this is honestly the most impressive one here. i looked into doing hitclips with a friend and we basically tapped out once i found out how they work under the hood since there's no way they'd be cost effective.
They were both people of relative privilege within their own societies (in Dostoevsky’s case, at least in his youth). I have a strong feeling the author isn’t arguing any sort of racial or gendered essentialism - there is merit in acknowledging that media produced by those of privileged classes may carry certain attitudes or opinions that don’t necessarily speak effectively to different audiences.
Cats pretty much decimated the native bird population of most Hawaiian islands which has had a pretty big impact down the food chain. House cats are definitely cute but they’re also a manmade ecological abomination as an invasive/introduced species.
Nah, that's natural selection at work. It is not like we are a kind of metaphysical entity floating above the aether like some kind of demiurge. We are part of the nature, there's no morals on evolution, no preferred steady state. If we protect an species we are playing god, if we don't, the same.
The trouble here is that this is a minor, technical nitpick, which I can't really support. "Natural" as a layman's term doesn't just mean "thing from nature" but also means "thing undisturbed by human activity". People here clearly mean this latter thing when talking about "natural". Which is pretty confusing, I agree. Languages should have a word for this, as it is clearly needed.
Also, observe that many humans don't like natural selection either. There are efforts, for example, to conserve species that are going extinct, no matter how natural or man-made the cause.
Natural already means "things undisturbed by human activity", among a good lot of other things. As long as there's a clear need for such a word, it would do us good to have a separate word for that, like notmanmade or whatever, because that would make discussions clearer.
Nope you are wrong. Cats are brought by humans everywhere where they are not native. Humans already destroyed ecosystem by many ways. This was just trying to reducing that harm.
Species purposely introduced by humans would be considered artificial not 'natural' selection. If the cats swam over to the island of their own volition as a survival strategy though, that would blow my mind.
So, would ticks brought to a new prairie by bisons. So, would seed brough by the feces of migrant birds.
Yes, we can CHOOSE any moral framework, including one where we introduce this arbitrary notion of artificiality to treat the impact of homo sapiens as a distinct category. But let's not treat this as science. I wouldn't go so far to call it as a religion, but it is still on the realm of ethics and philosophy.
We can even have pragmatical reasons for choosing so, like the need for a particular eco-system to stay in a given state for our own confort, health and economic reasons. But it is still an arbitrary choice.
Species migrate by themselves in the nature, sometimes they play havoc on the existing biome they migrate themselves into. This was, it is, and it will be a significant driver of evolution long after we are gone from earth.
And on this particular case, it is not even like we are restoring the island to some idealized, pristine steady state. Cats are not the only species that piggyback on our civilization to spread, we also have the domestic mouse. If anything, completely eliminating the cat from those islands will serve only to ensure that the domestic mouse will be the dominant species there.
> So, would ticks brought to a new prairie by bisons
Ah, no. Nature is specifically what has unadulterated by humans. If humans are involved, it's not natural. I didn't make up the words, but that's exactly what it is. At least if you're talking about nature as being distinct from something else. If you're talking about nature writ large, then there is no distinction, but we're not talking cosmology here.
> we can CHOOSE any moral framework
I was only making clear the distinction between natural and unnatural.
But, to take on this argument, cats and mice are exotic pest species in many places. You might object to them being called pest, but their existence is usually at the extinction risk of native species. It's fair to say there'll be enough cats and mice around the world. You could say that we should just let whatever thrives to thrive, but I'd argue the world would be a more boring place without native species, and indeed ecosystems can collapse from the introduction of exotic species, potentially even causing existential risk to the introduced species (including us humans).
Sure, "we broke it so we should try to help maintain it" is entirely an ethical question and not a scientific one.
Are you satisfied now? Can we go back to talking about the problem instead of arguing about the definition of "natural"?
...but wait, you're the one that introduced the word "natural" to this conversation, using it as a reason to do nothing. That's ridiculous. If everything is natural, then your argument would say we should never do anything ever.
You can't have it both ways. If you want to use such a wide-reaching definition of natural, then you can't also use "natural" as a motivation to not intervene.
When I first moved to the Netherlands, I had to visit a pharmacy to purchase insulin. I was prepared to spend nearly half my paycheck on a months supply and deal with the headache of not having a prescription on file before I’d established insurance.
I walked out the door with a box of Lantus pens having spent 80€. That would have cost me about $600 in the US at the time, if they’d even dispense to me without a prescription.
It only would’ve cost you $600 if you paid the list price, which no uninsured patient should ever have to do. GoodRx has a coupon that takes it down to $35 per 30-day supply - significantly cheaper than in the Netherlands - and any decent pharmacy should offer you their “store discount,” which will be about the same.
There is zero humane justification to require any chronically ill person to present a coupon to afford a regular medication that they would otherwise die without. Zero.
Why is there a "list price" and an actual price? What's the point? Do pharmacies not compete with each other? Imagine if you went to a McDonald and the Big Mac was 300$ but it really was 10$ if you asked for a discount. So many questions...
I’m not saying it’s a good system, just that there’s no reason for anyone without insurance to pay the unrealistically high list price.
There are discount cards that work with insurance, too. Like a drug with a $10 copay might have a discount card that fully covers the copay. You just have to do a little research before going to the pharmacy.
