Slavery also existed long before chattel slavery. Just because you have some rights doesn't automatically make it not slavery, Roman slaves had protected rights too, but were still slaves. Indentured servitude is also just another way to say slavery and yet that didn't give full rights over slave's children.
Yes it is still certainly debatable, but to so easily dismiss the entire idea and the person proposing it is foolish and privledged.
I agree with the sentiment but staying quiet is not right because it takes away the rest of the wifes life. He should have the courage to tell her so she at least has a choice of what to do.
For you and anyone else reading this I recommend the book "the designer relationship" - its actually about polyamory but I think it does a great job solidifying the concept that really, a relationship between two people can be basically whatever they want it to be, not defined by social norms. What comes first is open and honest communication and negotating through hard conversations to find a way of mutually meeting everyones needs
FWIW my wife is bi and dates women, not that really ever bothered me but in no way has it ever been more damaging to our marriage beyond basic scheduling conflicts. I will admit I would have had a much harder time opening up to her being with other men though. Im lucky that she has never fallen in love and wanted to run away with one of em I guess, but partly thats because our marriage is otherwise great and shes already free to explore her gay side so why would she want to leave?
I admit that when reading the description of your relationship (I don't mean to be disrespectful, for what it's worth) I can't help but wonder how it can possibly be consistent with "a relationship between two people can be basically whatever they want it to be." It really reads like the relationship is whatever _she_ wants it to be.
If you had come into the relationship with the understanding that you'd both date/have sex with other people then great; it doesn't matter what other people think. However, when you say that it was hard for you to accept her being with other men, and that you're lucky that "she has never fallen in love and wanted to run away with one of em", damn. My first instinct is that you should take your own advice: find or design a relationship where you don't have to accept this.
I realize that some of my knee jerk reaction might just be instinct/cultural values, I mean no disrespect.
In experiments they have found that women are much more ok with sexual infidelity than men. They aren’t fully ok with it just more ok with it than men by a huge margin. There’s a huge gender difference and given how culture doesn’t differentiate this aspect in terms of teaching, logically the only origin is biological.
It fits with evolutionary psychology as well. If a wife engages in sexual infidelity a man could end up raising a child that is not his own and that is a huge evolutionary cost so men evolved to be extremely guarded against sexual affairs while for women the cost is just a man potentially raising another child. She loses resources of the man but if the man doesn’t raise another child it’s not as huge of a deal. This isn’t stuff I’m making up… it’s academic.
For you to be in a polyamorous relationship you are definitely overriding your default biological drive and giving evolutionary advantages to your mate (if she is female and you male). Birth control largely eliminates this cost but the emotional states are the same in the sense that is a form of submission. Case in point: Most likely it is the female partner that initiated polyamory and the male partner who had to learn how to accept it.
Between this, a post about disrespecting your wife if they have sex during an open relationship, and your other post about emotional violence being inflicted on a child if their parent comes out as gay, you need to seek some therapy. This is major incel vibes.
Yeah if you wanna be closeted, fine - live like it then. Otherwise it proves getting your dick wet is actually more important to you than the wife and child you claim to love.
"we are nice to people to get what we want" is flat out not true. We are nice to people because cooperative societies out performed the non-cooperative ones on the macro level. On a micro level this kind of attitude sometimes/often prevails, we call the people who act like this "jerks", and the people who try to justify it with these kinds of rationale "sociopaths", because to the group as a whole its so incredibly damaging, and to the individuals on the other side of it, insufferable.
> We are nice to people because cooperative societies out performed the non-cooperative ones on the macro level
I.e. biology gets what it wants... We want to survive, mother nature wants us to survive, society wants to survive.
I am absolutely not suggesting that outright jerkish behaviour is acceptable (although to suggest jerks have no social success is probably untrue; plenty of people who are attracted to jerks). I am arguing that if there was no personal advantage whatsoever to being social and nice to people, we wouldn't do it. We'd be lone animals, spread out across the land rather than concentrated in towns and cities. There's a spectrum of selfish behaviour, right? We are somewhere in the middle because it's advantageous to be.
Both are true. We want to survive and being nice to others increases our likelihood of survival. Wanting to survive is also selected by evolution and wanting to be nice in order to survive in a group setting that increases survival odds too.
Its obviously not as dire (yet) but I think Texas will face something like this in the coming decades. Its the kind of problem that requires people at all levels of society to cooperate and sacrifice - farmers & businesses need to draw less, people need to use less and government needs intelligent and actionable policy, plus big investment into unsexy and invisble infrastructure upgrades - so basically we're screwed.
