I have a friend who asks people whether they’re running Windows or Linux when we go out to eat and they come to our table to introduce themselves as our server. None of them has yet to get the (bad) joke and I die inside a little more every time I hear it.
I mean, you needed someone to crunch non-financial numbers before machines were invented to do that. A major discovery in astronomy (the relationship between period and luminosity) that’s central to how we measure distances in space was actually made by a woman doing that job (Henrietta Swan Leavitt). If she’d lived a few years longer she likely would have won the Nobel for it.
I kinda agree with you but when you think about it it’s not that bad. They are released afterwards and we can use that blood to save countless people, like you and me.
It’s catch and release so they let them go afterwards where they found them. Horseshoe crab blood is an essential biomedical tool that’s saved countless lives.
It’s an anticoagulant and can detect the smallest traces of endotoxins in medicine. I’m sure I’m missing some details but there are some great medical journals that detail the process and help explain why it’s $60,000 a gallon.
It is not an anticoagulant, quite the opposite actually. The blood (limulus amoebocyte lysate) will coagulate at the slightest hint of gram-negative bacteria and their endotoxins.
It’s most likely a defense mechanism against bacterial infections.
It’s widely used in medicine to check for bacterial contamination of injectable pharmaceuticals.
Yeah, I may be a bit combative in my comments, but in general I dont want to contribute to toxicity, so when I’m wrong I’ll fess up and apologize for it
I feel you and I don’t know your age but me personally I found that with age, I was more forthcoming with saying i was wrong and just trying to be nice to folk.
Age might play a part in it, I do think I’ve been more willing to fess up to wrongdoing than average throughout my life as well though as I function best in honest environments. You have a great day as well!
Horseshoe crabs are not crusteceans, they are early chelicerates.
They have an open circulatory system, where the blood (heamolymph) freely spills out of the arteries into surrounding tissues, so a small clot probably wouldn’t cause issues. Think of it like a cyst, sometimes if an infection can’t be removed by the immune system, your body will just enclose it in a capsule, so it can’t spread.
The blood contains a coagulent which clots in the presence of bacterial toxins. It is extracted and used to ensure that medical equipent and stuff such as vaccines are sterile and safe.
The main use is to detect how much endotoxins (proteins that cause our immune system to react) are present in a sample. This is important because we often use bacteria/fungus/yeast to produce medicine and then remove the bacteria from that medicine. This checks for anything left behind in that process, far more sensitive than any other test or machine can do.
If it wasn’t for horseshoe crab blood, creating medicine that is safe for injection would be a lot harder and potentially more dangerous.
My guess without checking would be regulatory. The FDA doesn’t want to approve an alternative to an already working method unless it can be shown to truly be an alternative. That testing is lengthy and expensive.
It’s not a chemical compound, the active component is an amebocyte. Same reason we can’t just make red blood cells and need other humans to donate them.
There have been other attempts at making synthetic coagulants without broad success. The thing that seems to be the most effective at minimizing the horseshoe crab burden is using machines to do the detection and cut down on the amount of LAL needed vs running the test visually.
Bleeding horseshoe crabs to death is not an acceptable practice in the U.S.
The volume of blood taken is actually quite small, as most of the material in the collection jars is anticoagulant.
It may look uncomfortable to us humans, but keep in mind that horseshoe crabs are not human. What’s normal for the spider is chaos for the fly. Granted, it would be kinda weird to be hoisted from your home by a giant ape and forced into a blood drive. It’s done as gently as possible though.
Hmm. Assuming that the production was actually harmless, what’s the difference between wearing a wool sweater made from excess animal production of wool and using a vaccine made from excess animal blood?
Vegans can receive transfusions because I believe it’s down to “consent”. Humans consent to the blood draw. Crabs do not.
So vegans shouldn’t be taking any medicine or vaccines that have had blood crab blood used in their manufacture.
I have discovered the solution to the vegan problem! Tell all vegans about medicine being made using animal blood and they will die out faster than their B12 & iron deficiency does at the moment!
Oh, I don’t mean the “blood donation” being normal. The person I was responding to asked why they were being drained “this way”. I assumed they were concerned about the folded-over positioning of the crab.
Also, counter argument (in good fun): plenty of animals get their blood drained regularly in nature. Mosquitos, ticks, leaches, and vampire bats are a few examples of things that drain blood from others. Maybe the crabs see us as giant pests?
