders. The "killing religion" part is overblown.
>James Inhofe has written a book about how climate science is supposedly a hoax.
Much of it is. There is evidence to suggest the earth is warming, but anyone who tells you he can predict the global surface temperature in 20 years is selling you something. I don't know where people got the idea wild statements based entirely on demonstrably wrong models are Teh Science.
>Chris Christie said that a national teachers union deserves a “punch in the face”.
It does. Note there's a huge difference between teachers and the AFT. In most places you don't don't get to decide whether or not part of your paycheck goes to the union, so it's a bit disingenuous to characterize that as an attack on teachers. I don't know how we reached the point where to work as a teacher I would have to pay money to a third party that's going to support political candidates and educational policy I oppose.
I'd also point out regardless of what they say or don't say governors of both parties across the country are looking ofr ways to curtail the power of public employee unions.
> but anyone who tells you he can predict the global surface temperature in 20 years is selling you something
They are predicting the averages, not exact numbers. It's like when someone is predicting average dice roll, it can be done even though the exact next dice roll cannot be predicted. This is one of the most misunderstood aspects of climate science.
Except if you go back twenty years you'll see their predictions haven't even come close to panning out on "the averages". The data set is crap, and there's no way to validate the models. Normally in science when your model turns out to be wrong you realize you don't really understand what's going on.
Not these people, though. There's too much hubris, money, and professional standing at stake for anyone to admit he doesn't know any more than a five year old extrapolating historical data with a crayon.
These are different objections. I get the feeling the problem is you, you don't want to understand the science. And I can't help you if you don't state more precisely what your objection is. For example, you say "data and model are wrong" - which data and what model?
Predicting rate of change is a tricky problem, because it's nonlinear transition phenomenon. We can easily predict the resulting steady state, though. So for instance, in some areas, scientists grossly underestimated the rate of change - for example Arctic sea ice. But that doesn't mean they don't understand what's going on - the resulting steady state (what amount of warming are we going to get, called climate sensitivity) is actually quite well understood both from history and models.
>These are different objections. I get the feeling the problem is you, you don't want to understand the science.
I'm well equipped by training to understand the science. No, the problem is you don't like it when people tell you your emperor has no clothes. Look, when your model doesn't agree with reality that doesn't mean it's mostly right. It means you don't understand the system. You say you can predict the steady state, but you have no way to validate that assertion. It's all based on speculative modeling.
All models eventually make predictions to the future that are difficult to validate; that's the whole point of having the model of something.
We have plenty of evidence what the steady state (based on historical data and our understanding of physics) will be; I suspect you are not familiar with it (you still didn't tell me what exactly is the thing that you find in a disagreement).
>We have plenty of evidence what the steady state (based on historical data and our understanding of physics) will be; I suspect you are not familiar with it (you still didn't tell me what exactly is the thing that you find in a disagreement).
I suspect you and I have far different thresholds regarding what consists of "evidence", and I'd like to point out there's a difference between the words "difficult" and "impossible". In any event the "difficulty" of validating predictions hasn't stopped people who ought to know better from spouting off like it all came from a burning bush. So far this is what we've seen:
* "We have a model showing the earth is warming catastropically, and CO2 is the culprit. Look, in ten years average global surface temperatures will be $today_guess warmer.
* (ten years later) "Well, sure, what we've measured isn't anything like what we predicted. Of course, we have a new model that agrees 100% with the historical record."
* (ten years later) "Huh. Well, look, it's really hard to figure out what the temperature is gonna be in ten years, so let me tell you what the temperature is going to be in a hundred years, long after it matters to anyone alive today.
There must be tens of thousands of people who've gone broke trading on stock market models that match previous data.
> Well, sure, what we've measured isn't anything like what we predicted.
You still didn't answer the question, what exactly model you refer to?
Even if you look at work of Plass in 1950s, you will find very close estimates to climate sensitivity that we have today. And that's just from simple equilibrium models that include water vapor (his model is in fact wrong in several ways that pretty much cancel out).
In fact, no one has been able to show a working model of Earth that doesn't show a warming due to CO2. (Critics are trying to poke some holes but to have an alternate theory is a whole different ballgame.) The models are tested on historical data; they are not just statistical extrapolation of the current trend.
If you're young, I think eventually you're going to find that whether the rate of warming is 0.1 degree per decade or 0.2 degree per decade doesn't matter too much. Either way, it's too fast so it will cause mass extinction (and problems for agriculture), and either way, the new steady state temperature is driven by the amount of CO2 we emit.
>You still didn't answer the question, what exactly model you refer to?
Good question. Which of the many non-working models would you like to discuss. Why don't we start at the IPCC?
