Sorry to keep bugging you but I'm looking for solutions for my entitled cat. Currently trying a rope ladder on my window. She doesn't like leashes. Do you use a leash?
ZMoney
joined 2 years ago
How do you explore the outdoors with him? You take him hiking?
Sugar and Mylar
If we decide to ban smartphones from schools we should ban them from work too. I'm supposed to be writing an article right now and instead I'm here. Then we should ban them from streets so that people have to pay attention to where they are going and the things going on around them. At that point we'd have something like functioning human beings again instead of mindless zombies. We could still have terminals for plugging into the Machine but our time with it should be regulated (like it already is with research clusters) so that we don't waste energy. There, the whole problem is solved and all it takes is a global butlerian jihad.
Ok I see my sarcasm was lost on you so let me try again. There is nothing ethical about pet ownership or industrial civilization. If we cared about the well being of pets we wouldn't keep them, and if we cared about the well being of the planet we wouldn't build cities or burn fossil fuels.
I already have a cat. The above is moot for me. If I had to rethink this then maybe 12 years ago I would have made a different decision. At this point I am not going to euthenize my cat or blow up an oil pipeline. If you allow my cat agency then she should be allowed to explore her world and make her own decisions, just like the pigeons and rats that are forced to adapt to human civilization by eating garbage.
Anyway she's safely locked away and miserable now so none of this matters.
Yup, and I'm the only one with agency in the whole world. It's all about me.
Here is a perspective from someone who has owned an inside/outside cat for the last 12 years. My cat is independent and resourceful and yes, contributes to ecodestruction by killing birds and mice occasionally. To me this is negligible compared to the ecodestruction of simply existing in a city. If I lived in nature I would not have a cat. I don't think you can conflate my cat killing a pigeon twice a year in an urban environment with destroying the ecosystem.
It's also disengenuous to ignore the quality of life improvements of having a cat who is free to explore vs. one locked in an apartment all day. I recently moved and am now experiencing this and it sucks. I feel terrible for restricting her freedom and she is visibly less happy. If you think animals are sentient and have emotions, and you care about the environment, then none of what we are currently doing makes any sense.
I mean it depends on whether they actually pay it off. Many boomers were able to leverage the explosion in housing prices into paying off their cheap mortgages ahead of time. The boomer success metric is actually based on this principle. Buy a $150k house in 1998. Sell it in 2018 for $450k. The mortgage is irrelevant.
The obvious problem with this is that it completely fucks over the next generation.
Could you please finish your manifesto? I want to know what happens at the end. Do we mass shoot all the boomers?
Yeah every new technological solution has its associated ecological cost. Some are better than others. Guess which ones are the most profitable.
There's something called the Kuznets environmental curve that explains this pretty intuitively. It's an optimistic forecast that I only buy when I'm in a good mood.
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Wild how international finance is now tied to a feud between a rodeo clown and an adult gundam nerd. I thought the subprime mortgage crisis was stupid but this has to break some record. I've accepted that the world will get progressively dumber in my lifetime but at this point I can't imagine how.