In some takes on the trolley problem (do nothing, five people are run over by a trolley an die, flip a track change switch and two people are run over by a trolley and die) flipping the switch is the morally worse option because then those two people’s deaths are your fault, whereas the five people who die because you did nothing are someone else’s fault. I don’t agree with that take, but it’s taken seriously in philosophy circles.

I don’t get how in the Levant, where both Hamas and the Israelis have significant factions that want to genocide the other people, a situation where Hamas does the genociding (because an Israel without attack capability de facto also loses defense capability) is somehow more moral than a situation where Israel does it.

The problem is the very pro-death penalty camp wants the dying process - not the being dead part after - to be the punishment. The pro-humane camp is generally anti-death-penalty enough they don’t get a seat at the method-decision table.

Alabama tried that and managed to screw it up. You have to remove the carbon dioxide in the exhales to prevent the feeling of suffocation, and they didn’t provide enough nitrogen flow to do that. Took like twenty minutes of clearly desperate gasping and convulsions for the guy to pass.

I think it’s likely really surprising to learn/experience that feces of a breastfed baby (and to a lesser extent formula fed babies) don’t smell like shit. It’s natural to want to share a surprising learning. Might also be good to be forewarned the milky smell ends once normal food is introduced.

Unfortunately, the alternate option was not “let them stay hostage a while longer”. It was “let the hostages die”. And maybe that would have been the more ethical call. But let’s not delude ourselves that they could have been kept alive any other way.

Does Arizona not have an online free system? Illinois has a very hand-holding guided set of questions and has for years, it’s always been our federal taxes that make my head hurt to fill out via the IRS’s FreeFillableForms site.

Her son died of cancer as a young adult. I have wondered if the abdominal xray while she was pregnant contributed to that.

It’s such a creepy biological characteristic. Bedbugs are mildly social, and prefer to sleep near other bedbugs. But the traumatic insemination seems to be unpleasant for the females, and after enough holes are poked all over their bodies, they will leave the main colony. A single inseminated female hitchhiker is normally how they infest new places.

It has a lot of dissolved water that, if exposed to atmospheric pressure, boils off. So it could be said to have components that are boiling?

Beds predate language. Non-human apes build “nests” - beds in trees - to sleep in.

Haha, but batbugs and birdbugs - bedbug cousins that prefer the blood of bats or birds - are a thing. Bedbugs and their preference for specifically human blood evolved alongside primates starting to build sleeping structures.

Considering the size of the Canadian tomato industry (all greenhouse), it does seem like bananas should also solve. Just bananas can’t pack as densely as tomatoes, but maybe throw one banana tree in every dozen rows of tomatoes or something. A girl can dream.

Ha, poor kitty.

Fun fact, a banana is technically an herb and not a tree.

It’s more likely they ship poorly. Same reason the tastiest tomato or strawberry varieties are not the ones grown commercially.

I live in the Midwest, and had a coworker with a banana plant (I think a Cavendish). He cut it down and dug up the root ball to bring inside every winter. Every few years, the weather was warm enough long enough the thing actually made bananas.

It is sad that while there are so many interesting banana varieties all around the world, only two of them ship for crap. In addition to cool-sounding fruity varieties, one variety is so starchy it used to be the base starch the diet of local people instead of a grain, how neat is that?

It happened in Maine. And Alaska. And is on track in Nevada.

Modern industrial farming is not sustainable for the next hundred years, no, but there are a lot of levers to work to transform it into something that will reliably feed future generations.

One lever is amount and kind of meat in the average diet. It takes something like seven pounds of grain to make one pound of beef. Modern chicken breeds are amazingly efficient at converting feed grain to chicken meat, but even they are something like two pounds in to one pound out. Reducing the percent of meat in our diets would make our food go significantly further.

The plants use energy from the sun to turn carbon dioxide from the air into edible calories. When our animal bodies “burn” the food we eat, that turns it back to carbon dioxide, which we exhale.