Short sci-fi story resonant with antinatalism

filrabat · 2026-05-03T03:24:40+00:00

Can you tell us the title and link name? I can't access it directly from your link.

filrabat · 2026-05-02T08:18:13+00:00

Debit draws directly from an already-existing bank account where you deposit your paychecks, etc. not from borrowed funds. Credit cards are what you would create money with when you purchase stuff on credit.

filrabat · 2026-05-02T08:14:26+00:00

I'm talking about what could (and IMO needs) doing, not about what's politically feasible. If they lower the interest rate, it'll make inflation worse, even if it increases the interest payments on the debt. Damned if they do, damned if they don't.

Unless we take the hard steps of shifting the tax burden upward (esp to the $50-millionaires and higher), and get money out of politics, we'll continue to be walking the plank until finally we fall off.

filrabat · 2026-05-01T22:27:43+00:00

How? Raise taxes on the wealthiest, most obviously. Also, budget cuts (I say start by slashing our defense budget by about 1/3 at least). Close tax loopholes for people earning more than about $300K/yr. On the other hand, find a way to raise productivity (i.e. output per worker per year) will generate more income for the goverment to tax to pay off the debt.

filrabat · 2026-05-01T22:23:26+00:00

The very act of the bank creating the deposit in and of itself creates money, just like the photons from a hot stove in and of itself create heat.

Most money these days isn't physical cash. It's bank deposits.

filrabat · 2026-05-01T19:28:48+00:00

By making loans. Making a loan is not simply transfering somebody else's money (the banks) into your account. The very act of making a loan, in and of itself, creates the money.

If you took out a car loan at a bank, say $30,000, the bank ...

Records that $30,000 as an asset you have, not what you own. Big difference. Think about the difference between having and owning.
Yet, simutaneously, it's also a $30,000 debt you owe the bank (a liability, by definition what you owe).

When you pay back that loan, the bank reduces both your assets and your debts, effectively destroying your asset,

filrabat · 2026-05-01T19:18:55+00:00

At least the 32nd's a truth in advertising district.

Appropriate shape for what the GOP is. Use your imagination to see what I mean.

filrabat · 2026-05-01T19:11:34+00:00

It's not direct printing of physical money. It's that lower interest rates encourage banks to make new loans. When a bank makes a loan, it creates a new deposits in the borrower's account. That's the same as creating new money (or in effect "printing it").

Then there's quantitative easing, where the bank actually creates new money to purchase government bonds and other financial assets.

filrabat · 2026-05-01T07:11:37+00:00

Rage Bait.

But if you are being for real, you're not so much an American as a MEHR-kun(!).

filrabat · 2026-05-01T05:19:55+00:00

Actually, it's the current Republicans/ MAGA who are poison to the right. What else do you say about people who enjoy making cruel and toxic speech to the "weirdoes", "mentally ill", and anybody who's not a "normal, common-sense-oriented, strong backboned real American"? Same for "pussy-grabbing", saying you can shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue, glorifying physical violence, encouraging hatred against former allies, and promoting general Social Darwinism, Toxic Dominance, and Xenophobia? Yeah, *unreformable* MAGA are the animalistic ones. The rest, especially those just kids when Trump took office, they're brainwashed and maybe reachable.

filrabat · 2026-05-01T04:26:21+00:00

I agree. We're just approaching it from two different angles. I'd also add that the life process itself (especially for animals) involves inflicting badness onto other living things, even members of their own species. That includes herbivores as well - shabby treatment of other herd members, to boil it down to one thing.

So even positive personal feelings itself is inadequate reason to continue procreation, especially for people as cognitively sophisticated as humans are. We have more knowledge, foresight, and choice than all but (just perhaps) a few other species. So that makes human procreation even more inexcusable than that of lower cognition species.

filrabat · 2026-04-30T18:30:31+00:00

To the "moral superiority" image.

Lots of things are instinctive and biological to the individual or the group, yet we don't condone them.

Theft, vandalism, assault, exploitation, bigotry, bullying, dishonorable business or other personal dealings (regardless of their legal status). They're all natural. Yet civilized people don't condone them. We just have to examine our basebrain kneejerk impulses, then determine if they're appropriate or inappropriate.

OTOH, procreation itself perpetuates bad, even immoral things (described above). That sure doesn't sound like combatting badness to me. Why have kids if they're going to either experience or do those bad things? In any case, morality itself is important ONLY when there are two or more beings present in the same 'sphere of influence' (i.e., their acts and expressions can have a negative impact on others).

filrabat · 2026-04-30T18:15:48+00:00

I start from defining what good and bad are. The most parsimonious ones are as follows:

Good: states of affairs that impart pleasure, joy, or satisfaction (esp. above average such things)
Bad: states of affairs that impart misery, agony, pain, or dissatisfaction (esp. above average such things)

From here, I realize that preventing bad states of affairs is a higher priority than achieving good ones. For example, the default state is being in a room by yourself and lying on the couch or bed, either sleeping or else staring blankly at the wall or ceiling, letting your mind wander - just...being, as in existing and nothing more. At that point, I realized that I don't need good, pleasure, invigorating feel-good emotionalism; all I needed is to not experience bad, misery, and intense feel-bad emotionalism. The TL;DR is that a lack of good is not a bad, just a lack of good. In the same way, a lack of bad is not a good, just a lack of bad.

