You might just love Blind Sight. Here, they're trying to decide if an alien life form is sentient or a Chinese Room:
"Tell me more about your cousins," Rorschach sent.
"Our cousins lie about the family tree," Sascha replied, "with nieces and nephews and Neandertals. We do not like annoying cousins."
"We'd like to know about this tree."
Sascha muted the channel and gave us a look that said Could it be any more obvious? "It couldn't have parsed that. There were three linguistic ambiguities in there. It just ignored them."
"Well, it asked for clarification," Bates pointed out.
"It asked a follow-up question. Different thing entirely."
Bates was still out of the loop. Szpindel was starting to get it, though.. .
You're right, there is no economic system for dealing with this.
We are royally screwed. Global warming will only exacerbate the population drop, both through weather related deaths and less willingness to produce children.
If you're young, I'd suggest you learn to grow food. Not even joking.
It's important to everyone, including you. As the population ages, and fewer young people move into the economy, the tax base shrinks. Who is going to pay for government?
Also, employers will have to compete for the remaining workers, raising wages. That's good to a point, and then everything becomes too expensive, now you're in a depression. It's an economic death spiral.
Taxing the rich only works to a point. Their wealth is mostly in the global stock markets, which will eventually crash. As well, the value of those publicly traded companies will nosedive as fewer and fewer workers are available to produce the goods and services.
We're facing the global equivalent of the fall of Rome. Nation states will splinter into smaller and smaller, self-dependent groups and the riches we enjoy today will be memories of a better time. If you want a contemporary version of that, look at China restricting rare earths. That's impacting about every other country on Earth. Now imagine international trade utterly collapsing.
Had two girlfriends (in a row!) that hated turn signals because they kicked off their "repetitive noise disorder" (misophonia). My wife hates the regular motion of her windshield wipers, fucks with her head, uses them manually.
We can't expect this many humans to play together nicely.
I have no question as to whether animals feel pain, but I do question whether fish experience pain on any level comparable to mammals. Fish lack the very nerves that carry pain in mammals and completely lack the part of the brain that registers mammalian pain. (Yes, they have nociceptors, I get that.)
Read a great article on the subject where scientists gathered from around the globe, like a Michael Crichton novel, to try and answer the question, as it was relevant to a new law in Germany.
They did not conclude, one way or the other, but one item caught my attention.
Ever kept fish? They will swim around, fight, fuck and eat, even with the most grievous of injuries. Mammals OTOH display every symptom of depression. They don't move around, eat, pursue sex, etc.
suffering of animals is measurable in a quantifiable way
Was hoping to see how they measured that. Amoeba react to negative stimuli, all life does so, or it won't be alive for long.
These estimates are based on a comprehensive review of existing research to assess the intensity and duration of pain and distress experienced by the fish.
It was much the opposite! Yeah, we only had 3 or 4 news sources on TV, but they mostly said the same things. Being caught bullshitting, or having even a little bias, was unthinkable as trust was the only selling point as to what station you watched.
As to criticizing the government, catching politicians bullshitting was the national sport for journalists.
Bloom County was a great comic that covered American culture and politics from 1980-1989. You won't get many of the references, but it's a perfect snapshot of the 80s.
You might just love Blind Sight. Here, they're trying to decide if an alien life form is sentient or a Chinese Room:
"Tell me more about your cousins," Rorschach sent.
"Our cousins lie about the family tree," Sascha replied, "with nieces and nephews and Neandertals. We do not like annoying cousins."
"We'd like to know about this tree."
Sascha muted the channel and gave us a look that said Could it be any more obvious? "It couldn't have parsed that. There were three linguistic ambiguities in there. It just ignored them."
"Well, it asked for clarification," Bates pointed out.
"It asked a follow-up question. Different thing entirely."
Bates was still out of the loop. Szpindel was starting to get it, though.. .