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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: September 27th, 2023

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  • This idea is a complete non-starter from a practical standpoint. Parents would complain about it either way. Either they wouldn’t want girls in school early or they’d want boys in school early, too.

    It’s just much easier to treat children all the same.

    Also, I personally think this plan would backfire. Girls graduating wouldn’t want to have to be adults earlier than boys, so they’d stay in school longer. And from what I’ve heard, the most reliable way to reduce birth rates is to educate women more.

    I think everyone also knows how to ethically increase the birth rate. Make having children easy and affordable. Lots of government assistance. Make sure everybody has access to cheap or free childcare.

    And there’s also the generational problems. Young adults can see the problems that the previous generations caused. You can’t go back in time to fix those. It will be expensive to change this sort of thing.

    But quick fixes aren’t going to change the underlying problems.


  • Passenger compartment is even more wrong than glove box, though, isn’t it?

    That compartment is used by the driver. I’ve never seen a passenger use it. And obviously, the driver doesn’t keep passengers in that compartment.

    It’s got nothing to do with passengers, other than being on the passenger’s side. And if it’s really just because it’s on the passenger’s side, “passenger compartment” is an unusual way to say that in English. It sounds like what you’d call the main cabin.

    On the other hand, if you have gloves that you keep in the car, at least it’s possible to keep them in that compartment.


  • The Vatican said Pope Francis had approved the document, which also reaffirms its condemnation of surrogacy, saying the practice represents “a grave violation of the dignity of the woman and the child”.

    “A child is always a gift and never the basis of a commercial contract,” the document says. “Every human life, beginning with that of the unborn child in its mother’s womb, cannot be suppressed, nor become an object of commodity.”

    The ethical problems with surrogacy are real, but they’re not about the child. They’re about income inequality and putting adult women through a physically traumatic, dangerous, and possibly life-changing experience for money. If we were able to use artificial wombs for “surrogacy” (I know, it’s technically not the same thing), I think people would see it as nothing but a new type of fertility medicine.









  • Had they said 100 broken fingers, I would expect fewer deaths, yes. But that’s just for comparison, and they didn’t say broken fingers. My point with saying broken necks was that it’s obvious that it doesn’t matter how many other people were on the train. Common sense can be used, but only if we have reasonable expectations.

    This is two trains colliding at a fast enough speed to break bones in 100 people. How does that happen? In the video we don’t see anything like the results of a collision of that magnitude. I doubt anybody had a single broken bone of any sort from the train wreck in that video.

    100 people with broken bones, you’re talking about impacts where people are thrown over. People’s heads are smashing into things. You’re talking concussions. You’re talking crushing injuries and rib fractures. You’re talking skull fractures and whiplash. People of all ages could have been in the wreck. With 100 people with broken bones, this was a violent impact.



  • It doesn’t matter how many people were on the train. It matters how many people had broken bones. What if, instead of “broken bones”, it said “broken necks”? If you heard that an incident caused 100 broken necks, but there were zero deaths, would you find it hard to believe?

    A broken bone is a serious injury typically caused by a strong impact. The fact that there were so many serious injuries suggests that there would be more deaths.