BurningFrog

Maybe we don't really disagree on much at all.

I'm glad we had this talk :)

Sure. But if you zoom out again, you'll see that the eras before was even more peppered with wars, revolutions, and genocides.

Also famines and diseases we can now easily cure wiping out entire societies.

You're right that hardly anyone hires people because they feel a moral obligation. They need work to be done and pays what it costs to hire people.

Similarly, hardly anyone takes a job out of moral obligation to the employer. They need money, and accepts the best job they can get.

We've been doing this for many centuries now, and empirically it has been wildly successful for pretty much everyone involved.

This sounds like a clever argument, but the mindset of some executives really has no impact on how differently horses and humans are treated in society.

To spell it out: When horses are no longer needed for a task, they are sold or sent to slaughter.

I hope I don't have to explain how differently you and I are treated when we lose a job?

The fallacy here is that horses were never employees!

They were tools that people used to get things done.

They got replaced by better tools. Just like typewriters got replaced by computers and printers.

One thing you may not have thought about is that not everyone has a big enough social circle to throw parties.

I'd love to throw amazing parties, but I can't reliably expect more than 2-3 people to show up, so I don't try.

You're of course right, but note that I said "standard", not "only".

What the "alternate" methods all have in common is they don't leave a rotting corpse around. I imagine populations who did this did not tend to survive :)

I looked it up, and sky burial is/was done in places like Tibet, where the ground is either rock or frozen, so you often physically can't dig a grave.

Unless you're going to eat your loved (or hated) one you need to get rid of the body before it starts rotting, for health reasons.

Burial is the standard way for very good practical reasons. Having somewhere to put a flower is also nice.

That's a valid and interesting discussion!

The main reason real estate taxes work so well is that tax evasion is very difficult.

Because the building is standing right where it is, in the open, lit by the sun every day. If you don't pay your tax, the government can just take it.

This compensates for the several philosophical and moral problems with it, and I've seen several economists declare it the best form of taxation there is.

While common, this is such a weird idea...

Businesses are just groups of people working together.

I've worked in several businesses and seen it myself!

The costs for generating electricity needs to be paid for somehow.

Having the consumers of the electricity pay for has a lot of advantages!

If something is being used, it's by definition useful, and AI is used a lot.

There are solutions like this to most of Californias big intractable problems, and they're not done because some California laws and/or regulations make it impossible.

This is one reason I now live in Nevada, where pretty much everything is legal...

I'm talking about ocean crossing container ships having less strict emission standards, because almost no humans has to breathe those emissions.

The thing is that "cancer" is thousands of separate diseases with similar traits.

We'll never cure all of the at once, which is what "cure cancer" means, but we've been curing plenty of them lately!

Controlling physical artefacts is fine.

Stopping any science results that may be contrary to the Egyptian government's official view of history is awful!

The argument is simply that killing marine life is less bad than killing humans.

Before humans had domesticated cattle, it was of course not possible to steal it. Not sure if that's what you're saying.

I have read stories about this happening in the current day Amazon.

Unless you can enforce a weapons ban, "should be a neutral ground" means absolutely nothing.

Everyone would launch weapons while they deny it, because that is the rational and responsible thing to do.

The versions I've heard always included bringing back any cattle and/or women you could. That gives the raids a more demonstrable benefit.

If life-bearing debris exists, it would surely be floating around the galaxy forever.

If half of graduates get their degree from learning and half from cheating, the degree isn't really worth much.

The fact that cheating works is pretty damning for the utility of colleges.

I read that book and strongly recommend it too!

Don't remember that part though. It's been a few decades.

I learned this from "The Elephant in the Brain", which I strongly recommend: https://amzn.to/4iSyLX8

Starving tens of millions to death is also part of the CCP's traditional values.

There may be a good argument for your assertions, but I don't think you're making it.

I would describe it at showing how poor/unproductive the rest of Botswana's economy is.

Or is the theory here that De Beers somehow keeps the part of the Botswanian economy they don't participate in poor/unproductive?

Astronomy/Physics is overflowing with unexplained physics phenomena these days.

Especially after JWT started looking deeper into the early universe.