>In fact, no one has been able to show a working model of Earth that doesn't show a warming due to CO2.
Which isn't surprising at all, given no one has been able to show a working model of Earth.
>If you're young, I think eventually you're going to find that whether the rate of warming is 0.1 degree per decade or 0.2 degree per decade doesn't matter too much. Either way, it's too fast so it will cause mass extinction (and problems for agriculture), and either way, the new steady state temperature is driven by the amount of CO2 we emit.
There's no way you can know that. CO2 may be completely dominated by other factors.
In any event, I'm not young, so none of this matters to me on a personal level.
Current climate models are pretty accurate in their predictions.
> Which isn't surprising at all, given no one has been able to show a working model of Earth.
I am not sure, at this point, if you are just trolling. Every model has a certain limits, but it doesn't mean it is "not working". If you actually knew history (I always recommend https://www.aip.org/history/climate/index.htm) it is a remarkable achievement that we can model climate at all.
> There's no way you can know that. CO2 may be completely dominated by other factors.
Sorry, this is just trolling. Of course, in the same sense, we cannot predict the path of the Earth around the Sun because what if an unknown dominating factor comes to its path?
When creating a model, we simply try to account for every important factor we know of. And given that the predictions are quite accurate (look at Lindzen comparison!), we probably know of all the important ones.
> Chris Christie said that a national teachers union deserves a “punch in the face”
To be fair, teachers' unions do tend to cause a desire for percussive maintenance. In my own (admittedly anecdotal) observation, said unions tend to be run by - and thus prioritize - tenured teachers over all other factors (including actual approval from students, parents, other faculty, etc., and also including test results, passing rates, etc.). This results in skilled, fresh talent to be the first for consideration when schools need to cut back on teacher employment, rather than the arguably better alternative of encouraging some of the more tenured teachers to retire. This isn't to mention that said unions tend to impose dues regardless of whether or not one is a member, and that said unions frequently take political stances that the dues-payers may or may not agree with.
This isn't to say that the concept of a teachers' union in and of itself is a bad idea - far from it. Rather, in their contemporary form, they seem to be getting more in the way of education (by favoring tenured and perhaps out-of-touch educators over younger, fresher educators with more modern foundations; also, by favoring said tenured and more expensive teachers over younger, less expensive teachers, thus contributing to higher class sizes and thus a degradation of educational quality for students) than they are helping education.
Granted, I'm not really involved in the inner workings of teachers' unions, and my experience is limited to both what I saw as a student and what I continue to see among friends who got into teaching, so maybe these tendencies aren't universal.
Christ. Has it ever occurred to these hipsters that factory farming feeds people? It's simple science that conventional farming is the only way to feed 7+ billion (soon to be 9+ billion) people. And referring to slaughtered chickens as "contributed deaths"... This makes me sad because I once had a little faith in this project.
A vegetarian diet is i) requires less land and energy, ii) as a result is cheaper and iii) per $ is as nutritious as factory farmed meat. People in poverty eat very little meat. In fact, all meat production and consumption, in addition to factory farming, can be objected to on the further ground that it raises food prices for the poor: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/business/worldbusiness/27i.... This is inevitable as meat production is 3-10x less energy and land efficient as eating plant products.
Finally, do you think that the chickens do not die?
Do plants not die? Saying that people are causing death without clearly qualifying that its farm animals is childish.
The environmental issue is legitimate, but they treated it as an afterthought. It also brings up issues of personal liberty and how much we know about vegetarianism's health effects.
And yes, people in the third world eat very little meat. But, you know what? I bet a lot of them want to eat meat. Remember that that argument can be made about anything even remotely nonessential.
The plants dying point is somewhat irrelevant in this context as 80,000 Hours's philosophy stems from Peter Singer's brand of utilitarian ethics that interpret suffering as it relates to experience, or consciousness.
What a wonderful sentence. You can keep concocting winding philosophical sentences like that to defend the dignity of chickens, and the rest of us will keep trying feed people.
Not to say that I disagree with the notion that factory farming is cruel and unnecessary (I did quite a bit of ranching duties in my childhood, all of which were open-pasture). Rather, there's a point where a given human will consider it "cruel" to inflict pain or death upon another living being, and said point is a very subjective one.