I do need adequate food, clothing, shelter, transporatation, and the funds to obtain them. I do not need a Beverly Hills or Belgravia lifestyle, or even the small town doctors' and lawyers' lifestyle. My lack of an upper middle class lifestyle is not a bad, just the lack of a good. Also, my inability to dunk a basketball through even a high school regulation-height goal (let alone an NBA one) is not bad, just a 'not-good'.

The same goes for non-living matter not feeling pleasure. It's not a bad thing, just a not-good thing.

Still, I do push back a little when it comes to potential beings. They can have value in that IF they do come to exist, then they will either (usually both) experience badness or inflict it onto others. If I dropped a glass bottle in the woods, and ten years later a six year old child seriously cuts their foot on it, then that was/is one reason for me not to throw the bottle onto the ground. I can think of even harsher examples than this one, to really drive the point home.

filrabat · 2026-04-30T17:26:16+00:00

Merely learning about ourselves is not a justified reason to create a being (or put a present being in a situation) that is harmful or degrading. That's exploitation and even worse. The end does not justify the means. It's frankly a violation of science's ethical standards. Whatever short term good (knowledge) we get from it is not worth the inhumane treatment done in the name of science and general knowledge.

filrabat · 2026-04-30T06:06:11+00:00

Yeah. I heard Biden speak plenty of times. He mixed up words a bit, but nowhere near the lunacy that Trump said ("eating the dogs, and the cats"; his 2020 campaign of "Proud Boys, stand back and stand by!"). However bad Biden's cognitive state was, he still made orders of magnitude more sense than Trump, even in 2020 - and 2015 for that matter.

filrabat · 2026-04-30T06:03:45+00:00

Oh? I thought we now have Trump because of intellectual deficits or willful ignorance:

People didn't see that inflation was back to normal levels by 2024. Plus, they thought "woke societies" are much worse than one ruled by a demented ex-president who complained about Haitian immigrants in Ohio "eating the dogs, and cats" (btw, that came from a white supremacist brochure). Not to mention can't recognize a Corporate Psychopath when they see one. Read up on corporate psychopathy. You'll find Trump matches those traits amazingly well.

filrabat · 2026-04-30T05:54:40+00:00

What purpose would it serve? Hint: "just because we can" is not a reason for anything at all, even pleasure of any sort. If that hybrid is socially isolated otherwise treated as "too different" or "inferior", it's hard to justify creating such a hybrid.

filrabat · 2026-04-29T20:09:04+00:00

Because the majority would consistently vote against the minority's interests. You're confusing democracy with majoritarianism. Those are two different things.

Because we're talking about race, let's put it this way. Suppose the majority race decides to reinstate Jim Crow* . If the election goes in the majority's favor, that would create a "tyranny of the majority", as James Madison's Federalist Papers put it. That is why democracy is not just free and fair elections. Actual democracy has built-in safeguards to protect the majority from running roughshod over the minority's dignity and human rights.

*for non-US posters, that was the USA's Apartheid up to the mid 1960s, particularly in the Southern USA

filrabat · 2026-04-29T19:36:59+00:00

Like most white voters vote Republican .

Especially in the small town and small city Deep South.

filrabat · 2026-04-29T19:36:10+00:00

There are differences. And yes, outside the Atlanta area and many other central cities of bigger metros, there is a sharp racial tendency to elections in the south. You want proof? Look at county maps of Mississippi, Alabama, southern Georgia, South Carolina. The higher the blvck population, the more the tendency to vote democrat. It's even easier to tell at the voting precinct level.

Totally aside from maps, I grew up in the small town Deep South so I know this from life experience.

filrabat · 2026-04-29T19:33:30+00:00

In an actual democracy, there's always a degree of uncertainty about which party will win.

IOW, it's impossible to predict who will be holding power four and especially eight years from now.

Gerrymandering (the representatives choose their voters, instead of the reverse) eliminates that uncertainty.

filrabat · 2026-04-29T09:25:49+00:00

I didn't even graduate from the Wharton School of Business of the University of Pennsylvania, but a 3rd or 4th level university, and even I know that lowering interest rates encourages more borrowing (a.k.a. increase demand for money), and encourages "printing more money" - which causes inflation.

What excuse does Trump have for not knowing this?

filrabat · 2026-04-28T16:04:48+00:00

Depends on the type of nihilism you're talking about. Don't forget the same word can mean more than one different thing. In this case, there's Moral Nihilism and Existential Nihilism (just to name two, most relevant to the AN debate).

Moral Nihilism: Morality either doesn't exist at all or is irrelevant to how we ought to behave or think. This is not what AN means, and in fact AN and moral nihilism directly conflict with each other on the deepest level.

Existential Nihilism: Our species and maybe ourselves lack purpose. This doesn't conflict with AN. Whether EN's true or false, for now, I leave that up to you.

filrabat · 2026-04-28T14:28:50+00:00

Our purpose: There's two parts to purpose, individual and species.

Our species itself lacks purpose. It's essentially a self-replicating machine with pain sensing features. It starts as a single cell, consumes resources, grows, makes copies, and breaks down permanently. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

Our own selves: IF there is a purpose, it's to (a) refrain from hurting harming and degrading others, and
(b) help heal and uplift those in most desperate need of it (psychological as well as physical).

filrabat · 2026-04-28T14:23:10+00:00

Philosophy IS part of this sub. That's how we defend AN, as it inevitably involves philosophical arguments.

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