~ crapsolutely ~

What we know is we have found a cache of complaint tablets about him selling low quality copper as high quality, in a site that was probably his own residence. We know multiple people complained he was a cheat. It's entirely possible they were right. It's also entirely possible that he kept these complaint letters as records of people he would no longer do business with, because they had made accusations and threats in order to bully him into giving them free copper. That is an equally valid interpretation of the evidence.

so many responses of “its nice that you’re privileged enough to be able to steal from Target willy nilly!” and that’s not at all what this is about. like, yeah, shoplifting and loitering and graffiti and breaking the rules is, obviously, part of “do crime”. but they’re not parts you have to do.

would you help someone get an abortion where it was illegal?

would you help a trans friend get healthcare that had been criminalized?

would you shelter someone fleeing persecution, even if the law said not to?

would you help a gay couple stay together when the state decided their relationship was unlawful?

instead, would you report someone else for breaking the law? will you snitch on your hungry neighbors for stealing food? on your homeless neighbors for sleeping where they’re able?

Alice has learned how to get to the high window in the feral room. She's very happy to surveil her kingdom and avoid getting flea meds.

* yes

* no

* no mom button

I have switched to using Startpage.com and vastly prefer it. for one thing, instead of displaying an "AI summary" at the top of the search results (unless you turn it off, yes I know), it displays the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article, with link, whenever it finds one that's relevant.

also a waaayyyyy better sense of design than duckduckgo

Search Engines

Infinity Search is an alternative search engine with a special focus on privacy

DuckDuckGo is a popular search engine for those who value their privacy and are put off by the thought of their every query being tracked and logged. Uses bangs, ![site] for in-page search (sells your data to microsoft and draws from fucking bing)

WolframAlpha is a privately owned search engine that allows you to “compute expert-level answers using Wolfram’s breakthrough algorithms, knowledgebase, and AI technology.” A data search engine.

Boardreader is a search engine for forums and message boards. It allows you to search forums and then filter down results by date and language.

Based in France, Qwant is a privacy-based search engine that won’t record your searches or use your personal details for advertising. Uses “&” as a bang search.

Another privacy-based search engine is Search Encrypt, which uses local encryption to ensure that users’ identifiable information cannot be tracked. Metasearch across multiple engines. 

Offering unbiased results from several sources, SearX is a metasearch engine that aims to present a free, decentralized view of the internet. Can be self-hosted. 

Gibiru’s tagline is “Unfiltered private search” and that’s exactly what it offers. Requires AnonymoX Firefox add-on for privacy. 

Disconnect allows you to conduct anonymous searches through a search engine of your choice.

Swisscows provides fully encrypted searches to protect your privacy and security. Built-in violence/porn filter cannot be overridden. 

MetaGer offers “Privacy Protected Search & Find” through its anonymised search. A plugin will allow it to be made a default.

Gigablast is a private search engine that indexes millions of websites and servers real-time information without tracking your data, keeping you hidden from marketers and spammers. Variety of filtration and refinement options for searching. 

Oscobo is a search engine that protects your privacy while you search the web. By not using any third-party tools or scripts, your data is protected from hacking and misuse. Has a Chrome extension to allow use in toolbar. 

https://search.marginalia.nu/ an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed. Use old-school searching rather than query-based for the best results. 

https://www.mojeek.com/ 

https://wiby.me/ - It’s goal is to index as many personalized websites as possible, and NOT commercial sites. 

https://4get.ca/ it works a lot like SearX, but honestly better. It doesn’t have its own index, but pulls from many others. I think it’s the best for research, since it allows you to search for answers from different indexes, is easy to configure, add free, and avoids censorship as much as it can.

https://www.searchenginemap.com/ for more on how search engines relate to each other.

https://yep.com/ is a crawler

https://www.etools.ch/ retrieves from Google, Mojeek, Bing, and Yandex, like Searx

https://www.dogpile.com/ 

https://searxng.org/ (next gen Searx)

https://luxxle.com/ - possibly conservative?

https://presearch.com/ - good for academic?

https://kagi.com/smallweb - free/randomised Kagi.

Other Searchers

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

Background: someone asked how to humanely euthanize their betta who has tumors.

but that IS what it comes down to: Do you support forcing - or even allowing - animals to suffer without end? If no, then you must support preventing and/or ending animal suffering. And sometimes that does mean treatment, but sometimes the only way the suffering ends is when the life ends. There are cases where nothing can be done, and the only future an animal has is one where they suffer. In this case, the absolute kindest thing anyone can do is prevent the animal from having to go through that, by ending the life swiftly and painlessly.

The antelope did not lie down and die because it has no concept of life or death, and it was not making a sapient choice for life but rather following instincts which dictate all of their behaviors. This is not the same thing as choice.

Most animals have no concept of their own death ahead of the time it occurs, at the very least not the human concept of death. Instead, they are alive, until they are not. They are aware of the former as an experience (they are experiencing life via seeing things, they are hearing things, they are feeling things, etc), and most of them cannot anticipate the latter before it happens. They are not aware of "life and non-life." They are not aware they are alive, and they are not aware that they will die someday. Most of them aren't even aware of The Self (some are, but most are not). These are human concepts you've assigned to an animal.

They cannot avoid something they have little to no concept of. Instead, they avoid pain. We have documented, scientific proof that animals avoid pain if they can anticipate it, and predators are something which brings pain. Showing pain is likely to bring more pain. Showing weakness brings pain. Animals limp to avoid experiencing more pain. They graze with their intestines hanging out because they are hungry (or because signals from the GI tract are messed up from this injury), and being hungry can cause pain or at least discomfort (hunger pangs), not because they are thinking "I have to eat to stay alive." (and just for the record, "not eating" is like the single most common thing sick or dying animals do. it's like a top tier "this animal does not feel well/is dying" symptom. some random video of an antelope that at this point could have been AI does not change thousands of years of this being a most common and prevalent symptom of animals being unwell/dying. this is how we KNOW that it's not connected to any thought about staying alive, or every sick/dying animal would be horking down food to live longer). Animals give up and lie down to die all the time, but they will attempt to avoid pain in practically every situation.

So we must assume that, if given a choice, animals would choose to avoid pain. Because we see that happening, over and over and over, across all animals we've studied that can feel pain. It's universal. They avoid it, if they can. This is hard wired into every animal with the nerves and functionality to experience pain. The whole reason pain exists is to learn to avoid it, because the things which cause it are usually bad and can cause injury or death. Avoiding pain leads to avoiding death, which can be mistaken as avoiding death, but it's not the same thing.