• 2 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • I dont think Putin would let him nuke Ukraine. Beyond issues with it being on their border, and their own military forces occupying part of the country, a missile launched from the US towards Ukraine is going to look a whole lot like one launched from the US towards Russia, at least at first, and the nature of nuclear conflict is such that you generally would launch your own missiles when you see your rival’s missiles coming, rather than waiting to see where they land. Trump seems to care what Putin wants, and nobody is going to want their main rival, even if their leader is currently one you have influence over, to be launching nuclear missiles in the direction of one’s country.

    The EU is even less likely, since France is both one of its most prominent members and a nuclear power itself.


  • Ive ended up making one of these myself lol. When I came over to lemmy from reddit around the third party apps thing, I tried to create a community for the game Spore (a bit niche these days, but it had a small but active reddit community that was fun, and I hadnt really realized yet that the small size of lemmy would mean individual game communities wouldnt really be viable except for a handful with very large playerbases).

    Ended up posting a few things I made in game myself, and I think I got one or two posts from other people, but nobody else really joined it and eventually I moved on to other games again (I tend to go through my library in cycles of a few months).

    I may come back to it if I get back into that game someday, and I am still active on lemmy, so if someone started trying to use it as a space to spread hate thinking it abandoned, I am still around to remove it, so for the moment I dont think mine at least poses a problem per se, though I suppose if I ever tire of the platform as a whole I’ll need to either ask around if anyone else wants it or else look up how to close it/ask an instance admin to if that’s needed.


  • The argument is that there exist some use cases where we do not have a viable low carbon energy source yet (things like heavy farming equipment or aircraft), and one can effectively counteract the emissions of these things until we do develop one. Or alternatively, by the time that we eliminate all the high carbon energy, the heating effect already present may be well beyond what we desire the climate to be like, and returning it to a prior state would require not just not emitting carbon, but removing some of what is already there.








  • the sprouts are a similar size and shape to those chocolates, and theyre hidden under the gold wrappers, meaning the actual chocolate isnt visible from the outside. So, they can remove the chocolate, wrap the wrappers back over the sprouts, and put those back in the package so as to make whoever it is given to think theyre getting chocolate, until they unwrap one.



  • To be fair, our ancestors, evolutionary speaking, didnt resemble us that much if you go back far enough. A system that just considers a few key features a “child to be protected” is probably more adaptable than if every change in appearance had to be accompanied with a corresponding mutation to whatever gives us our mental picture of what our young should look like, for them to still get taken care of.






  • Indeed, it’s not incoherent, at some level though I’d argue that morality is at it’s core simply a tool for deciding what actions one should take, and a system that both follows a utilitarian model and makes it extremely easy for someone’s life to be negative carries the implication that the world would be happier were you to just kill off the huge segment of the population who end up on the negative side. As this is completely contrary to our instincts about what we want morality to be, and completely impractical to act on, it is no longer a very useful tool if one assumes that.

    I do tend towards a variant of utilitarianism myself as it has a useful ability to weigh options that are both bad or both good, but for the reason above I tend to define “zero” as a complete lack of happiness/maximum of suffering, and being unhappy as having low happiness rather than negative (making a negative value impossible), though that carries it’s own implications that I know not everyone would agree with.