Lie with dogs, you get fleas. I have zero sympathy for those who fall prey to closed ecosystem BS like this, including my own wife. People just don't listen.
I expressly disavowed family support for all Apple devices about 4 years ago. If my spouse has a problem with the iPhone, it goes straight to the Apple store without landing in my lap first. I'd rather be in the doghouse than use iTunes.
My mother had a DNR. She contracted meningitis, and died. She was resuscitated, suffered severe brain damage, and lived another 2 years as a semi-vegetable before dying in her sleep after choking on her own vomit.
If I believed in such things, I would hope my stepfather is in Hell.
Your stepfather apparently violated your mother's directive based on the desperate belief that his spouse could recover, and she did not. This is absolutely tragic.
Then your stepfather presumably refused kill his spouse (due to hope, moral beliefs, cowardice, etc.) by unplugging her from standard, non-extraordinary life-support. She eventually died a painless death.
For which of these does he deserve to suffer for, more than he has already?
A DNR is not an order to cease basic life-support post-resuscitation. For example, I don't want extraordinary measures, but I also absolutely do not want anyone to euthanize me if I somehow end up semi-vegetative.
Because I would be participating in killing a living human. It's our duty to avoid intentionally doing that, even if it really hurts.
Technically it's the same reason that I don't want someone to euthanize me right now. The value of my life does not derive from feeling happy or otherwise using my senses. Nothing important changes when I have brain damage (or cancer, or depression). All I have to do is be human, and my life has a certain type of value that makes it wrong for anyone to intentionally end it.
If I try to build in loopholes, or start messing with semantics, or if I compromise because something is going to hurt, I end up being unable to act from reasoned moral principles, which is something else I value.
(I have a similar curiosity, if you'd oblige, about what makes euthanasia any different from simple suicide - I actually asked that earlier, but all I got was downvotes.)
Thanks for that explanation. I can't speak for the OP (or anyone else), but my take on the difference between them is that euthanasia is suicide, but only once all other options have been exhausted.
I don't see "simple suicide" (i.e. not in the face of terminal disease) as immoral or wrong. The tragedy though, is how often it happens because of poor social support systems, such as lack of access to mental health support systems or, in some parts of the world, bad debts to loan sharks.
These are often relatively spur of the moment, avoidable situations and, IMO, more of an indictment of society than a moral failing of the person. Euthanasia is different in that it is usually a well-considered decision, once there is little hope of any change for the better. I don't see any value in forcing people to live through misery without anyone having a clue on how to improve their life.
(I don't expect you to necessarily agree with this point of view, but I hope it helps understand another perspective.)
Thanks - yeah, I agree, we need better palliative care, better social support in general. I understand your perspective, but I do have trouble following it through - I need to be able to say "at this point, a life loses that value, and it becomes permissible to kill". I don't see that happening with consent, because dueling to the death is rightly illegal. I also don't see how we can get somewhere by counting up something (like suffering, failure to contribute back to society, whatever) that then makes it permissible to kill a person. And if I try to combine both, I end up with rules that are still problematic, but make it easier to kill the elderly, the dying, and other vulnerable people, which is a bad sign.
For what its worth, I think we're approaching this question from opposite ends of the spectrum. Rather than asking when it is permissible to kill, I look at it as "when is overriding free will (on victimless actions) for societal good permissible"? Forcing terminally ill patients to live through the misery doesn't meet my bar on that front.
I realise that you're drawing a distinction between taking your life and having someone else take it for you, but to me, in this case the difference is largely academic since the agency remains with the patient at all times.
The objections to dueling were, as I understand, more around the social pressures which required one to participate making the idea of consent much more fuzzy.
Interestingly, family pressure to euthanize is a major practical concern for countries with euthanasia.
The point is actually that there is no distinction between taking your life own or someone else's. If consent is our metric, dueling is permissible (with societal pressure safeguards, if you'd like). Consent is irrelevant, the issue is that intentional killing should be a relic of a more barbaric past. The cure (resolving psychological distress over having a painful death by being willingly poisoned, often in front of your family) is worse than the disease.
Ultimately, you're saying that it's permissible to kill when a terminally ill patient would "live through misery", where someone who is not the patient defines what constitutes "misery". Am I understanding that correctly? On what grounds would that not apply to, for example, a severely depressed homeless person suffering from substance abuse, who a doctor might judge has much more suffering in store for them than a cancer patient with access to painkillers?
> "... family pressure to euthanize is a major practical concern..."
Agreed, and this is one of my major reservations about euthanasia. I still think it is overall for the best, but this aspect absolutely needs monitoring. I can only hope that better social services and support help reduce the financial burden on families (which is often one of the biggest reasons for pressure). The emotional aspect, of course, is another story.
> "The point is actually that there is no distinction between taking your life own or someone else's."
Here I have to disagree. Only one of these is an action on one's own body (which one should have relative autonomy). I think consent is absolutely key -- personally, I'm not opposed to the idea of legalizing dueling, as long as we have adequate societal safeguards against it. We don't outright ban other dangerous things that could end up killing people (tobacco, alcohol, free climbing...)
