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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • I get the feeling of discomfort but it’s basically the same feeling we get when someone breaks a pencil

    There is no evidence that a mosquito is capable of feeling the kind of despair or horror that a human would feel in a similar situation. It’s unlikely that mosquitos can form emotions at all.

    At the same time, a huge portion of human-animal interactions involve the human controlling the animal in ways that they animal can’t even comprehend. A dog has no idea you’re doing operant conditioning to change their behavior. Pigs have no idea they’re being fed just so they and their children can be eaten.

    The only way to avoid this kind of thing is to turn off your big human brain and go back to ape tier. We might need to go farther down the tier list than that though https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War








  • Charity is about who benefits, not about who decides how to provide that benefit.

    The idea of choosing a charity based on the donor’s will of how it will get spent describes almost all types of charity. If someone donates to any charity at all, they have made a choice on how to allocate their resources and they just take it on faith that that’s the people who need it the most.

    Furthermore, any given dollar of his can only be spent once. The money he spent on himself enriches himself. It’s a considerable amount of money but it’s a tiny fraction of the money he controls. Any dollar he gives away can’t be spent to enrich himself.

    Finally, Buffet has donated over $57 billion. How is he supposed to distribute that? Fly a plane around the country and dump cash out the window? Send a huge check to the IRS? Give it all to your favorite charity? The obvious answer is that he sets up an organization that will analyze existing charities for need and effectiveness and then distributes his assets accordingly.


  • I’ve been thinking about this exact question recently.

    My Austrian grandmother and her sister were working class teenagers during the war. They couldn’t realistically have done anything to stop the Nazis. They didn’t really do much to help but since they were seamstresses they secretly snuck the Jewish family in the building some sewing supplies. It wasn’t much and they stopped when they were told that someone had reported them to the Gestapo. Their experience during the war was dodging bombs and trying to find something to eat.

    None of that matters. When I was a kid growing up in the US people regularly made Nazi jokes as soon as they found out about my heritage. Nobody was willing to entertain any ideas that maybe those civilians shouldn’t have been held accountable.

    History judged all of Germany and Austria harshly. It judged the civilians harshly and it judged their descendants harshly.

    https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/12/1144717
    The world is watching.




  • There’s an odd trend of labeling everyone with even the slightest advantage a, “nepo baby”.

    Nepotism is when you give friends or relatives special consideration for jobs or positions. As far as I know the only job Buffet ever had from a relative was working in his grandfather’s grocery store. The closets I could find for Elon Musk was that he started one of his companies with his brother.

    Elon’s father was an engineer. That certainly put him in a comfortable position, particularly as a white engineer in South Africa but it definitely doesn’t get you recognition from old money families. Buffet went to public school.

    They both had advantages growing up but if we expand nepotism to include people like that, it becomes a pretty meaningless term.



  • nednobbins@lemm.eetohmmm@lemmy.worldhmmm
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    1 month ago

    I’d really like to know more about this. Google shows that there are a bunch of people selling this, or similar things like a rainbow Gadsden flag but it’s not clear to me who is actually buying them or what their intended message is.

    Is it a joke? Maybe they’re just trolling everyone?
    Do they not know what one or both symbols mean?
    Do they actually support the causes behind both symbols? (I saw one post that suggested it might be a different kind of “Southern Pride”)