Roko’s Basilisk is just pascal’s wager but with AI.

No, just a weighted blanket and a regular pillow. I’m not sure why people find this weird tho, jeans are comfy.

1, t shirt and jeans.

Meanwhile, if you’re looking for a somewhat older movie, in my experience you can find it about half the time by going to the “videos” search tab in a browser, using any advanced search options that may exist on that browser to limit it to longer videos, and searching “(movie name) Internet Archive”.

I mean, wood already biodegrades quite readily, yet we are able to make some pretty long lasting things out of it anyway. Having a bacteria that can break down some variety of plastic doesn’t really imply that all plastic things are going to rot away like old fruit.

I renamed my cat because of this guy. I don’t really like to change animals names from what it was at the shelter in case they’re used to it, and I have a cat named Mel, who I suspect was named for him because there was another nearby cat in the shelter he came from named “Gibson”.

So I’ve renamed him after Mel Brooks.

To be fair, making text hard to read somewhat defeats the entire purpose of text.

I think I alluded to this in one of my other responses, but I would hold that things like that are situations that the person involves thinks are worse than death, especially given that all they would be able to think about under those conditions is what they are or anticipate feeling rather than what death is. They may also simply have beliefs about death that are nicer than what I view it to be.

A lot of the objection i get along those lines seems to be “But have you considered just how bad (horrible fate) is”, when I totally acknowledge that there are some truly agonizing things that can happen to someone, my objection is simply that I believe death is just that bad.

I did consider things like that to be under the case of terminal illness yes. I do understand that circumstances, especially around such disease, can bring about extreme suffering, and that the way brains process pain can override a person’s normal feelings on the matter and make them seek death to end it. Its just that, I think that an end of existence (which, not being someone that believes in afterlives, is what I believe death is) is the worst possible state, worse than any amount of suffering (even an infinite amount of such, not that a human can actually process an infinite negative stimuli). As such, I view it is as more ethical to extend life for as long as possible than allow it to end early.

I acknowledge that a person in great pain will likely disagree, even myself if my life brings me to that, but I dont take this as actual evidence that the pain is worse, because pain shuts down a person’s regular thinking and can in high enough amounts override that persons values and ability to think clearly about them. In other words, I think that a person, any person, even myself, that is in sufficient pain will consider that pain worse than death, because pain is almost like a sort of mind control in that it forces you to think that way, but I think that person, even myself in that hypothetical, would be wrong about that. In the same way that if some cruel inventor devised a machine that manipulated a person’s mind and forced them to have suicidal thoughts, I would think it wrong to let the victim act on them.

I actually agree that it is a restriction on personal freedom. Its just that, in my view, maximal personal freedom isnt actually a moral absolute, but a moral heuristic, something that is usually true and so makes a decent guideline, but not under every circumstance. This is simply one of the situations where I think that heuristic fails and no longer aligns with what I view as moral.

Probably yes, however, I consider a person under such conditions to not truly be sound of mind, as torture is rather extreme duress, so that isnt really much of an argument in my view. I dont dispute that you could inflict an amount of suffering on me that would make me wish to die, I just think, while not in that state, that if I were in it would not be ethical for me to make that choice, and so that under that circumstance I shouldnt be able to.

Everyone dies eventually, so the distinction in my mind isn’t so much the how, though obviously does change, but the when.

If you take the stance that deciding to die is okay if you know you won’t live past a certain time period, then you either need to arbitrarily definite a cut off time period for how long until death is certain a person can do this, or simply decide that anyone can do that whenever, because death is already certain given a sufficient time interval.

If you don’t, then information that someone’s death is imminent doesn’t really change that.

I think one of the more controversial ones I have is that I don’t tend to be in favor of things like MAID or voluntary euthanasia. I understand why people are for it, but I don’t like the idea of killing someone over something that is ultimately in their head, like pain or a person’s desires, and the way I tend to evaluate the value of life has something of a floor (that is to say, I do not really believe that there is such a thing as a “fate worse than death” so to speak, because I believe that death is the least functional state a person can have and anything above that implies at least some functioning even if that state is still highly undesirable).

If he were a chicken, he’d probably care more about dealing with bird flu, even if for purely selfish reasons.

Even there though, what is the actual point of a phone app controlled smart toilet, even if you open sourced the whole thing? Unlocking one’s phone and tapping the app icon, and then presumably a button on the app, is going to take more time than one press of a lever that one is right next to anyway, and the latter doesn’t present as many points of failure.

Avoiding flushing the water is even harder

If the violence actually stops that and doesn’t just become a symbolic victory where the fascists get to keep the laws they passed at the cost of a punch at the legislative floor, sure. But that wasn’t my point. I wasn’t saying “violence in politics is a bad thing to consider under any and all circumstances”, but “if a country has reached a level of polarization where even the members of its governing body feel the need to resort to that with eachother, things have already gone wrong”. It’s a symptom of a serious problem coming to light, not the problem itself, in other words.

To be fair, there is precident for things to escalate to physical violence on the floor of the US Congress. It was just in the lead-up to the civil war, is all. Arguments getting so heated that legislators can’t resist the urge to just beat up the other guy probably are a bad sign for a country.

Isn’t this the entire “dollar store” industry? My understanding was that these kinds of thing were the entire reason that business model was profitable. Or does this company do it worse than say dollar general or something does?

I mean, the whole “no ethical consumption under capitalism” or “all corporate ethics are fake” type stuff has plenty of truth to it, but at the same time, one does have to get any good or service not made oneself from somewhere, and corporations are made up of people with different views about what they’re personally willing to do, or how much they think taking unethical actions even is the profitable thing. So, there is still room for some businesses to be worse than others.