Livestreamers have it bad enough already when they allow viewers who donate to play audio or TTS over their speakers.
Here is one hilariously tragic example with a Seattle livestreamer who went by the name "Arab Andy" while in a UW classroom. Hint: it landed him in jail.
Uber doesn't inform drivers what they will be paid for a trip. Except where mandated by state law, they don't even inform them of the trip duration or destination until after it is accepted. It is hardly a marketplace when one side of the exchange knows next to nothing about what they will selling until after it is sold. Uber may not "fire" them, but failure to accept gigs will significantly impair your ability to be offered more in the future.
Except where mandated by state law, gig workers do not receive the gig description until after it is accepted. There is no transparency about details such as price or duration when they must make the decision to take it or leave it. Failure to accept a gig will result in penalization that significantly reduces your ability to receive more offers in the future.
Assuming these reports aren't psychosomatic, it is beyond implausible to believe that the CIA is uninterested in determining the source of something specifically targeting their own personnel. Not to sound too conspiratorial, but this sounds like the pretext to funding portable detection devices for all state personnel (both at home and overseas) in addition to years of both defensive and offensive research.
Pretty close to being on the list. "Have a really smoky fire at home. Life cost: 1 day"
Considering the close association of food, warmth, security and socialization with the habitual use of fire for at the very least several hundred thousand years of human history, is it really any surprise that some people still enjoy the practice?
Sikh temples unconditionally offer free meals to all without concern for a recipient's religion or economic status.
Religion and charity are voluntary. You can choose to donate to charities that will most effectively utilize your donations. You don't have that choice with a state, and the outcomes are not always good. Even in Democracies, the state social services are often such inefficient massively entrenched institutions that they are resistant to change.
Religions also serve as bulwarks against increasing state power. Depending on your perspective this could be a good thing or a bad thing, but I'm more concerned about the great harm an unrestrained state can inflict on the world than what good it may be able to do.
If the technology were readily accessible to conceive what could be referred to as a "super human" (without genetic disorder, resistance to disease, no predisposition for mental illness, superior athletic ability, high IQ), would it absolutely be immoral to conceive a human being via an entirely natural process?
If it is absolutely immoral to genetically engineer a human being that would require an organ transplant then it would seemingly also be immoral to not utilize readily accessible technology that could have prevented such a disorder, no?
>"If it is absolutely immoral to genetically engineer a human being that would require an organ transplant then it would seemingly also be immoral to not utilize readily accessible technology that could have prevented such a disorder, no?"
Well, actually, no - that doesn't necessarily follow. It's not valid to say "if it's wrong to do x then it's wrong to not do things that prevent x" - you can substitute X for plenty of other things. It's wrong for me to steal money from a friend, but it doesn't logically follow that I'm morally obligated to buy a security system for my friend so he doesn't get stolen from. The analogy is kind of funky here, but I think you get what I'm saying.
There's an intentionality that exists with genetic engineering that doesn't exist with people having kids the old-fashioned way. If someone has a child, and that child turns out to have a birth defect that causes issues, that's a sad accident most of the time, and accidents don't have the same moral quality as intentional acts, like genetically engineering someone.
Let's not lose track of why this came up. The question was "So, are trans folks immoral? Organ transplants? Prosthetics? Where do you draw the line?" and that was in response to "It is immoral to create something sentient which has not been created by natural processes. To bring a sentient being into the world which is created by human engineering process is immoral because there are no guarantees that we do not create something which is horribly mutated, fucked up genetically, and experiences only pain for its entire life."
Asking if we're morally obligated to try to make super babies is a distraction from that earlier question. I said what I did not because I wanted to argue for or against the validity of eugenics, but because I wanted to call attention to how absurd the line of reasoning was.
The person commenting thought that they hit on a pretty solid point when they seemed to equivocate scientists making human-monkey chimeras with people that have to use a fucking cane. I pointed out that no one is intentionally genetically engineering people to force them to have to use canes, and then you've come along to say that if it's possible to ensure that someone will be born without having to use a cane, then they're morally obligated to do that. Somewhere we went off the rails, huh?
Research is already performed using human fetal tissue obtained from aborted fetuses. How is this significantly different?
"A majority of people would find it unethical to continue to develop viable embryos" seems contradictory to the current legal status of abortion in the US. Perhaps it is unethical but worth doing regardless?
Just how many women create a fetus and abort it in the name of science? Human embryos are not manufactured for experimentation. What you're talking about is completely orthogonal.
Now, breeding/manufacturing animals for experiments is awful and morally complex--ethically unclear (at least to me). But the line must be drawn somewhere, and we can very easily draw it at manufacturing human-monkeys, human-pigs, or human-anythings.
At what point does a thing become a human-thing? Imagine there was a way to copy a few human genes over to a mouse so that its immune system more closely resembled a human, but it was still, in every other respect, a mouse. Would it be a human-mouse?
It's a great discussion to have when the matter at hand is that subtle. Frankensteining together human stem cells and monkey blastocysts until something works is pretty far from surgically selecting specific genes.
From the article:
The announcement of the new chimeras will no doubt be labelled “unnatural” or “playing God” by some people – but the same could be said about many scientific breakthroughs. An iPhone is unnatural.
When lifeforms are compared to iPhones, we've reached a pretty clear David Mitchell moment of saying "Are we the baddies?" Something reeks here of amoral science.
We need a better understanding of consciousness and awareness before trying such things, or it's only a matter of time before realizing a catastrophic error that joins the many permanent stains of humanity, as we accidentally become the monster "AM" in "I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream"
I agree that we should be maximally wary of ethical considerations here, but a uniform mass of cells is a uniform mass of cells. We do know when important structures develop.
