That story reminds me of something one of my teachers told me about his experience as a child in Germany during WWII. As children were indoctrinated and parents could get into trouble for things they said, his father was very careful in his talks with him on walks, which he described to me as "deprograming" though his father was careful about what he said. I think he also conveyed the idea to his son that he needed to keep his mouth shut to stay safe.

It must be horrible to live in a place like that, but if one does, it is often wise to keep one's thoughts to oneself and not make public declarations.

Assuming that everything else is the same (ice is same temperature in both cases, not considering the effects of the surrounding area, the thermal properties of the bowl, etc.), they would cool it the same amount, though the shaved pieces would melt faster, cooling it faster. However, the soup would likely be cooler after the ice cube melted, than the soup after the shaved pieces melted, because more time would pass by then, so the soup would lose more heat to the surrounding area, to the air and through the bowl over that greater period of time. But that is including the effects of heat radiating into and out of the bowl and directly into the air over that greater period of time, and is not just a change in temperature from the ice cube.

So, does that mean that they are no longer trying since 2017?

I don't think we are going to reach that point in 20 years from now. I think it will be much later on, unless government regulations require them to close down.

Right now, the EU is planning on allowing the selling of new gasoline cars up through 2034. Since it is 2023 now, if gasoline were no longer distributed 20 years from now (2043), there would be cars that are only 9 years old when gasoline would no longer be distributed in the EU. That would cause significant hardship for poorer people who cannot afford new cars.

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Notice, even in Luxembourg, which has the highest percentage of newer cars (according to the chart of the opening post), over 25% have cars over 9 years old (it is 25% who have cars over 10 years old, so it must be more than 25% for those having cars over 9 years old). All of the other countries have a higher percentage of older cars on the road.

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In the U.S., where I live, it is likely to be longer that gasoline will be widely distributed than will be the case in the EU, so I expect to not run into that issue with my current car.

Yes. I am not in the EU, but people can drive cars for many years, especially if they take decent care of them. My previous car I kept for 21 years, and it was still reliable. I would probably still be driving it, but my wife wanted some nicer features and so I bought a new car. I plan on keeping it until after 2040, unless something happens to it, or it turns out to be less reliable than expected. Given my age, this may be the last car I ever buy.

My guess is, some gasoline cars will still be on the road 50 years after no new ones are made, unless a ban on them is enacted. Some people like antique cars and drive them occasionally. Probably, a ban on them is the only way that they will be completely eliminated from the road in the foreseeable future.

I think if I were writing music, I would willfully "steal" from composers who are in the public domain from being old, like Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, etc., so that no one could claim a copyright violation, since no one can copyright those works. I would, of course, give them credit in the song, say it was composed by Bach and me, or Mozart, Beethoven, and me, or whatever.

And I would keep track of what bits I took from which pieces of music, so I could prove it in court that it originated in something that cannot be under copyright, in case someone else is claiming a copyright on a similar piece of music.

It must be very annoying to write a song and find out there is something that is similar that someone else wrote, so that one can get sued over it.

You have it backwards, though the feeling is the same. Cold things absorb heat. Cold is the absence of heat, and is not a thing in itself.

So, in a basement, if the walls and soil outside are cold, they will absorb heat that comes into the air, making the air cooler down there.

It appears that the rate of infection is slightly higher for people without an appendix, but for most people without an appendix, there is no noticeable difference in quality of life.

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>So what does this mean for people who have had their appendix removed? Luckily, not much. “In general, people who have had an appendectomy tend to be relatively healthy and not have any major detrimental effects,” Smith says. (She herself had hers out at age 12.)
Some studies have shown, however, that people without an appendix may have slightly higher rates of infection than those with a functioning organ. “It may also take them slightly longer to recover from illness, especially those in which the beneficial gut bacteria has been flushed out of the body,” Smith added.

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https://time.com/4631305/appendicitis-appendix-gut-bacteria/

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Most people who have their appendix removed don't have problems.

Since appendectomies have been going on for a long time, with many thousands done every years, the evidence is pretty solid that it is generally not a serious problem to have it removed.

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>About 327,000 appendectomies were performed during U.S. hospital stays in 2011, a rate of 10.5 procedures per 10,000 population.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appendectomy

With that rate of the surgery, there are millions of people without an appendix, and most of them have no discernible problems from it. So this is not something one should be particularly worried about.

Most people who have their appendix removed don't miss it at all.

>Now that the appendix's usefulness has been discovered, isn't it dangerous to deliberately remove it?

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No. People who have their appendix removed typically have no problems. The current thinking that the appendix harbors beneficial bacteria is primarily relevant in cases where the rest of the beneficial bacteria in the intestines are mostly lost for some reason. If they are not, then having an appendix does not appear to make much difference.

It gives me joy to consider his mummified body in a glass case for people to look at. So, from a utilitarian perspective, of the greatest happiness of the greatest number, we would have to compare and count the feelings of people whose opinions are more like yours, and people whose opinions are more like mine, and also factor in the other consequences of the creation of his mummy and display of it, to determine if it fits or does not fit with utilitarianism. It is far from obvious that a proper analysis of all of that would turn out as you predict.

Yes, I think that would fit with act utilitarianism. It seems the best act for the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.

Yes. The whole thing is silly. At the first attempted mugging:

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>MUGGER. Here's the thing: there is, clearly, more utility in me keeping my finger than in you keeping your measly ten pounds. So there would be more utility in the world if you gave me the money than if you didn't.

A better response than what was given is:

"No, I am giving the money to stop a child from starving, so cut off your finger you stupid bastard."

90 mph is almost nothing.

