HelixDab

HelixDab, 10 months ago

First: How do you reconcile that view with the idea that animals also experience the world as people do with the idea that animals kill and eat other animals? Bears, for instance, are roughly as intelligent as a kindergartener, and yet happily kill and eat any other animals that they can. Pigs and crows are also omnivorous, and will eat any source of meat that they come across. They can all likewise avoid killing if they choose, yet they don't. Are they immoral? Or does morality only apply to humans? (Even animals that we traditionally think of as herbivorous are opportunistic meat eaters.)

Second: What would you propose replacing animal products with, when there are no alternatives that function as well? What about when the alternative products also cause greater environmental harms?

Third: So you would not have a problem with, for instance, hunting and eating invasive species, since those species cause more harm to existing ecosystems than not eradicating them would? What about when those invasive species are also highly intelligent, e.g. feral pigs? Or is it better to let them wreck existing ecosystems so that humans aren't causing harm? To drill down on that further, should humans allow harm to happen by failing to act, or should we cause harm to prevent greater harm?

Fourth: "Exploiting" is such an interesting claim. Vegans are typically opposed to honey, since they view it as an exploitative product. Are you aware that without commercial apiaries, agriculture would collapse? That is, without exploiting honey bees, we are not capable of pollinating crops?

Would you agree, given that all food production for humans causes environmental harm, that the only rational approach to eliminate that harm is the eradication of humanity?

HelixDab, 10 months ago

...And how exactly do you think people are going to be able to eat meat otherwise? Or have dairy, eggs, wool, etc.? Do you think that people should e.g., raise chickens in the city?

And that's ignoring the small obligate carnivores that make up most of the pets in the world.

Hey, I'd rather hunt my own food too, but we no longer live in tribal or feudal societies where you can reasonably expect to engage in animal husbandry yourself.

HelixDab, 10 months ago

I have a pair of Bellville MiniMils that I wear every single day; I had the last pair for about three years, and I'm at about a year and a half on this pair. I work and hike in them (although I want to get nicer hiking boots, something like the VivoBarefoot Tracker). They are minimalist boots though, so if you don't already like and wear minimalist shoes, you're not going to like these.

HelixDab, 10 months ago

That seems like a dangerous approach to not care if you disagree with people. Shouldn't you know if your disagreement with them is based on sound reasoning?

HelixDab, 10 months ago

"Truth" is a matter of conclusions and meaning, not of facts. Factual information would be something like--and this is an intentionally racist argument--53% of the murder arrests in the US come from a racial group that makes up 14% of the population. This is a fact, and it can be clearly seen in FBI statistics. But your conclusions from that fact--what that fact means--that's the point of rhetoric and logic. Faulty logic would make multiple leaps and say, well, obvs. this means that black people are more prone to commit murder. A more logically sound approach would look at things like whether there where different patterns in law enforcement based on racial groups, what factors were leading to murder rates in racial groups and whether those factors were present across all demographics, and so on.

HelixDab, 10 months ago

There was a woman that I was in love with a little over 20 years ago. She was my idea of physically attractive--definitely not most people's idea of attractive--and was so entirely fundamentally broken that it triggered intense feelings of being protective towards her along with desire. She was smart, sarcastic, liked cats (yeah, that's pretty important), and was also entirely addicted to opiates and cocaine. She was very open about how fucked up she was. I was fucked too; I was not a mentally or emotionally healthy person in the least.

If I had ended up being in a long-term relationship with her, I would almost certainly have ended up dead by now; I either would have gotten equally addicted to opiates, or I would have killed myself at some point. Thankfully, since I couldn't supply her with drugs, she wasn't interested in anything long-term with me.

I look her up every so often on Facebook. She's still alive, and posts the same kind of angsty cringe shit she would have posted if Facebook had existed 20-odd years ago (and, to be brutally honest, the kind of angsty cringe shit I used to post before I quit doing anything except lurking). If I spoke with her again, I'd probably have to deal with the same unresolved feeling again, because there really isn't a resolution to them. It would be dangerous to me to get close, and so I don't.

There have been several women like her in my life; I am not in contact with any of them, and I do not plan on having anything other than--at most--electronic communication with them at any point in the future.

Feelings are not enough to make a functional, coherent relationship. Feelings are necessary, but are not the only thing. You can love someone completely, even recognizing all of their many, deep, and varied flaws, and that doesn't mean that it's going to be good or healthy for you. Or for them. Mistakes happen, and you hurt people. You can apologize and be a better person in the future, but you also can't unwind the past.

I would strongly suggest that you work on your current relationship rather than revisiting something your past. There are some things you've said about your own tendency towards avoidance, and about your relationship with your wife, that lead me to think that perhaps you could use some help with communication and intimacy. That's not a bad thing; relationships can almost always be improved. If you are certain that you want to resume contact with this person, I would, at a bare fucking minimum, set very strong and clear boundaries about what is and is not appropriate to talk about, and I would suggest that you should ensure that your wife be a part of this contact--which is to say, a chaperone--so that the risks of going to an inappropriate place are reduced.

HelixDab, 10 months ago

You see, comrade, terrorist attack is when Nazis attack bridge we stole, not when comrade bomb Nazi apartment building.

