Donald Trump is President... during a major national emergency. And sadly, things are going about as horribly badly as that sentence suggests -- his inaction, and actively damaging action, is killing Americans and will kill more.
And sadly, Trump doesn't understand that his inaction isn't just killing or hurting a lot of people -- he doesn't care about that -- but he does care about the stock market. And what he doesn't understand is that what the stock market actually wants is a plan to believe in and strong guidance from the government, something he provides none of.
It's tragic that this had to happen now and not a year from now after a Trump defeat, but hopefully we can get through this without things going as badly as they have in Italy, despite Trump's utter failure of action.
Meanwhile, the public panic is insane; toilet paper is probably sold out nationwide now, huh. Hope you have enough... strong governmental leadership could have averted insane panic buying like this, something not connected to actual need in most cases, but with THIS president? Forget it, panic buying it is.
I hope that Biden (our nominee now), Pelosi, and Democratic governors can come up with a good plan, regardless of what damage Trump does to the anti-virus (COVID-19) effort.
That's another new trend in advertising. Show some random shmoe repairing his sneakers with some superglue while violens and pianos make your HEART SOAR.
Obviously the comic is hilarious and the title of this thread is tongue-in-cheek. I've been firmly pro-choice for years, and still am, but I WILL say that after listening to pro-life arguments over the years, I'm more sympathetic to their claims. Were there not the factor of bodily autonomy and the burden of pregnancy, I might be more inclined to agree with the idea of "do we truly know when life begins, and is it up to us to snuff out that life?"
That's the fundamental question, isn't it? When DOES life begin? Is life defined by a heartbeat? Seems to me like the heartbeat argument is spurious. Why exactly would heartbeat imply life and sentience? It's simply a mechanism to distribute oxygen and nutrients to an assortmant of organs. It seems to me that higher brain function is a better descriptor of whatever the hell a "soul" is, without getting into the distracting and problematic idea of souls to begin with. Keeping in mind that independent of the idea of "souls" (which is religious/implies life after death, and is irrelevant in this discussion), we can all agree that all life is sacred, and that in particular as liberals, we ought to be doing everything we can to promote the well-being of every living human, including robust social programs to feed, clothe, shelter, and provide health care to every citizen.
So the heartbeat argument is spurious for another reason. In 2-4 weeks after conception, we can detect a functional "heart" beat, pumping the fetus's own circulatory system. Of course, recent developments in science demonstrate that this is not a completely formed heart, but a primitive version that still hasn't fully developed. So making the claim that "the baby has its own heart" is less robust than we might think.
Let's get back to brain activity. Can science determine whether a fetus is a life based on how advanced its brain is? Does this mean that patients who are comatose, with little-to-no detectable brain activity, are not alive? More to the point, does this render their life no longer sacred? Are they no longer afforded the dignity and sanctity of a functioning human being? How much brain activity can make this distinction? What about those with major brain disabilities, low IQs, or brain damage?
Can science answer these questions? Using science to determine what life is worthy of dignity has problematic backgrounds. In the name of science, eugenics has been advocated, determining that humanity as a whole would progress if we culled out races that were considered of natural lower intelligence. Many prominent thinkers (possibly including Darwin?) believed that "negroids" were naturally inferior than whites, and used junk science (now debunked) to justify their attitudes towards Africans.
Keep in mind that I fall back on the sanctity of bodily autonomy, and that women have inherent reproductive rights (as important as any other civil right). I may be projecting, but I assume the same is true of the other (all 4 of you) other regular posters up in this bitch. So I think it's interesting to explore alternatives to what we believe and contemplate them. I'll further assume that no one here believes that life begins at conception, that terminating first-trimester fetuses is cool and good, and that terminating a late-term pregnancy (let's go extreme and say 2 weeks before delivery) is bad and and wrong.
So exactly where do we make that cut-off? Noted obnoxious-but-admittedly-sometimes-effective-rhetoricist Ben Shapiro makes the argument that you can't rigorously define that cut off. Let's say we define it as viability outside the womb, which I think is a good starting point. Does this mean that simply a week or a day before we meet this criteria, it's suddenly okay to abort the fetus? What's so important about that one week? You can continue moving the goal posts until you come up with a window so small, that it's better to simply disallow abortions altogether. Maybe life really DOES begin at conception? (Narrator: it doesn't.)
But the goal posts thing is obnoxious because you can also apply it to other gray areas of a timeline, such as the age of consent. Hey, it was a week before her 18th birthday, so is it really statutory rape? Come on, she's 17, she's ready, you can't tell me that one year would make a difference, she's mature for her age, a lot of them are having sex by 17 anyway so who cares? And come to think of it, 16 isn't that far away from 17, etc.
So we can agree that a cut-off is important somewhere. But there's always the lingering doubt: can we TRULY be the judges of whether life is real and legitimate at any point during the pregnancy? Isn't it better to err on the side of caution? Isn't it more compassionate to assume that the fetus's life is as important as any of our own? Isn't it problematic to "play God", even if you don't believe in such an entity?
So I've been hearing lots of people asking why we haven't started distributing our music using higher bitrates and sample frequencies. "HD Sound", so to speak.
In answer to this, mathematically there's no room for improvement. We reached the pinnacle of sound quality (at least in respect to bit rate and sampling frequency) when CDs arrived on the scene. There is nothing further to be gained there. The limit isn't in the tech, of course we can go further in bit rate and frequency, but in biology and physics. Our ears are the limiter. We can only hear in a range that caps at 20000. The typical 41000 is over double that, which according to a mathematical proof that cannot be challenged (literally, it's a mathematical proof, there is no overthrowing it) is all you need to perfectly capture all audio data in a band limited audio stream. The bit rate can be 2 and it will still handle that. The only thing increasing the bit rate does is reduce the noise floor. 16 bit is enough to reduce it to nearly imperceptible for the vast majority of people. 24 bit will reduce it even more, but it's a diminishing return. My own sound card even manages 32 bit sound sampling. I can't even pick up the difference using my own equipment honestly.
There are SOME ways to improve audio left to explore, but all improving the bit rate and sampling rate could ever do is make all our files take up way more space. If we're going to do that, I'd rather advocate using FLAC files instead of MP3. Not only is flac an open source codec, it's lossless and allows for more than two audio streams. That's a better way to use up more drive space. (Because it's lossless, it necessarily doesn't compress as tightly as MP3, but in this case I think it's worth the tradeoff.)