Absolutely. It's probably worse than you think though. I work with some groundwater conservation districts in Texas. Texas has some aquifers that they rely heavily on, and they're being depleted at an unsustainable rate. Efforts to regulate the rate at which groundwater is consumed are met with mixed results because of state laws that make it very difficult to regulate pumping.
One particularly depressing example from the recent past is what happened in Hays County. The groundwater situation in Hays County is bad, to the point that springs are going dry.
Hays County managed to push something through the state legislature that'd give the Hays Trinity Water Conservation District more power to manage groundwater use (it passed overwhelmingly), but then Greg Abbot vetoed it - likely at the behest of Aqua Texas, a big water utility company that pumps a TON of water and has been pretty blatant about ignoring pumping caps and generally acted in bad faith.
The American Southwest needs to get started on desalination. It’s the only long term answer we have now, know works, and is at least within shooting distance of cost-feasible.
Well, if you’re selling the water at rates that aren’t below cost farms will remove themselves. Desalination is cheap enough for humans to live and do most work things, it’s hard to imagine it ever being cheap enough for farming.
Its definitely complicated. But the end of the story is that the government can not easily stop the farmers from using water in many of these drought stricken areas. Its going to be a big political battle
Then tax them at a rate equivalent to their environmental cost? I don't think this is complicated (except politically, of course). You just want everyone to carry the cost of their own externalities.
Dubai is paying ~$2,450 per acre-foot of desalinated water. You generally need around 2 acre feet of water per acre of farmland assuming near zero rain, it varies by crop type but goes up with temperature and down with humidity.
Farms growing food crops don’t produce ~5,000$ in profits per acre, even 1/10th that is an extreme outlier. On top of this desalinated water still has significantly more salt than rainwater which eventually causes issues. Subsides can always make things look cheaper when you ignore the subsidy.
Is that just because imported Dubai food is insanely expensive? I don't believe the math on anything but maybe indoor farming here is going to work out if the water costs anything at all.
Indoor farming can be extremely water-efficient, often at the cost of energy inefficiency, but with low solar prices and the level of sun they have in the Southwest perhaps that can become economical?
I don't know, I just do know that water shortages are a problem, are going to continue to become more of a problem, and there's currently just one technology that's affordable enough that some nations currently use it at scale. So let's get started.
The southwest, for the most part, refuses to accept the federal funding & infrastructure support that would be necessary for desalination at scale to be feasible.
Nobody wants to vote for water rationing, and the state can’t even enforce consumption limits against corporations and the wealthy.
Is it really feasible if a state can only pull it off with large federal funding efforts?
It seems like a problem those in the area will just have to deal with given that they're knowingly walking down that path. If you can't fund desalinization or other options, won't take federal funding, and choose not to region or conserve water then you collectively made your own bed.
They shouldn't be my problem, and I say that as someone who lived in a flood prone home with no flood insurance as it was ridiculously expensive for pretty terrible coverage. I wouldn't have lived in that house if I was unable or unwilling to deal with the consequences of a flood, no one else should either.
Louisiana refused federal highway funding for long enough that their highway system went to shit. They refused due to a federal mandate that the drinking age be raised to 21.
It isn't common, but states have absolutely forwent federal funding to stand their ground, and in my opinion they should do it more often. Its a huge weakness in our federal system that states are so dependent on federal funding for long lived programs.
But I have property in Arizona and I have a real hard time imagining this state saying no thank you if offered water. It’s sort of a big deal out there these days.
My main concern there is that states can and should turn down federal funding if it comes with strings the state isn't interested in accepting. Our federal system becomes fairly useless if states are so dependent on federal funding that we can no longer have 50 different experiments running to try out different legislative approaches.
Texas has also recently started building new reservoirs after a long time of not building any. Bois d'Arc and Arbuckle have recently been finished, others are in progress, and a few more are in planning phases.
There's a lot to hate on about Texas politics but there are some competent people trying to address water concerns. Not saying Texas is doing everything perfectly, we're still drawing on aquifers at an unsustainable rate and need to change that.
Texas is either desert or desert adjacent. We have always gotten our water by having torrential rains inconsistently.
This doesn't mean don't conserve, be intelligent, etc.
But this does mean that your water won't "balance out" year to year, you need to look at big 25-30 year intervals.
Right now the single biggest waste of water in Austin is leaky pipes. Like infrastructure pipes owned by the city. Meanwhile our water conservation budget is going to billboards telling people to rush in the shower. The entire population could stop bathing and not reduce enough to make up for the leaks happening in the crumbling water infra.
