yawpitch

AI is not going to kill you… but a Westinghouse M-25 40-watt Phased Plasma Pulse-Gun held by an AI just might.

Reading this thread is like watching the Irish start roasting and eating their excess children immediately after Swift modestly proposed the idea.

Not this one, or, come to think of it, any that I know of.

Now, hobby entrepreneurs, that’s different.

Anything that takes money away from narcoleptic, right wing [self]-abusers of the COA^1 is a net good for humanity.

^1: Concept of Acronyms

I mean what’s another $1.3 trillion on the national debt?

I’m not sure that qualifies as unpopular, but I am sure both quality and trust have already collapsed, at least for me.

When these assholes finally find themselves in jail, may the soap be both extremely slippery and far too caustic to safely lubricate.

#americahasfallen

… first, find a mirror.

Not sure it can be defined as malware if what it’s doing, if successful, is a net gain for humanity.

Assuming these cameras capture only license plate data (which cannot, and does not, happen) even the 100% elimination of all vehicle-involved criminal activity (which cannot, and will not, happen) cannot possibly justify the creation of a searchable database of every vehicle-involved non-criminal activity. Especially when access to that database is for sale.

Also a good alternative title for this piece would be “A Thought-Cop’s Case for Big Brother”.

You could contact the Parton Community Council: https://glenkens.scot/community-councils/parton-community-co...

Doesn’t the head of Health and Human Services have a symbiotic relationship with one of these?

They’re cultured from either pluripotent stem cells or neurosurgical specimens.

Oh wow, someone on a tech site that doesn’t know how OR works!

In much the same way as exercising any other muscle, by increasing the strength and flexibility and utility of your moral fibers.

> Those species do not care about ethics. Our discussion started from ethics, which is uniquely human. We are not discussing if a behavior occurs in nature. We are discussing if that behavior is ethical for humans.

Those species also don’t care if they’re domesticated or enslaved. The cow doesn’t care if it’s milked, so long as it’s done gently, indeed it seemingly enjoys it and will avidly seek out a milker. The cow doesn’t care if any excess of milk surplus to its calf’s requirements is taken from it, indeed it will loudly call for it to be taken. The cow doesn’t care about consent, or the fact it hasn’t given it (and can’t)… the cow cares only for ample water, some salt, good grass, a warm and dry place to sleep, a minimum number of flies, an occasional burp, someone to remove the pies that keep piling up everywhere, and nothing nearby with claws or teeth. If its “enslaver” provides all of that, the cow wouldn’t (and couldn’t) consider itself “enslaved”.

Is it ethical for a human to consume the meat of a cow? Sure… right up until that human seriously engages with ethics. Is it ethical for them to continue to treat as domesticated a species that has adapted to that domestication? Yes, or that species will suffer an environment it’s no longer adapted for. Is it more ethical to do so without consuming the animal’s meat? Sure, or at least until after that animal’s natural death. Is it more ethical to do so without consuming the animal’s milk? No, not inherently, because the cow does not have to suffer for that milk. If I have a cow and I care for that cow and that cow wants rid of some excess milk and I rid it of that milk in a caring way then there’s no cognizable ethical reason for me to not consume the resulting milk, any more than it would be unethical of me to eat the cast off skin of a snake or unfertilized eggs in an abandoned nest or apples fallen from the tree. Is it more ethical of me to consume only the dairy I know was sourced in an ethical manner? Of course. Should we move towards an entirely symbiotic relationship with the species we’ve domesticated? One that isn’t parasitic? Absolutely, and we certainly should… and the further the degree to which we do the less we can cast that symbiosis as slavery and still sound reasonable.

One hopes the decorator crab and the anemone evolve towards that mutually-aiding symbiosis as well; and one hopes if the former ever evolves to consider ethics it then walks a long road towards expanding its circle of empathy to the point where it considers caring for the weird little death-dealing hairball on its claws. But where it discovers said hairballs have been evolved to suit those claws it shouldn’t feel particularly guilty for benefitting from the symbiosis that has now attained.

Well that’s not obviously original.

Mutual evolutionary pressures represent a kind of symbiotic relationship, even when that symbiotism is heavily weighted to one side. In your view has the anemone enslaved the clownfish? Or the decorator shrimp the anemone? In all cases one side has applied selective pressure to the other. Sure, that’s not conscious, thinking, reasoned selective pressure, but then neither was it with us until some emergent moment.

Also quite a few human communities have relied on excess milk supply being used for communal rearing. Most mammals produce more milk than is required when sufficiently fed… yeah we’ve selected for the cows that produce the most from the least, but arguably nature was already doing that, it just hadn’t planned for another parasitic species figuring out pens and tractors.