In the US, pharmacies absolutely compete, but the model is complex. They are delivering service to a party that is not always the one paying (Patient vs. Insurer). They can dispense the same drug from multiple suppliers with wildly different costs in some cases (Original vs. Generic). Most of their customers have some sort of coverage, so the coupons don't apply. The drug companies really hate when their are articles about people dying because they can't afford meds, so they have coupon programs for the uninsured, but keep the list price high since that is the starting point for negotiating with the insurers.
Don't forget that doctors are completely disconnected with cost. They don't even know their own rates that will be charged to the patient in many cases, let alone what the cost of drugs are, and what portion of that the patient will end up paying.
So on the patient side, the pharmacy will compete for patients with convenience, while the insurer will try to steer the patient to approved generic drugs and manufacturers with negotiated deals, while the drug companies are trying to steer the patient to the most expensive name brand drugs. Oh yeah, and then there are the unlucky minority that don't have insurance or have insurance that won't cover the drug they need, and they get a coupon.
It is SUPER fucked.
The answer is that there are at least four parties in any pharmacy transaction (Dr., Pharmacy, patient, drug maker, and sometimes insurer) that all have different incentives. Some that overlap, and some that are opposed.
Four parties? Try five! Insurance means there’s a pharmacy benefit manager in the mix as well. Sometimes those are independent companies, but often they’re owned by either your insurer or your pharmacy (or some other big chain of pharmacies, e.g. CVS). That’s one more middleman and often one more conflict of interest in the mix.
You cannot specifically target a military objective using a small explosive in a crowded area. It’s not possible other than by pure luck, which negates any assumed specificity.
The whole premise of this attack is that you can, which is what makes it unprecedented. We can disagree that it succeeded! I understand skepticism about this. I've seen the same videos everyone else has, and the explosions we're talking about are quite small, but obviously there have been civilian casualties.
I see two ways history might judge this:
1. History could decide that the Geneva Conventions and current IHL with respect to combatant status, collateral casualties, and proportionality were simply wrong, and so everything done under current IHL is indefensible. Could happen.
2. It could turn out that the military impact of this strike was dwarfed by the direct civilian cost (in deaths and injuries to noncombatants and property they rely on), which we'll know more about in the coming weeks.
I can kind of appreciate where you’re coming from (in a very morbid, cynical way) but I guess I just think the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Civilians died and I’m not willing to accept the grim argument (not necessarily yours) that “civilians die in conflict and we must abide by it.”
Just to be clear: I think that is very much my grim argument. There is no such thing as a modern war that doesn't kill civilians and anyone who claims otherwise is living in a dangerous fantasy. There are moral distinctions between conduct in war (for instance: Hezbollah has evacuated most of northern Israel by firing over 7,500 rockets at untargeted civilian areas, in one case killing half a youth soccer team). Israel presents a clear example of the continuum: if they're capable of remote-detonating the entire leadership structure of the Radwan Force in Lebanon, what possible justification could they have for flattening tent camps in Gaza?
The fantasy is dangerous because it creates the expectation that military force can solve problems at minimal civilian cost. It can't. Wars are fought in cities, not on marked battlefields; unless we reduce ourselves back to a pre-industrial state, they will never be fought on marked battlefields again. Factor dead children into every war that ever happens from now on.
I don't like anything that is happening in the region. I don't think morally scoring Israel and Hezbollah is productive. All I have to say is that Hezbollah and Israel are military peers, and they are extremely at war right now.
If we're getting to a point where two different cadres with a beef can settle their scores by liquidating each other's top guys instead of taking everything out on each other's pawns and unfortunately associated randoms, I say let's take this technology and run with it.
But when there is war - well, I've picked my side.
You're probably American, as am I, and you're definitely from a country that has attacked and militarily dominated other countries. (Because they almost all have.) Get off your high horse.
Besides Sheldon Brown, look for community bike shops in your area! They often need volunteers to help out with all kinds of things and you’ll get direct exposure to a huge variety of bike tech and really knowledgeable folks who live and breathe bikes.
I wonder what the income disparity is between minimum-wage Taco Bell employees and Pepsi’s executive team is, and how much the difference has grown in the last 20 years. I would be willing to bet that the company could, in reality, afford not to replace human jobs and still pull in huge profits/pay their shareholders and corporate officers quite a lot of money without requiring a bunch of my personal information in order to buy the worst taco I’ve ever had.
Fast food workers are not minimum wage. I don't know about Taco Bell, but McDonald's has had signs up offering $18/hr in the Bay Area for a while which is like $3 more.
Well, they might be now since California passed a higher minimum wage for fast food workers.
> afford not to replace human jobs
There's practically no such thing as replacing human jobs; having a machine replace some of your /tasks/ (taking orders) lets you spend more time on the other tasks (preparing the orders) and makes you more productive.
Higher productivity in this environment pretty much universally translates to fewer staff on shift. It’s just another way to lower costs at the expense of non wealthy people. Why do you think it’s so hard to find help in any big box store nowadays? Or why most of them only have one or two cashiers working when lines get longer and longer?
PS: $18 an hour in the bay in 2024 might as well be under minimum wage. It’s unconscionably low if one wants to maintain any standard of living.
There really is no ethical or moral defense for natural diamond mining. When presented with the human and environmental impact, one’s response is pretty informative of their character and motivations.
The difference is: LLMs are not humans with human needs and human rights. Unless these for profit AI companies can ensure that they can fairly compensate the sources of their training data, they’re using IP they have no right to use in order to replace the work of living breathing humans who need income in order to live in houses and eat food. Why would you place the potential profits of the few (and the massive environmental impact of using LLMs) over the needs and rights of your neighbors and humans all around the world?
