Asklemmy

Euthanasia should be available for anyone at any age. You don't choose to be born, life has no inherent value, suffering is strictly personal. Suicide is a terrible option with lots of drama, an extremely high failure rate and lifelong treatments or medication that are seen as the solution by society is a conservative convulsion of keeping people alive under any circumstances.

We could set up three sessions with a therapist, to keep people from losing loved ones too fast. But honestly, to me that would feel patronizing. That other people find it important someone stays alive is their problem. If it hurts them too much they can do the same.

There is joy in life and that's beautiful, but on a scale suffering has the possibility to be more intense. Let people die without drama, let them say goodbye if they want with a ceremony, let them choose.

That's the next step in the mentality of a modern civilization. It will fix the drama of wars, hunger and pain as you always have a simple painless solution if the suffering gets too heavy. Just end it, peacefully, whenever you want.

You all look dumb when dancing.

I don't believe in prison for punitive justice. Prions should be used to keep society safe from dangerous people, not punishing them imo.

Blaming slow drivers for your dangerous driving to pass them immediately and dangerously has the same energy as a rapist blaming what the victim was wearing: The other person made me do it. I have no agency over my own reactions.

If you live in a city and have no backyard or similar, you should not be allowed to own a dog.

Modern Israel should not have been created.

Corporations should only be allowed to exist as long as they're doing more good for society than the damage they do. Businesses should either be a net positive or run by people who are individually and jointly liable.

People need to pay extra for their bodily excess weight. I'm done being harassed to pay for a kg more in my baggage.

Trying to get people to change problematic behaviour, language, or opinion through yelling, or shaming is ineffective most of the time. Obviously I can't expect people who belong to minorities to not be angry, not everyone can be Daryl Davis, but if you are white and don't have a personal trauma, you should use more effective methods to correct people's problematic behaviour.

Source: I was able to get my family to stop using the N word, and even my elderly father who doesn't actually remember that it's bad to use the N word has stopped using it thanks to this very simple technique: every time he says that word, stop the conversation and explain why this word is harmful and dangerous to use, don't let them steer the conversation back. Being visibly angry with them will only make them dig in their heels and seek comfort with other people who are racist, making it more difficult to get them out.

Eventually they will subconsciously stop using that word, simply because this causes the conversation to be interrupted every time. So while I don't punish them (can't exactly tell my father to go to his room or something), the repeated inconvenience of having the conversation halted every time will get it in their head eventually.

I think this is the most effective method to correct problematic behaviour in adults.

The majority of the ruling party of Texas wants to secede, and we should let them.

Take their nukes and kick them out the door to enjoy the ancapistan experience.

Eggs are gross.

Python is just as bad if not worse then JavaScript. The fact that if you misspell a variable name, instead of giving an error like any sane language, Python code will still run, but do something different then it looks like it does, creating a hard to spot bug is just awful. The amount of time I have spent debugging python code only to find a tiny typo that any sane language would have caught before the code even ran is several weeks now, I can't imagine how much collective time has been lost over this, and a few other, horrible languages.

Swearing shouldn't ever be censored.

I have quite a few. I don't believe in copyright laws or IP in general. I think it holds back innovation and exists solely to benefit megacorps like Disney or pharmaceutical companies.

For example - you develop a new drug that really helps some people. You charge $50 a pill even though it costs you $5 to produce. Without the government protecting IP, another company will come around and produce it and sell it for $6 a pill, providing cheaper access to healthcare.

People will say "what would give someone the incentive to make new things?" Without actually thinking it through. For a great example of how lack of IP is a good thing, look at how Shenzhen went from a fishing village to a Chinese San Francisco in a few short decades.. one company will take the product of another and iterate on top of it.

Another unpopular opinion is I'm pretty absolutist with free speech. I think certain things like calls to violence or intentional defamation of character should be restricted. But pretty much everything else should be fair game.

I believe in open borders and think the US should return to the late 1800s style of immigration. We're gonna need the population to compete with China in the coming century.

I also think that the primary investment into climate change at this point should be preparing for the inevitable changes instead of trying to prevent the inevitable.

The rise of feminism has seen the steady devaluation of the contribution of men in those areas of society where they should be most active. Rather than celebrate and recognise what's right, the focus is on attacking what's wrong.

