Blake

Fuck the manufacturers. They’ve had years to invest in local battery manufacturing and chose not to, betting on the fact that they could pressure the EU to roll it back. Nope, hold them to the flame. This is a step in the direction of reducing our exploitation of the developing world.

No, legitimate interest goes further than functionally required cookies. Legitimate interest can be treated to mean almost anything, because it refers to the “legitimate business interests of the data processor”. If you’re on a news website, it’s their business to show you ads and to get them to click on them. Therefore, it’s their best interests to improve the click-through rate. This can be used to justify tracking cookies as legitimate interest.

Would it survive the test of a day in court? I don’t know, maybe not, but it probably will never go that far, so it basically doesn’t matter anyways.

It happens much faster than you’d think, and it doesn’t have to be absolute power by any means. Have you seen/heard stories of even tiny amounts of power going to people’s heads? It doesn’t happen because they’re evil people, it happens because they had a way to improve their living situation (maybe even for nothing more than an ego boost) at the expense of others, even if in a very minor way, and chose to take it.

We would all like to believe that the world is good and fair and that if we just got the right people in power, everything would be okay, but that is just not realistic unfortunately. Power almost always corrupts anyone who wields it, and as long as there are unequal structures of power, there will be abuses of power.

Ambition isn’t a binary thing. Most people have some amount of ambition, even if it’s just “I aspire to get a decent job so I can live comfortably”. It’s surprisingly seductive to abuse power to further your goals, even seemingly unambitious goals, especially if you think you can get away with it, and doubly so if you think that your abuse of power isn’t really doing any significant harm (as per my example of taking $0.01 from people). If you give yourself a moral justification for your abuse of power on top of those things, you’re doomed.

I want to believe that if I had significant power that I wouldn’t abuse it, but I have to be realistic. I have no reason to think that I’m special or that I would somehow be immune to this. It’s better for all of us that we get rid of as much of the unequal structures of power in our society as possible.

Fair enough, and no harm done, at least from my perspective. I agree that it is interesting topic worthy of consideration and I think your view absolutely has merit, it just felt more to me that you thought your view was more “valid” because it was backed up by works of speculative fiction, but now I understand that I have misinterpreted your comment, so I apologise for my part in that :)

I’m much happier to discuss the ideas on a level playing field.

I agree that the loss of a pet isn’t generally as devastating as, say, losing a parent while young, or losing a partner. I was thinking about kids - usually their first experience of loss is for a pet, and it’s often really difficult for them, because the experience is so new and kids already have such sensitivity to emotions.

I agree that in a world where people live forever, each loss would be more impactful. I’m sure the first loss would be as difficult (or more so) than a child dealing with the loss of a beloved grandparent - very hard and painful, but there’s little reason to think that it would uniquely break our brains, and I think there’s also little reason to think that something being rarer makes it harder to deal with.

I spent all of my life being able to walk and taking that for granted, with no reason to think I would ever have to deal with the loss of that ability - until something happened and I ended up with a disability that left me unable to walk. It was hard to come to terms with but I managed absolutely fine. And that’s a relatively minor thing compared to what some humans have had to deal with. We are an extremely resilient and adaptable species!

For all those reasons I really don’t think immortality would be particularly difficult for our brains to deal with. I think the significantly bigger problem would be more social and geographic - how would we avoid overpopulation, and would our society/culture continue to progress as it used to? We know very well about how elderly people are “set in their ways”, for example, would that trend mean that if we had immortality in the 17th century that we would still be having arguments about whether or not slavery was ethical today?

Damn! Hope that friend is now an ex-friend, what a crazy dangerous thing to do! Hope you recovered okay from the burns <3

Yeah, I know how lucky I am, for sure. That’s horrible what happened to your uncle, what an awful way to go :(

If you had the ability to push a button and divert $0.01 from a random million US bank accounts in a way that would leave no trace, would you press the button?

Power corrupts. Most people are not strong enough to resist the abuse of power. It starts very small - such a minor, harmless thing, but then you abuse power more and more to cover your tracks or to benefit yourself more.

I disagree completely. I strongly believe that people can start with the absolute best intentions and attain power with good morals and ethics, but eventually the temptation to use power for your own benefit is too strong for most people to ignore.

If you had the power to divert $0.01 from every bank account in the US to your own account, would you do it?

Another thing to consider - you have power over animals. Do you use it for your own benefit?

Now you’re being internally inconsistent. You explained that it would be bad because we’d live together but would be sad because we’d lose our loved ones, but now you’re saying that it would be bad because we wouldn’t lose our loved ones. Why wouldn’t we learn that the things in our life are temporary just because we wouldn’t die of old age? We’d still lose pets, we’d have fleeting moments, etc. exactly the same way, the fact that our lives would last forever wouldn’t change the fact that we would learn that nothing else is temporary.

Kids deal with their first experience of true loss all the time, and even with their underdeveloped brains and lack of emotional understanding, they’re capable of dealing with the loss and moving on. Your claims have no basis in reality and are pure conjecture. You’re absolutely welcome to your opinions and free to express what you think would happen in any way you like. My problem is that you seem to think that your opinions are somehow more based in reality than the opinions of others. None of us know what the impacts would be, it’s as simple as that.

“Semi-closed outdoor area” is not considered to be outdoors by UK law. I’m not arguing semantics with you. You are interpreting everything I say in the weakest possible way. I’m not doing that to you, so I just feel like you’re really being quite unfair. Are you trying to understand my position, or are you just trying to win some internet argument?

I haven’t seen any good proof of the levels of nicotine from second-hand smoke being harmful to anyone. Please feel free to provide a source if you want to make that claim.

Are you seriously not seeing a difference between kids playing on a go-kart at 6am and someone listening to extremely loud music at 3am and refusing to turn it down when asked?

I’m getting really tired very quickly of your aggressive manner, please dial it back or I’ll just block you.

Neither - we learn to accept that loss is sad, but ultimately something we can’t prevent, and therefore we become more accepting of it. We learn that everything is temporary, so we learn to appreciate the things and people we enjoy while we have them, but we also learn to let those things go when we lose them.

You’re right that we don’t know what effect immortality would have, but given how, on average, the elderly react to the loss of their friends compared to how the young react to the loss of their friends, we should surmise that it would be easier to deal with the losses, rather than harder.