I personally draw that line somewhere between the raising of livestock as food and the continuous torture of said livestock as practiced in many larger livestock facilities; that's because I recognize that humans are naturally omnivorous apex predators, and don't subscribe to the belief that there's something fundamentally different between myself eating a cow and my dog eating a cow. Others may draw that line as "vegetarian, but I'll swat a mosquito that's biting me and I might try eating bugs". Still others might even let that mosquito suck freely. Regardless, the position of said point on the scale between "I don't even kill plants; like, everything has a soul, brah" and "HAHAHAHAHA MURDER EVERYTHING! ENDLESS SLAUGHTER! BURN THE EARTH! BURN THE SKIES! SATAN/GARGAMEL 2016! HAHAHAHAHAHAA!" is very subjective, as are the notions of "good" and "evil" that tend to influence such a placement.
Obviously any such list will be colored by the ethical system of the author.
Many people see zero harm in slaughtering animals for food. A large fraction of those also see a net positive in causing pain to those animals if it reduces costs.
Some libertarians would see little to no harm done by those marketing harmful products, and instead ascribe the moral weight of the harm to the consumers.
I'd be interested in seeing any empirical data on the weapons research angle. My understanding is that wars have been approximately equally deadly to the participants for much of recorded history. With the exception of weapons that are a risk for near-extinction level events, my intuition is that opposing sides in a war kill each other, regardless of how they are armed.
This comments section reads like a bad joke. How many times do Rob and Ben have to cite the overwhelming empirical evidence that 1) factory farming really does harm animals (how does anyone doubt this?), and 2) factory farming is not preventing anyone from starving to death, before someone admits they were wrong?
I was really hoping this would be something about jobs that are occupationally-hazardous, rather than an opinion piece judging various careers based on subjective notions of "good" and "bad" without any real qualification. Not that the points are wrong, but the authors could have delved further into why those careers are immoral ones to have.
Also.
> [raising animals for food] involves killing, which is both painful and perhaps immoral in itself.
Not if done properly. There are numerous ways to kill an animal painlessly and quickly; the most high-tech I've personally seen is the use of a high-voltage electric current through the cranium of an animal (usually when working with cows), which pretty much immediately shuts down the brain and any consciousness the animal might have. Sedation/anaesthesia also helps significantly. Smaller livestock can be decapitated (which, while likely not painless per se, is quick if done properly) or a probe can be jammed into the cranium to "stir" the brain and quickly shut it down (this is something you may have very well experienced firsthand in your run-of-the-mill frog dissection from grade school).
I personally disagree with the immorality (humans are naturally predators; I don't judge my dog for eating meat, nor do I judge some guy walking down the street with a bucket of fried chicken), but I realize that not everyone feels the same, and I do agree with the immorality of factory farming.
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[ 233 ms ] story [ 482 ms ] threadAgriculture and the systems built around it in much of the world has serious problems for the world and it's future.
"Military decision-makers"
and
"Working in the army"
They didn't make the top ten in part for the reason you gave.
For instance, I've read (I think it was in "Fast food nation") that factory farms in the US are often staffed by people who are not legally permitted to work or reside in the US and who are at constant risk. They generally don't have much education or options, and have no recourse if they are mistreated on the job or denied pay. I'd also be disinclined to hold a burger flipper at macky d's responsible for, well, macky d's.
A patent troll, on the other hand, is a well educated person, almost certainly a US citizen or someone with legal rights and options, who had every opportunity to choose a different path in life, and indeed still does.
By the way, there's this job where you collect vast amounts of personal information about people, who may be unaware or only semi-aware of what is being collected, and then using sophisticated machine learning to get them to click on ads... where does that fall in the spectrum of harmful jobs?
If you don't consider the absence of your own (or your loved ones') privacy as "harm", then perhaps the job of inducing such an absence of privacy wouldn't be considered "harmful" by your standards. By my standards, however, that is considered "harmful" - maybe not physically, but certainly psychologically.
Do you not consider the eating of a Big Mac harmful for the eater just because the eater felt said Big Mac to be relevant to him/her?
It is not unreasonable to believe that someone who is used to being exceptionally cruel to animals, when it is not terribly expensive to avoid that cruelty, will on average be more willing than usual to be cruel towards other humans. "Avoid hurting beings that can experience pain" is arguably a more compelling Schelling point to organize 21st century civilization around than "avoid hurting other humans, but do whatever the hell you want to other species". I disagree with Wiblin about this being a "no-brainer", but I mostly agree with his final judgment of the desirability of phasing out this type of factory farming.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10062999.
It's completely wrong to say that anyone would go hungry because we stopped farming meat. The market would easily adjust and provide other foods at a lower cost.
James Inhofe has written a book about how climate science is supposedly a hoax. http://www.amazon.com/The-Greatest-Hoax-Conspiracy-Threatens...
Chris Christie said that a national teachers union deserves a “punch in the face” http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/chris-christie...
The universities are heavily in the business of indoctrination. That's why millennials are so much more pro gay marriage and anti free speech than their elders. The "killing religion" part is overblown.
