I recall recently seeing an article posted that was related to euthanasia, and I started thinking about the subject. I see both potential pros and potential cons associated with it. For example, there's the concern about family members or authority pressuring an ill person to opt for doctor-assisted suicide to ease financial burdens, for instance. There's also the benefit, on the other hand, of allowing someone who is terminally ill or guaranteed to live the rest of their life in excruciating pain the option to go out on their own terms. With proper oversight and ethical considerations, it generally seems to be an all-around ideal to provide an "opt-out" for those who would only continue to suffer and would rather not prolong it, as a merciful alternative to forcing them to live it out.

But then there are some trickier questions.

As a disclaimer, I spent nearly a couple of decades struggling through depression and have been surrounded (and still am surrounded) by people who struggle with their own mental illnesses. Because of this, I'm perfectly aware of the stigma and subpar treatment of mental illness in general. With that in mind, I completely recognize that there are certain conditions which are, at this time, completely untreatable and result in peoples' quality of life deteriorating to the point that they become perpetually miserable, particularly with certain neurodegenerative diseases.

Thus, the question occurred to me: wouldn't such a condition be the mental health equivalent of a terminal illness? Would it not be unethical to force someone to continue living under conditions in which their quality of life will only diminish? Shouldn't someone who has such a condition, and is either of sound enough mind or with a written statement of their wishes from a time when they were of sound enough mind, be able to make the same decision about whether or not to opt to go out on their own terms?

And yet, as reasonable as it sounds, for some reason the thought of it feels wrong.

Is there something fundamentally more wrong about euthanasia for mental health vs. euthanasia for physical health? Is it just a culturally-learned ideal?

More importantly, what makes euthanasia acceptable in some cases and not others? Which cases do you think exemplify the divide? Is there something more fundamental that we can latch onto? Is there a clear line we can draw? Is psychology itself just too young a field for us to be drawing that ethical line?

I'm genuinely not sure how to feel about this subject. I would be interested in hearing some other thoughts on the subject. The questions above don't necessarily have to be answered, but I thought they could be good priming points.

I had a discussion today about the ethics of cloning your pets. It's a thing you can currently pay (a lot) of money for, but I don't really see much discussion about it, even though it's absurdly sci-fi and a little crazy to me that it's a real business.

So what are your thoughts? Is it ethical? Is it a bit weird? Is it perfectly healthy?

For example, 500 people working long hours in dangerous conditions for terrible pay, but they make it possible for 5000 others to live in a utopian society. What about 50 workers and 50,000 benefactors? I think everyone can agree that it's wrong for there to be less benefactors than workers, but what about 50/50? What if it's 500 blue skinned people and a million red skinned?

I usually find myself internally preferring the species level ethical decisions, but I've never been brave enough to admit to it out loud because I know it makes me sound like a socio/psychopath.

I've been consuming the darkness that is wartime histories from the past three or four centuries and I feel like I've encountered a lot of people who had what they believed to be justifiable reasons to launch wars against other powers. There are people who thought they had divine right to a particular position of power and so would launch a war to assert that god-given right. There are people who believed in a citizen's right to have some (any) say in how their tax money gets used in government and so would fight wars over that. People would fight wars to, as John Cleese once said, "Keep China British." Many wars are started to save the honor of a country/nation. Some are started in what is claimed to be self-defense and later turns out to have been a political play instigated to end what has been a political thorn in their sides.

In all this time, I've struggled to really justify many of these wars, but some of that comes with the knowledge of what other wars have cost in terms of human carnage and suffering. For some societies in some periods, the military is one of the few vehicles to social mobility (and I think tend to think social mobility is grease that keeps a society functioning). Often these conflicts come down to one man's penis and the inability to swallow their pride to find a workable solution unless at the end of a bayonet. These conflicts also come with the winning powers taking the opportunity to rid themselves of political threats and exacting new harms on the defeated powers (which comes back around again the next time people see each other in a conflict).

So help keep me from embracing a totally pacifistic approach to war. When is a war justifiable? When it is not only morally acceptable but a moral imperative to go to war? Please point to examples throughout history where these situations have happened, if you can (though if you're prepared to admit that there has been no justifiable war that you're aware of, I suppose that's fine if bitter).

I have been reading a lot of the articles on uncivility. A big complaint is politicians don't like the power it gives people. Which I understand can be bad, but it also seems like for the first time in a long time, the average person has a way to impact these high powered politicians. Ordinarily there is nothing we can do, we can't touch them when they continually do things not in the best interest of the people they represent. They do shady things, and we have to go with it.

They are arguing uncivility is dangerous because it creates the problem of officials being scared to make decisions based on how they will be impacted. If a judge rules one way, and the masses start making his life hard, they say it isn't really fair to the judge. Which makes sense.

This is the information age. We have access to so much more going on than adults did before us. We actually have platforms to be heard on a large scale. Which means pressuring these people to do right through "uncivility" could be harnessed and used positively to enforce change. If the people making these decisions that are not in our best interest have something to lose, maybe they will finally start doing right by us.

What are your thoughts on this aspect of the uncivility debate going on right now?

Companies can technically and legally track just about everything you do at work digitally, from your entire browser history to even particular usage patterns on company web apps. Should there be an expectation that companies disclose what they do/do not track to employees? Or should employees have to just live with the fact that companies can and will spy on them as a cost of doing business?

The book Code Complete changed me as a programmer and as a person. It is the best book I have ever read and if you're a programmer I highly recommend you read it.

The book was so good that after having read the pirated version of it I just had to give the author its money's worth. The problem was that almost nobody sells a PDF version of the book - Amazon sells it as a Kindle book, but I prefer PDFs (can use my chioce of software to read it). After searching for a short week I finally found a seller that sells a PDF version. I have never been so happy to find a legal PDF version of a book. Having been a pirate in my teens I'm proud of having gone to such lengths to the right thing. That's all. Just wanted to share this with you.

TL;DR: Instead of pirating a book because I didn't find a legal PDF version spent time searching for a seller and bought it legally.