Defo not the best arrangement for the crabs though. As others pointed out to me, apparently despite the optimistic wording in the link I shared the process is still fatal to some. I’m glad we’re working on alternatives.
Not a reply directly to you, but to contrast the dominant view in the thread - what would it matter if even 100% of the crabs died? Sustainability considerations aside - a crab died for my delicious salad, who cares if they die for a life saving vaccine? Who cares if it’s painful and disorienting for the crab, it’s a crab. As humans, why should we prioritize crab life and well-being over our own?
Ripple effects, sure, I’m with you there, sustainability considerations, which I haven’t seen anyone mentioning ITT.
I completely disagree with you about the status of humanity. Is it really your view that the well-being of a crab has equivalent moral status to your own well-being?
I don’t know about spacecowboy, but I do. I still eat crabs, but I don’t think I’m superior to them morally just because I’m more intelligent or something. We’re just animals eating each other.
What I mean when I say moral is, I don’t see why it’s wrong if a bunch of invertebrates are subjugated, in pain, or die in order to provide something that improves the lives of humans. It’s not sad, it’s a good thing. “Oh but the crabs get stressed out, and 30% might die”, yeah, who cares, they’re crabs.
Sure, I’m a human, and I have a particular perspective on these things. But, we are special. Anyone who considers a trolley problem with a crab on one track, and a human on the other and honestly says, “hey it doesn’t matter humans aren’t special”, that’s, unappealing. In a purely academic, cosmic, arrangement of particles sense, OK, nothing is special. But in that condition, the suffering of animals isn’t even a question worth considering.
The fact that so many accounts in this thread are going out of their way to give weight to the well-being of invertebrates, in a conversation about human well-being, is baffling.
Should we be using existing clotting factors in medical settings that don’t rely on the blood of an endangered species that lives in an incredibly volatile habitat? Probably, but crab discomfort is at the very bottom of the list of reasons why.
People can think of other species as being morally as valuable as people and not be psychotic.
They can also chose the human in the trolley problem and still feel bad for the crab. If the trolley problem included people from my familly and strangers, I’d chose my family, but not because I think it’s morally superior. I would feel bad for the other people.
The line where compassion stops can be drawn anywhere. Many people draw it where their nation or race ends. Many people draw it at the elusive pet/food distinction. Many people draw it where being mammal stops.
I don’t think drawing the line is based on moral principles. It’s practical. Sometimes you need to eat meat, sometimes you need to fight in a war. But when it comes to morality animal lives are animal lives, no matter whether it’s a crab or a white male human. They’re either all worthy of compassion or non of them is.
So that’s my point of view. And thanks for your previous answer.
Disclosure - Before you had replied, I edited out the word ‘psychotic’ above, felt it was unfair.
Cheers, thanks for the thoughtful and reasonable reply. I agree with most of what you say. & it circles something I think about a lot but haven’t made much sense of (if there even is sense to make if it), which is, the role of bad feelings in moral decision making.
I think though, the compassion line should be drawn somewhere, sometimes, with moral reason as a guide. To dip into the quagmire of philosophical thought experiments, you know, what if certain humans produced this special clotting factor, and we had to bleed them to get it, and it came with a risk of their mortality? I think reasonable people could agree, that would be an entirely different question to grapple with. So, you know, I would say it does matter, it’s not a black & white thing, where either everything is worthy of compassion or nothing is. The circumstance can, should, dictate the moral approach. Eating meat, fighting in wars, there might be a right or wrong that’s worth determining there. And knowing that, the moral and the practical are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
And totally, I expect people to have differences when it comes to compassion. Suppose I’m just surprised at the outpouring of love for the gross horseshoe crab, in spite of its real usefulness for global human health. Or at least my understanding of it, which I admit, is not very deep.
“Oh but the crabs get stressed out, and 30% might die”, yeah, who cares, they’re crabs.
“If I shot a couple of your fingers off, who cares, you’re not me. I only care about me.”
The fact that so many accounts in this thread are going out of their way to give weight to the well-being of invertebrates, in a conversation about human well-being, is baffling.
Because some people see morality not as something that’s subjective but believe it is a moral objective truth that suffering should be reduced as much as possible.
That’s not more or less rational than to believe humans are somehow ‘special’.
For the sake of argument, let’s take for granted your statement, that ‘suffering should be reduced as much as possible’.
