exporectomy

They're mostly on islands so it's very unlikely they matter at all outside of their island. If Hawaii had never been discovered, we wouldn't have to worry about losing them.

I live in a country filled with endangered "native" species but after I grew up, I learned that many of them are basically the same as common species in nearby countries, so similar that even the experts keep disagreeing on whether they're the same species or not.

If their numbers are already extremely low for a long time and everything else is doing fine, it's unlikely they're "pillars of their biome".

Yep. Every western country I know of except America, has only a token gesture of human rights and they're only rights that happened to match the culture at the time with no longer term vision at all.

New Zealand, for example has its Bill of Rights Act which says no forced medical procedures. Somebody was recently fired for refusing a Covid vaccine and went to court arguing that right. The judge said, yea, there is that right, but also the government can revoke it whenever they feel like for any reason they want, and they have, so no luck.

Discrimination based on race or sex? Certainly not! Oh, except for hiring domestic workers, selecting flatmates, decency, safety, sports, etc, etc. In other words, all the places where people were already doing discrimination.

The UN's ambitiously named "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" has 28 rights for people, and a 29th right of governments to deny any of those rights for reasons of morality, public order, general welfare of democratic society. In other words, any reason whatsoever.

Remember freedom of internal travel? China used to be a human rights violator for restricting that. Now every country and its dog is doing the same. But this time it's "us" not "them", so it's all OK.

Of course they can, because they do. What are you really trying to say? Is it that you believe no other moral authority should exist besides the law?

I wonder if the thing that should be uninvented is the profit motive for political speech. Why do people have to be paid to share their political opinions? We could still have Youtube and people saying whatever they like, but in a way that neither Youtube nor the creator is financially rewarded for popularity. Somehow. Of course that applies to traditional media too which is divisive because its profitable.

No because humans can spend that money on things. Squirrels can't eat more than they can eat.

I was surprised to learn that the population (and density) of Manhattan was higher 100 years ago than it is today. It's been falling pretty steadily throughout the entire 1900s.

Everyday credit card users who rely on the bank to protect them from fraud should not be using cryptocurrency directly. They also should not carry their money around in cash, yet cash still exists and people can take personal responsibility for the risk of loss if they choose.

A blockchain can solve "didn't receive the item" fraud because the merchant has the payment before they send the item and can refuse to refund it. Of course it creates a new kind of risk for the buyer, but that's not what we're talking about here.

How would any reversals be decided without a benevolent God? I've shown that traditional finance can't do it "correctly". Apparently smart contracts can't either. Courts can't because the law is sometimes ambiguous and unknown before it's tested in court. Traditional contracts can't because people get tricked by not reading the fine print. I think nobody can except an imaginary benevolent God.

If you just call the boss of reversals and say "sorry I made a terrible mistake, please reverse the payment", how can he trust that you're not the fraudster yourself? Even in the case in this article, how can any 3rd party truly know that it was a mistake and not just someone pretending it was a mistake so they can get it back?

Blockchain solves the problem of chargeback fraud. It's one specific class of fraud but it's solved by that technology even if other classes of fraud are created.

Reversing transactions is massive problem in finance in general. It causes losses for merchants in both physical shops and online sellers because there's no objective measure of whether a transaction was a mistake or not so it's begging to be abused for fraud. Even if a court decides, somebody still loses when both parties had different expectations. People have overpaid wages or social welfare payments taken back from them after they already assumed it was correct and spent it, and are now in a big debt. People accidentally sign contracts that require them to pay more than they expected. There's fraud where people buy an item online, then claim they never received it and get their payment refunded while keeping the item.

Here's an example of traditional finance screwing someone over for making an obvious mistake. Where's this ability to reverse transactions when you need it? https://www.livemint.com/opinion/online-views/a-fascinating-...

You're assuming there's some benevolent God who can arbitrate who's right and who's wrong. In reality, people get screwed by bad payment reversal decisions all the time and there's no objective way to decide in every case.

With empathy of course!

I don't think I have a downvote button. You said "path of destruction". That's the speculation based on current popular opinion. Had you been saying this 50 years ago, you would have chosen whatever the popular path of destruction at that time was instead, having no awareness of climate change.

For the state to not tolerate any violence, it must prevent violence among its citizens and from foreign attackers. The only way we have that works is using violence to restrain criminals, or fight against enemy armies. We don't have any perfect safety shield that can protect everyone without harming the attackers, or to prevent people from doing violent acts without physically restraining them (violence).

Then what does this flashing arrow on the back of the vehicle mean?

https://trafficsafetyzone.com/product/magnetic-led-direction...

or this which looks a lot more like the Mini indicator:

https://www.duluthnewstribune.com/business/2304413-red-light...