>James Inhofe has written a book about how climate science is supposedly a hoax.
Much of it is. There is evidence to suggest the earth is warming, but anyone who tells you he can predict the global surface temperature in 20 years is selling you something. I don't know where people got the idea wild statements based entirely on demonstrably wrong models are Teh Science.
>Chris Christie said that a national teachers union deserves a “punch in the face”.
It does. Note there's a huge difference between teachers and the AFT. In most places you don't don't get to decide whether or not part of your paycheck goes to the union, so it's a bit disingenuous to characterize that as an attack on teachers. I don't know how we reached the point where to work as a teacher I would have to pay money to a third party that's going to support political candidates and educational policy I oppose.
I'd also point out regardless of what they say or don't say governors of both parties across the country are looking ofr ways to curtail the power of public employee unions.
> but anyone who tells you he can predict the global surface temperature in 20 years is selling you something
They are predicting the averages, not exact numbers. It's like when someone is predicting average dice roll, it can be done even though the exact next dice roll cannot be predicted. This is one of the most misunderstood aspects of climate science.
Not these people, though. There's too much hubris, money, and professional standing at stake for anyone to admit he doesn't know any more than a five year old extrapolating historical data with a crayon.
Predicting rate of change is a tricky problem, because it's nonlinear transition phenomenon. We can easily predict the resulting steady state, though. So for instance, in some areas, scientists grossly underestimated the rate of change - for example Arctic sea ice. But that doesn't mean they don't understand what's going on - the resulting steady state (what amount of warming are we going to get, called climate sensitivity) is actually quite well understood both from history and models.
I'm well equipped by training to understand the science. No, the problem is you don't like it when people tell you your emperor has no clothes. Look, when your model doesn't agree with reality that doesn't mean it's mostly right. It means you don't understand the system. You say you can predict the steady state, but you have no way to validate that assertion. It's all based on speculative modeling.
We have plenty of evidence what the steady state (based on historical data and our understanding of physics) will be; I suspect you are not familiar with it (you still didn't tell me what exactly is the thing that you find in a disagreement).
I suspect you and I have far different thresholds regarding what consists of "evidence", and I'd like to point out there's a difference between the words "difficult" and "impossible". In any event the "difficulty" of validating predictions hasn't stopped people who ought to know better from spouting off like it all came from a burning bush. So far this is what we've seen:
* "We have a model showing the earth is warming catastropically, and CO2 is the culprit. Look, in ten years average global surface temperatures will be $today_guess warmer.
* (ten years later) "Well, sure, what we've measured isn't anything like what we predicted. Of course, we have a new model that agrees 100% with the historical record."
* (ten years later) "Huh. Well, look, it's really hard to figure out what the temperature is gonna be in ten years, so let me tell you what the temperature is going to be in a hundred years, long after it matters to anyone alive today.
There must be tens of thousands of people who've gone broke trading on stock market models that match previous data.
You still didn't answer the question, what exactly model you refer to?
Even if you look at work of Plass in 1950s, you will find very close estimates to climate sensitivity that we have today. And that's just from simple equilibrium models that include water vapor (his model is in fact wrong in several ways that pretty much cancel out).
In fact, no one has been able to show a working model of Earth that doesn't show a warming due to CO2. (Critics are trying to poke some holes but to have an alternate theory is a whole different ballgame.) The models are tested on historical data; they are not just statistical extrapolation of the current trend.
If you're young, I think eventually you're going to find that whether the rate of warming is 0.1 degree per decade or 0.2 degree per decade doesn't matter too much. Either way, it's too fast so it will cause mass extinction (and problems for agriculture), and either way, the new steady state temperature is driven by the amount of CO2 we emit.
Good question. Which of the many non-working models would you like to discuss. Why don't we start at the IPCC?
>In fact, no one has been able to show a working model of Earth that doesn't show a warming due to CO2.
Which isn't surprising at all, given no one has been able to show a working model of Earth.
>If you're young, I think eventually you're going to find that whether the rate of warming is 0.1 degree per decade or 0.2 degree per decade doesn't matter too much. Either way, it's too fast so it will cause mass extinction (and problems for agriculture), and either way, the new steady state temperature is driven by the amount of CO2 we emit.
There's no way you can know that. CO2 may be completely dominated by other factors.
In any event, I'm not young, so none of this matters to me on a personal level.
Here are some analyses: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/05/hansen... http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/02/2012-u... http://www.skepticalscience.com/lindzen-illusion-2-lindzen-v...
Current climate models are pretty accurate in their predictions.