It’s pretty easy to empathize with a rock, actually… they pretty much always feel stoned.

We don’t help only cows, we milk a whole lot of mammals. Admittedly many mammals aren’t all that into being milked, and many (if not most) of the carnivorous animals won’t let you hang around long enough to see if they do, or do not, consent, but it’s not solely because we like milk, nor is it solely parasitic (and certainly not solely slavery). Humans have milked orangutans to feed baby orangutans, milked giraffes to feed other giraffes, and milked elephants because, rather like cows, they can get right cranky (and downright dangerous) when there’s insufficient young to remove the excess. For that matter we help our own species, at times, express milk that needs to be expressed — admittedly in that case usually (one hopes) with explicit verbal consent. Nature does not make precisely one teat per toddler, nor does nature produce precisely one portion per progeny. I’ll admit we’ve primarily treated cattle like, well, cattle, but you give me a cow and a bull and sufficient forage and, assuming they like each other and I keep the predators at bay, I’ll soon have a herd and more milk than they know what to do with… if she’s had fewer than four calves (likely) and especially if she’s only had one, then on a roughly daily basis she’ll be bursting at the seams and pushing up against all sorts of things for relief.

I get where you’re coming from, but I’ve seen with my own eyes cows essentially orgasm when someone finally helps get the first really cheezy, frothy, kinda curdled bits out of a neglected nipple. Now I for one wouldn’t go saying I like that milk, I wouldn’t even say I’d come close to consider drinking it… but I’ve seen enough looks of ecstatic delight on enough mammals (of a great many species) to know that it can be a relief to express the unexpressed, and the species doing the expression isn’t of that much issue at all times.

Ever seen the eyes of a shark roll back into its head when you find the bit of obviously dead skin it hasn’t been able to rub off and hasn’t been able to get a wrasse hole near and you give it a back scritch where it by evolutionary design can never reach? I have. Am I imagining that ecstasy? I mean probably… but said shark kept coming back to me for like half an hour. Maybe it was brain damaged, but maybe my choice to do what it didn’t verbally consent to was nevertheless what it was hoping something would do, to whatever degree it can hope. Or maybe I did a shark a dirty and I should feel ashamed… or, for that matter, maybe a shark did me a dirty and both of us should feel ashamed… honestly, not sure now, hence I’ll resolve the dissonance by continuing to assume I just helped out a creature that looked like it really regretted not having evolved fingernails and opposable thumbs.

What I sure as hell didn’t do was enslave that dogfish, any more than I’ve personally enslaved any animal.

A well-nourished, well-protected, comfortable cow will produce much more milk than is required by its normal complement of newborns, and it will (and loudly) want rid of it. In my experience not milking a dairy cow of the excess would be considerably more cruel than milking it, even if you kept the milk exclusively for the newborns, and I’m pretty sure the cows I’ve seen milked in rural Nepal would agree.

1 is unnecessary and wasn’t present for most of history, 2 is a natural consequence of cattle being cattle, even without humans, but today we have both painkillers and bovine veterinarians, 3 is, again, not strictly necessary unless you’ve made the mistake of falling for the profit motive, and 4 is much more of a problem from a calves mouth parts than from a suitably gloved and balmed human hand.

Human beings can engage in subsistence-level dairy consumption without causing suffering beyond that already present in the reproduction cycle of cattle. They choose not to. I never said dairy farmers were or would choose to be moral, just that they aren’t required to be immoral by dairy production itself.

You’re clearly not a top-level CEO; keep pruning.

I do, and I hopefully will eventually get to leeches too.

You tell me where the consumption of dairy products must result in harm to the cow. I grew up around small-scale, subsistence-level dairy farming, it doesn’t inherently require any more suffering than either egg-harvesting or apple-growing inherently do.

A Jain doesn’t have to purchase milk from a factory farmer.

And AFAIK even the most stringent vegans don’t brush insects from their path with every step, or avoid onions and carrots because it causes death.

Depends a great deal on the planet and the snowball, doesn’t it?

But, that said, a mark of being more important than a lesser being would kind of be the virtue of still empathizing with that being, even if we assume there’s a hierarchy.

And considering you and I are really just elaborate transport vessels for E. Coli and a lot of fungal spores, I’m not sure we should assume there’s a hierarchy.

Self-improvement, for one.

Ever met a Jain?

If your circle of empathy doesn’t include fruit flies, endeavor to expand your circular of empathy until it does.

Goto 0.

Ethics has nothing to do with how an action is perceived, rather its focus is on is the action moral.

One should never take any action without considering the ethical implications of that action. Being capable of that is, arguably, the sole thing that meaningfully separates us from the (real or simulated) fruitfly.