this movie is weirdly based

that’s not a problem with trains it’s a problem with unsustainable land use

the whole point of firearms is that it’s deadly force. you can’t fire one at a person without being ready to take their life because it’s always a likely outcome.

Discrimination being tied to unjust, prejudiced, unfair, etc. treatment is part of all the dictionary definitions I found:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/discrimination

https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/discrimination

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/discrimination

https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095721450

https://ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=discriminate

Not to take away from your main point at the end, but that’s just not what discrimination means. Discrimination in this context isn’t just making a decision between choices, it’s when that decision is made unjustly or based on prejudice.

So yes, it’s wrong to put profits ahead of people’s well-being. But the question was whether insurance companies’ policies to not pay out for causes of death that are strongly correlated with poor mental health unjustly treat people with mental health issues.

To be honest, I think that’s an interesting point, because while I similarly find the whole concept of health and life insurance abhorrent, I think these policies are in place so people don’t take their own lives for the sake of the insurance money for their loved ones. In that respect, they may save a handful of lives, and you could argue that makes it a just policy. I’m not sure I 100% buy that argument either, I just think there’s more to the question than just whether insurance companies are generally moral.

I don’t think the launch permits have anything to do with this company at all. They would’ve just purchased a ride on another company’s rocket (likely Space X or ULA). They probably assumed they could figure out reentry when they got to that point in the mission. I can’t say for sure, but they very well may even have multiple plans for getting the capsule back, and this was just the first one they tried.

Great read! I always found Strong Towns’ critiques of North American suburban planning useful because they put things in terms that liberals can understand easily - essentially, that widening roads and encouraging low-density development ends up costing towns more money, and that we can provide better services to more people by building more densely with more mixed uses. I hadn’t looked into the actual recommendations of Strong Towns’ founder, though, and this article points out some real doozies that are good to keep in mind when using his critiques.

it would be interesting to see these graphs on the same y-axis scale to show the relative time differences between latitudes.

Right This Way

Cars. Not only are they getting bigger, with both higher weight and worse blind spots making them more dangerous, but the new technologies they are coming with make me uneasy. The touch screens to control everything from climate control to radio are bad enough, but now they even have social media apps installed! Plus all of the driving aids like lane departure assist up to “autonomous” driving means drivers are paying less and less attention to the road.

you’re like almost getting at the social model of disability, but framing it in a way that invalidates people’s lived experiences of having a brain that works fundamentally differently from the norm.

I thought DS9 had some great time travel episodes tbh. Past Tense and The Visitor I think are top tier episodes, plus some fun antics between Far Beyond Stars (if that counts as time travel) and Trials and Tribble-ations.

I’ve use swype on mobile for probably about a decade. I find it’s way faster than clicking individual keys on a touchscreen. but to think it would be faster than a physical keyboard is wild to me!

first game I got into was Pokemon Blue, but Guild Wars is what turned me into a gamer

Sources of entertainment have - by definition - more viewers and attention than Exxon’s office building.

you know wild animals are suffering and dying and whole species are going extinct as a result of climate change and deforestation, right? how does that jive with the golden rule in your book?

what new phones have a headphone jack? I’m hanging onto my Pixel 4a for as long as possible so I can keep using my wired headphones