The majority of men are lonely, isolated and uncared for. Many feel unvalued, unsafe and vulnerable. There is less community support for men than there has been in the past, less institutional support, and a continued decline in the tolerance of men being in shared places. The minimisation of value in societal roles is yet another way that men are cut off.

This seems to escape the vision of feminism. There is always claim of ideological alignment, where the empowerment of women directly benefits men, but when it comes to any form of concrete action that helps men that need help, or celebrates men that contribute - it's nowhere to be seen.

Men kill themselves. They kill themselves. In their thousands. Leaving cratered families, trauma, guilt from the survivors, many of whom are female. Because they feel valueless, helpless and can't see a purpose to going on.

Accountability goes both ways. In demanding support from men, feminism must support men.

My unpopular opinion is that too many people give way, waaaaaayyy too much attention to "correct use of gender pronouns" and they should all just stfu.

I understand why that is a big deal for trans people, because they make their gender the defining aspect of their character. Something I consider a mistake, nobody's main defining characteristic should be their gender.

The kWh is a silly unit. Joule (J) is the one true unit of energy.

Also, common time units suck as much as inches, pounds, feet and whatever nonsense units you Americans still use. Just use seconds with the appropriate SI prefix instead.

Cubic meters and tonnes suck too. Just use kl and Mg instead.

In order to actually fight climate change, we should start by trying to reduce the population in the future. Less people = more resources per person.

I think having children when the world is already overflowing with unwanted children is pretty fucking selfish. how about you do humanity a favor and stop for a round or two, eh? maybe pick up all the lost and forgotten children society has strewn across the way.

(only child unwanted by both parents, dont know who my father is. left my mother at 18, but she made sure to remind me how much her life got fucked up because she had me...Currently married to my lovely wife going on 10 years at 2024 and 12 years together total. and we have considered a child. but...i cant stop thinking about the ones already here, unloved. but as a bastard only child with no real parents, i could be bias.)

Nobody should have kids, we should just drift off into extinction. Nobody has been able to tell me why that would be a bad thing without using anthropocentric reasoning.

AI is to computer science what black magic is to science.

Seriously, what do you get after you've spent days and days to train a model? An inscrutable blob that may as well be proprietary software written for an alien CPU; studying it is damn near impossible, understanding how it works would require several lifespans, and yet it works, and we trust these models and use them to get solutions to problems that would normally be impossible to handle by computers using "real" computer science. And one day, this trust will bite us in the ass, not in the form of an "AI rebellion" but with every system that uses AI becoming unreliable because of situations outside its training.

Americans really think they own the world sometimes, and truly underestimate the disdain the world has for them.

Lemmy should have a Controversial sort for comments.

I like sand

Both parties - Democrat and Republican - here in the US - are part of the ‘problem’ and need to go. We desperately need a third or multi party system and an end to this bullshit of geriatrics ruling our government and making decisions.

I would make comments about the first line all the time on Reddit and immediately get downvoted to hell because people would start arguing or making comparisons to the old ‘two sides of the same coin’ bit. That’s fine if that’s how you want to see it.

I get it, we all have certain things we fight for that the other party shits on, women’s rights (abortion), equal rights, labor, gun control, taxes, etc.

But both parties still serve their corporate masters and still do their damndest to turn people here in the US against each other using ever scare tactic imaginable and thru the media sources (Fox, CNN).

They just keep playing the Game to turn people against each other and create more decisiveness and more power for them.

Spaghetti sucks. Come eat my ass, italians

Everyone should try and reduce the amount of meat they eat as much as they can. Same goes for flying and driving.

Souls don't exist.

Too many people conflate the evils of corporatism and corruption with the general concept of "capitalism"/a market economy.

Now, I'm hardly an advocate of laissez-faire economics. But I'm not a full-on socialist either. I think the majority of problems people attribute to modern market economies can be corrected with aggressive anti-trust and pro-consumer regulation.

(The keyword here is majority. I'm sure it makes sense to socialize some things, but those details are best left to people smarter than me.)

A lot of things around the world were better before the Internet. And they were definitely better before smart phones reached ubiquity.

Negative motivation is the real way to make changes.

It's great to have goals and positive things to look forward to when you reach those goals.

But to be consistent in doing the hard work to reach that goal it's better to scare the shit out of your self by asking

"what happens to me if I don't do the work?"