Sweater, n. Garment worn by child when its mother is feeling chilly.

― Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

In my experience, there are three types:

• Alive and well, as here - they are up at 6am, clearing up, making breakfast, rolling other people out of the way to vacuum etc.
• Still hungover, as here - the ones being rolled out of the way etc
• Still partying - arrive at 6:am straight from another party, hoovering up leftover pizza, talking at both the above types and keen not to stop the party until Jan 2nd at the earliest.

This article is from 2009, of course.

I have only heard of him through the podcast. I’d suggest listening to that. It’s a great series. Or, of course, his actual books are listed on the wiki page.

However, I think that he is saying that we shouldn’t be relying on something that can be and clearly IS being removed or ignored when inconvenient. Maybe, instead, we should be looking at respecting human life just for itself, without cluttering things up with legal language that doesn’t actually add anything.

Personally, I can see where he is coming from, and seldom think or speak in terms of rights myself for much the same reasons. But, either way, however much ignored or misused it is, I don’t think that we can realistically expect anyone who is likely to create exceptions to human rights to have any innate respect for people otherwise.

Until someone comes up with something better, human rights are about the best way of framing the ideas that we have.

In addition to the reasons suggested in several of the comments here so far, the philosopher Giorgio Agamben is extremely critical of the concept of human rights since they are a legal and political construct, and the same legal and political systems are used to create ‘exceptional’ circumstances in which the rights are deemed not to apply to certain groups. Relying on these rights is flawed, in his view, since they will be suspended when most needed. The Philosopize This Podcast did an episode on this just recently.

Been using QBittorrent for longer than I can remember now. It certainly does everything I have ever wanted from it.

I would say when you are aware that what you see may be subject to illusion or deception.

It is the Federation’s we do not discuss it with outsiders thing. It confuses time travelling Klingons.

Although I am required to use windows machines for work normally and, since we dont have access to firefox, i normally use edge there, there are occasions on which I find it convenient to hop into a similar setup on my home linux machine to get to my work account. I will use edge for that - as well as outlook online etc.

For a work browser, I find it pretty useful. There is no way that I would want to use if for general purposes though.

So that would only be ‘good’ from the point of view of your totalitarian ruler themselves. It doesn’t say anything about whether it is good or bad for anyone else. And - critically - only good even for them as long as your ruler was actually competent enough to get to where they wanted to get to in the most efficient way. If they were not going to be taking opposing views into account they would have to be universal experts.

Why is that a good thing? It would only be good if the results of the decisions were good. Making bad decisions fast would make things worse.

Decision speed is simply neutral unless there is an associated bias towards good or bad results from those decisions.

What kind of explanation are you looking for?

As well as the required technology, it was political will during the cold war that drove the manned landing back then. That political will hasn’t been there since: no-one is really interested in being second on the moon just for the sake of it.

And technological advances have, if anything, made manned missions less necessary if we want to investigate particular subjects: robots and remote scanning can do far more these days without the need for boots on the ground.