I wish there was a way to set how much I value my time and every extra mile driven, so that it would select only those tolls that are a good trade-off.

I remember back in grad school they told us we would have to take an ethics seminar and I thought it might be something interesting about the role of a scientist in society or something like that, but it was actually pretty much just “Don’t have sex with the undergraduates, even though technically there isn’t a strict rule against it.”

That’s a rather radical departure from society’s general attitude towards suicide.

Would you rather have them let him die?

Edit: With that said,

But in this latest case in Texas, ICE also received permission to force-feed the Cuban hunger striker through a “percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy” tube insertion. This is a surgery in which medical staff make an incision in a person’s abdomen, insert a tube that remains in place indefinitely until it is surgically removed again and pump liquid directly into the stomach.

Are they keeping this prisoner constantly restrained?

I think our moral intuitions are out of alignment with a logical consideration of good and bad. So I’m not a bad person according to my moral intuitions (not the same thing as being a good person) but also pretty much everyone (including me) is a bad person according to logical consideration.

(My logic is that only humans appear to be moral agents, but non-human animals deserve moral consideration and there are a lot more non-human animals than there are humans. Thus even seemingly simple questions like “Is it good to save someone’s life?” depend on whether it is better to prevent that person from eating meat by letting him die or to have him contribute to environmental degradation by remaining alive, and thereby prevent wild animals that would have suffered from being born. The effect on the person is not the major deciding factor.)

we just have to accept their is a wanna be mob boss in the White House

Yeah, that’s how democracy works in this case.

Getting on Trump’s bad side can mean an anti-trust lawsuit or an end to tariff exemptions. With billions of dollars at stake, the executives would be negligent to act otherwise.

I’m a big fan of his, but I’m also not sure he’s the right person to judge what a mentally healthy, well-adjusted individual should act like.

The New Hampshire style lowercase-L libertarians I met weren’t like the online uppercase-L libertarians that that book is about. (They generally wouldn’t call themselves libertarians, for one thing.) My impression (as, ultimately, an outsider) was that they were practical people accustomed to rural life who thought it was important that everyone should mind his own business.

My favorite so far has been New Hampshire - lots of space, beautiful forests, cool summers, low taxes, and the general libertarian attitude. I don’t really have a least favorite. Even the ones that I felt weren’t right for me had their appeal. California was the one I had the strongest negative reaction to. The extent of homelessness in the Bay Area was shocking, but on the other hand the climate was absolutely heavenly. (The two facts are not unrelated.)

I suggest trying antidepressants. Obviously I can’t diagnose you from one post, but my impression is that your problem is primarily in your ability (or lack thereof) to enjoy your circumstances, not in your circumstances themselves. For what it’s worth, I’m an adult with a good job, few responsibilities, and enough money to buy anything I might reasonably want and I still need my bupropion - it’s just something about how my brain works, not anything in the external world.

Being told that my girlfriend was probably too old to have children naturally - technically about her age rather than mine, but we were close in age.

A few years earlier, seeing people born when I graduated from high school graduating from high school themselves.

Or before even that, living longer than my mom had - she died young but I hadn’t really felt how young.

I meant that I would be paying extra for it as opposed to a hypothetical car manufactured without the requirement. So it would be like having my taxes raised to pay for providing me something I didn’t want.

Maybe this makes me sound like a jerk, but my thinking in that regard was “I don’t have children and rarely drive near other people’s loose children. Why should I pay for hardware I don’t need?”

I deliberately sought out a car without that stuff when I had to buy a new(er) car recently. It’s usually quite annoying - the worst was a rental car that had an alarm buzz whenever I activated my turn signal while there was another car anywhere near my blind spot.

IMO the only technological improvement from the last decade and a half that’s worth having is a backup camera, and that’s only because I must shamefully confess to being terrible at parallel parking without one despite having years of practice. (I was tempted to buy a Miata since they still have real dials, but ultimately I did settle for a car with a digital display instead of an instrument panel.)

This one is interesting because spacing out the vaccines will reduce the fraction of children who actually go through with getting all their vaccinations and therefore have a net negative effect on public health, but at the same time I personally wouldn’t agree to get more than one vaccine in the same day. I recall getting rather sick after getting multiple vaccines at the same time when I was a child. (It wasn’t life-threatening, but it was quite unpleasant for several days.) And even now, the last time I got a covid booster I was in bed for two days afterwards. I wouldn’t want to potentially compound that reaction. A relative of mine recently insisted on spacing out all her child’s vaccines and that’s what I would do if I had the time and money for the additional visits to the doctor.

I have in mind the people I’ve worked with - I would have known where they were from even if they were lighter-skinned.

Is the portrayal in non-Indian films bias or just a consequence of immigration patterns? The Indian immigrants that I’ve met in the USA have usually been relatively dark-skinned.

They can’t help because they don’t have plot armor if it isn’t their movie. I mean, look at Multiverse of Madness…