Because life is priceless, and the life of the cat you care about should be priceless to you. When you get a companion animal, that’s what you sign up for. And if you’re not willing to go the distance to take care of your pet when they are sick, you shouldn’t get a pet.

Part of that is also how in our car-centric society, our public transportation sucks. And biking is unsafe in many places— even spots that have bike lanes. Everything is too far way, so you can only get there by car. Everywhere you that is close is either unsafe or actually impossible to bike to, unless you’re lucky. And if you wanna take the metro or bus, it’s slow af, unreliable, and in many places has very few stops and runs infrequently.

And then the lack of people using public transportation only leads to more cars on the road which makes the problem even worse! More lanes, more land used for parking lot deserts, etc.

Nowhere to go, no way to get there, nothing to do.

I’ve seen videos of the ventilation bs. To call it awful and disgusting is an understatement. They get slow cooked alive and take hours to die and they scream for all of it until they can’t scream anymore. And there’s hundreds of them. Hundreds of screaming voices dying in absolute agony. For hours. It’s literally the Brazen Bull. It’s torture, full stop. I can’t believe we allow this bs to be done to anything that can feel pain and suffer.

The dude who made this site believes in the “great replacement” and that the Covid vaccines were a psy-op to modify people’s dna and make the sheep slave people.

:/

Maybe due to his paranoia his privacy advice might be good lmao. But still. Wow.

Mentioning the obvious things: Remember that depending on your location, you will not get full sunlight everyday of the year. The orientation of your roof and whether it’s pointed toward the sun also matters. If you have any young trees around you, they might grow and cast a shadow on your roof. If you have neighbors, they might plant trees.

You can use Project Sunroof to roughly estimate the average sunlight your location receives during a full year (accounting for weather conditions): https://sunroof.withgoogle.com/

Personally, YouTube isn’t other people’s inane rambling for me. It’s science education, it’s about how to identify and forage for food, it’s video essays about nuclear disasters… it’s constantly introducing me to new concepts— like why lawns are bad for the environment, how other countries tackle the problem of traffic and public transportation, why DIY air purifiers are more effective than nearly every commercial air purifier on the market, etc.

It’s a platform where the medium is video form content. Everything is available there. Both garbage and gold. It’s the way that you use it that determines which one you get. For me, it’s like Wikipedia in video form. With the occasional bit of entertainment on the side, as a treat.

What about what I said was tenuous? Did you think I said the death penalty held no power to deter? I made no claims about that. I suggest you reread what I said, if that’s what you think.

I merely pointed out that the greatest deterrence comes from the likelihood of being caught, not from the severity of the punishment itself. This is the popular view. Here’s an article from the National Institute of Justice about it, with sources cited at the bottom: https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/five-things-about-deterrence (Points 1, 4, and 5 may be of particular interest to you.)

This Wikipedia article may also interest you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deterrence_(penology)

The reason I make no claims (and disagree with you) about the effectiveness of the death penalty as a deterrent is because there is no body of evidence supporting either view. You seem convinced that the death penalty is an effective deterrent on your instinct alone. I am uncertain how I am the one reaching tenuous conclusions here, lol.

I disagree that the deterrence would be significant enough to justify the death penalty. But I don’t think our disagreement matters. Even assuming what you say is true, it’s not worth the lives of the innocent people who will be found guilty and executed, in my opinion. I also think it’s a bad idea to give the government the power to kill its own citizens. So even if you are correct, I have other objections that outweigh the potential deterrence factor.

It has been found that the greatest deterrent is “likelihood of getting caught”, and not the actual penalty. Think of the war on drugs. No matter how harsh they made the consequences, the drug trade continued. It’s like this: how likely are you to return a wallet you found to a lost and found if a cop was watching you, versus if you were out in the middle of the woods when you found the wallet?

It doesn’t matter if the penalty for not returning the wallet is death. If the likelihood of you getting caught is tiny enough, you will feel less terrified of playing those odds. Or at least, the average person will.

The death penalty isn’t a deterrent if you’re certain it will never apply to you.

I know you meant this as a funny reply, and I’m sure your cat is very well taken care of.

…but I want to point out that the argument against pet ownership is more about the millions of animals in puppy mills, or on the streets, or abused by breeders, or bred with genetic issues for the sake of purity of breed. Your cat was extremely lucky to be adopted by you. But so many other cats are not. So many other cats die in shelters, or on the streets, or from euthanization, or in breeding mills. We create and fund the system that brings the unlucky cats into existence, for our own benefit.

