Tango

Was it Jeffries that vetted her?

So there’s no genetic component then? Good to know. I had always been told there was.

Question: where does sickle cell disease figure into all of this?

Only sorta in NYC; they use it for primaries but not the general, IIRC. Better than nothing though, since it helped Mamdani get past the primary stage.

America NEEDS Ranked Choice Voting (RCV).

The word “liberal” is useless because there is no consensus on what it means. Similarly useless are the words “left” and “right”. “Marxist” is still useful because nobody can deny that it denotes adherence to the ideas of Karl Marx. Similarly, even though people TRY to erode its meaning, “Christian” must ultimately mean adherence to the philosophies espoused by Christ. So for example anyone who identifies as “Christian” but makes no attempt to follow the principles he espoused, is simply lying.

I’m starting to think that maybe Elon DIDN’T turn off Ukraine’s access the other day and merely said he did, in the same way the Russians say “the Ukrainians didn’t blow up that depot; a soldier was smoking and accidentally started a fire”.

Ironic, given that DARPA originally envisaged the Internet specifically as a decentralized comms network which would be resilient against these kinds of strikes. But I suppose it’s different in a dictatorship which needs central control.

Anyone who believes Bezos clearly doesn’t understand how capitalism works. AI will allow rich people who already own the companies to increase productivity with fewer employees. Meaning, they will gain more money and have less reason to spend it. Without a drastically higher wealth tax which funds social programs, how are the working (read: redundant) class going to GET access to money? With what jobs?

Let me ask you this: back in more chauvinistic times, a family was expected to subsist entirely on a single salary: the husband’s. Since women’s lib doubled the workforce, have families become more or less able to afford necessities like housing? The economy doesn’t adjust to make things easier for people. If the average household income doubles, households don’t become more able to afford things. Prices just go up.

The people who already possess resources like property aren’t gonna suddenly stop asking have-not newcomers for as much money as they can squeeze out of them. There’s absolutely no aspect of capitalism that will ever lead to that outcome.

So if rich people who own businesses can make those businesses function with fewer employees, then they’re not gonna just say “hey guys, I’m gonna pay you the same wages for only working 3 days, doubling my workforce and the amount I have to pay it”. There’s no reason for them to do so. None. Poor people will, instead, go jobless and be allowed to slowly die of any of many poverty-related causes.

Rich people only tolerate poor people because they need so many of us to do things for them. That’s about to change.

“They have no shame, do they? They don’t even bother to lie badly anymore. I suppose that’s the final humiliation.”

Pretty sure Christopher Nolan did not, in fact, melt any civilians.

I’d be interested to know what reaction this has in the Kremlin. And I don’t mean the “we don’t care, we are the great Russia; all others are foolish ants we will crush” bullshit that Lavrov will inevitably spew.

Non-proliferation isn’t about protection from other countries with weapons. It’s about protection from the weapons themselves in disarmament and collectively deciding that their use is a war crime.

Except the world is very evidently incapable of collectively deciding anything. Just because you think the world SHOULD work some particular kinda way, doesn’t mean it DOES. If you’re incapable of seeing the world for what it is and dealing with the reality you see, that doesn’t make you more moral than people who see a deeply flawed world and decide to make it, even if not perfect, at least better.

Abdicating responsibility for the concrete planning of how people who want peace should protect themselves from people who want war, is not the same as building peace.

Unfortunately the previous plan, i.e. non-proliferation in the expectation that the USA will provide the deterrence, thus reducing the number of “fault points” as you call them, AKA the “Pax Americana” plan … has failed. Or at least, is in the process of failing, with no way to stop it while Trump is in office.

SOMEBODY STOP HIM! HE’S GOT EUROPE IN HIS POCKET! HE’S GETTING AWAY!

What society? The Earth just got wiped out. Except for two people.

Which is why I brought up the Trolley Problem in the first place. Saying that there’s no scenario in which euthanasia can be considered is just like refusal to pull the lever in that neither decision is motivated by a desire to do good or be helpful, but only by a motivation to preserve one’s own moral standing and nothing else.

Not really sure why the guy that brought up the trolley problem decided to insist on five million.

Would it make it easier for you to answer if I said eight billion? What would you do? One person on one set of tracks, the entire rest of the population of Earth on the other. Do you pull the lever then?

Well, if he’s just in there for a broken leg and he’s conscious, I think I’d ask him to volunteer. Is there a reason we can only use his organs and not mine?

Your scenario seems overly complicated when field surgeries already exist, where medics frequently have to make life-or-death decisions already via triage.

What about you? How do you save the five million patients?

Five? It’s five million. There are five million people on the trolley tracks. The correct answer is to pull the lever and then run to try and save the one person on the other set of tracks. Any decent person would at least TRY to save everyone, even if they’ll fail.