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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Did you mean to reply to me? I don’t see how that is relevant.

    Like, sure, oil and gas companies are corrupt and doing immoral things to prop up their industry.

    But if a coal plant can sell me electricity for 5¢/kwh and the windmill company can sell it to me for 2¢/kwh, I don’t care what immoral stuff they try, the consumer is gonna buy the cheaper option.

    Historically fossil fuels have been the cheaper option, and most of the immoral stuff was to avoid bad press. That strategy doesn’t work if you’re the more expensive option. The market will in fact work for the best in that scenario.

    Which isn’t to say the free market always makes the “correct” decision. Fossil fuels are a great example, as they have continued to be the primary form of energy for the past 100+yrs, since it was cheap. But it looks like natural market forces are bringing us around to green slowly but surely, and Chase Oliver might be right that this is a problem that will, at this point, largely solve itself.


  • I mean, I think that’s what the majority of people are advocating for in green circles too, no? “No New Coal” and all that?

    I don’t hear much advocacy for tearing down working power plants.

    Power plants don’t exactly have an infinite shelf life. They get run down and need to be replaced. Eventually only building green leads to only having green.

    Combine that with the ever increasing cost of actually running a coal fire plant. Shipping in hundreds of tons of coal is eventually gonna get way more expensive than operating a solar or wind farm. At that point the business owners will likely tear the plant down of their own volition to replace it with the cheaper option. (Though that will be admittedly a little slower, as you have to amortize in the construction and downtime costs.)




  • I like Chase Oliver. I don’t agree with him on all the issues by a long long shot, but I think he seems like a genuine dude, and I understand his positions, even when I disagree with them. And he’s ideologically consistent if nothing else.

    I’m in a state where the Electorial College is a hard lock anyway, so I’ll probably vote for him since my vote doesn’t matter otherwise. Just as a protest vote if nothing else.

    Plus, if they can get enough of the popular vote they’ll get federal funding in the next election cycle. The Libertarian Party definitely has an extremist wing to it I can’t stand, but there’s something to be said for rewarding them for picking a reasonable human being for a candidate lol.








  • See, I feel like your whole post could be summarized as, “some people’s mental illness makes them unable to work and earn money, so they’re too poor to afford treatment, and therefore the morally correct thing is to just let those people kill themselves.”

    And while I don’t think that’s exactly what you meant, it’s how it comes across. Almost all of your points are some variation of who’s gonna pay for their treatment and take care of their physical needs.

    And I would strongly argue that the answer is instead to have more robust social safety nets to cover those needs. Allowing people to kill themselves as the solution is hella dystopian.

    But, I’m not saying that this is 100% always right. This is a hard issue with no clear answers, and I am absolutely not minimizing the pain of mental illness. My point is that mental illness is much less understood than physical illness, and I wouldn’t trust any diagnosis that said the condition could never be resolved. In the same way that I would be loathe to euthanize someone with a physical illness that has an acceptable chance of being transient, I’m loath to do the same with most if not all cases of mental illness. Especially if the person is otherwise very young/healthy.


  • I think the question is one of balance for me personally. Where do you draw the line?

    Like, this person seems to have been in a pretty long queue and had a lot of time to evaluate, but is that denying her dignity? Should there be a waiting period, or is that denying someone healthcare?

    I think we would all agree that we shouldn’t allow an 18yo who just broke up with their first SO to decide to have a doctor help them unalive themselves, right?

    Is the three and a half years of waiting and treatments that this woman has undergone too much? Not enough?

    I’ll admit that it feels bad to me to allow a 29yo to go down this particular path. People who are seeking death are rarely in the kind of headspace where I think they are able to meaningfully consent to that?

    And this feels meaningfully different than the case of a 90yo who’s body is slowly failing them. This is an otherwise healthy young person.

    Idk, there are no easy answers here. Bodily autonomy is important, but so is helping people not engage in extremely self destructive behavior. If we didn’t have that imperative, fire departments wouldn’t try and stop people from jumping off bridges, right? Where is that line? I don’t know, and I wouldn’t want to have to make that call.