This is either bait, or you need to get the police involved for the kids and find somewhere safer/saner to live yourself.

<3

It’s not clear what goalpost you mean, exactly. Any consequentialism being bad, or pure consequentialism?

I was pretty careful not to set a goalpost of any kind on pure consequentialism, if you go back and double check, exactly because it has well-known problems.

Go bootlick a billionaire if you want to but don’t come here try to convince anyone that they are in any way good people

Don’t flatter them with the evil genius shit either. That’s how they want to be seen.

The fact I know what deontology means should suggest that I’ve heard of the trolley problem.

Also, leg[al] isn’t moral!

Correct. But, you’d have to figure out an alternative system of rules that he broke. And it may very well capture people you like as well. Most people would have no problem killing a technical standard for a very large sum of money.

I can’t say it’s impossible to do reasonably, but I can’t say it is possible either. Most people just acknowledge that sometimes the ends justify the means.

People also say he’s putting microchips in the COVID vaccines, so pardon me if I’m skeptical about all that. It appears to be a philanthropic project. Maybe not the best possible one, but one nonetheless.

good should be done for the improvement of humanity and bad people should be held accountable for their crimes.

Wouldn’t the “holding accountable” itself involve some bad actions?

Hey, it’s a pretty popular ethical philosophy. Generally, people like to leave caveats, but fully rejecting all consequentialism is similarly uncommon.

If you’re going to be a pure deontologist, you have to pick out single actions he’s done that went against your chosen rules. One hurdle there is that most of his activities were legal in their time or place. Another is that seeking personal profit is almost universal and often commended.

Dictatorship had a pretty clean run of several thousand years there. Sure, dynasties changed, but never the actual system.

Also, consider the attractiveness of dictatorship. I think that everybody would like to be a dictator. Who wants to share power? Not me. I want to be in control, of my forum, my project, my game.

So, my second paragraph kind of addresses that. It’s never actually about one person having the power, as a government system.

One-person control over something, backed by externally imposed laws, is a completely different thing. You don’t have to worry about your forum members poisoning you and physically taking control of your server.

Almost certainly, he’s saved far more lives than he’s taken at this point.

He scalped Western technophobes pretty hard and tried to hobble a lot of early FOSS efforts (although we came through in the end). Few of the idiots buying Windows XP licences needed that money more then the recipients of the Gates fund, though, so if that’s his lifetime transaction it’s based.

so what’s your threshold for being a scumbag piece of shit?

It’s not clear good people exist at all.

Experience shows democracies work better in just about every way. Mainly, there’s questions about how stable they can be over the long term.

I’ve known people who liked the idea of a dictatorship, but they’ve all had funny ideas about how they internally work. Palace intrigue and corruption are inevitable and huge, it’s never just one potentially-wise individual calling the shots.

I don’t know, but the way they’re answered often ends up being very interesting.

I’m probably one of the people OP is thinking of. Before my time he was apparently a massive bastard, and he even admits to it. These days, as far as I can tell, he rescues Africans and doesn’t do much else. Every other famous billionaire is higher on my shit list.

Time to find a good counterfeit.

Interesting. Mine is based on a NiCad battery and I don’t think it lasts anywhere close to that long.

The specific model is rechargeable, unless I’m misunderstanding you.

For Lemmings from other areas, it doesn’t read like a warning, exactly, but in the context of what the Alberta government literally this minster has been doing it kind of is.

Edit: Didn’t notice this is signed Devin Dreeshen.

This government has blown up one Calgary transport plan already (they’re literally building two halves that don’t enter downtown at all now), so that may or may not be wise. Cities don’t really have constitutional protections in Canada or Alberta.

I’m pretty sure the trend didn’t come from nowhere, although like every other fashion most adherents wouldn’t have necessarily chosen it in a vacuum.

Whether that makes the preference less valid is an interesting question of it’s own.

It’s pretty impossible not to be tangentially connected with someone bad somewhere. Unless I have reasonable grounds to think the production of something was directly unethical I can’t and don’t worry about it.

For example, if you buy a thing from a poor country, there’s a chance a slave made it, but a greater chance it was part of somebody’s ticket out of rural poverty, and there’s no way to tell. On the other hand, meat is always meat (unless it’s lab-grown I guess, but that technology doesn’t work very well to date).

I mean, it’s not really a new problem, although it’s just been ordinary health issues rather than AI.

Usually disability has been addressed very poorly, though.

It sure seemed like one, yeah. One unusual thing is that there was apparently a Discord channel with multiple marks in it at once.