Could be, but my rotation does include a decent number of tracks with sexually explicit lyrics or anti-government themes.

Go figure.

Only some users though? Very strange setup. I’ve not been asked at all, but maybe my music choices out me as old as fuck?

You’re moving the goalposts.

You made two key points;

1. That suffering can be beneficial and
2. That denying someone the opportunity to experience something beneficial is immoral, somtomhave kids is moral positive.

My primary objections are

1. That suffering is always bad (although we disagree on the definitions of suffering, somits likely to be a moot point)
2. Having children on the basis of it being morally good presents a number of very upsetting and dangerous implications.

Gaza was an example of a point, and of my own views on suffering; that suffering is something you cannot escape and that you do not choose, not something that’s difficult or temporarily painful you can choose to do which will ultimately produce some good. I’d posit that everyone experiences some form of suffering in their lives, to varying degrees, and the minimisation of this can only ever be a net positive.

Personally I don’t want children for a number of reasons, but boiling it down to a moral reason is reductive, unhelpful, and can be dangerous.

I’d put it to you that suffering, in the sense that we’re discussing, would be something more than the pain of exercise - the people of Gaza are suffering, when I go into the ‘pain cave’ on a bike ride I’m enduring something for the benefit of it; I can stop, pause or relent if it becomes overbearing. It’s type 2 fun. It’s not suffering if you can opt out; challenge, and difficulty arent bad; suffering is.

It’s interesting that your anti-theistic approach has led you to what I would see as a very religious adjacent approach to reproduction; my worry with approaches like the outline you gave is that it can end up punishing any sort of reluctance to have kids (and can paint those who aren’t able to as immoral in some way). Not saying that’s you’re intention, just saying.

Could an artist not suffer for their work that brings great joy to themselves and others? Is that suffering not then worthy and good?

This is an awful take. Not suffering is always preferable to suffering.

If something is worthy and good then denying others the opportunity to exist and be worthy and good is itself immoral.

Does this mean that you have a moral imperative to have children because there are “worthy and good” things in the world? Is the logic “I can have children, there is good in the world, therefore it’s immoral to deny a potential life the opportunity to experience life”?

I say this as someone who can, but won’t, have children, and who grew up in an evangelical church - that’s a bizarre logic that feels an awful lot like some fundamentalist Christian quiverfull shit.

Please! Although I’d hesitate to say I have any “claims” as such - I’m ex religious and flip-flop from agnosticism to some kind of atheistic nihilism depending on the day. “I don’t believe in anything” is as close to a solid statement of belief as I’m likely to get.

I’d love to hear more about your belief system. This kind of stuff is endlessly fascinating.

I doubt it - these will have the chocolate dropped over them rather than being dipped in. They’ll just run on a conveyor.

It’s fun when it’s both.

The UK would be one if anyone could be bothered to run it properly.

Artificial diamonds are still diamonds! Just because nobody died to make it they are identical on a chemical level.

They don’t just look purer, they are purer!

The problem is that rich people have been fleeced by diamond sellers for so long that they over value the “story” of a diamond (IE, carbon forged into a diamond over millennia etc etc. as a symbol for love blah blah).

Cities feel dead to me. There’s social stuff, maybe but it’s easy to get lost in it all.

Give me a community with some vibrancy in spitting distance of some wildlife instead.

+1 for this.

If I write it, I usually remember it. I have project specific trackers which I’m forced to use for work (an ERP), and occasionally I’ll use some spreadsheets for “complex” note taking, but at the end of every day I write what I need to do tomorrow (top tasks, at least), and add to it as I go.

I do that most days and most days I have a pretty good idea of what I need to do to keep things moving.

I mean I live in the UK so it’s not a massive risk (part of why it’s acceptable) but I have a farmer friend who almost lost a seasons worth of crop to a fire started by a fag end flicked from a car.

But yeah, smoking correlates with poor behaviour more broadly in various ways (in my experience). I feel like such a crank but I identify strongly with Costanza screaming “we live in a society” more than I’m comfortable with when I see people brazenly littering (esp. fag ends).

My neighbour’s douchebag boyfriend drops his cig butts all over the front of their (her) place.

I found one flicked onto my front windowsill literally this morning, on my doorstep nearly daily, and it turns out that he’s been chucking them out of a window and they have been ending up in our shared guttering for months. This affects about 4-5 other houses as well.

Smoking is an inherently selfish act - but at least have the good grace to keep your fucking plastic pollution to yourself - especially when you’re smoking outside your own goddamn residence!

We have the benefit of a private education system whose primary output is financiers and politicians - give the septics time to figure it out.

One of my go-to pizzas back in the day was sweetcorn, pineapple, and black olives.

I love traditional pizza, but sometimes, you want to get your freak on.

It’s mildly infuriating that I don’t have this slce of pickle pizza in my mouth right now.

Honestly I don’t know enough about the way that it’s run to give a correct answer!

I mean even pre-privatisation the rail service was being reduced (Beeching’s cuts etc.) so there’s clearly a cultural element at a government level, but the actual running of the rail firms is pretty opaque; there’s a lot of subcontracting, and the profitability is high, with reinvestment in the railway services not being proportional to that. I suspect that the culture around rinsing public services for private gain isn’t quite so dominant in Japan, but again, I couldn’t comment on that really.

We also have relatively old infrastructure, comparably narrow gauge railways that we would struggle to update because the country was built up around it, but this might be a bit of an old-fashioned take. I’m sure some transport historians could set me right!