Not that you're asking for an argument, but I do want you to know why I, and many like me, find this whole life-from-conception argument totally ethically unpersuasive. And it's not the usual nonsense of "it's just cells" because, as you well know, that's an unimpressive and pointless debate. Whether a fetus is a human or not is fundamentally subjective. And so I'll grant that it is, because I have total confidence in my pro-choice position even then.
The issue with the pro-life position is not that it asserts that abortion is bad. Frankly, I don't give a crap if you or anyone else thinks it is bad. Again, that is subjective. A personal preference. The issue with the pro-life position is that it always seems to assert that abortion must be banned and even criminalized. That's what pro-life is. It doesn't mean "I think abortion is bad", it means "I think abortion should not be allowed."
My position isn't that abortion is good. Mine is that the pregnant person has a right to choose. I think the moral calculus on when and whether it is good or bad is FAR too complicated to form a rule, and so we must leave it up to the biggest stakeholders to figure that out privately.
I think a lot of things are bad, but having a preference against something is different than justifying use of the state's violence to prohibit it.
A Defense of Abortion by Judith Jarvis Thomson, PDF - 1971. Hardly new, and I doubt you've never seen it, but ultimately it is still the line of argument that I do not think has been convincingly rebutted. This essay is still probably the most sound and straightforward work of philosophy that shows that banning abortion is impermissible in an ethical society, and it presumes life from the moment of conception just as you do.
My extreme summary of the point it is making: at the end of the day, you have two competing human rights. You have the right to autonomy of your own body against another's right to life. Both are undeniably rights a person has -- and highly related ones, at that. When these rights are in tension, we need to make a choice as to which is supreme. And the consequences of giving life supremacy over autonomy are disastrous compared to the consequences of giving autonomy supremacy over life.
Rather than empower the state to take any and all actions necessary to protect life, we instead must impose a limit on the power of the state -- it may not violate someone's ability to make choices about their own body functions, even if to protect the life of another.
I'd prefer to be in a world that has no abortions at all. Just as I'd prefer to be in a world without contagious disease. One way to get rid of all contagious disease is to systematically euthanize every sick person at their first sniffle. Problem solved! Such is an abortion ban.
We get rid of disease by investing in research and healthcare and doing our best to use it maximize efficacy with fair triage, vaccination programs, etc.. We get rid of abortion by preventing unwanted pregnancies from the get and by creating a world so supportive and safe for pregnant people that they do not want to terminate it.
This argument presumes that the entire many-billion and maybe even multiple-trillion dollar global ad industry is ALL based on complete, ineffective nonsense. That everyone has just been bamboozled. That's a naive view, I think.
The best argument for why we must be vigilant against ads and data collection by advertisers is because the shit does work. It influences people to make purchases, sometimes against their better judgement or reason. Because subverting someone's agency over their own body and mind is heinous at a very high level.
I'm certain you are wrong. You've absolutely purchased products that were advertised to you. You just didn't make the connection between your decision and the advertisements. You THINK seeing an ad makes you unlikely to buy a product, but you likely only really notice and have an emotional response to the ads for products you weren't likely to buy in the first place.
There's also a totally plausible and far more insidious answer to what's going on with the experiences people have of the ads matching their conversations.
That explanation is advertising works. And worse, it works subconsciously. That you're seeing the ads and don't even notice you're seeing them and then they're worming their way into your conversations at which point you become more aware of them and then start noticing the ads.
Which does comport with the billions of dollars spent on advertising every year. It would be very weird if an entire ad industry that's at least a century old was all a complete nonsense waste of money this whole time.
To me, this whole narrative is just another parable about why we need to do everything possible to limit our own exposure to ads to avoid being manipulated.
Australia has a lot of distributed grid capacity. Some of the highest rooftop solar numbers (to the point where curtailment is an issue). And this stuff with vehicle-to-load/vehicle-to-grid capacity is a possible way to continue doubling down on that stuff.
It's a weird market. If they play their cards right, Australia -- particularly because of its mineral resources -- will become a huge part of a green energy transition. Though they'll have to commit quite seriously to make it happen.
Decentralizing the grid is a great way to build resilience. It saves lives. But it's tough when you have private capital natural monopolies, especially vertically-integrated ones (as is the norm in the US), in charge of operation. You have to align incentives towards lowering cost, improving resiliency, and meeting growth. Rather than incentivizing giant, absurd capital investment, discouraging maintenance and infrastructure, and pitting the utilities against consumers.
I can't help but smell an orphan crushing machine somewhere in this story. Or maybe just a regular old BEV ad. But this kind of stuff really does need to be the future if we want our species to survive.
All the industry analysis of the ROI on advertising would've had to come to the same spurious conclusions about that effectiveness, too. With the largest, richest, and most profitable firms being the ones MOST fooled.
No, I don't think anything that strange has ever happened. This is basically a conspiracy theory.
Cosmic Inflation is a good one to read up on if you never have. Because the slow acceleration we observe right now in the expansion is actually vastly inadequate to explain what we see now, so the big bang theory currently involves spacetime itself having to go through a few phase changes that are hard to wrap your head around.
Obsidian is not just an alternative, it is better.
Getting rid of all the formatting bullshit makes notetaking better. Honestly, I consider this to be the killer feature of Obsidian -- no styles. No fonts. No font sizes. No weird/unpredictable line breaks or fights with bullets. No jimmying about images trying to get them in the right places. OneNote needs a plaintext mode to even hope to compete.
The linking is nice. I am very skeptical that the knowledge graph is useful, but I won't be mad at people who like it.
Once you're used to the mathtex syntax, it's a fine way to do formula entry. And with the right extension, the way it handles tables is just fine.
The only thing OneNote does that Obsidian doesn't is nested notes. I really wish Obsidian let you define an "index" note for a folder that would let you mimic the nested note feature of OneNote. And that it would let you manually re-order notes to be in whatever order you want (maybe achieved by a TOC on the index note or some such). Maybe there's an extension that does that? OP seems to want the same functionality. I work around it by just making an "!TOC" file that sits in roots rather than relying on actual file hierarchy.
You've literally just described your own view as believing in a grand conspiracy where all players have sworn themselves to secrecy in a scheme any one of them could undermine in a moment, so I guess that's that.