I am not a lawyer, but I am pretty sure that if you, as a child, have your parent fraudulently open an account in your name (like so they can avoid taxes or scrutiny or whatever), you can sue your parent for every single dollar they put in that account and then later took out of it. And because minors are not allowed to file lawsuits, the statute of limitations does not even start ticking until the child turns 18. Maybe we should all make sure that children like Steven Millers’ are aware of these facts.

I think it’s definitely worth doing some serious math first before publicly writing it off. Even if its a marginal benefit, as long as its just a tiny bit greater than the marginal benefit you get from intentionally avoiding exposures as much as reasonably possible, then over time the PFAS levels will come down slowly but steadily

Secondly, no its not okay to give people contaminated blood. But the blood is contaminated with something basically everyone is contaminated with already, and the person who needs transfusion will likely die without it, so it is kind of moot.

But after only a few more moments of thought, if we were really concerned about it, we could just perform the dialysis on all the donated blood and plasma after it has been taken where we have economies of scale and nobody needs to be hooked up to a machine for it

Once the plasma is collected, I wonder if you can perform dialysis on it at an enormous scale to protect future recipients while still keeping things economical.

Describing donating a pint of blood every several weeks as “regular bloodletting” is really something. I mean I guess in a literal sense that is what is happening, but they literally will not take your blood if it is not safe to do so, including donating too recently.

Edit: by the way, after thinking about this for only a few moments longer, i have realized you can probably do even better just by donating plasma only, and now you are not even losing your blood cells.

I really don’t feel like we’re on the same page right now so let me just ask you some questions and focus on what I believe to be a serious misconception you have about what metaphysics is:

Do you understand that when two quantum physicists are arguing about what the “correct” interpretation of the mathematics of quantum mechanics is, that they’re literally arguing about metaphysics? Do you understand that when Albert Einstein figured out general relativity, he did it literally by reconsidering the metaphysical assumptions that were implicit in Newtonian physics? And if you do understand those things, do you think that Isaac Newton and that Albert Einstein (both of whom thought a great deal about religion, more broadly too, in particular about what their work suggests about the world we live in) were just like liars and fools or something?

I really think you should look into what constitutes a metaphysical assumption if you think that you can escape making them

I feel like you didn’t actually try to understand any of what I just said. I hate to break it to you, but it’s literally just a fact that there are religions that make metaphysical assumptions that are literally equivalent to secular humanism. If you think that they’re actually contradictory, it just means that you probably actually haven’t tried to study the history of religious thought from an actually critical perspective where you didn’t just presume that you already had it all figured out.

So like I used to be anti-religion. But when I studied the history of religious thought, it seemed like every criticism I had of religion I was able to find a religious tradition which explicitly accounted for that criticism, and it made me realize a lot of the essential beliefs that I had about religion in general were simply untrue. Like there are religious traditions that literally deny institutionalization (so you can’t even associate religion in general with organized religion), there are literally religions that explicitly reject the existence of any kind of deity (so you can’t even identify religion with a belief in some kind of a god). In general, it seemed like the only thing that literally all religions had in common was that they represented a set of metaphysical beliefs that an individual has attached themself to for whatever reason. And I realized that it’s kind of impossible to never make any metaphysical assumptions about the world we live in. And I started to ask myself questions like “is it even possible to reject the entire category of religious thought in a meaningful way while still retaining the ability to reason about the world?” And “is there actually a good reason why I don’t want to think of my own humanist ideas about the world as religious in nature, or does it just make me feel kind of funny because I had already prejudiced myself so heavily against the concept of religious thought?”

I think it’s possible that the flyers were not planted. I don’t really know why it never crosses anyone’s mind that maybe he just stole a bunch of these flyers because he wanted to limit people‘s awareness of the protest.

When I was a child, I wanted everything. But by the time I had become an adult, I had realized along the way that having lots of things actually means having lots of burdens and the only way to have lots of stuff without it actually making you unhappy is if you find a way to make your problems everybody else’s problems too, and get them to take care of it for you. This is why I think that we need to cultivate a new social norm where anybody who is perceived as being interested in acquiring great wealth is seen as nothing more than a baby-minded individual that wants to turn the entire world into their mommy because they can’t even wipe their own ass