Fair enough, I didn’t mean to pry. Good luck with figuring things out.

Okay, then what do you believe?

I don’t understand. Are you an atheist then?

Nope, didn’t see that. Though I did see your comment about not bothering with atheists, so surely you’ve got some sort of belief system. Something you came up with on your own?

The Bible explicitly says a tiny number of people shall be saved, yet the Catholic Church has over a billion. That is not consistent with what the scripture says (and don’t forget: 8 people survived Noah’s Ark, out of millions or possibly billions) that’s all the more evidence that the Catholic Church is not the church of Christ

Which denomination is the correct size to be the real Church of Christ? I’m assuming it’s the one you follow?

Lol come on man, you go complain on the internet about how they hurt your feelings by talking shit about your slop, literally bring up dick size, then brag about how much money you make? You gotta be trolling, this is obviously an over-the-top caricature of an insecure tech bro.

Sounds like somebody’s upset they got called out on slinging vibecoded slop

But the number of saloons/taverns decreased thanks to prohibition and never rebounded, as did the amount of alcohol consumed by Americans per capita.

Incorrect. “Never rebounded” on alcohol consumption is flat out wrong. It rose back up over the years and surpassed pre-Prohibition alcohol consumption levels during COVID.

https://apnews.com/article/public-health-health-statistics-health-us-news-ap-top-news-f1f81ade0748410aaeb6eeab7a772bf7

how am I being downvoted lol

Poe’s Law

This is so blissfully optimistic that I’m not even gonna try to bring you back down to Earth with my weary bitterness.

Grindr and underlying network infrastructure can definitely take big loads.

Interesting choice of words for such a serious conversation, I’m offended

Because as far as I can tell it’s a meme based on a website which takes user reports as evidence of an outage, which would be very susceptible to false reports because it’s funny.

Even if we assume each and every one is instantly hopping on the grind (which is a HUGE if), it would still be a drop in the bucket compared to the usual traffic of Grindr in Dallas.

Honestly, fair point. I don’t know the methodology for the outage tracking, you could be right on this one.

Attack Republicans for what they are (or are shamefully revealed to be), not what would be funny if true.

Fair

That just gives actual straight homophobes an excuse (“I’m not homophobic because I’m definitely not gay”) and spreads the narrative that homophobia is just something gay people do to themselves.

This is where you go off the rails. It’s a very weird jump to make and is completely illogical. You’re claiming that Republican Grindr jokes reinforce a narrative that only gay people hate gay people, and to that I say, respectfully: what the fuck lol

If you’re just doing the “haha calling the homophobe gay” bit, that’s homophobic by using homosexuality as an insult.

It is not using homosexuality as an insult. It’s using hypocrisy as an insult.

Ultimately it just comes down to that, if you see a homophobic person and immediately assume they are gay, that is homophobia.

No one said that.

Republicans are generally more prone to homophobia, yet many of those Republican homophobes are actually homosexual, as evidenced by various high-profile instances as well as the multiple times that Grindr has crashed in the immediate vicinity of a Republican convention.

Again – homosexual is fine, hypocrite is not. Especially when that hypocrisy is directly harming other homosexuals through shitty policies being pushed through.

It is about preventing needless suffering. So, if suffering constitutes an overwhelming part of life, one should not procreate in order to avoid it. Sure, we may have our coping mechanisms to get around the suffering, but why learn and deploy them when it can be avoided altogether? It is not for the benefit of the child that they are being brought into existence.

This just doesn’t track with my lived experience. I have personally had my fair share of pain in life, but not so much that I wish I was never born, or that I want to prematurely die. The suffering is there, but not so much that it is overpowering or unbearable.

Am I enjoying life because I’m deploying coping mechanisms and don’t even realize it? Maybe. Is my brain tricking me into thinking everything is fine? Maybe. Does it matter? I really don’t think so. The subjective experience is what matters.

I would say overall that I’ve enjoyed existing and am thankful for it, and I don’t know how to square that with the argument you’re presenting.

Avoiding all procreation to prevent the possibility of future generations experiencing some level of bearable suffering seems like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

See Blue_Morpho’s comment above. The things you’re describing as the product of resistance and the square of the current is power.

Heat is literally power dissipation. Saying “heat is a function of power” is essentially a tautology.

Should be P = V^2 / R, but other than that, yes exactly.

Everyone saying “it scales with voltage” or “it scales with resistance” are describing different sides of the same coin. At the end of the day, the thing we’re talking about is just power, you can pick and choose whichever version of the power formula that you want.

You’re right, current is a fine proxy for practical purposes like sizing wires and such. I was just being a bit pedantic in that heat fundamentally is power dissipation.

Heat is actually a function of power, which is voltage times current.

It’s an interesting take. You may be right about the biological weighting of suffering vs. happiness, so in some high-level, scientific sense perhaps “life is suffering” is a valid statement. But if I start asking people on the street if, based on their subjective lived experience, they agree with that statement, I can guarantee that not everyone would.

And that’s the rub for me: I see antinatalists taking this position as if “life is suffering” is subjectively true for all humans, and I don’t think that’s true, or at least not to an extent that leads to the conclusion that no one should reproduce in order to save the next generation from the suffering.

So it seems to me that one driver of antinatalism is people with depression incorrectly assuming that the next generation will experience life the same way they do. All it takes to prove that assumption wrong is a single person who disagrees that their subjective lived experience is one of constant suffering.

There are obviously specific situations or conditions which would lead to suffering for any potential children – not enough money, food, security, etc – but my understanding is that isn’t the kind of thing we’re talking about here.

(Though there also seems to be a certain flavor of antinatalism which is something like “our universal shared conditions are going to get so bad that everyone will suffer” due to global warming, lare-stage capitalism, whatever. That one I can understand.)

Also, my depression and anxiety play a large part in my decision not to bring children into the world. I don’t want them to go through all this bullshit (and this is where antinatalism comes in).

This is interesting, because my initial (possibly naive) reaction to learning about antinatalism was that it sounded like a projection of depression. It sounds like the core thesis is “life is not worth the suffering and therefore shouldn’t be forced onto anyone”, and it seems like depression is a prerequisite to holding that particular view.

Sounds very reasonable, thanks!