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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • It’s almost difficult to believe Kant wasn’t just pulling a Schrödinger and proposing a ridiculous thought experiment to illustrate the absurdity of genuinely holding those views.

    The idea that morality exists only as an intrinsic quality of an action, regardless of context or consequence, is more theology than philosophy. It’s useless to the point of harm to anyone faced with a world beyond a university or a monastery.






  • Are you in the US? I wouldn’t dissuade anyone from being an organ donor, it’s obviously a great necessity and saves thousands of lives, but I’m always amazed that the bottomless skepticism of our for-profit healthcare system dries up on certain topics.

    We all love to moan about greedy health insurance companies and hospital administrations putting profit above the actual health of patients and outcomes of procedures, so why is it taken for granted that, when faced with a decision to go to extraordinary lengths to save a badly injured, uninsured person, or get expensive organs for 3 or 4 insured people at the top of the recipient list, that the responsible parties will make the right decision? Hell, even without a profit motive, that can be a difficult decision that can be influenced by personal beliefs and biases.

    I certainly don’t know enough about exactly how these decisions are made to have a strong opinion, but I don’t think it’s fair to characterize potentially warranted skepticism as moronic.


  • From the bottom of the graphic: “Total tax burden based on property tax, individual income tax, and sales & excise tax.“

    Several states have no state income tax at all, so it wouldn’t make sense to only look at that.

    What does make this a bit of an unfair comparison is that it doesn’t break it down by income. Compare tax burdens for the bottom quartile earners and it tells a different story.








  • Yeah, this is exactly what’s wrong with constantly demonizing boomers and attributing every shitty thing they’ve ever done to leaded gas and paint chips. Populations tend more conservative as they get older and they have for centuries. Even if a minority of individuals actually change their minds, people who were politically apathetic when they were younger tend to be more conservative when they do start voting when they’re older, skewing the whole generation more conservative. There’s already plenty of conservative millennials out there, and even more of them among the ranks of the non-voters.

    Remember, boomers are the generation of hippies. Actual, literal hippies who, despite whatever imperfect motives you may ascribe to their movement, achieved greater social revolution in their time than any attitude shifts that have occurred during millennials’ peak social years. And that was only with ~30% of boomers participating in the movement. The rest of them went on to vote for Reagan and kick off helicopter parenting and satanic panic and music censorship and the whole bit.

    Anyone who thinks millennials will be somehow immune to this pattern is in for a rough next few decades.


  • Unwavering support for whatever Israel wants has been status quo for the US for decades. There’s plenty of people who don’t like it, but the unfortunate truth is that we are too broken and divided to fix it right now.

    Trump is a literal existential threat to democracy. Assuming he becomes the republican nominee next year, our only chance of ever having a voice in US foreign policy in the future is through a second Biden term.

    No candidate will ever be perfect and no vote will ever be without moral baggage, but when you consider all of the issues together and look at what Trump has already said he would do if reelected, there’s really no other choice on the table anymore.





  • This is the correct answer. All of the replies saying to use Firefox/support FOSS are missing the point. Once Google rolls this out and promotes it as higher security and guaranteed ad impressions, it will become the standard because all of the websites you want to use will opt in. It won’t do you much good to keep using Firefox when your bank, your employer/school, and every news/weather/sports site you try to use require a Google-verified, ad-displaying browser. It’s not our choice to make, and that’s the point of doing it this way.

    I’d go one cynical step further to say that once they have complete control over how pages are displayed on your end, they’ll roll out a subscription for ad-free* browsing, which will eventually include ads anyway a couple years down the road.