I think our moral intuitions are out of alignment with a logical consideration of good and bad. So I’m not a bad person according to my moral intuitions (not the same thing as being a good person) but also pretty much everyone (including me) is a bad person according to logical consideration.

(My logic is that only humans appear to be moral agents, but non-human animals deserve moral consideration and there are a lot more non-human animals than there are humans. Thus even seemingly simple questions like “Is it good to save someone’s life?” depend on whether it is better to prevent that person from eating meat by letting him die or to have him contribute to environmental degradation by remaining alive, and thereby prevent wild animals that would have suffered from being born. The effect on the person is not the major deciding factor.)

The problem with letting the President unilaterally start a war is that you can’t unilaterally end a war - you can only unilaterally stop fighting, which is different and often a bad idea.

we just have to accept their is a wanna be mob boss in the White House

Yeah, that’s how democracy works in this case.

Getting on Trump’s bad side can mean an anti-trust lawsuit or an end to tariff exemptions. With billions of dollars at stake, the executives would be negligent to act otherwise.

I’m a big fan of his, but I’m also not sure he’s the right person to judge what a mentally healthy, well-adjusted individual should act like.

Is that a refutation? I admit, when I consider how my distant ancestors and the majority of humans throughout history lived, I wonder why they chose to go on, and to create new generations who also lived lives like theirs, and the only answer I have is that they lacked perspective. Maybe a philosophy that teaches one to refuse a life without dignity is, in that context, correct philosophy.

The New Hampshire style lowercase-L libertarians I met weren’t like the online uppercase-L libertarians that that book is about. (They generally wouldn’t call themselves libertarians, for one thing.) My impression (as, ultimately, an outsider) was that they were practical people accustomed to rural life who thought it was important that everyone should mind his own business.

My favorite so far has been New Hampshire - lots of space, beautiful forests, cool summers, low taxes, and the general libertarian attitude. I don’t really have a least favorite. Even the ones that I felt weren’t right for me had their appeal. California was the one I had the strongest negative reaction to. The extent of homelessness in the Bay Area was shocking, but on the other hand the climate was absolutely heavenly. (The two facts are not unrelated.)

I vote for keeping the old one.

Fair share? What California chooses to tax its residents is its business, but the proposed wealth tax claims to apply to non-residents and taxes even those assets they acquired after leaving California. It’s a grotesque violation of any reasonable understanding of jurisdiction.

There has to be some balance between promising the voters what they think they want and actually doing what is a good idea.

I suggest trying antidepressants. Obviously I can’t diagnose you from one post, but my impression is that your problem is primarily in your ability (or lack thereof) to enjoy your circumstances, not in your circumstances themselves. For what it’s worth, I’m an adult with a good job, few responsibilities, and enough money to buy anything I might reasonably want and I still need my bupropion - it’s just something about how my brain works, not anything in the external world.

Being told that my girlfriend was probably too old to have children naturally - technically about her age rather than mine, but we were close in age.

A few years earlier, seeing people born when I graduated from high school graduating from high school themselves.

Or before even that, living longer than my mom had - she died young but I hadn’t really felt how young.

I meant that I would be paying extra for it as opposed to a hypothetical car manufactured without the requirement. So it would be like having my taxes raised to pay for providing me something I didn’t want.

Maybe this makes me sound like a jerk, but my thinking in that regard was “I don’t have children and rarely drive near other people’s loose children. Why should I pay for hardware I don’t need?”

I deliberately sought out a car without that stuff when I had to buy a new(er) car recently. It’s usually quite annoying - the worst was a rental car that had an alarm buzz whenever I activated my turn signal while there was another car anywhere near my blind spot.

IMO the only technological improvement from the last decade and a half that’s worth having is a backup camera, and that’s only because I must shamefully confess to being terrible at parallel parking without one despite having years of practice. (I was tempted to buy a Miata since they still have real dials, but ultimately I did settle for a car with a digital display instead of an instrument panel.)

The ship is not expected to be delivered until 2034

Why do they bother? It’s not like the ship will still be named after Trump by the time it’s built even if it’s named after him now.

Vindman wouldn’t have been a MAGA Republican.

What makes me mad is when people press the button and then jaywalk immediately anyway. If you press it, you should have to wait just like the drivers will.

Ashley Moody, the Republican candidate, was elected by a 21-point margin last time. If only the people voting in the Democratic primary vote for the Democrat in the general election, the Democrat definitely loses. So yeah, in this case I trust establishment leaders to do what might have won the election. Vindman still probably would have lost, but at least he had a chance.