Kobolds with a keyboard.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • On the morality point, I’d argue that we should spend the money to rescue any person if we have the money/means, and it can feasibly happen without excessive risk to other lives, otherwise we’re assigning monetary value to human lives.

    Resources are finite, though. If rescuing one person requires, say, 10 units of resources, but rescuing 10 others require only 1 unit of resources, isn’t choosing to rescue the 1 over the 10 already placing relative value on human lives, by declaring them to be 10x as valuable as the others? This is obviously operating on the assumption that we don’t have the resources to rescue everyone who needs rescuing.


  • My real wonder would be if the majority of Americans would okay the amount of money it would cost to save that one man?

    Depends where the money is coming from. Military budget? Absolutely. Being taken from social services and whatnot? No. The amount of money that would cost could save so many more lives if it was used for things here. Choosing to spend it on saving an astronaut rather than on, for example, feeding homeless people and distributing medication and disaster relief is like a version of the trolley problem where the trolley is already heading for the 1 person, but you have the option of switching it to the other track to kill more people if you want to. I’d have a really hard time calling that moral by any metric.


  • I don’t think though, that for the goal of living a happy life, any harm is theoretically necessary.

    Whose happiness are we talking about? Surely if one person’s happiness conflicts with someone or something that already exists, they can’t both have happiness and harmlessness. (Also, what are you considering harm? Just harm to people? What about animals? Plants? The planet as a whole?)

    Modern human life is inherently very harmful to a wide range of things.





  • A lot of small things. I have some velcro on the wall in few rooms that I can stick a tablet to, for example. I’ve got velcro holding down a few items on my desk - a USB hub, speakers and the like, that I want to move sometimes, but that were commonly getting knocked off (by the cat). I’ve got a small whiteboard and a few places I can stick it, so I can use it to sketch something up and take it with me to our workbench, for example, and not have to precariously balance it.

    All things that could be solved with other solutions, obviously, but the heavy duty velcro just happens to be a one-size-fits-all solution that leaves no permanent marks and is very convenient to set up.





  • As far as I’m aware, death punishment is not what happened to any of those that refused during Vietnam or Afghanistan.

    “Life-ending consequences” doesn’t necessarily mean literal death. Court martials for serious offenses (which disobeying orders absolutely is) can come with very heavy penalties. It’s possible that it’s a regional colloquialism, but ‘life-ending consequences’ refers to consequences that end “life as you know it”, typically referring to something that is reasonably impossible to recover from.