If the discomfort of a single crab can prevent worse discomfort/suffering/death of many other beings, and results in reduced net pain, then the utilitarian line of reasoning seems to be that we might actually be morally obligated to take blood from crabs.
Sure, but the question was why humans in the first place have trouble with seeing suffering. And the reason is that we naturally seem to have a tendency of making moral judgements in the favour of being against suffering.
It’s often not easy to decide which decision leads to the best outcome. And people have a tendency to react more to what they are seeing now than to judge the bigger picture.
So, while the outcome may be the same (whether you believe the pain of animals doesn’t matter or that you accept there isn’t a better solution at the moment) the way people react is influenced by their moral compass.
I don’t understand the point you’re trying to make above.
In this case specifically, the outcome isn’t unclear. Let’s call the crab’s pain one unit of pain. Assume that unit can directly alleviate 20 units of pain across a handful of other beings. The utilitarian ought to prefer avoiding 19 units of net pain, than allowing 19 units of net pain to occur.
I read your initial post to be some sort of utilitarian moral argument, roughly, that less pain is better. Or something like that. That argument, in this case in particular, leads in the opposite direction than I think you want.
I don’t like hurting animals. If one believes we really are a special species because of things like our innate curiosity, I think you’ll understand the interesting quest to try to eat without hurting anyone/thing.
Why? Better, why not?
Consider how difficult “getting off this rock” is with live food onboard. Plants can directly feed humans with limited processing. With some processing, you can make tasty high protein burgers that taste a lot like beef. Admittedly, still not nutritionally the same as beef, but compensable in other ways.
We’re a concious species (mostly), why not try to avoid hurting our fellow companions in this barren wasteland called space? Who else do we have in the known universe?
I still eat eggs & cheese. Perhaps a day will come where I don’t need those either. I hope you’ll be curious enough to try some alternatives too.
I’ve read good moral arguments for a veganism. I think it’s the right thing to do when it comes to diet. For what it’s worth, this isn’t really a discussion about diet.
It isn’t a decision between a lentil burger and a beef burger, this is an animal resource that can assist in saving human lives. There are other clotting factors used in medicine, and that’s great, let’s use and develop those. But suppose something more lethal and dangerous than COVID comes along, and vaccines need to be produced quickly and globally. I think it would be foolish to wince if we needed to take crab blood to roll out a program that would save human lives.
I’m vegetarian for moral reasons primarily. Steak smells great, I miss al pastor tacos, etc. But, nothing wrong with wincing, doing the extraction as gently as possible, and trying to keep the crabs alive as well. Sure, we gotta live too but I won’t accept taking every other creature with us just so we can survive.
We need to degrow a bit. As a species, humanity is running the planet a little too close to the redline, to put it mildly. Overpopulation has almost guaranteed a dependency on fossil fuels for more than just powering farm equipment, we now artificially produce fertilizer out of it.
Nothing is black and white, and the older I get, the more shades I see. I think we can exist, in a less damaging way that people can enjoy. We humans can, should, and will strive for better.
I completely disagree with you about the status of humanity.
Why because we happened to evolve to think? Given enough time something else would of if not us. Given we may end up causing our species to go extinct due to careless disregard for our environment and even human life in general. We really are not that special and it would serve us to treat the ecosystems, which enable life on this planet to thrive and evolve, with respect if we want to live long enough too see other stars or at least leave the planet in a decent state for the next species if we all die from pointless wars like humanity seems to love doing regardless of if we treat our environment better.
Not quite sure how this answer is relevant. Childfree, or just too young to have kids yourself? The question stands for your mother, a sibling, a niece/nephew, a girlfriend, or whatever makes no stop and consider for a second that you just said you’re okay with random, innocent people suffering and dying.
Because we HAVE to kill a crab to eat it, we shouldnt be killing or harming other animals unless we “need” to. If theres a way to harvest blood without killing the animal, that is the ethically cleanest option. I do think we should prioritize helping our own species over others, but that doesnt mean ignoring the suffering or harm of other species
This is a necessary evil to save many many human lives. Alternatives are being worked on, but this isn’t just for money or food, it’s for lifesaving medicine.
It seems like a flavour of the rubber duck method; by trying to explain it to a third party, you think about it in a different way and find a solution.
Trust me bro(ette): Rubber duck is the SHIT. I don’t even program save for a few rare instances, but any complex issue where you just know something is wrong but can’t quite put your finger on it? It works miracles. A lot better tbf if you are actually explaining it to someone who can ask questions, but any object that you can look at is a good substitute.
