Sadly not unexpected for a company that managed to rack up a body count using baby formula.

and then theres Kelvin, where 0 literally is 0% hot

“Kidnapping people, separating them from their family, locking them in prison and then exiling them from the country? That’s a horrible thing to do! Unless of course they happen to have not done some paperwork correctly and were born on the other side of this line we drew in the dirt, then its just common sense.” /s

its difficult to say that that has been the key to that in my view, because the primary mechanism by which this has happened has been a spread of industrial infrastructure (and thus both automation and the capacity to trade more things with other places) into areas where it was previously lacking, which has a tendency to reduce the amount of labor needed to produce many common goods and thus their relative price. Making more things and for cheaper is likely to reduce poverty under just about any economic system, and theres nothing about industrial development that implies that it must be done under capitalism, so I dont think we can say that it was key so much as one of the options, which most places have gone with.

That being said, say for the sake of argument that I accept this, that capitalism has been the key to driving a lot of people out of poverty. Would that actually change anything that I had said previously? The notion that a transition to capitalism has lowered poverty, and that capitalism inherently promotes poverty arent contradictory, if the conditions that the capitalism replaced trend towards an even higher level of poverty than capitalism does. Under that circumstance, you would expect to see a dramatic drop in poverty when first adopted, but then for that progress to stall without poverty’s elimination once the level that capitalism trends to under the circumstances is reached. Were the question something like “would you prefer to live under capitalism, or something like feudalism or an authoritarian command economy?” then sure, it’d be the least bad among these. But its still not good enough, and if nothing else we’ve tried has got there, then if we want the actual elimination of poverty, which I think we should, we’re going to need to experiment with new ways of doing things.

It has indeed, but you could, for instance, have said that poverty was a result of feudalism, when that was the primary economic system. The sentiment here isn’t that capitalism alone causes poverty so much as that it’s a result of the design of our social order rather than the individuals experiencing it, with the implication that solving it requires adopting some system that doesn’t inheritly promote it.

The question I always tend to have, when the subject of if economics is or isn’t a science comes up is: given that economies and trade are clearly things that exist (to the extent that any sort of human social interaction exists anyway), and that have measurable properties, it at least ought to be theoretically possible to analyze their behavior using the techniques of science. If you don’t think economics is a science, then if you were to use science to study those things, what field would you consider that work to belong to?

Personally I think the true nature of ethics is both of these. I’m not someone that believes that an objectively correct set of moral laws exist, but rather that ethics are ultimately just reflections of our evolution driving us to like and dislike certain things, and simply a tool we make up to analyze how our actions and the actions of others affect those desires.

Without moral rules being a measurable property of the universe, we cannot simply discover what we “should” do by experiment and reason, as we do for physical laws, but if you arbitrarily define a goal, you can then use reason and knowledge of the world’s workings to analyze if a given action furthers or hinders that goal. Different ethical systems can be phrased as such a goal (generally one with no achievable “end condition” so you can use them indefinitely), for example “follow this set of rules in all circumstances” or “maximize the happiness of sapient beings in the universe”.

But you cant do this without deciding what “goal” to further, and you cant decide which one of those you “ought” to use without already having some sense of what you ought to do, and this is where I think one’s “moral intuition” (or really just the combination of one’s evolved desires and cultural preferences and things taught by one’s parents and similar) comes in. That kind of thing can give you a general sense of things being right and wrong, but without being codified into something consistent.

So, you use that to select goals and axioms so as to create a consistent and defined system that fits your existing moral preconceptions. Under most circumstances, you don’t really need to use it, because it fits your general feeling of right and wrong anyway. If it ends up clearly conflicting with your intuition in some circumstance, you think through the implications of both and either modify the system to make it produce the guidance you feel is appropriate, or you conclude that your intuition is being undesirably inconsistent and try to follow what your system says until what “feels” right to you changes. The system becomes a useful tool to you in cases where your intuition does not come to a clear conclusion. Rather than suffer indecision or risk a choice you might later decide was wrong, you can apply your system, figure out what action it prescribes, and follow that.

If you make no attempt to codify your morals, you cant use them very well in cases where nothing “feels” right, or where multiple mutually exclusive paths do, and risk undermining yourself if you decide very different things in similar situations. But in most everyday matters, you won’t need that formalized version of them to figure out what to do.

The question this notion leaves me with is this: how does this style of a system deal with cases where its not so much one criminal, but the community itself, or someone with power in or over the community, that’s in the wrong? This covers a few different types of scenario; cases where a “cult” (doesn’t have to be a religious type group per se, but more high-control social groups that grant a leader significant power) has high membership in a given community and whose leaders abuse that status, cases of organized crime where a gang or mafia style group might have significant numbers within a community or community leaders in their pocket or just enough firepower that they’d win against the locals in a fight, and cases where a local culture springs up that enables some kind of abuse as a norm (as an example of what I mean with this, there’s the case of Pitcairn island, in which a small and isolated community developed a culture of sexual abuse, such that when it finally attracted outside attention and intervention, about half of the adult men on the islands were charged.) If left entirely to itself for justice, is it not likely that in cases like this, the response by the community will oftenbe to allow abuse to continue, given the percentage of the community involved and their social standing?)

Mind, this is still an exceptional type of scenario, and I do agree that for many crimes, especially more minor offenses or those committed by lone individuals, keeping things to a local level probably works better than involving an outside organization that can’t easily account for nuance and context. However, I’m still left feeling that there are plenty of cases where those in the wrong simply will have more power, be it social standing or some kind of direct influence, over their community than the victims and those who believe them do, and in those cases, there’s utility in having a higher level to appeal to if justice on the local level is denied.