We have similar problems in Colorado re: pipes leaking. People don't want to pay the full cost of water, which includes supporting infrastructure. Municipalities are caught between these unfunded costs and taxpayers refusing to pay 1¢ more. I believe the utilities require political approval to raise rates, so that doesn't happen either.
Water in the ground from leaky pipes will travel in all directions. Some of it may end up back in the aquifer, but some will end up on the surface and evaporate. Depends on conditions near the pipe and the volume of the leak.
People use very little water. Most of what is drawn is returned back to the system. By that I mean if you use 20 gallons for a shower 19 is going into the drain to be reused.
The only real usage of water is evaporation and that's stuff like growing plants and cooling towers.
Most places get freshwater from rivers or acquifers, sometimes lakes, use it for whatever, some large amount of that used water is collected as sewage, treat the sewage and discharge it downstream/into large bodies of water/the ocean.
Many systems also output reclaimed water; it's clean, but not up to environmental standards for discharge or drinking; typically excess clorination. This is often used for municipal irrigation sometimes toliet flushing, etc; uses where water below drinking standards is fine.
A handful of systems discharge treated water into their reservoirs or into acquifer recharge ponds. But there's an ick factor, even when discharge water is often held to higher standards than drinking water, so it's only done when the situation outweighs the ick.
You have seperate drainage for shower water and effluent?
That’s certainly not the case here in Australia.
Here, typically storm water and household waste water are carried over a common system. Usually if it rains more than 3mm in 24hrs the treatment systems are overwhelmed and untreated waste is sent out to sea. Coastal areas anyways.
I can’t imagine the various legislatures in several “highly skeptical” states that are either considering or have already implemented “no chemtrails” and fluoride laws are going to find it easy to convince people to allow cloud seeding. Pretty sure Tennessee already preemptively banned it.
Yes, TN did pass that. Much of TN (especially around the capital) is temperate rainforest, so I imagine the lawmakers perceived downsides, but not upsides. Unfortunately, there is conflation or confusion between cloudseeding and sunlight reflection methods.
I hope to see this legislation in TN changed to allow cloudseeding.
Ahh yes, the old “let’s outlaw those things I don’t like, but others do that has billion dollar industries supporting it” approach. That always goes over well.
Parks need to be landscape maintained, so does new development—-often in very similar ways that a golf course is (water, chemical, maintenance). Unless around you simply doesn’t have the open land space to support the area’s park and development needs, what is actually wasted?
I think folks get caught up on golf course water usage, but every course around me uses reclaimed water. If houses were built there, that would no longer be reclaimed water, but potable water. Also I am convinced that landscape chemical usage would go up as well.
I have close family and friends in the business, I guarantee that huge efforts go into making sure not a single drop of irrigation isn’t used unless it’s needed. I can tell you that my neighbors don’t pay that much attention to their exact irrigation needs—simply watering for as long as they can, when they can. I doubt seriously that replacing a golf course with more homes would net much water savings…at least around me.
I think the point is that you can't ban houses through policy but you can ban golf courses. So like it or not (and I sympathize with your point), the policy knobs that can be used to curb water can only directly influence things like golf courses, but they can indirectly affect home water usage through utility pricing.
Reality is that if you are going to convert 150-200 acres of course space to residential, it’s not going to happen organically. A developer will come in and drop infrastructure and a couple of hundred homes, and then add an active HOA so folks feel good about that nice neighborhood maintaining their property values. That is going to likely demand a level of property maintenance that will work to counter any utility pricing soft control you try to impose.
I think the folks who try this ecological impact argument and want to push homes into that space just don’t think through all the consequences or assume there is a greater landscape effort than it actually takes. It’s a lot of work, but is it less that the combined work of 200 homes? Probably not. A couple of tractors vs 200 mowers? Landscape chemicals on perhaps 20 acres of the 150-200 (tees and greens, spot treat everywhere else) vs 3 homes per acre treating their whole lawn? 300-400 more vehicles driving in and out of the area everyday?
You want to outlaw them and let them go wild, I can accept that argument and can’t counter it but for “golf is fun and people enjoy it.” However if the concept that houses are better ecologically…I think that is a huge stretch.
Public parks directly serve way more people than golf courses and don’t discriminate based on income (or class, ethnicity, etc) to the same degree, if at all.
On any given Saturday the public parks around me (that are free to enter) have far less people than the golf courses around me. So just because it can serve more people, doesn’t mean that it does.