Of course you can work it out with context and time, but are you sure your reflexes can work it all out quickly?

I wonder if progressively shrinking the scale from human-visible to as small as we like would be a better way. After people see the obvious data, it would be clear that there's always more just out of sight and create the incentive to develop the technology to access it.

Stainless steel still corrodes, and even 316 can't even be used for many marine applications because of the salt water corroding it. Maybe fancier alloys are OK but for 1000s of years, it might pay to use something more history-tested.

Antarctica's ice is continually sliding into the sea. Anything embedded in it will eventually get dumped on the sea-floor as it melts out the bottom of an ice sheet. We have already lost things that were left lying around there.

Funny that their solution isn't higher frequency backups but having someone watch it carefully to make sure it doesn't fail again. Maybe it's not really a serious problem. Only 2 weeks of data and student submitted data so it's probably mainly an inconvenience for the students to re-upload it.

When you said tolerating any violence was unacceptable. It takes violence to protect people from violence.

It can be better because it exists even if it's worse than some ideal but mostly non-existent community.

> There is only one acceptable level of violence and abuse and that is zero.

You don't actually believe that because governments commit violent using their police and military and you accept that.

"never felt they had some higher purpose" ... "my values of making the world a better place for future generations". Sounds like you're now having an epiphany :)

I'm a counterexample. I was hesitant about getting vaccinated for covid because it was developed so quickly and all medical interventions carry some risk, so you shouldn't completely abandon decision-making. I eventually got vaccinated because it felt like the risks favored that. But at that time, in my country, only 1 person this year had died from covid and also 1 person had died from the vaccine (yes, the vaccine does kill people occasionally). In a covid-free country, the relative risk of vaccine is much higher.

Also, orthodox Jews are idiot conspiracy theorists? Yes, I guess so. People neglect to include Jews when they criticize religious people because they have their favorite demonized religion (Christianity) and somehow venerate the others.

Most Christians have already shed a lot of now-disproven beliefs. Angels aren't literally flying in the sky over our heads. Literal stories get re-interpreted as metaphors or the definitions of words changed. Contradictions get solved by picking whichever one agrees with the culture at the time. And there are a lot of contradictions, so if logic was enough to un-believe a Christian, they would all have become atheists already.

> a long, happy life is guaranteed by forces outside man's control. This will likely alleviate a lot of the tribal issues we face as well.

I suspect it would make it worse. People without a purpose tend to invent tribes and social status to fight for. School kids and prisoners are great examples. Their purpose is basically to passively exist while their physical needs are provided for by the system. Another example is neighborhoods with high unemployment and lots of people living on social welfare.

I don't think you have correct examples of memes not benefiting their hosts. Those are examples of them not benefiting other people who aren't the hosts. A better example would be something like martyrdom. A religion that's perfect for its host might turn out to be one that exterminates or enslaves all non-hosts - if it could somehow achieve that without sacrificing its own hosts.

A blame game is only sad if it was a true accident. If both the US and China were actually trying to develop such a virus and one of them accidentally released it, neither will be able to tolerate transparency because it would lead to international blame and desire for revenge.

Perhaps Auckland has already reached the point where people have stopped caring and downgraded their expectations. Actually, Wellington too seems to recently have prices for attached townhouses approaching those of SFHs. A couple of years ago, the ratio of the two types of prices was greater.

So

"Study of the use of mechanized artillery by guerilla fighters in the blah blah region"

is context but

"use of mechanized artillery by guerilla fighters in the blah blah region"

is promotion? Clear as mud.

Remember when ISIS started showing beheadings on Youtube and people thought it should be allowed to inform the public of how horrible they were? Turns out it was actually promotion and helped recruit foreign fighters.

You said that being convicted before being imprisoned was an important difference. Maybe you didn't mean good vs bad but I'm claiming that difference is neither important nor even exists. It's just arbitrarily made up to put a dividing line between China and the US. No matter how similar two countries are, you can always find some difference and claim that it's important.

I agree that Apple and all the other big techs say contradictory moral nonsense. They're just trying to please the public but the public itself has internally contradictory standards even with the same individuals so it's impossible for Apple to really make any sense unless it's willing to alienate everyone.

What if some person or algorithm notices that you don't have those skills while walking or shooting at other body parts - only at heads? That's the kind of inconsistency I'm talking about. Or what if the nature of the mouse movements is consistently a little different between the AI and yourself?

You're neglecting the fact that human development is not exponential. Population, for instance increased in its growth rate over the past 1000 years, with a sudden step up due to the industrial revolution. It didn't look the same 1000 years ago as it does today. The growth rate was less than 10% of what it is now. If population was exponential, the growth rate would be constant.