I think it’s a bit more than that. I think that the idea is that you simplify the problem so that the rubber duck could understand it. Or at least reformulate it in order to communicate it clearly.
It’s the simplification, reformulation or reorganisation that helps to get the breakthrough.
Just thinking out loud isn’t quite the same thing.
Even though this is true for like 90% of my thinking (that I can see when I try), so far I’m concinced this ist because I am a predominantly language-and-normal-grammar-rules thinker.
There are people that mostly think via associations of words that don’t have to be formulated/ cast into grammar.
And then there supposedly people mainly thinking in pictures or smth, without words.
Anyways for some people rubber duck mode reoresents a change in thinking method, I think
I’m one of the latter that doesn’t really think in words, and a LOT of the time, thoughts have to be greatly simplified or at least much more organized to be stated in clear sentences. It’s that pause-and-refine that often gets the breakthrough for me. Sometimes it takes clear until I’m trying to put it in understandable sentences instead of a big ramble, but it still largely boils down to ACTUALLY stopping the task work to loop back over the landscape.
A lot of people do the same thing physically. Like when you’re climbing a big ladder and suddenly realize how high up you are, or how unstable the ladder is. Just a pause and broadening of attention is often enough to cue different thoughts and realizations.
Yes, saying thinks out loud requires a different change in thinking because you are verbalizing the thoughts in addition to approaching it as an explanation instead of just an understanding. I know how a phone works, but describing how it works is a different thing from knowing. The duck is just a stand in for someone else to get the mindset of explaining
I’ve been using it like that. I have been trying to program this macropad thing I bought that uses python without having done much programming and it has yet to give me a solution that works. But in the course of explaining to it why whatever it gave me doesn’t work I’ve made a lot of progress so that’s nice at least.
Not sure how badly you want it back, but it is possible to restore. Non-sugically. Basically skin under tension causes Mitosis (skin cells dividing to make more skin) - think putting on weight, gaining muscle, getting pregnant, or ear gauges. You tug the skin long enough and eventually have your hoodie back. The results are surprisingly impressive. r/restoring_foreskin has a bunch of info
bruh. I don’t necessarily want it back and was just angry about the fact that it was taken from without my consent in the first place. But thanks for the info anyway, tho not sure what I’m gonna do with it.
New nerves do grow. Muscly/fat/pregnant people have the same skin senstitivity. But there are special function bits that are lost. The Rigid Band has special nerve endings, gone forever. Frenellum too
Oh, I’ve seen that. It’s fascinating. There’s a ball with outer clamps and varying degrees of weights you can add on a dangly bit. You attach the contraption for some number of increasing minutes per day, and it stretches the skin surrounding the glans until it’s long enough to encompass the glans. After a while, the little ball will be encompassed by the new foreskin.
He says it’s not painful and I believe him, but not being the owner of a penis, it looks at least uncomfortable to me. Then again, I’ve never used gauges, either, and as you said, it’s pretty similar to that.
I don’t want much just want my foreskin back again
No it’s not TMI I shared it 'cause we’re friends
My parents chose this road but I’ll choose where it ends
Don’t I deserve it all? Gonna grow it back again
Oh yeah I remember this guy. He has a good cause (anti circumcision) but had to ruin it with Bill Gates conspiracy theory nonsense. Also I love How to with John Wilson
edit: hmm actually there is some stuff about bill gates and circumcision so I should probably fact check myself here
Or when objectivity is not called for. All those fallacies and "unfair strategies" are described as they are in order to keep objective discussions at said objective level. Yet, when the discussion by it's nature cannot be objective, none of those "fallacies" apply as fallacies.
Besides: An appeal is not a bad tactic in any way, shape or form.
This is the only time so far I’ve seen “fallacy fallacy” used correctly and not being used, ironically fallaciously, as if it automatically cancels out every fallacy in a person’s argument automatically making it valid.
Look at his eyes, and look at his face… this is the trained male.
Long have nation states and governments tried to break the male, to wrangle the male into a submissive state, but none are more successful than the woman sociopath.
The female sociopath is in many ways addicted to control. Her one impulse to anything the male does is how she can turn it into her advantage, to control the male entirely.
Luckily for the male, the sociopath woman gives fierce blowjobs, so it’s up to him wether or not the pain and degradation is worth it. 4/10 males say it is.