Also, pretty sure you will be hard pressed in 2025 to find courses actively discriminating anyone who has the $$ to spend to play a round. Every course I have played in the last 40 years seems to have all sorts of people from all sorts of backgrounds, ethnicities, and income.
I have absolutely enjoyed my time on the golf course, but much like recreational cruise ships I’ll be perfectly content with them gone too. Just because I enjoy something doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate how wasteful it is and would oppose ending or at least reducing it.
I just don’t see the waste. Unless you are just going to let those spaces go wild again you will have similar efforts to maintain the spaces and with potential similar water usage.
> you will have similar efforts to maintain the spaces and with potential similar water usage.
For more people across a broader socio-economic background. I mean come on let’s just acknowledge the elephant in the room: golf is a rich sport for upper-income/rich people that requires a massive amount of space that then often has a deleterious effect on surrounding real estate (i.e. inflates it and prices people out).
You have obviously not spent much time at a golf course if you believe it only attracts upper income/rich people. Go to your local course and drive around the parking lot sometime on a Saturday…my guess is you are going to see far more older Hondas, Hyundais and Kia’s than Bentleys.
Yeah, not gonna attract the lower income folks because it’s not a zero dollar hobby, but from experience I know the middle class is well represented.
Most of that idiotic crap goes out the window when real problems show up. I do believe Texans will get the same "pray for rain" BS we're laughing at Iran for now though.
I think the first step is to develop a "we're not Texas" culture. Observe the ways in which Texas is ruining its environment and deliberately, conspicuously do something else.
For example, the aquifer situation in the Central Valley of California is in some ways similar to Ogallala aquifer in Texas. "If we don't want to end up like Texas, we need to get a handle on this." Enact laws and conservation measures which make it difficult for those coming from out of state to bring their ecologically irresponsible practices with them. Ideally, reduce the ecological impact wrought by well-established California interests as well, but if necessary grandfather them in in order to prepare.
Im not actually in support of killing these people but I have to say, people seem to
gloss over that each boatload of these drugs literally destroys multiple American families. People who have lost someone (either through death or just throwing their life away) to drugs will tell you these "poor fishermen" are murderers, who in no way extend the kind of empathy to us that we're expected to show them.
It does get very complicated when you consider they're probably under a lot of "carrot AND stick" from the cartels... but the damage they do is real.
I don't see how killing a lot of fishermen and destroying their families alleviates this pain.
There might have been drugs on the boats, but maybe not. No one bothered to check first.
The fishermen might have been part-time drug smugglers, maybe not. How do we know? What investigation was done?
And if we really believe that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness"
then taking away people's lives without due process is murder. Cold blooded, premeditated murder. That's a worse crime than selling someone a drug that might kill them.
Friend, don't let your pain blind you to causing more pain. Ethics is hard.
I mean it is noble to act like you are some being of infinite sympathy and forgiveness. The reality of being alive though is that many people will 100% hurt you for their personal gain.
> That's a worse crime than selling someone a drug that might kill them
I am pretty sure the 14 people who died weren't smuggling in 14 doses of fentanyl, is killing someone a worse crime than selling 100,000 people a drug that might kill them, and will guaranteed fuck up their lives, their families lives, and their community?
The USA (and many countries) decided long ago to allow the sale of alcohol, a drug that ends many lives and ruins many, many more. I hope that once these fentanyl smugglers are dealt with, we can do something about the drug sellers that are operating out in the open with impunity.
> People who have lost someone (either through death or just throwing their life away) to drugs will tell you these "poor fishermen" are murderers
Just to be clear-- we're talking about a hypothetical family member of a potential future victim of drug overdose who was unwittingly saved based on fully trusting the federal government's claim that their extra-judicial killing stopped the international trade of illicit drugs as opposed to killing innocent fishermen.
Did I correctly label all the global mutable state in your example?
I get and agree with your non-sequitur that there's a clear difference between drug mules and fishermen, I just don't see the relevance of that to the danger of leveraging these post-9/11 counterterrorism laws (and secret interpretations of them) to carry out extra-judicial killings.
Edit: to be extra clear-- the whole point of meaningful democratic oversight in this case is to be able to meaningfully care, measure and review the difference between drug mules and fishermen. The entire modern history of secret interpretations of counterterrorism laws tells us that without this basic oversight, the government will always claim they only target the murderers. Worse, they'll use the veil of national security to hide the fact that innocent victims are jailed, tortured, and killed through the same counterterrorism programs.