I’m not sure this is really a defense of North Korea so much as pointing out how recent US actions incentivize other governments to build nukes like NK has done, which is something the US historically has seen as an undesirable outcome.

I’ve usually seen it defined as meaning you believe that life had no “meaning” or objective purpose. In that sense, you could absolutely be a nihilist and also strongly stand for something, so long as the internal justification for your conviction wasn’t based on it being somehow objectively correct, just a strong personal liking for that position. Sort of like, “the universe might not care, but I do.”

“Nothing matters” isn’t a position that demands, well any kind of ideology or behavior, because self indulgence or apathy are just as meaningless in a meaningless universe as following some arbitrary and self-assigned code to the bitter end would be.

I never did. I got a learners permit at 16 or so, practiced with my parents for a number of years and renewed the learning permit at least once without testing for a full license, but eventually stopped and let it expire.

I have pretty bad anxiety issues, which driving has proven one of the triggers for, and unlike everything else that triggers it, for driving it got worse with exposure instead of better. I actually wasn’t even that nervous at first, but every time I’d make a mistake, or witness someone else make one, it’d come to mind every time I’d practice driving, because I didn’t want to accidentally kill someone from a lapse in judgment, and eventually every little thing built up so much that one day, my father handed me the keys and asked me to try taking us to a store, and I had a full-on fight-or-flight panic response just sitting in the drivers seat. At that point I finally deicided that it just wasn’t responsible of me to be on the road if after several years I still couldn’t even think straight while driving, and Ive never done it since, and ended up moving states a couple years in order to live somewhere that going with out a car is at least somewhat viable.

To be honest, Ive actually been happier since, its a huge expense that I don’t have, and Ivr found I can get a decent amount of exercise without having to go an intentionally make myself do it, just from walking a lot. But of course, it’s only comfortable in the kind of dense urban area with decent (by US standards) public transit that in the US seems to exist only in a handful of places, the cost of living for which eat a lot of the savings from not having a car in the first place.

Lemons contain water. I’d assume, being fruit, they probably contain at least some sugar? Thus, if you were willing to tolerate a lot of waste and the effort of extracting those ingredients, and had enough spare lemons, maybe you could make lemonade out of just lemons?

I mean, art supplies, even if its just pencil and paper, generally cost money and dont last forever, so someone out there is charging for kids doodling. Unless theyre drawing in the dirt with a stick I guess.

I get that sentiment, but consider: there are orders of magnitude more people in the US than Greenland. As such, if Americans go into communities for Greenland to demonstrate to them that we don’t all support Trump in such a way, the result would be less a “little thing” and more the people actually using that community getting bombarded with Americans apologizing for the actions of other Americans in a space meant to be for Greenland. I’m not from there and so can’t say for sure how that comes across, but I at least imagine that were I from Greenland, I’d probably find this far more annoying than reassuring.

Part of it, I think, is that a random person apologizing on behalf of an entire country is rather pointless. It doesn’t benefit that other country at all (in a personal sense a genuine apology might provide reassurance that the apologizer doesn’t intend to repeat some offense, but a person apologizing for an entire country, that they don’t control, can make no such garuntee, same as apologizing on behalf of an unrepentant stranger would be pointless). The only thing it really does is make the person apologizing feel slightly better about what is going on.

In a pure debate sense, this would be true, even an unpopular or suspicious person is still capable of making a valid point. It should be considered, however, that internet arguments are not formal debates. They can at times use the form and language of them, but most people are not skilled in that kind of formalized arguing, and most people are not arguing in an actual attempt to use the debate to identify stronger vs inconsistent positions (rather than just trying to push people towards ones own ideas or to put down ideas one finds reprehensible).

Now, I dont personally tend to find much point in looking through profiles, it takes too much time for little benefit in my view, but it can sometimes tell you if an account is not worth the time and emotional investment to interact with, or if it has signs that it might not be. The nature of social media is such that there are always far more user’s trying to get your attention, than you have attention to spare. As such, if theres even a notable red-flag that an account isnt worth the time and potential frustration to engage with, it can make pragmatic sense to move on (depending on how much one is willing to put up with, I guess).

From that perspective, telling other people what it was that seemed like a red flag to you lets them consider if that thing makes that account worth their time or not, without them having to find it too, and therefore potentially does those other people a favor. That sounds a bit harsh (at least to me) because plenty of things others might consider suspect, like a new account, cant always be helped (everyone starts off new after all), and being ignored, or having other people call out that thing as a reason they might want to ignore you, is frustrating, but that’s just the nature of giving massive numbers of people the ability to talk to everyone else; most people wont want or have the time to listen to you, and you’re not entitled to their time, however unfair their reason for dismissing you might be.

Big cats are, after all, big cats

A rather extreme way to promote personal hygiene, Id say.

The edges of the hair look like hes been cut and pasted over a different background to me, so maybe he is from that?

It seems to me there are two scenarios: you’re burying a body legally somehow (the question never specifies a human body, so it could be a dead pet, and even if it is human, maybe that person had specific wishes and you’ve done whatever paperwork that might take, idk) in which case the answer is surely yes. Or, you’re doing it illegally, presumably to dispose of the body, in which case I have to question why you’d bury it somewhere that, if found, will immediately implicate you as a suspect.