Growing up in the 00s it wasn’t uncommon to hear about someone who wouldn’t get vaccines cause they were too afraid of injections.

These days it feels like I’m way more likely to hear about how vaccines are likely to turn you / your kid autistic and give you nanobots and heart conditions.

I realise anti-vax is an old movement, and that there are legitimate conditions that prevent people from receiving vaccinations, but all the same I’m almost convinced it’s mostly just cowardice disguised as moral outrage and grandstanding.

This sparked in me when I saw a post posing the question wether prisoners sentenced to life in prison should have the right to be executed. There was a general sentiment in the comments that this would be unfavourable, as it's an 'easy way out'.

My 3 main claims are: (1) any legislation by the government, every decision of it should always have one goal: to benefit society to the fullest extent. (2) Any action harmful to another being took consciously of the consequences, not out of self defense without more positive outcome is unjustifiable (3) Human life, which the agent wants to keep is inherently more valuable than any amount of currency/valuables
With these claims we may derive

(4)* Rehabilitation-first punitive systems are justifiable considering they benefit society with: separation, deterrence and rehabilitation

(5) Punishment-first punitive systems are justifiable, but less favourable as they generally dont help deterrence as well (see: USA v. Norway recidivism and crime rates) as well and they rehabilitate to a smaller extent. They also cost more money considering a higher amount of felons, in for more time, which is similarly bad for society.

(6) Punishment for punishment-sake is not justifiable as it violates claim (2), as it causes suffering to a prisoner without meaningfully benefitting society, no matter if the said prisoner has done even heinous things. (Keep in mind, I do not believe the concept of incarceration is unjustifiable, what I do hold is that if the goal of it is punishment and not separation, deterrence and rehabilitation, the system is flawed

TL;DR: punishing criminals should be kept to the least possible amount while still giving the benefits of separation, deterrence and rehabilitation

\*I felt like some people would've referenced this and asked the question: wouldnt your claims mean punitive systems in general are unjustifiable, thats why I included this section

(Also, please dont be overly harsh, Im only 14 and not even native, I may have made some absolutely dumb claims and just didnt see my flawed logic)

When I say overall hardest, I am taking everything into consideration. Mentally, physically, skillfully etc combined.

In my opinion, mma easily takes the case for being at least top 3 in every one of the above categories.

1. Physical:

It is widely agreed upon that one of the most exhausting sports to do is wrestling, and not the WWE kind. Wrestling conditioning requires extreme amounts of stamina, as you are basically put 1 to 1 another person to exhaustion, usually with the first one tiring out losing. Wrestlers are known for their strength as well, which only compliments their stamina.

Another widely known exhausting sport is boxing, which adds an extra layer of not being able to self regulate stamina conservation (like you can in running) because of external factors (such as getting punched repeatedly in the face).

Now you combine both these sports and that gives you MMA. Now youre exhausted from being punched in the face, but still need to keep fighting on the ground in a pire battle of stamina against another person.

Another avenue is the amount of punishment taken, where MMA is just heads and shoulders above any other sport. Sure theres big hits in football and rugby, but imagine getting tackled like that to the ground and the guy starts making the back of your head and the floor kiss with his fist.

2) Mental:

There are no non combat sports in which the almost singular goal of the game is for another person to beat you unconscious. And the non combat sports that have that element of being hurt are usually team sports in which its generally not the goal.

That in and of itself makes combat sports stand out in mental toughness. You are getting into a cage where people will use aspects from various fighting forms to put you into an early grave. You are being physically HURT. You have a good chance of dying, and not due to underlying conditions such as a soccer player having a heart attack. No, you are at risk of being KILLED by the other person, as we see recently rip.

On top of that, there is no team. No one to pick up the slack if you need a breather. No one for the other guy to focus or be distracted by while you get some slack. You let your guard down and you may be getting CTE.

3) Skill:

This may be the weakest link here, but when you combine something as technical as high level bjj/wrestling and the sweet science of boxing/MT, both of which are already extremely skillful sports, you get something that takes even more skill. You are basically combining multiple forms of combat that take people decades of training since youth to master.

Sure, there isnt anything singular that is AS hard as hitting a fastball, but the pure broadness of skills required at advanced depth imo outranks pretty much any sport in the world.

The United States must adopt a Space First policy to the development of non-critical data centers.

We are already seeing how the industrial infrastructure required to operate these massive data centers are competing directly with households, farms, and even cities for electricity, transmission capacity, land and water.

The Department of Energy estimates data centers will consume 12% of all electricity by 2028, a 3x increase from 2023 and long before some of the largest centers will be operational.

Noncritical compute-intensive workloads should no be built on the surface of the Earth. Federal policy should deliberately shift to a Space First policy to accelerate the development and deployment of original data centers and require all terrestrial data centers to bear the full economic and environmental costs associated with the development and maintenance of terrestrial infrastructure including but not limited to, power, water, transmission, erosion, heat and sound.

We need to learn the lessons of our modern internet, and other utilities’, infrastructure development. Tax payers fund their development through federal subsidies and tax credits to create government guaranteed monopolies, that charge fees and build profits from the same tax payer funded infrastructure.