> "The cure ... is worse than the disease."
This is not a determination I am comfortable making for anyone else. Unless there is significant societal/family pressure which means that people are not making this choice themselves, I think they should have that right. If there is extensive pressure, there should be safeguards against that, as opposed to banning the practice?
I see a similar kind of argument in the anti-abortion debate -- there are folks who wouldn't opt for it themselves, but want others to have that right, while others feel that it should be banned for everyone because it is overall a societal ill.
I realise that this is a different question, but is this the kind of angle you are coming from?
> ... not the patient defines what constitutes "misery".
In the long run, it should absolutely be the patient who determines what constitutes misery and makes the choice. Unfortunately, there is entirely too much risk of it being used as a way for society to ignore people we should be helping ("if we wait long enough, maybe they'll just go away") for it to be practical to use it that way yet.
Terminally ill patients are a relatively well-defined set where there is less risk of society starting to ignore the problem (I don't see interest in cancer research drying up just because of this option), so it seems like a reasonable place to start?
My answer actually didn't mention anything about watching over you to ensure that you don't inject lethal poison. I was talking about why I personally would not kill myself or ask anyone else to.
But yes, if I think it's wrong to intentionally kill a human, it follows that I neither want my government supporting it, nor for others to mistakenly think it's fine. Morality isn't something to "keep to yourself".
Presumably you think it's fine to intentionally kill, in certain special cases? Could you do the opposite of keeping your morality to yourself, and tell me what your exceptions are? (I'm wondering, for example, if it is just consent? If so, can someone buy that consent?)
Suffocating while "semi-vegetative" is assumed to be painless, much like we assume euthanasia to be painless.
In any case, I'm sorry about your mother. There's not much I can say about your stepfather, except that you probably shouldn't hate him for trying to hold on to someone he loved.
>You don't want to be working with someone who can't work with other people.
That describes me pretty well, and those with whom I work love me. They just keep me in my little box, leave me alone and let me do my work. But they are also a grown-up company that doesn't make people wear 27 hats. PMs do their job, Infrastructure does theirs, Client Support does theirs, etc. Not every job has the same requirements as every other job.
> As someone else pointed out in this thread, a great advantage of established frameworks is that they provide a coding standard for a team.
So it's useful for young, inexperienced developers. Do you kids really not have in-house coding standards anymore, or do you rely on your toolsets to provide that for you?
A counter-point to your argument: In-house coding standards smells a little bit of NIH syndrome.
Odds are good that even if you are not a "young, inexperienced" developer, widely-adopted coding standards (that most frameworks probably use) have had more thought and reasoning put into them than you would ever be able to do on your own.
So I agree with your overall point of "don't just blindly adopt something", but the case can be also made for not naively doing everything your own personal way (including at the team/company level).
Odds are good that even if you are not a "young, inexperienced" developer, widely-adopted coding standards (that most frameworks probably use) have had more thought and reasoning put into them than you would ever be able to do on your own.
If your own in-house developers, with full knowledge of the nature of their project and the kinds of requirements they're trying to meet, and with full control over their choice of tools and standards, really can't ever do better than some external organisation that is building a generic tool to cater to generic requirements and writing to general coding standards, then you should probably question the competence of your in-house developers.
This is not to say you shouldn't use existing material from outside your organisation if it's a good enough fit for what you're doing and saves time or otherwise has some tangible benefits, of course. However, your in-house team will normally have a huge advantage in terms of knowing specifics compared to almost any external equivalent. This is true whether we're talking about frameworks, coding standards, tools, or almost anything else used in programming.
The meme that anything written by a larger group of people outside your organisation is somehow inherently superior for your purposes to anything you could write in-house, and that any reluctance to use those external resources is inherently a case of NIH syndrome, just doesn't make any sense to me. There is no logical reason to believe it should be true since you're almost never comparing like with like, and I see very little empirical evidence that it is true in practice either, assuming reasonably competent and experienced in-house developers.
> naively doing everything your own personal way (including at the team/company level).
You, and my downvoters, all assume (naively) that any in-house standard must somehow be different than "widely-adopted coding standards (that most frameworks probably use)". Obviously, that need not be true, and in my limited 40 years of experience, it rarely is. Not sure how you even got there.
I actually upvoted you, for the record. But you drew a distinction between "in-house standards" and "the framework's standards" (which are by definition probably taken from widely adopted standards).
If you were implying that those two things might be identical then you did a bad job of conveying that (and then why even comment?)
It's always possible to craft an anecdotal argument to disprove a generalized statement. We were obviously dealing in apples and oranges here..
I was making a generalized statement that likely applies to a large number of places (but indeed not all places), and you were providing a specific but not really comparable counter-point in return.
So yes, we were both right, but then again I ask "why reply?" if you're not replying in a similar context.
That's like me saying "the oceans are vast and dangerous" and you saying "but a pond is relatively safe"... You're technically correct, but what does it have to do with my initial statement?
Except for that in the post the author acknowledges its basically a parody. It seems like a bit of salt from DB naming their new product in the same sort of space a very similar name, which is kind of a dickish move.