HelixDab, 10 months ago

Not strictly necessary. If his parents were US citizens--and they aren't--then it wouldn't matter where he was born. Kind of. I think that there might be residency requirements for children of US citizens that are born abroad, e.g., if your parents are expats and you live all your life in another country, you might not be a citizen, but it's complicated. You'd def. want to contact an immigration attorney if that was the case.

BUT...!

The point is that Musk, since he wasn't born to US citizens, and since he wasn't born in the US, isn't eligible to run for president.

It's an open question as to what happens if he ran anyways, and how votes would be tabulated, etc. It would get messy, but I don't think that it's ever happened that someone ineligible has run for president and won any significant amount of the vote.

HelixDab, 10 months ago

I think we should give them both Bowie knives and tell them to go at it, and may the most reprehensible person lose/win.

HelixDab, 10 months ago

‘Cities should be better designed so that we don’t have to use cars’

...Which I agree with. And it's incredibly frustrating to me that, on the one hand, Republicans actively don't give a shit about sprawl, and on the other hand, Democrats don't want to ruin the charm and character of their lovely urban single-family neighborhoods with half acre plots of lawn in order to build dense housing that can make light rail economically viable. E.g., the people that should be on board with this shit talk a good game until it's their own neighborhood.

I recognize my own hypocrisy here, because I moved to a rural area to get away from a city, and I am now finding that it isn't rural enough because I can sometimes hear my closest neighbors. I just want to live in a shack like Ted... :(

HelixDab, 10 months ago

Quick counter: lower kelvin lights are terrible for color reproduction. Pure sunlight is around 5000K, and has a CRI (color rendering index) of 100. Switching to warmer (lower kelvin) lights is going to also alter your CRI, and will change the way that you perceive colors. If you need high color discrimination, that's going to be bad.

For outdoor lights, in most cases that's not a problem.

Usually. In most cases, you aren't going to notice just how much the colors have shifted, because your brain automatically adjusts. Youre perception of color is usually how colors appear relative to other things; you will see a red as red because your brain is comparing it to other objects with a known color. OTOH, if you're taking photos under poor lighting conditions, you'll see a significant shift in color. If you've ever taken film photos under fluorescent lights, you'd see that everything looked sharply green, when you don't perceive them as being green at that moment. (Digital cameras often make color adjustments, and the sensors are often not as sensitive as film can be.)

Going to an extreme, if you use a red filter on a light source, all colors are going to end up looking brown and grey; switching to red lights does the best at minimizing light pollution and loss of night vision, but at the cost of most color information. That's not bad, just a thing to consider.

HelixDab, 10 months ago

As far as pay goes, doing from web development to dispatch is (probably) going to be a pretty big step down in most cases. Going from warehouse to EMS dispatch is probably going to be largely a lateral move (although likely with better benefits, if you're working directly for a municipality).

As far as my own pay rate is concerned, I would be fine with the amount that I was paid if it was annually adjusted for inflation and cost of living. As it stands, I make less money--in terms of purchasing power--now than when I started five years ago.

HelixDab, 10 months ago

...Huh. I had expected something completely different when it said "high-end bicycle" in the title. Not something that's not really a bicycle per se. I'd been thinking more along the lines of Storck.

I feel like electric "bicycles" are fundamentally missing the point of a bicycle.

HelixDab, 10 months ago

The fact that there are decent Mormons doesn't mean that the entire religion itself isn't a steaming pile of rancid dog shit.

I was raised in it.

HelixDab, 10 months ago

Pity about being Mormon though.

HelixDab, 10 months ago

I'm fully aware of the tolerance paradox. And it doesn't apply here. Or to the exercise of any rights. The tolerance paradox applies to social pressure, not legal and gov't pressure. The problem you run smack into is that the less intolerance you allow from a legal perspective, the closer to approach fascism, until the two are indistinguishable.

HelixDab, 10 months ago

Bingo. It would also make it trivial to alter images just enough so that it wouldn't match the hash, and then they can post shit that would need to be manually flagged and removed.

I already see things like this with pirated media; pirates will include extraneous material bundled with the target media so that it's not automatically flagged and removed.

HelixDab, 10 months ago

Likely, yes. Which is why the PLCAA was originally passed. While I'm certain that people who believe they are on the political left don't see why this would be a problem, it's easy to apply the same principle to any business that someone on the right disagrees with, in order to eliminate business models that social/economic regressives disagree with.

HelixDab, 10 months ago

...Huh.

I tend to fall asleep in bright light too.

HelixDab, 10 months ago

Well. Yes. This is true though. And that's a 'problem' with a lot of things; they can be 'true' when looked at from a certain perspective, but not necessarily useful in any meaningful way. For instance, pain is a sensation, and that sensation is not, by itself a 'bad' thing. It's just sensory information. Pain in the context of BDSM can evoke positive judgements in the person experiencing the sensation. An identical sensation experienced in the context of being physically abused by an intimate partner will likely evoke a negative judgement. Your judgement about those sensations is based on your context and past experiences.

But at the same time, looking at a larger picture here, if times are getting tougher, then rather than looking inward to the self and your own perception, it makes more sense to look outward to community, to try and change circumstances in a way that is positive for the entire greater community.