Tiresia

I checked out at “good and evil are fundamental forces and your goodness is in your genes”, after skipping the Vulcan minstrel show and being weirded out by the race/species essentialism.

It’s hard to feel particularly sorry for them when

Exactly. It is hard to feel sorry for people who have done horrible things and whom the world would be better off without. It’s hard for a Marxist-Leninist to feel sorry for the petit bourgeoisie. It’s hard for a liberal to feel sorry for criminals. It’s hard for you to feel sorry for rich people.

The question is how freely the list of people you don’t feel sorry for grows as you make a business out of murdering people, ignoring the anguish of their friends and family, and dismissing reports on the negative consequences of their death as propaganda.

The list could expand ahead of you so fast you never have a crisis of conscience. You could hit boundaries that dissuade you temporarily but which you abandon after you’ve grown more cynical. You could actually have solid boundaries in many areas but still have some where the list grows to massive proportions. Or you could cause changes in the world that lead to more people you don’t feel sorry for.

The ease with which you dismiss these concerns make me think the expansion of your list will not be bounded.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

I dunno. They defaulted to a lack of empathy with those affected by their actions and got defensive when challenged on that. That seems like it could be enough to spiral like JK Rowling when put in a similar position of power and public scrutiny. With similarly catastrophic results - if not more so, given the power of the death note.

(And to clarify: I don’t think they’re a terrible person. Most people have issues that, if expanded to horrifying scale by a weapon of mass destruction like the Death Note, would lead to horrible outcomes. Given what little interaction with them I’ve seen, I just don’t think they’re an exception).

Getting murdered sucks. Being friends or family of someone who got murdered sucks. Using the Death Note inflicts great suffering.

As long as the Death Note user remains anonymous they can avoid any sort of accountability, while they can hold others accountable to whatever standards they wish. Using the Death Note creates inequality between the holder and everyone else.

The issue is that with a death note, you’re a global power structure that feeds off inequality and suffering now.

Yeah, and dictators, of course. And rapists that got away with it. And people that participate in genocide. And people that deliberately cause famine to cause genocide. And CEOs of companies that murder people through their policies and actions. And major shareholders of those companies that are pulling the strings. And…

It’s probably because it’s safer as an experimental proof-of-concept.

Hydrogen leaks extremely easily, and there are large amounts of electricity going through it because of power generation, static electricity from wind in certain conditions, and, in case of hydrogen, electrolysis. All of this can be managed safely, but it takes a lot of blind faith in the engineers to assume it will all be managed safely on the first go.

If this one burned down in the most predictable way imaginable, the bureaucrats that greenlit it will look bad and the project will likely be delayed or canceled.

But if this one works, they can (request state permission to) develop a second design that uses hydrogen, and when that design works well they can start mass producing those without dependence on natural gas extraction.

You could go the SpaceX route and build multiple designs that you expect to fail catastrophically so you can get to building ones that work faster, but that takes a lot of faith from the people funding you, and a lot of willingness to generate pollution.

There is real political will behind it - from the Chinese Communist Party. It’s their subsidies/planned economy that is driving this.

Trans rights, and any minority rights, can turn on a dime if rich people decide to assign them as public scapegoat.

If inherent commonality of experiences was enough, then a bunch of WASP cishet male gamers studying physics should have a very easy time making friends.

Laws suck at catching cheaters. That’s why they are incomprehensibly complex now while cheaters still keep exploiting loopholes.

Practically no honest person obeys the law. They don’t have time to consider all the legal intricacies, and even if they did people would rightfully call them assholes for following some legal duty to rat someone out for failing to do something unjust that is an unintended consequence of how multiple laws interact. Good people find just loopholes, break unjust laws where they can, and find social ways to hold harmful law-obeyers accountable. That’s the anarchic reality known as “common decency”.

Even the practical mechanism by which the current system tries to catch cheaters - by having a judge or jury of their peers judge whether they did anything wrong and treating that judgment as the truth for everyone to be enforced with cops and prisons - does not require laws.

Laws exist to project the opinions of a central authority without that central authority’s need to understand the situation. They are a successor to people having to see the king to settle a dispute because a king who lets his subjects settle a dispute without him is barely a king at all.

Billions of people have existed without laws. If we want to stop living in a world where all law enforcement are bastards, we’ve got to get rid of the laws. Judgment on morality doesn’t take fine print.

Isn’t metal fully recyclable already? Much more so than wood?

Speaking from experience, EU government green innovation grants are often wasted on ill-considered “solutions”. There’s a whole ecosystem of corporations specializing in convincing bureaucrats with no scientific education to give them grant money rather than trying to build stuff that makes sense.

Wooden wind turbine blades are exactly the sort of thing that makes an EU green tech bureaucrat salivate. Visible but inoffensive, cute but grand, natural but industrial, a rustic solarpunk-aesthetic without actually requiring any sort of social restructuring.