• KnightontheSun@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      A friend and I talked about this years ago. We thought large predators should be released throughout cities and suburbs to provide real threats to people’s lives. This would weed out the weak and infirm and keep people fit and on their toes.

      Not really being serious, but an interesting and dark idea.

        • KnightontheSun@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          I was pondering this since you posted and I thought that (short of crafting some other sort of rules) maybe we could shower those rich compounds with smaller deadly creatures. Smaller deadly snakes, venomous spiders, and other deadly insects (Tsetse flies, malaria mosquitoes, etc). Unless they opened their walls.

          IDK, but it is interesting to think about.

        • CheeseNoodle@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          More realisitcally the large predators would all be hunted down pretty fast, given thats what happened every other time in history.

      • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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        9 months ago

        As our power to make the world safe gets more and more complete, it becomes more and more necessary that we understand the role of danger in human health.

        We’ve started to learn this lesson in terms of environmental pathogens, but it’s still only in science. Science shows us that a sterile environment for kids leads to adulthood allergies and autoimmune diseases. But that knowledge hasn’t spread into our culture. Foolish people who think respecting what’s natural is woo (ie who preposterously think anything without an articulated reason is woo) are still falling over themselves to provide their kids with the most sterile environment they can find.

        We need danger. We’ve never had to deal with the possibility of eliminating danger before; it was always something to minimize.

        Used to be, we are leafy greens because it was all we could find. Now we have to force our kids to eat their vegetables because we know it’s best for them to do so despite their instincts all pointing to sugar and fats. Same thing with danger: we’ve got no instinct to seek danger because we grew up in an environment abundant with it. Naturally, our instincts crave safety because there was so little of it before that we had to take it wherever we could get it.

        It’s a hard problem, but not one we get to ignore.

    • [email protected]
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      9 months ago

      The wolves managed to talk the Wainwrights into a poorly structured loan that they inevitably defaulted on. This was a frequent problem in the 90s and 2000s thanks to the bull market massively contributing the proliferation of wolves. If you’d like to know more, the 2013 documentary “The Wolf of Wall Street” covers the topic.

      • Everythingispenguins@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Luckily the wolves love of Quaaludes ended up being their downfall. Saving middle America from predatory lending and variable rate mortgages for all time…

      • clearleaf@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Wow I didn’t know The Far Side was providing such deep insight into the contemporary struggles of the working class. I guess it just takes an extremely high level of literacy to understand it.