For example, one of the most important cell line in research is called HeLa, which was harvested from a woman with the same initials without consent from a cancerous growth. Since then, it was grown to a huge biomass (couldn’t find exact number). Other than the lack of consent which is obviously amoral, would you consider research on this human cell line bad?
[citation needed]
No one has any idea what consciousness is, how it arises, what its physical correlates and boundaries are, what perceived valence corresponds to, whether small systems can experience pleasure or suffering beyond what humans are used to...
> No one has any idea what ... its physical correlates ... are
We do know a fair bit about the neural (physical) correlates of consciousness in humans, and the evolutionary purpose of those facets of consciousness, such as fear or pain.
This understanding can help us to make a reasoned guess that cows are more capable of suffering than a small lump of cells in a blastocyst:
(1) We can see that cows have similar brain structures to humans[1], where those brain structures (amygdala, etc) are known to be a necessary condition for pain or fear perception in humans, and those same brain structures are absent in a blastocyst.
(2) We know that pain and fear is an adaptation that all/most mammals likely have, because (i) it confers significant fitness, and because (ii) it manifests below our cortex (e.g. in the amygdala) which suggests it evolved fairly early.
My claim isn't that a blastocyst doesn't have consciousness. My claim is that its consciousness and capability to suffer is likely to be less than that of a cow (based on the above reasoning), and so society should make sure it is being ethically consistent in the way it treats both.
My first question to you would be - if your position is correct, i.e. that we should be extremely ethically cautious with blastocysts because they may suffer and have conscious states - how can society then ethically justify abortion?
My second question would be - how can a meat eater (which you might not be) express such ethical caution pertaining to blastocysts but willingly eat meat? [I am a meat eater].
Things can't be further detached from reality. Once you ever spend a few days with a herd of cows, you get a feeling for their personalities, their joy, their pain. Comparing to a group of humans, be it kids on a playground or some factory worker, you really start to wonder why in one case we allow ownership, life-long suffering and death under excruciating pain, while in the other case those things are punished by lifelong imprisonment or even the death penalty.
You can't claim "but we don't know what conciousness is" to justify how we treat animals while at the same time have the strongest protections for fellow human beings. Well, usually only those of your own backyard, since we westerners also tend to treat third world country populations like sh*.
Did you know that when you cut grass it sends out distress signal - the lovely smell of fresh cut grass. In principle it is the grass screaming out loud in horror. https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/30573/what-causes-fresh-... Unfortunately we can't survive without hurting other species.
Humans are also great at personifying non-person things. The grass isn't 'screaming out in horror', rather it's emitting a chemical that its evolved to emit in response to certain stimuli.
Its one giant organism, we are awfully hung up on that its parts are not touching and imagined some fringe type of individualism like covering your eyes with your hands makes you invisible. We are nothing without context.
We are slaughtering, maiming and torturing people (plants and animals) all of the time, non stop, since the beginning. We build ever more sophisticated machines to do it. I cant even look at the butcher robots that feed me.
Chimeras might actually improve the situation. It would force us to question our holier than thou, my shit don't stink attitude. I for one welcome our chimera underlings. It will be a revolution of philosophy.
I'm not sure about the purpose of your comment, but it sounds like your conclusion is "therefore can do whatever we want to other species." As if ethics doesn't apply. As if we shouldn't try to minimize that hurt. Maybe I'm wrong about that.
Paragraph speculating about such arguments and why people use them:
Hopefully one day soon people aren't still offering "plant=animal" justifications of eating animals, like this. I find them very depressing. It's as if suffering is a joke to these people. Or something, I don't understand. Just repeating pro-meat arguments they've heard, I guess. Maybe it's a positive sign, and such comments try to bury unease from their growing sense of ethical responsibility to other species.
> We need a better understanding of consciousness and awareness before trying such things,
We do have quite a good understanding of those things in animals. Yet, nobody cares and people make fun of the "animal welfare" concept. Even in this thread. But suddenly a few human cells are involved for a few days and people start screaming.
There are vegetarians who eat fish "because they don't have feelings". As long as society accepts this nonsensical hypocrisy, your line of reasoning goes nowhere.
Abortions are not a desired action, by society, doctors, women, families, anyone really.
They are a compromise to help women who made a mistake, were victims of assault, are too young to take care of a child. It's a bit less about "taking ownership of your body", than it is about "being tolerant and understanding about facts of life we can't change".
That's where it's less unethical: it's not like people support terminating a potential human life, they support instead lifting one up that took a wrong step.
Now these chimera experiments are fine to me, but I'd be okay to wait, go slow, debate in society about them rather than point at 16 yo rape victims and say "see she killed her baby and we used it to test a vaccine, why can't I mix a monkey with a human and see what grows before terminating it when I dont need it anymore"? Again, I m anti religious but I wouldnt want street riots and Trump 2.0 because scientists felt it was boring to explain to the idiots.
I use `autojump` (aliased as `j`), which sounds quite similar as it also records your most frequently visited directories. It's as simple as entering `j down` to enter /some/path/to/MyDownloadFolder.
For exploring massive file trees, a terminal file manager that allows you to preview the contents of subdirectories without entering them is huge time saver. I use `lf`.
Here is one hilariously tragic example with a Seattle livestreamer who went by the name "Arab Andy" while in a UW classroom. Hint: it landed him in jail.
https://www.bitchute.com/video/VOI9sw3MmDM/