The same scientists who cry about ethics, have happily experimented on mice and guinea pigs in their labs, even if it causes the deaths or distress of those little sentient beings.
Mutations/mutatives like Halo's Master Chief and Marvel's Super Soldier serum won't remain sci-fi for much longer, methinks.
former practicing scientist at an institute whose name you would recognize.
The field may not be fully constrained by ethics, which is just a way of saying that the work is done by people and people have varying ethical bounds, but from what I saw many of my colleagues were highly ethics driven.
I remember one Russian colleague who smuggled blood products out of Russia so they could be tested for HIV. Because the Russian government refused to help these patients. The man risked his life to help HIV sufferers.
Ethics is best when matched with courage, if a person is willing to put their life on the line for their beliefs.
Also noting that in the western world, experiments generally need approval of an ethics board before proceeding. That board's sense of ethics might make different judgments than you on, for example, mice experiments, but there is a big difference between "not constrained" and "some of the constraints are different than what I would choose".
where in this case, the ethics boards decided that provided a certain risk/reward barrier is crossed, and that the animals are otherwise treated well, sacrificing mice to improve human health is just fine.
That is an ethics based decision that was debated for a long time. And maybe should continue to be debated, there is real value in your stance that all beings are sentient and this demands a level of care.
@a_better_world: (apt username for this conversation!)
I do understand what you mean, and I do comprehend that animal testing cannot be avoided for scientific advancements to help and progress humanity.
But I have a simple motto I want to adhere to (it is very hard though, to practice it in principle and action daily):
Ethics is best when it is for the good of humanity, without being bad for Earth.
In recent years, I am starting to feel humanity is sharply veering away from its basic ethics (and the first ethic must be to not shit where one eats - but hey, we are actively aggressively destroying the only beautiful bountiful planet we know of, that can support humanity), and doing whatever the top richest most-powerful elites want.
And this unbridled greed and apathy is going to sow the seeds for the downfall of humanity, I'm afraid. At the cost of our precious Earth and its other denizens who share this planet with us humans.
There has been a catastrophic 73% decline in the average size of monitored wildlife populations* in just 50 years (1970-2020), according to World Wildlife Fund‘s (WWF) Living Planet Report 2024.
Our generation is the last one that can still save the wild forests of the Earth, which help us cope with the climate crisis and preserve the biodiversity of the planet. A new study by Greenpeace Russia and the University of Maryland has shown that if urgent and effective measures are not taken to preserve wild forests, most of them will disappear in the next 20 years.
Volkswagen (the same megacorp that did the infamous Dieselgate/Emissionsgate scams) forced monkeys to inhale exhaust from its automobiles, to try to show that fumes from current models (the cars, not the monkeys) were less noxious than previous models.
> it‘s a-ok to insult small men, ugly men and small dicks, as long as the recipients are evil or not well liked
As long as you're punching up. And if your target is at a authoritarian force occupying your city, abducting and murdering your neighbors, that's definitely punching up.
> It shows you what society really thinks about men with those
I think you're missing a rather big part of what's actually happening, which is that it says nothing about the insulter's feelings about dicks and everything about the insultee's feelings about dicks. The entire reason it's viewed as an effective insult is because it's the sort of thing that the ICE members themselves, who appear in every moment to be of the most fragile-in-their-masculinity caliber, would feel insulted about. What the dick chuckers believe about dicks is quite unrelated.
> it‘s a-ok to insult...as long as the recipients are evil
I've been party to arguments between different groups of progressive feminists where one group was gleefully using these kinds of masculinity-impugning insults against their right-wing political enemies; and the other group was admonishing them not to do that or at least feeling conflicted about it, grounded in intersectional feminist argumentation that insults based on small penises and physical ugliness harm marginalized people and uphold conventional beauty standards.
In at least one argument of this kind I've been party to, one of the people most prominently in the latter camp was a fairly short trans man, who had not taken enough T to be clearly distinct from a butch lesbian. I imagine he was not super happy about dick-sized-based insults.
That's a bit of a stretch. They don't seem to publish much info, but they do publish quarterly shipments. According to macrumors it's more in the range of single digit millions a quarter for their all computers, 4-7 usually.
Maybe, just maybe, they are reaching that billion this decade or so, but looking at those numbers it's rather in the range of 10% of that.
Still a huge number, but that's a fraction of PC market.
As an Austrian I have to wonder, is this name a homage to Josef Fritzl, one of the most well known Austrians of modern time?
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