Like any kind of contest, finding rules violations is hard and not foolproof. It’s like sports that forbid using steroids - competitors do regularly take those substances while training, then quit taking them for competition and go uncaught. Competitors who are discovered later to have been violating rules are stripped of titles.

That said, I don’t think it’s a very controversial concept that a beauty pageant shouldn’t be a contest about who could afford the best surgeons. Well - as I said earlier I think beauty pageants are absurd to begin with, but if they have to exist I don’t think it should be a contest between surgeons.

I think it would have been fair to have a rule saying “no surgical modifications”… because doing things like facelift, nose-job, breast/buttox implants, cheek lifts, wrinkle removal, etc, are obviously unfair advantages (in a beauty contest) for those who have the money pay for it; and having a generic blanket rule like that would have accomplished the same thing they were trying to accomplish without being so blatantly transphobic… so a rule like what they have only proves that they are both despicable AND dumb. The entire notion of beauty pageants is outdated and stupid if you ask me.

This crucially important caveat they snuck in there:

“Prof Scarborough said: “Cherry-picking data on high-impact, plant-based food or low-impact meat can obscure the clear relationship between animal-based foods and the environment.”

…which is an interesting way of saying that lines get blurry depending on the type of meat diet people had and/or the quantity vs the type of plant-based diet people had.

Takeaway from the article shouldn’t be meat=bad and vegan=good - the takeaway should be that meat can be an environmentally responsible part of a reasonable diet if done right and that it’s also possible for vegan diets to be more environmentally irresponsible.

A lot of community types just simply don’t work without a minimum critical mass of members.

Imagine asking a programming question on a software development community of just 5 people. You end up with 3 people who aren’t active enough to see the question, 1 person sees but doesn’t have an answer and doesn’t respond (classic lurker), and one person sees it and responds that they don’t know the answer. Now imagine a community of 5 thousand people…it’s suddenly much more feasible to even bother asking the question.

Sure, fediverse could exist with just 5 people, but it would be worthless and pointless.