guildenstern

> Please re-read the emphasis I've been placing on the sorts of facilities I'm defending.

Please reread my comment, I am talking about farms (specifically chicken farms where 10% of chickens will die before they reach 1 month old because they are often packed 50,000 to a barn and not cared for), not zoos. I am not arguing that some zoos don’t do fantastic conservation work, I am arguing that it’s comparatively meaningless when you look at the wholescale abuse of animals perpetrated by the absolute majority of humans on this planet.

You’re ignoring my point. Every single day the average person will actively benefit from the direct, quantifiable harm of individuals animals — your lunch, your dinner, there’s probably at least one animal’s suffering associated with it. Every year tens of billions of animals are slaughtered after spending their lives in inhumane conditions.

How many whales are there on earth? How many lions? 50,000 at most. You could put a bullet in the head of every lion on earth tomorrow and it would be a drop in the ocean compared to the hundreds of millions of farm animals that would be killed _on that same day_. And the lions at least wouldn’t have spent their lives packed 10 to a square foot in a barn dying to sickness.

There are some incredible, highly regarded documentaries (planet earth, blue planet) that do far more for educating people about animals than viewing that animal in a cage ever can. If zoos actually created any sort of compassion in visitors for animals then we wouldn’t be having this argument — all they create is fascination in a select few species we’ve deemed to be interesting enough, and what use is that to the animals being tortured on a scale millions of times greater.

Exotic animals are just a tool used to support an entire species cognitive dissonance.

Zoos have nothing to do with my beliefs around animal welfare and that assumption shows your blinkered view of this problem.

The fundamental problem is that humans view animals as tools, torture and murder for our benefit is normalised from birth and zoos are just an extension of that.

You can argue that zoos play a part in giving some humans some compassion towards some animals but what use is that when their next stop after the lion enclosure is the hotdog cart.

We shouldn’t need zoos. There’s lots of non-invasive ways to learn about animals, and if our shared fundamental belief was that we should do everything we can to show animals compassion and respect, then at no point would anyone need to say “unless these kids see a caged tiger they’re not going to consider the consequences of deforestation”.

Except we have zoos now and we treat animals very poorly, consider the billions upon billions of animals we slaughter every single year who’ve been forced to live in torturous conditions — zoos haven’t saved them.

Perhaps zoos aren’t the solution, maybe if we stopped the wholesale destruction of animals in our every day lives that compassion would spread to wild animals and we wouldn’t need zoos to remind people that animals aren’t just tools for us to abuse.

Consider how much money had to enter the market for the price to reach $1000.

Consider how much money had to enter the market for the price to reach $20,000.

Now consider how much money will have to enter the market, after everyday “normal” people from outside of tech have lost hundreds or thousands, for the price to reach $250,000.

Spend any time on the crypto currency subreddits and you’ll find dozens of people who took out >$20k loans to buy cryptocurrency. There are people still doing it. My co-working office space was filled with people in December talking non-stop about buying crypto currency, although all the crypto currency traders are long gone now.

I don’t think people losing tens of thousands are the norm but absolutely there is a never ending list of people who’ve lost most of what they put in, whether that was hundreds or low thousands.

Authy specifically stores your account in the cloud and can be recovered using SMS. They have a 24 hour warning period during which the email address on file receives multiple notifications that a recovery is being attempted with the option to cancel but if someone has control over your phone number for an extended period of time they can absolutely take over your Authy account. I found this out when my Authy account was corrupted somehow and support said, hey no worries just go through the recovery process.

Google Authenticator is offline only and is not vulnerable.

Recreational usage is not relative to the substance, it’s dependent on behaviour. If you’re dependent on a substance (whether that’s physically dependent or mentally) you’re no longer a recreational user but if you’re using something frequently or infrequently for enjoyment then you are a recreational user — regardless of whether or not that substance is safe to use at your chosen frequency.

Yes but MDMA specifically will mangle your brain after very little recreational usage relative to almost all other drugs. Recreational use of MDMA a few times a week is _very bad_ on the long term health of your brain, very few other drugs are on that level — certainly none of the drugs you’ve listed.

This is absolutely untrue. There are many very profitable dating sites and apps. Tinder is a fantastic example of a dating app making money hand over fist since they began monetising, their revenue is in the hundreds of millions per quarter. Tinder is projected to be half of all Match groups revenue this year.

The question to ask is where will the money come from? The last bubble was all over TV, it was a constant part of the news cycle and everybody knows somebody who bought at least some crypto currency based on promises of wild riches. Most of those people have lost at least some (or even most) of the money they “invested”. When the layman has already been burned, where can money come from?

People often make the mistakes more than once so perhaps there’s room for “this time it’s different!” but I’m not convinced. I don’t see the crypto market ever exceeding the previous all time high.

There’s certainly room for individual cryptocurrency projects to succeed from their own merit as projects that happen to be crypto currencies so I don’t think all crypto currencies are dead forever but crypto as a growth market almost certainly is.

Out of the blue. I am very careful about what I sign up for, I don’t have a car nor can I find any previous emails from the person involved (going back ten years). There’s no chance I signed up to a mailing list for a car accessory — and just in case I had somehow subscribed (maybe through another product they offer) I asked how they got my email address and they didn’t respond which is a tell tale sign of a spammer. My email address was included in a database leak from Kickstarter in 2014, so I am almost certain they have been spamming everybody from the Kickstarter database leak.

I received their spam, reported it to mailchimp (their provider) and was told that they were suspended.