willington

It's not 100% safe for the patient either, but if surviving the treatment is more likely than surviving the disease, it's a go? Assuming the pain is bearable, and the post-treatment quality of life is worth a damn too. Mere survival is not good enough.

Micro$oft isn't America. Micro$oft is a special interest inside America, maybe, at best, American-government-aligned, assuming the government is heavily influenced or captured by Micro$oft. If Ameirca is first and foremost its people, the megacorp and the oligarchical interests (economic royalists) inside America are at odds with most of the American population. The megacorps and the oligarchs can be considered anti-American. Anyway, what's bad for Micro$oft is not always bad for America. What's good for America is not always good for Micro$oft. These interests are not all on the same page, to put it politely. (this is just me agreeing with you in a longer form)

The problem lies in direction and methods. Direction: toward greater wealth consolidation. Methods: fear, lies, fostering ignorance, fostering political disinterest, truth embargo, surveillance, overclassification, embezzlement and other white collar crimes unpunished, eliminating the commons, paywalling all things, etc. Both of those are huge problems that create unlivable societies. The only proper direction is toward a legally mandated wealth ceiling plus a wealth floor plus enforced and publicly measured and publicly tested market competition to regulate maximum allowed wealth consolidation. And of course truth has to be the informational currency. And rights. And privacy for the small players, with heavy oversight for the large players because large is dangerous. We can't lose the big picture here. Of course the governments must govern, but toward what ends and with what methods matters hugely.

Hopping from one proprietary platform to the next is like shopping arround for a kinder slaver who doesn’t beat you as much. We can do so much better. Promote the platforms that respect your rights and freedoms. Apple and Google are financially wired to squueze you for all you’re worth. You are the product. You are the sheep that needs fleeced. We need tech platforms and solutions that respect us and that are not incentivized to squueze max profit. We all know where the road to maxxing profits leads.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

Any universe has at least one sentient being. Rights aren’t circumstantial. How people are treated IS circumstantial. Rights as a concept is not about outcomes. Rights is what is rightly DUE. Rights get violated all the time. That means we tresspass on the minimums that are due. Someone is due privacy, but we spy/surveil them instead. Rights are worth defending. Without defending, rights will get violated. Whether we defend rights or not, they exist as defined. Anyone can just start defending rights at any time, and it doesn’t mean you’re building rights at that time. It’s like counting. Whether you count or not, number 3 exists as a distinct meaning. Rights are like that. Rights exist and have meaning. You can even live a million lifetimes and not know a damn thing about rights in all that time, and this would not negate rights any more than if even every sentient being stopped counting and forgot counting, but counting concepts exist, are real, are ever available, and their use can be resumed at any time.

Let the unregulated “free” (for some!) market ruled by the winners decide. The billionaires are the winners and the deciders that our wonderful free market system has given us. /s

Rights as a concept I described correctly. I have my interests and my dignity. I prosecute my interests. Where did I get all that from? Interests and dignity, what is that if not another way to describe rights? The fact that I will prosecute and defend those regardless of your opinion, what is that? Rights again. When we say Nature “gives” we don’t mean it transfers something to us. It’s just a way of saying we have some qualities or properties as beings by way of simply us being what we are. In this case “gives” is not literal. As for Gods not being real, I won’t bother arguing for God being real in the interests of time. I purposely included Nature as an alternative to God.

Here’s one of the best traders talking about the same issue: invidious.nerdvpn.de/watch?v=bMK8ct6ybjQ&t=1918 It eloquent and funny at the same time. I included a timestamp to jump (almost) directly to the most relevant bit (also 33m, but 31m sets up a better context for an extra 2min of time compared to going directly to the 33m mark). But the whole video is worth watching.

Rights always exist. They come from God or Nature. Our fellow men either respect or ignore those rights. But even ignoring a right or disrespecting it doesn’t make the right just vanish. It is not our fellows who give us rights. Nor can our fellows take them away.