skulblaka

More like, on the scale of mortal vs god, the things that are important to us either aren’t important to god(s) or may be so insignificant to be actually imperceptible.

As a thought experiment, say you get an ant farm. You care for these ants, provide them food and light, and generally want to see them succeed and scurry around and do their little ant things. One of the ants gets ant-cancer and dies. You have no idea that it happened. Some of the eggs don’t hatch. You notice this, but can’t really do anything about it. So on, and so forth. Now - think about every single other ant you’ve passed by or even stepped on without even noticing during your last day outside the house. And think about what those ants might think of you, if they could.

Now an argument that a god is omniscient and all powerful would slip through the cracks of this because an omniscient god WOULD know that one of their ants had ant-cancer and an all-powerful one would be able to fix it. But the sheer difference in breadth of existence between mortal and god may mean that such small things are beneath their attention. Or maybe he really does see all things at all times simultaneously down to minute detail. We don’t know. It is fundamentally unknowable to mortals. Our scales of ethics are incomparable.

We also don’t know if the ethical alignment of a god leans toward balance rather than good. It would make sense, in a way, if it did. Things that seem evil to us are in fact evil, but necessary in pursuit of greater harmony. Or in fact even necessary to the very function of the universe from a metaphysical perspective. If we assume the existence of a god for this argument it leads to having to assume an awful lot more things that we can’t really prove or test one way or the other. But one thing that seems pretty self evident is that the specific workings of a god are fundamentally unknowable to mortals specifically because we are not gods. We don’t have a perspective in which we can observe it so any argument made in any direction about it is pretty much purely conjecture by necessity.

More like, you know damn well that Jim keeps passing code reviews without reading a line in them, he’s been talked to, still does it, and you need something actionable to prove it so that you can get someone’s ass in his chair who does their job.

As it seems to me, who hung around with a lot of drug users back in the day, as well as regular folks: most people who are interested in trying them can and will get their hands on it regardless of legality, sometimes easily. It’s about as low risk of a crime as there is. Those who aren’t interested, won’t, again regardless of legality. There will be edge cases where somebody will go “Ah what the hell, it’s legal now, why not” and toddle on over to their local dispensary for the first time but largely speaking anybody that wants to smoke weed or snort coke is probably already doing it.

Now what probably would change is the number of people on record using drugs, per capita, over the next few generations if it becomes normalized like alcohol has been. Which makes sense. But, counterpoint to that, in countries where they have legalized many drugs they still often have lower rates of severe addiction because they’ve generally also set up safety nets for those folks. Accessible medical care and available addiction treatment options will keep many drug users from hitting rock bottom, but we don’t really have that in the US so many users will often go unassisted in any way for ages and lose jobs and homes because of it, only getting “help” when it becomes forced upon them by the state (which is frequently not in any way helpful).

Anyway, I’m rambling, but tl;dr it’s definitely a multifaceted situation and blanket legalization probably isn’t a great move without accompanying medical and social support, which needs to happen anyway regardless of any moves for drug legalization. Gotta walk before we can run, unfortunately.

If anybody’s gonna know what will kill you…

Absolutely yes, but also, choose your targets. Walmart ain’t gonna miss it. The local bodega will.

A sibling is a lot easier to approach in a lot of subjects than a parent, I think. Sometimes this is what a person needs, and if their sibling is willing and able to meet them on that this is just a good personal family dynamic.

Much more likely that no company wants to use it no matter how much it costs because it degrades. We use plastic as a packing material specifically because it doesn’t degrade and lasts forever.

They know it’s rigged because they’re the ones rigging the damn things

It’s impossible for them to understand the idea that the Democrats might not also be desperately trying to counter-rig every election, and rather just have such a shit ton more voters outside the hostile voting environments that they still occasionally pull out a win now and then

Fuck that I still unironically enjoy electro swing

Booty Swing was a gateway drug and Parov Stelar is a legendary musician

Teaching someone the wrong way to do something frequently makes the right way make way more sense. Someone who just copy/pasted 99 near identical if statements understands on a fundamental level when, why, and where you use a for loop much more than someone who just read in the textbook “a for loop is used to iterate elements in a collection”.