> Which isn't surprising at all, given no one has been able to show a working model of Earth.
I am not sure, at this point, if you are just trolling. Every model has a certain limits, but it doesn't mean it is "not working". If you actually knew history (I always recommend https://www.aip.org/history/climate/index.htm) it is a remarkable achievement that we can model climate at all.
> There's no way you can know that. CO2 may be completely dominated by other factors.
Sorry, this is just trolling. Of course, in the same sense, we cannot predict the path of the Earth around the Sun because what if an unknown dominating factor comes to its path?
When creating a model, we simply try to account for every important factor we know of. And given that the predictions are quite accurate (look at Lindzen comparison!), we probably know of all the important ones.
To be fair, teachers' unions do tend to cause a desire for percussive maintenance. In my own (admittedly anecdotal) observation, said unions tend to be run by - and thus prioritize - tenured teachers over all other factors (including actual approval from students, parents, other faculty, etc., and also including test results, passing rates, etc.). This results in skilled, fresh talent to be the first for consideration when schools need to cut back on teacher employment, rather than the arguably better alternative of encouraging some of the more tenured teachers to retire. This isn't to mention that said unions tend to impose dues regardless of whether or not one is a member, and that said unions frequently take political stances that the dues-payers may or may not agree with.
This isn't to say that the concept of a teachers' union in and of itself is a bad idea - far from it. Rather, in their contemporary form, they seem to be getting more in the way of education (by favoring tenured and perhaps out-of-touch educators over younger, fresher educators with more modern foundations; also, by favoring said tenured and more expensive teachers over younger, less expensive teachers, thus contributing to higher class sizes and thus a degradation of educational quality for students) than they are helping education.
Granted, I'm not really involved in the inner workings of teachers' unions, and my experience is limited to both what I saw as a student and what I continue to see among friends who got into teaching, so maybe these tendencies aren't universal.
Finally, do you think that the chickens do not die?
The environmental issue is legitimate, but they treated it as an afterthought. It also brings up issues of personal liberty and how much we know about vegetarianism's health effects.
And yes, people in the third world eat very little meat. But, you know what? I bet a lot of them want to eat meat. Remember that that argument can be made about anything even remotely nonessential.
Not to say that I disagree with the notion that factory farming is cruel and unnecessary (I did quite a bit of ranching duties in my childhood, all of which were open-pasture). Rather, there's a point where a given human will consider it "cruel" to inflict pain or death upon another living being, and said point is a very subjective one.
I personally draw that line somewhere between the raising of livestock as food and the continuous torture of said livestock as practiced in many larger livestock facilities; that's because I recognize that humans are naturally omnivorous apex predators, and don't subscribe to the belief that there's something fundamentally different between myself eating a cow and my dog eating a cow. Others may draw that line as "vegetarian, but I'll swat a mosquito that's biting me and I might try eating bugs". Still others might even let that mosquito suck freely. Regardless, the position of said point on the scale between "I don't even kill plants; like, everything has a soul, brah" and "HAHAHAHAHA MURDER EVERYTHING! ENDLESS SLAUGHTER! BURN THE EARTH! BURN THE SKIES! SATAN/GARGAMEL 2016! HAHAHAHAHAHAA!" is very subjective, as are the notions of "good" and "evil" that tend to influence such a placement.
Many people see zero harm in slaughtering animals for food. A large fraction of those also see a net positive in causing pain to those animals if it reduces costs.
Some libertarians would see little to no harm done by those marketing harmful products, and instead ascribe the moral weight of the harm to the consumers.
I'd be interested in seeing any empirical data on the weapons research angle. My understanding is that wars have been approximately equally deadly to the participants for much of recorded history. With the exception of weapons that are a risk for near-extinction level events, my intuition is that opposing sides in a war kill each other, regardless of how they are armed.
Also.
> [raising animals for food] involves killing, which is both painful and perhaps immoral in itself.
Not if done properly. There are numerous ways to kill an animal painlessly and quickly; the most high-tech I've personally seen is the use of a high-voltage electric current through the cranium of an animal (usually when working with cows), which pretty much immediately shuts down the brain and any consciousness the animal might have. Sedation/anaesthesia also helps significantly. Smaller livestock can be decapitated (which, while likely not painless per se, is quick if done properly) or a probe can be jammed into the cranium to "stir" the brain and quickly shut it down (this is something you may have very well experienced firsthand in your run-of-the-mill frog dissection from grade school).
I personally disagree with the immorality (humans are naturally predators; I don't judge my dog for eating meat, nor do I judge some guy walking down the street with a bucket of fried chicken), but I realize that not everyone feels the same, and I do agree with the immorality of factory farming.