I remember back in grad school they told us we would have to take an ethics seminar and I thought it might be something interesting about the role of a scientist in society or something like that, but it was actually pretty much just “Don’t have sex with the undergraduates, even though technically there isn’t a strict rule against it.”

So I wonder, how does a person go to a shelter and pick a pet? When I got my dog ten years ago, I wasn’t actually planning to get a dog, he was the only dog there, and he just started freaking out when I walked past him. I didn’t feel like I was making a choice. Yesterday I went to the animal shelter and deliberately met several sweet dogs, but I have no idea how I’m supposed to just pick which one will be in my life for probably about a decade after knowing them for only half an hour.

The article focuses on the negatives but significant warming seems like it might be a net benefit for Canada.

That’s a rather radical departure from society’s general attitude towards suicide.

Would you rather have them let him die?

Edit: With that said,

But in this latest case in Texas, ICE also received permission to force-feed the Cuban hunger striker through a “percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy” tube insertion. This is a surgery in which medical staff make an incision in a person’s abdomen, insert a tube that remains in place indefinitely until it is surgically removed again and pump liquid directly into the stomach.

Are they keeping this prisoner constantly restrained?

I think our moral intuitions are out of alignment with a logical consideration of good and bad. So I’m not a bad person according to my moral intuitions (not the same thing as being a good person) but also pretty much everyone (including me) is a bad person according to logical consideration.

(My logic is that only humans appear to be moral agents, but non-human animals deserve moral consideration and there are a lot more non-human animals than there are humans. Thus even seemingly simple questions like “Is it good to save someone’s life?” depend on whether it is better to prevent that person from eating meat by letting him die or to have him contribute to environmental degradation by remaining alive, and thereby prevent wild animals that would have suffered from being born. The effect on the person is not the major deciding factor.)

The problem with letting the President unilaterally start a war is that you can’t unilaterally end a war - you can only unilaterally stop fighting, which is different and often a bad idea.

we just have to accept their is a wanna be mob boss in the White House

Yeah, that’s how democracy works in this case.

Getting on Trump’s bad side can mean an anti-trust lawsuit or an end to tariff exemptions. With billions of dollars at stake, the executives would be negligent to act otherwise.

I’m a big fan of his, but I’m also not sure he’s the right person to judge what a mentally healthy, well-adjusted individual should act like.

Is that a refutation? I admit, when I consider how my distant ancestors and the majority of humans throughout history lived, I wonder why they chose to go on, and to create new generations who also lived lives like theirs, and the only answer I have is that they lacked perspective. Maybe a philosophy that teaches one to refuse a life without dignity is, in that context, correct philosophy.

What’s on your door that you might not want people to see? I really can’t think of anything. (Generally the private things go inside the house…)

The New Hampshire style lowercase-L libertarians I met weren’t like the online uppercase-L libertarians that that book is about. (They generally wouldn’t call themselves libertarians, for one thing.) My impression (as, ultimately, an outsider) was that they were practical people accustomed to rural life who thought it was important that everyone should mind his own business.

My favorite so far has been New Hampshire - lots of space, beautiful forests, cool summers, low taxes, and the general libertarian attitude. I don’t really have a least favorite. Even the ones that I felt weren’t right for me had their appeal. California was the one I had the strongest negative reaction to. The extent of homelessness in the Bay Area was shocking, but on the other hand the climate was absolutely heavenly. (The two facts are not unrelated.)

Fair share? What California chooses to tax its residents is its business, but the proposed wealth tax claims to apply to non-residents and taxes even those assets they acquired after leaving California. It’s a grotesque violation of any reasonable understanding of jurisdiction.

There has to be some balance between promising the voters what they think they want and actually doing what is a good idea.

I suggest trying antidepressants. Obviously I can’t diagnose you from one post, but my impression is that your problem is primarily in your ability (or lack thereof) to enjoy your circumstances, not in your circumstances themselves. For what it’s worth, I’m an adult with a good job, few responsibilities, and enough money to buy anything I might reasonably want and I still need my bupropion - it’s just something about how my brain works, not anything in the external world.

Being told that my girlfriend was probably too old to have children naturally - technically about her age rather than mine, but we were close in age.

A few years earlier, seeing people born when I graduated from high school graduating from high school themselves.

Or before even that, living longer than my mom had - she died young but I hadn’t really felt how young.

I meant that I would be paying extra for it as opposed to a hypothetical car manufactured without the requirement. So it would be like having my taxes raised to pay for providing me something I didn’t want.

Maybe this makes me sound like a jerk, but my thinking in that regard was “I don’t have children and rarely drive near other people’s loose children. Why should I pay for hardware I don’t need?”