I think a lot of what people complain about with Common Core is bizarrely written school materials that were developed by some bureaucracy and don't make a whit of sense to an adult who already knows the skill, let alone to a kid. Khan Academy definitely does better on that count in my opinion, so it's a good supplement.
You should check out Khan Academy because it's well aligned to the Common Core. The general effect of the CA Common Core was advance the math curriculum by about 6 months.
Many people have conflated Common Core (a set of objectives of what should be learned and by when, generally pretty good) with the materials that came out to support it from textbook publishers and others (pretty shitty).
Crypto is a great utility in this respect, when physical commodities and fiats are severely regulated or vulnerable to seizure in times of strife.
But when using crypto, you are fundamentally trading high utility in exchange for high risk. The extremely volatility of crypto makes the stock market look like a playground. There’s nothing in the way of your life savings being reduced to zero when you need to make a life-changing transaction.
Nationalized paper fiats such as the US dollar are at least protected from extreme volatility by the Federal Reserve, but to obtain such protections, you must trade the high utility for encumbrances like heavy regulation.
This resonates with me. It deeply disturbs me that other animals still don’t have rights on parity with humans.
I can play devil’s advocate and make the ethical argument that animal lives have more intrinsic value than human lives. For one, they are innately innocent due to their (as we currently understand) more limited capacity for reasoning. This limited reasoning dismisses blame when they do things we see as wrong (similar to the way we do for children) and also limits their capacity to cause significant harm to the planet.
I will always side with other animals over man. If I could only rescue one organism from a burning building and had to choose between a human or another animal, I’d choose the other animal. If I had to choose which species becomes extinct tomorrow, it would be humans. We are a plague to this planet and solar system.
Selfish humans, obsessed with self preservation, will easily disagree with this judgement.
As an anti-speciesist vegetarian, I’d like to note that the above viewpoint probably sounds as extreme and incoherent to me as it does to most other people.
Parity as regards rights should be based on interests. There is nothing special about life itself. A mouse’s interests are not on par with the interests of a child, and saving the child would generally result in the least amount of suffering.
I did my best to take the parent comment seriously, but I really need to stress how ridiculous it is. Please don’t assume that that is a common viewpoint amongst vegan or vegetarians. It ultimately commits the same error: devaluing the life of an individual because it happens to belong to the “wrong” species.
I'm not a vegetarian or vegan, so I don't know why you're conflating my devil's advocate argument with those philosophies.
> A mouse’s interests are not on par with the interests of a child
For an anti-speciesist, this is a very anthropocentric and speciesist statement.
I would argue that saving the child would cause greater suffering[0], not only because the human condition unto itself is rife with suffering, but because we have the greatest capacity and demonstrated ability to cause grave harm to all species and to the planet, more so than any other living being.
The voluntary human extinction movement[1] is a very real movement, however ridiculous you find it to be.
I’m sorry. To clarify, the entirety of a mouse’s interests are less than the interests of a child. This includes external interests, like the interests of the parents, etc.
I agree regarding the generally higher capacity of healthy humans to experience tremendous suffering, and also the human ability to cause tremendous suffering. I do see a tension between those facts and my contention that saving a human results in less suffering. In my mind, human experience falls on a 3D plane, with positive/negative on the y-axis, severity on the x-axis and complexity on the z-axis.
The human ability to experience complex emotions like inspiration, jealousy, etc. make our interests slightly unique and weigh more as compared to most animals. Add on top of that the social aspect of interests (eg a parent has an interest in the well being of their child), and suddenly the value of human life can take on exponential degrees.
With that in mind, I think an individual should have the choice to end their life if society finds that the net suffering of their continued existence is greater than if they ceased to exist. To that end, human extinction is antithetical to my understanding because it implies forcing individuals to end their lives involuntarily. It’s the same with a pig. I wouldn’t eat a pig unless he somehow gained healthy adult-level sentience and told me he wanted me to eat him and that that would fulfill some deep desire of his. I know that example sounds absurd, but consequently, because no animal has a level of sentience complex enough to consent to being murdered, I refrain from eating any animals at all.
If you still want to engage, I have a question. I’m curious why, if you feel that humans are such a huge cause of suffering to, as you put it, innocent animals, you aren’t vegan or vegetarian?
Cancer is largely a failure of the immune system, and it is well known that nearly 70% of the immune system lives in the digestive tract. Sometimes the microbiome in that digestive tract gets messed up, paving the way to bowel issues, autoimmune disorders, general illness, and cancer. Studies have even shown that poor gut health is linked to many mental health issues such as depression and autism. Populating the digestive tract with healthy microbes from another person is a good way to jumpstart it again.
I’ve actually done probiotic and fecal transplant enemas at home and put my UC into remission without the need for steroidal or anti-inflammatory medications. It can be easily done using standard enema equipment, healthy donor stool, saline and oral loperamide to increase efficacy. Expect to be able to fill the rectum, ascending, transverse, and descending colon. There are big risks to this, especially if you are immunocompromised. Most people will want advice or support from a doctor.
Careful. As someone with UC myself, I’d like to say, be careful promoting procedures like this. I’ve looked into this myself, quiet a bit, and although many studies show promise—as someone in this thread also previously said; we are not yet sure what is going on—it is not clear that poop transplants (especially administered at home by oneself) is safe.
Wow that's amazing!
One reason that I suspect these therapies aren't more widely used is the lack of funding. Big pharmaceutical companies have millions to spend on R&D and also fund studies.
Yeah. Admittedly, I was frustrated with having to rely on $1000+ a month prescriptions to treat my symptoms rather than the underlying cause. My venture into researching the human microbiome and homemade enemas was sprinkled with “danger” and “don’t try this at home.” Being riddled with daily bouts of diarrhea caused by my UC, I wasn’t go to just sit idly by.
Enema kits are sold in grocery stores and are perfectly safe if not used regularly. There was simply no reason for me to believe that breaking open some probiotic capsules or putting a little poop in that enema is going to kill me. More than likely, toxic megacolon or colon cancer is going to kill me if I didn’t take the risk.
I consider myself a body hacker, having experimented with nootropics for many years before. Hacking of any kind involves some level of risk, and it’s risks that I’m willing to take to become better.
When you have anxiety and there’s a “reason” for it, it’s not actually anxiety. This is called stress, since you know that the underlying cause is work. It’s an important distinction, similar to panic attacks versus anxiety attacks. Knowing the cause is half the battle.
Reminds me of people who are staunchly anti-systemd. They are luddite masochists who prefer shit that is inconvenient or broken for the sake of being a contrarian hipster.