To help you understand, think about tossing a bullet back and forth with a friend. You can do that without your hand getting hurt at all, because the bullet is not going very fast. However, that same bullet being shot from a gun is going very fast coming out of barrel, and it hitting your hand at that speed makes a very significant difference for how it would affect your hand if the bullet hit your hand.

And the speed of a bullet out of a gun is practically nothing compared with going near the speed of light; the forces involved are vastly greater with vastly greater speed.

The British Empire extended further than you might think. Also, Doctor Who has spread British ideas throughout the universe in both the past and future.

There are so many things wrong with most space movies, someone could write a book about the drivel one sees onscreen. For example, most space movies have magic gravity that does not exist in space and their ships magically have it. They also often bank their ships flying in space, as if they were using wings in an atmosphere. They ignore the reality of distances and the impossibility of faster than light travel, the fact that hitting a spec of dust at anything near light speed would obliterate the spacecraft, etc.

Most "science fiction" movies about space are more properly thought of as fantasy films rather than SCIENCE fiction, because they have little to do with science.

This reminds me of the idiots who get themselves crucified to be like Jesus:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/03/29/good-friday-real-cruxifixion/2035347/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crucifixion_in_the_Philippines

They just stay up for a while and are brought down. Some of them are crucified again and again, year after year.

I did a quick search on this. The world record is 18 days, and even that isn't a proper record without water:

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>Andreas Mihavecz, an 18-year-old Austrian man, may have survived the longest without drinking water: Police accidentally left him in a holding cell for 18 days in 1979. It's a fuzzy record, though, since he allegedly licked condensation off the walls of the prison.

https://www.sciencealert.com/here-s-the-longest-people-have-survived-without-air-food-water-sunshine-or-sleep

So he got some moisture licking the walls during that 18 day period, so even that was not completely without water.

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It is probably just false that this pastor went without water for 25 days.

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One must be an idiot to attempt to go 40 days without food or water. Food, that is possible (though not a good idea), but not water.

>I'll never get over the fact that Harry Whittington publicly apologized to Dick Cheney for getting shot in the face by Cheney.

His other option was for Cheney to finish the job. So he decided to apologize instead.

It is something they had better keep an eye on, given that we keep accelerating global warming by putting out ever more greenhouse gases. Either that, or the people should move now before some of these break.

I think I would want to sell now, while the prices are still high, and move elsewhere, rather than end up in a news article about how one of these "unexpectedly" breaks in a few years.

That is pretty quiet, which is not surprising. It is also not surprising that it is not absolute silence, as one typically does not have that in one's life.

I would expect the particular frequencies of sound may affect this, as well as the type of sound (i.e., music that one likes versus music one dislikes, ocean sounds, etc.).

>and empower us to fight back

It is really easy not to feel terrible from people's Facebook posts. Just don't use Facebook. The same applies to any other online platform that makes one feel terrible.

I personally have never had a Facebook page as it never seemed like a good idea to me. Keeping superficial contact with "friends" and family isn't my thing. Friends and family who wish to maintain contact can do so in an individual way. If they don't want to do that, then that tells you something important about the closeness of the relationship and what it means to them. And if you don't want to bother with individual contact with your "friends" and family, that indicates something important about how you feel about them.

>If you can choose which specific human dies (but it can't be someone who wishes to die), does that change your answer?

I think for anyone who would, with the original question, choose to let the pandas die should change for that version. I can think of plenty of people whose death would be a good thing for the world. Putin, for example. If I had a button that would magically kill him, and not do anything else (like saving pandas or whatever), I would push the button. He is presently getting a lot of people killed, and it would be far better if someone had killed him before he started the war against Ukraine. Still, better late than never. It likely would help end the war if he were to die now, and save many lives.

>If we all had a mastery of every known skill, an encyclopedic knowledge of all of history, generations of life experience from all corners of the globe, and a complete understanding of all known sciences, then would we not naturally strive for a just, equitable, and sustainable world for all living things? Would we have boundless empathy, compassion, and wisdom?

No. Empathy is a feeling, not knowledge. People often use the terms "psychopath" or "sociopath" to describe people who lack empathy, though I believe the expression used in psychology today is "antisocial personality disorder." But regardless of what one calls it, a lack of empathy isn't a lack of knowledge.

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David Hume expressed this rather well with his famous statement:

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>'Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.

https://davidhume.org/texts/t/full

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For his reasoning on that, one would want to read the material preceding that quote.

>Are the arguments against objective ethics/morality, motivated by persons unable to deal with shame and/or thier previous bad decisions?

Some might be, but others are motivated by the fact that those who advocate for an objective morality almost invariably have extremely poor arguments for their position. In other words, those who advocate for objective morality tend to not prove their position, and we are left wondering if their failure is due to them being just wrong. If it is objective, like other facts, such as rain falls from the sky, a demonstration of some type ought to be given, yet that isn't done, and they almost always end up appealing to someone's feelings about facts, rather than demonstrate some fact that is morality. Which suggests that what they are doing is really subjective instead of their claim that it is all objective.

Of course this also depends on how, exactly, one defines "objective" and "subjective" for morality. If, for example, we look at something like David Hume's ethical theory, what determines right and wrong are feelings, but not simply one person's preferences. It is based upon feelings of empathy, that are shared among people who are not regarded as psychopaths or sociopaths (and whose feelings are not corrupted with false beliefs). So, is that objective, since it is felt by many, or is it subjective, because it is based on feelings?

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If anyone wants to read what Hume has to say about ethics, a good place to start is his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals which can be found here (among other places):

https://davidhume.org/texts/m/