= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
If a nurse started talking to me about her "sacred duty", I certainly would not believe her.
Meetup : NYC Solstice
Discussion article for the meetup : NYC Solstice
Our annual, huge East Coast event. Saturday will be the Solstice Proper - a beforeparty starting at 5:30pm, 2 hours of singalong music starting at 6:30, followed by an afterparty running till 10:30. Tickets are on sale at http://www.humanistculture.com, for $25 each.
Discussion article for the meetup : NYC Solstice
Would you believe them more or less than if they said they're not annoyed that you shat the bed?
I think it's important to note here that their fee is $12 a year.
I don't see how this is a meaningful number. The cost to the user is much higher since they're now stuck in a high-fee fund. And I'm pretty sure that a lot of Stash's revenue comes from something other than $12/user/year. In particular, high-fee funds tend to pay commissions to those who sell them.
I think a much better analogy would have been "drink tap water instead of bottled water." It's a more similar instance of paying explicitly for branding with a misguided understanding of what's for sale. (i.e. most bottle water is literally tap water)
In response to
Vegetarianism Ideological Turing Test Results
Interesting update/realization I just had:
I was one of the people putting down "40%" or "60%" type answers - despite also thinking "man, I'm really not sure here." But "40%/60%" feels like a number that's "sufficiently" uncertain to represent a rough mental state of "not really sure, but if I had to pick I'd go with meat-eater." When it fact if anything I should have been putting down 49%/51% at best, because seriously it was genuinely hard to tell.
I also remember the essays being very weird and throwing me off a bit. Like, in the normal population, vegetarians say "animals can feel pain and we shouldn't hurt or kill them" and meat eaters say "we're at the top of the food chain and it's the natural order of things for us to eat."
On less wrong, vegetarians say things like "animals feel pain, therefore factory farming is evil but also we probably should destroy all natural habitat so that wild animals can't exist or suffer. Also maybe we should just eradicate all life on earth to prevent suffering." And meat eaters say "I look forward to tasty cost effective meat grown in test tubes but right now I'm too lazy and don't care that much. Also, probably better to have slightly-better farming conditions but then continue creating billions of chickens for a net hedonic gain."
It was pretty clear that any lessons I took on identifying vegetarians/meat-eaters from this test were pretty localized.
I still don't get it. Could you (or someone else) please explain it?
Va gur ynaq bs gur oyvaq...
In response to
Happy Petrov Day
Note that Petrov suffered very few consequences after the initial backlash. His US counterpart Harold Hering was discharged from the Air Force, drove a truck for a while to make ends meet and watched his personal life crumble, for asking the question
How can I know that an order I receive to launch my missiles came from a sane president?"
I don't know if his stand forced any changes in the missile launch protocols, but I admire his courage to take his oath literally and seriously and his refusal to back down under pressure from his superiors more than Petrov's 5 min of agonizing over a decision to disobey a faulty computer algorithm he himself helped design.
I am glad to now know about Harold Hering, and I think I'm going to add his story to the reading we're having tonight in NYC.
That said - there are a great many people I admire more than Petrov. Petrov is significant not because he's an amazing person, but because he literally was the person who saved the world, for good or for ill.
In response to
Film about Stanislav Petrov
Oh, neat. Trailers look kind of "eh", but I'm glad this was made at least.
Very quickly leading to the usual:
-- You are an idiot!
-- And you're evil!
:-(
I didn't say those were comprehensive arguments for Veganism or Meateating, just that they're fairly succinct and compelling arguments against "don't need ideologies. Just get your nutrients somehow."
In response to
Vegetarian/Omnivore Ideological Turing Test Judging Round!
I find ideologies quite frustrating to deal with, and that's why I thought of but didn't answer the test.
Consequentially the body needs certain nutrients in order to survive. That's it; I can't see the point of the supposed false dilemma in the whole meat/vegan stuff. Get the nutrients, anyhow; problem solved, no ideology needed.
Meat eater counterargument: But! Tastiness!
Vegan counterargument: But! Torture!
= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
Sorry, I'm a bit confused. Not being fully versed in the terminology of utilitarians, I may be somewhat in the dark...
... but, is the point of this piece "Money should be the unit of caring" or "Money is the unit of caring"? I expected it to be the latter, but it reads to me like the former, with examples as to why it currently isn't. That is, if money were actually the unit of caring—if people thought of how much money they spend on something as synonymous with how much they care about something—then a lawyer would hire someone to work five hours at a soup kitchen instead of working there for an hour.
It sounds like, as it is now, money isn't the unit of caring and you think it should be. But the end again reads more like the latter statement. Which one was your intent?
I think his point was a fairly critical "money is the unit of actually caring". Donating your clothes or some soup kitchen time is the thing you do if you want to feel good about yourself. But if you actually care about getting shit done, money is the unit of how much of that you did.
This may or may not be fair, and may or may not be a useful framing to consider whether it's fair or not.