Luckily for the male, the sociopath woman gives fierce blowjobs
Honestly that’s a 50/50 shot between fierce and dead fish. I have proclivity for crazy, and a good half the time it’s all for show and a real disappointment at game time. That all said, always test drive the car before signing the paperwork.
On the contrary, given my current life experience, I damn well diserve answers to all the questions I may have… if there are none or not enough, yes, the transaction is not worthwile.
Unfortunately, women tend to want partners, men want caregivers. Reminding him to care for his kids because he doesn’t recognize how children as his responsibility is now a women’s personality issue, rather than a man’s personality issue. It’s wild that a woman doing merely most of the care work and the full entirety of family organization from cleaning to meals has become something to look down on as a woman failing rather than men being irresponsible and not respecting their spouse.
You may be right in general, but none of that is a good excuse for a transactional sex life.
If I wanted to exchange services (labor) for sex, I could simply take the money earned from labor to purchase it from a prostitute. That is not what a marriage should be like.
You are making a lot of sweeping generalizations that are wildly inaccurate. Some of those statements (hell, maybe all of them) may be true for certain socio-political subgroups of our society, but I absolutely do not agree that that’s the dynamic through which most heterosexual people view their partners (or more accurately, the idea of a partner).
You’re basically just regurgitating the “atomic family” ethos from back in the 1950s.
by treating him like a kid will not help. Yes, making clear that you expect him to share the care work with you is important. Making rules together can be a way of doing it, but he needs to do it because he is the dad and her partner and a reasonable adult that takes their responsibilities serious, not because he wants a BJ at the end of the week. They both need couple therapy, because he isn’t a responsible adult and she infantilizes him on top.
Men tend to trend more irresponsible, women more neurotic, in my experience. There’s plenty of exceptions, but on the whole that’s what I’ve seen. Neither is good, both can collapse a relationship. In straight relationships this can result in women taking on everything. Even where she’s overcome (or not originally had) any neuroticism, a sufficiently irresponsible man can still put the problem on her shoulders.
What I think you’re omitting is that this can happen in reverse.
Even when a man overcomes (or didn’t originally have) any irresponsibility, a sufficiently neurotic woman can still put all the problems on him. He has to pull the tasks away from her because she thinks only she can do it ‘right’. Only then can he pull his weight. But he then must also do the dance of convincing his partner that he’s doing a good job, or she’ll just feel compelled to do the work again herself.
Of course most relationships are somewhere between these extremes. And some even see the roles reversed. People are, of course, extremely diverse. But this is a common pattern I’ve seen.
Unfortunately, women tend to want partners, men want caregivers.
Thank you. Nobody’s seeing that. All the comments saying the woman is mean, instead of talking about how irresponsible the man must be that he needs a reward system to do what he should be doing on his own* for his family.
*I’m not sure if it’s the right expression. I mean by his own volition and out of responsibility.
Edit: I won’t acknowledge the rest of your comment because, honestly, it got confusing.
Leave it to big tech to introduce the same exact product with less features while they gaslight you into believing it’s a shiny new product that you should be excited about.
When I see “New and improved!!” all I get is “We have found a way to make more money, and we sure as fuck ain’t passing the earnings to you”, or potentially “We faced a lawsuit so have since begun to follow the smallest possible set of FDA guidelines the law allows for, making OUR product safer for YOU!”
Sure our product is made by Filipino children, and sure it pollutes pristine wetlands, and yes, it does unfairly contribute to an insanely skewed distribution of wealth, but think of the INNOVATION!
Is there a photo of Elon and Ghislane Maxwell out there? Is there evidence he visited Epstein’s house? Did he get subpoenaed in the case against JP Morgan holding them responsible for child sex trafficking? I’m just asking questions.
I d wouldn’t call it new, they’re used quite interchangeably. Also, its usually tied to political stances (conservative->lib & lib->conservative) - its like a insult on political views.
Oh come on after almost 10 years of the right using “pedophile” as their go-to insult for anyone they don’t like, the normal people do it once when it’s actually true, and you fly off the handle? That’s weird.
Like the time Elon Musk called the diver who saved the kids trapped in a flooded cave a pedo just because he managed to do so before he could build his"robot" idea?
The submarine thing is still one of the most ridiculous ideas I’ve ever heard. The cave is in some places so narrow divers had to remove their tanks. How would an imaginary submarine based on a space X rocket make it through?
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