As if the taxpayers should automatically give billions to Harvard, no matter what Harvard does. That's insanity (to me at least).
AFAIK, Harvard doesn't get money for nothing -- it's primarily for research. The demands are orthogonal to what Harvard provides: top tier talent for whatever the government sees fit to fund.
It's amazing how communist problems always end with: "you eventually run out of other people's money"
It's always someone else's money. Roads suck? You probably have too many roads for other people's money to fix. The list goes on. Libertarian dreams of self-sufficiently die when their money has to pay for things. Unless you meant feudalism or plutocracy, where wealth primarily flows away from the working class.
Humans are creatures of community. There will always be taxes for any sufficiently developed people, the only hope is they serve the public good and aren't funneled into the oligarchs' pockets.
The Chinese look to the future. America, barely looks past the next stock market report. Trump looks to some unidentified time in the past when daddy loved him.
Not having a high level, shared vision of the future dooms America, and the current political divide has the boat swaying worryingly side to side.
Largely, yes. I also challenge if it would be measurable for the size of most sites.
Typesetting all of wikipedia? Probably measurable. Typesetting a single article of wikipedia? Probably not. And I'd wager most sites would be even easier than wikipedia.
Thank you; the opening paragraph of that article was fantastic.
> American Alsatians were first bred to create a family friendly dog breed that looks like a dire wolf. (The dire wolf is an ancient North American wolf species that became extinct around 13,000 years ago.) This dog has all the benefits of looking like a dire wolf, but it is calm and gentle enough to be a great pet. They are an intelligent, loving and gentle family dog [...]
"Has all the benefits of looking like a dire wolf" is a great phrase, and I think highly relevant to the OP article here and the disagreement I see in the HN comments between the people who think "the benefits of looking like a dire wolf" are self-evident and those who think they're non-existent. :)
"looking like a dire wolf" is exactly what Colossol has done. They just used CRISPR to modify some genes in a dog to give it traits of the dire wolf (white hair, large size, etc)
We can decide to spend our money on more ethical providers, be it eggs, milk, or meat, but as animals, we cannot get away from the circle of life.
Is it more "humane" for an animal to be eaten alive by another predator? The only difference is mankind has industrialized the process, and we don't truly give thanks because we are so separated from the process.
Edit: I don't really want to dissuade against alternatives, the problem I see is many nutritionally inferior options.
That's called the naturalistic fallacy, and there's a clue in the name that should indicate how reliable an argument it is.
And re "nutritionally inferior", every dietetics and nutrition peak body on the planet agrees that a fully vegan diet is suitable for all people throughout all stages of life. In fact, billions of people have already lived perfectly normal, perfectly healthy vegan and vegetarian lives throughout history. If your diet — any diet — is nutritionally incomplete it's because you made the wrong choices.
There's so much to respond to that I'm afraid I'll have to use a list. It's not conducive to conversation between us , but other readers may appreciate it.
1. We're talking about dairy. To my knowledge, humans are the only animal that harvest another animal's milk. An outlier in the animal kingdom. (i.e. not the naturalistic "circle of life" any more than plastic bottles or sarin gas.)
2. No, it would not be "humane" (as in "human") to eat something alive, but animals do it! There's a distinction there between human and animal, like squares and rectangles. I am encouraging you to lean into that distinction and be as humane/human as possible.
3. How far off of ideal nutrition would you be willing to go to save a dog? Would you give up broccoli if it meant no more dogs would be abused? Could you find a way to replace broccoli, difficult as it may be?
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