This is not a useful conversation because there is no way to know that any drugs have been destroyed. The issue at hand is that the government is blowing up unidentified boats full of unidentified people. Talking about the harmful effects of drugs is a complete non-sequitur until there is some convincing reason to believe that drugs are involved.
Beyond this administration, the US government has a documented history of lying about the justification for military action. When people are being killed it is irresponsible to assume, with no evidence, that they are telling the truth this time.
I am not assuming the strikes are baseless, I am stating that there is no evidence for any basis, so discussing if they might be justified if some hypothetical evidence existed is pointless.
We've actually had multiple high profile intelligence leaks by the current admin because it's full of absolute idiots, and the leaks would indicate that they're about as smart as your average user on Twitter. Frankly if anyone believes their strikes have any sort of valid basis with all the leaks that have gone out then I would question their critical thinking ability.
> If you are smuggling large amounts of fentanyl or weapons into another country and they shoot you that seems pretty ok.
Assumes facts not in evidence.
Also, there's great reasons to have punishments for crimes that are not just summary executions. Even if you have a warped morality where all criminals of any sort should die, there's _still_ great reasons to not allow that to be chosen by the closest person with a gun. That way lies chaos and corruption.
So if China CLAIMS without evidence that Americans smuggle large amounts of fentanyl or weapons on international water then you are OK with them killing Americans? Would it include your family if it was claimed they are smugglers?
If other countries were bombing US boats in the Gulf of Mexico, closer to the US and hundreds or thousands of miles away from the country doing the bombing, would you be okay with that?
Why limit it to boats? Maybe he would support shooting down American civilian planes if claimed they had drugs on board. I’m sure he would support that.
How do you know that already doesn’t happen? Not necessarily blowing up but I’m sure there’s a gulf of dead people with US citizenship who have been killed by various states for participating in drug activities and illegal activity at large.
Singapore has given many foreigners the death penalty for drug smuggling and I couldnt care less actually
If youre implying the people being killed are innocent countrymen of the real criminals then of course I object. Everything I have said applies to people actually comitting crimes
"Penalty" is the key word here. Like, issued by a judge, after proper judgement according to the law of the land. Not random shooting people without any due process.
This will definitely get lost in the conversation but like I said right up front, I dont actually agree with killing them. It seems that we ought to be able to intercept these boats and process them as suspects of a crime. It just rubs me the wrong way how every issue gets written up as a one-sided narrative of good vs evil depending on who you support politically.
I'd argue a missing social safety net combined with grossly inadequate public education, no job opportunities, unaffordable healthcare and housing, and a prison system designed to punish all drive people to take drugs. Drug addiction is just the symptom. Let's focus on giving people real hope and value and meaning in their lives, from birth to death, instead of killing people, without trial, a world away.
> Im not actually in support of killing these people but I have to say, people seem to gloss over that each boatload of these drugs literally destroys multiple American families.
So does alcohol. (And a whole bunch of other domestically-produced stuff.)
How much effort is being put into the demand-side of the equation?
> people seem to gloss over that each boatload of these drugs literally destroys multiple American families
They also gloss over the fact that alcohol does the same. But I don't think it's bizarre to allow people to make their own decisions.
When alcohol was criminalized, many people would go blind from impurities in their own homebrews. Legalization and regulation are good things to prevent some of the unintended consequences, like deaths from adulteration with fentanyl, hotspots, and so on.
Many (possibly all) of the boats in question were not capable of making it to the U.S. from where they were hit without refueling multiple times. It is not possible that they were headed directly to the U.S..
If your barometer is 'thing destroying American families' does this mean you'd also be willing to excuse blowing up health insurers or does your logic only apply to things that aren't directly under the thumb of American businesses?
The pragmatic approach is that we're spending far too much money blowing up small boats which could be better invested in actually fixing our healthcare system and other domestic issues, with decent odds of going to war and spending even more money because of it. The empathetic side is that these are just fishermen that aren't even involved in this whole shitshow getting killed for political points by a bloodthirsty and stupid admin.
Even if you just assume guilt it doesn't make sense. You send the coast guard to capture the boat and then you have a person with knowledge and drugs and a boat which can be traced & used as evidence...
You mean the casual sense of "innocence", but they are literally innocent in they they've not been convicted of the crime they were killed for allegedly committing.
"The only real drug problem is scoring real good drugs. Haven't we learned our lesson? The corner store sells finer scotch. But who's got uncut powder?" - NOFX