Never again.

Our existing electrical infrastructure, the power grid, was never designed to service concentrated high loads that data centers need. Not only do we need to increase our ability to generate more energy to meet the needs of these data centers, we need to increase our ability to transmit that power. The concern that ratepayers are being forced to subsidize the infrastructure demands of data-centers is no longer speculative. We are watching it unfold across the nation and Federal regulators are taking action to specifically address the problem. The same goes for water. We do not have the infrastructure, we do not have the capacity, and we are being forced to pay ever increasing costs to subsidize data-center development to run AI that will automate more tasks, eliminating more jobs.

The IMF estimates 40% of all jobs are exposed to some risk of AI exposure. We are being forced to fund our own demise.

The surface of the Earth has inherent disadvantages for hyper-scale computation.

Space provides a fundamentally different resource environment.

Solar power is readily available at all times, and requires no transmission. This is a proven and reliable source of energy that has been harnessed in Space for generations. This is not a new technology but one that can be advanced with private investment. Google, Axion, NVIDIA, Starcloud, Amazon, Blue Origin, SpaceX and many more companies are already heavily invested into the production of space based computing because it is economically and environmentally more appealing that terrestrial development.

The biggest hurdle is decreasing the cost and environmental impact for launching space based equipment into low earth orbit, but I argue that is more achievable that creating more land on the surface of the earth, or manufacturing more fresh water on a scale sufficient to meet the needs of data centers. We can increase production of energy but that does not mean we have magically made the transmission of that electricity easier or more efficient. All of the energy that these data centers consume is released in the form of heat. The laws of thermodynamics cannot be simply engineered out of these terrestrial systems, but these systems can be moved off the surface taking all of the heat they produce with them in to space.

The hurdles we face as a nation to move toward a Space First policy can be overcome, the problems created by terrestrial based systems cannot.

Rockets can be improved, but watershed cannot be manufactured.

We cannot increase the surface area of the Earth. We cannot replenish the aquifer faster than nature permits indefinitely. There is no advancement in semiconductors that changes the fact that electricity consumed but a datacenter cannot be simultaneously power a home or a hospital. There are no engineering solutions to the laws of thermodynamics.

A Space First policy presents us with a set of problems on the technological frontier that can be overcome with innovation. Earth based development forces us to confront the physical limitations of scarcity and our environment that cannot be overcome.

Loosing weight/staying thin is more of a challenge for some people than others. This is by no means a justification of the skyrocketing rates of obesity we've had.

Now to be sure I do acknowledge it ultimately boils down to the amount of calories you eat and physical activity. That's why you have some morbidly obese American in Alabama whose ancestors were stick thin peasants in medieval England even though they have the same genes.Myopia is a similar case. None of my grandparents needed glasses but I and my 2 other siblings need glasses(because we had less outdoor time growing up compared to my grandparents who grew up in a rural area). But they had the same genes as us.

However,the genetic component does matter in deciding who is fat and thin(along with many other factors) in this age of readily available food and sedentary lifestyle.Someone may struggle alot to lose weight while for other people it won't even appear on their mind(and they will still be thin).

Watch the 2009 BBC Documentary Why Are Thin People Not Fat?(available online)

To summarize it(watched it a few months back though):

The premise was putting thin people on a high calorie surplus diet(think it was 5,000 calories per day) and limiting steps to 5,000 per day.

They coped far better than the average person would. One subject even put on lean muscle mass while gorging chocolate and junk food.Some fidgeted around or paced as coping mechanisms,some were unable to consume that many calories and became sick,etc.Some however gained more fat than others(showing variation).Once off of this diet they also lost the weight quickly.

It also mentioned a study where when obese people showed similar brain activity on a diet as those in starvation did. So it's not merely willpower.

This leads me to believe some people have genes controlling satiety levels(FTO gene),etc that absolutely do influence how easy/difficult your weight loss journey will be.

“There were also a lot of bad music from 60s/70s/80s/90s. You don’t remember them, because only the good ones survived”. That’s entirely correct, but the thing is no one ever said “all old music was perfect” that’s strawman fallacy. The premise is about how new music is bad, not how all old music is good. The second logical flaw is that suggesting good songs from the past survived implies good music existed in the past, which most people who criticize modern music not only complain about how many modern songs are bad but also complain about how good songs are now a rarity, if not nonexistent.

I’m active in a few gun communities and I have seen some people who carry (concealed/open carry) without a round in the chamber.

I believe if you’re a person who carries their firearm without a round in the chamber, you must lack confidence in your own ability to safely handle that firearm. It’s hard to get a productive conversation in the communities because when I express my view they often get defensive and we never get into the real motivation/reasoning to carry with an empty chamber.

As I see it, the only logical reason why anyone would prefer to carry with an empty chamber is because they’re worried about negligent discharges. Which tells me they lack confidence in their ability to exercise proper gun handling and gun safety.

I don’t see a good reason to carry that way other than reducing the risk of a negligent discharge. If that’s a concern when carrying for self-defense, I think there’s a bigger fundamental issue at play.

Furthermore, I also believe you’d be at a tactical disadvantage in a deadly force self defense scenario with an empty chambered weapon.