The argument is that all those millions of cats and dogs that suffer and die so we can choose a few of them to pamper as pets, is not worth it.

Your cat isn’t an abuse victim. But all the other cats who weren’t so lucky, are.

Plus animal abuse is incredibly hard to discover: because animals cannot go to the police and report their owners. Lol. They don’t have voices. That makes them incredibly easy victims to exploit. Humans as a whole are really a hard group of people to trust with such vulnerable creatures, ngl.

I’m very fun at parties, I know.

My most charitable interpretation of you bringing up that spiders have frog pets is that, because pet-ownership is a thing that other animals do, it’s okay/natural for humans to do them too. And if we argue that it’s not okay for humans to do it, it must be because we think humans are inherently superior or something. Hopefully it’s accurate because that’s how I understood you.

This leads me to say:

The difference between us and other species that develop ownership/shepherding/symbiotic/whatever relationships with other creatures, is that humans can conceptualize morality. (inb4 the “morality is subjective” line: yeah, it is. But if you agree that suffering, torture, etc is a bad thing then we’re on the same page here axiomatically.) Unlike spiders, or farmer ants, we understand that causing other creatures to suffer is wrong. Because we are smart enough to understand, we have the responsibility to act in accordance with that understanding.

Another point is: male lions kill the cubs of other lions. Dolphins rape each other. Rats eat their own babies sometimes. Cats play with the mice they catch before killing them. The natural world is full of animals doing horrific things to each other. If you are going to say that it’s okay for humans to keep pets (or whatever) because animals do it/it’s natural… why can’t humans kill and eat their own babies? It’s because we know causing others to suffer is wrong, and therefore hold ourselves to a higher standard. We ARE superior: in the sense that we’ve invented philosophy and morality. That’s not a weird take. And it’s not a take that’s incompatible with this argument.

Similarly, we don’t hold our own children accountable for their crimes to the same degree we hold adults. If a kid steals money, or beats someone up, our society doesn’t punish them the same way as an adult. Because we understand that their brains have not yet developed the capacity to fully understand empathy. To truly be responsible for the suffering they cause.

Animals are, a lot like human children in that sense.

Therefore, we totally can “exist in a category of responsibility distinct from all other organisms.” We literally already do when it comes to things like murder, rape, and torture. Why not add distressing and frightening animals to take photos with them, or keeping them in cages, or what have you; to the list of things we should take responsibility for?

I hope that helps clear up the confusion for you.

Both. Matrix for all occasions except when streaming a game, then Discord.

I just use this god-tier free, open-source app: https://hydrusnetwork.github.io/hydrus/index.html

It’s called Hydrus Network, and it’s like an organized database for managing your pics, videos, and more.

Features include: tagging images, adding notes to images, saving urls for images, searching your collection for duplicates and letting you compare them to keep the highest quality image, dark mode, meta tags, and more.

It’s literally one of my top 5 most essential apps to my life, and it’s so unknown. I feel like a cultist because I’m always harping on about how great Hydrus Network is and no one knows about it.

An end to the problem of aging, and death. Whether that means turning into cyborgs, I don’t care. I just want to choose when I die. Not having dying slowly happen to me like a terminal illness. Plus life is way too short. If I get tired of immortality let me off myself. But let me at least get tired of it first.

Actual Budget went open-source a while back! It’s self-hostable and fantastic alternative to YNAB. YNAB’s budgeting philosophy has garnered a bit of a cult following, and I highly recommend their budget method (which is a mix of envelope and zero-based budgeting, iirc). Actual Budget is built to mimic YNAB, so it’s perfect. There’s a community of contributors adding features. There’s an option to encrypt your budget, so that whatever server you host it on cannot see it. I highly recommend this app.

Another up-and-coming alternative to YNAB is Budget with Buckets, which is not free. But does have an unlimited free trial lol, and a good privacy policy. It’s still developing though, but it is good!

You are indeed expected to come up with all those answers. Usually someone who already knows the answer asks the questions to you in person, and you guess until you get it right. Slowly, you realize the answers all have to do with the previous questions, and it makes it easier to think creatively hahaha. I wish I knew more than just this series of questions, but these are harder to come up with than it seems like lol.

This is just insane. How are people not cooking alive? I don’t look forward to the coming years…