I'm going to offer you a choice - you get to kill one terrorist, but at the same time, you will also kill a young child.

Would you take that deal?

Okay, perhaps instead of a young child, how an older child? Or even an innocent adult?

Again, same deal, for one terrorist, you also kill one innocent.

Would you gladly take the deal? Or would you reject it? Perhaps somewhere in-between - you may accept that the life of the innocent is a regrettable but necessary sacrifice to take the life of a terrorist.

Or perhaps you reject this idea as absurd - questioning the premise as contrived.

After all, it sounds contrived. But as a general rule, the ratio of civilian to combatant deaths in most wars is greater than one civilian for every combatant killed. A one-to-one ratio is more favorable than most wars.

So regardless of what your choice would be, it is wise to feel to uncomfortable.

The hospital is about 30 miles away. But for severe cases, you probably want to call 911, due to the ability to air lift to about 120 miles or 180 miles away for larger facilities.

But I'm talking about a scenario with one ICE vehicle and one EV for a two vehicle household.

Instead of trying to prove it, maybe the smarter move is to try and disprove it. Concoct an experiment that would disprove the simulator hypothesis if its untrue.

There are many ideas in philosophy that aren't provable or disprovable. Ideas about what is good or right aren't provable.

My problem with it is that it doesn't result in anything. Saying we are in a simulation doesn't provide any meaning or any course of action. So maybe we're part of a simulated reality created by hyperintelligent ducks to study supernova, and we just exist as a byproduct. What does that matter?

It's not science. It's not philosophy. It's just BS.

Yeah how cruel to arrest people for stealing so much from stores they're shutting down

You probably should dig deeper into those claims, instead of relying on claims by those who would benefit from deflecting possible problems with their own management.

EVs as rentals might start to make sense after the charging infrastructure in this country has been built out further and most people are familiar with EVs. I recently made a trip from Orlando to Jacksonville in my Bolt EV and while I was charging for the trip back, I ended up helping someone with a rental figure out how to use the Electrify America charger, since they were only familiar with ICE cars.

You need to change the mentality first. I have rural family members with two vehicle households, who typically drive 30-50 miles per day to commute into town and back out to their homes. Perfect situation for them to buy one EV and charge them at home each night, while keeping the ICE vehicle for longer trips. None of them have done so.

But Assange actively took part in committing the crime. You can't commit a crime and then say, "But I'm a journalist, so it's okay!" The notion that that should be legal leads to absurd places.

I'm of two minds of this.

Yes, Assange participated in encouraging hacking.

On the flip side, Assange was outside of US jurisdiction.

So for the argument for absurdism, should everyone be subject to all laws in other countries?

I really don't want to open up the possibility that someone could run a murder-for-hire scheme from another country with lax laws. But I'd also rather not be extradited for saying something like "GLBT people deserve human rights", even if it's against the law in some countries.

No.

In the US, yes:

EPA has adopted emission standards to control both exhaust and evaporative emissions from small spark-ignition engines. Phase 3 exhaust emissions standards took effect in 2011 or 2012, depending on the size of the engine.

I could see return to office reducing efficiency.

I currently WFH. Most of the people I work with aren't local. RTO would mean I get to go into a noisy, distracting place to do my work, and that's going to lower productivity. In addition, when WFH, I'm prone to working a little later than usual to finish up a project - I don't have a commute, I don't have to beat traffic, and I don't have to rush home to let the dogs out.

A return to office is going to reduce my efficiency. YMMV.

Then when winter comes it's nice to have a truck to get through snow.

It's nice to have snow tires to get through snow.

Trucks, due to their lack of weight in the back, tend to suck in the snow. Especially 2WD.

I say this as someone who lives in Minnesota.

I do find a truck useful for DIY, but I just keep an old one around for the few times a year that I use it. But if I had to buy a replacement, I'd strongly consider a regular vehicle with a good tow rating and a trailer. Especially with how ridiculously small modern truck boxes tend to get these days.

I do feel an obligation to condemn one side or the other

There's probably something deeply wired into our brains - a legacy of our time in small bands of primates when we didn't have as many neurons to figure things out. Where we had to simplify everyone to being either with us, or against us.

But the simple case is that there's usually more than two groups. Take the example you gave - the Hamas attack on Israel, and the Israeli government's attack on Gaza. There's far more people involved, even unwillingly.

Social media may amplify the voices that want to separate people into two groups. It may reinforce our beliefs by curating the voices that agree with us. Or by showing us the extremes of the voices that disagree with us. There are millions online, and all it takes is a tiny fraction to give the illusion of a large, homogenous group.

It's different in the real world. Our meatspace social networks have a limited number of people.

I'm not saying all groups are equally good or bad. But what I am saying is that there are many, many groups. Far more than social media would lead us to believe.

And it's harder in the real world to stop seeing people as human beings.

You must be outside of the US. A quick search shows US light vehicle pumps are limited to a max of 38 liters per minute for flow rate.

Assuming human-level AGI, a corporation would make a sentient being, and under current law, that sentient being has all the rights of a toaster.

Seems like we're heading down the path of slavery 2.0.

Seriously, no human has hearing good enough to even remotely justify this type of effort.

I'd go a step further, and claim that for many things, if you go beyond the typical "good" quality of the day, what you are hearing is not how most people experienced the band. You probably aren't even hearing what the band was focusing on.

It would be like watching a classic tv show from the 1960s on a giant movie screen in high definition. It's not the target for the media, nor how it was intended to be experienced.