SIMCHA FISHER

Hunger and Help: Are Community Fridges the Answer?

The community fridge not only feeds the hungry, but helps cut down on waste. In the United States, recent data suggests that as much as “133 billion pounds of food … [or] 31 percent of the total food supply” is wasted in a typical year, rather than going to feed someone — a waste which Pope Francis said is “like stealing from the table of the poor and the hungry.”

But food safety laws prevent communities in the U.S. from setting up community refrigerators like the one in Spain.. A couple of UC Davis students ran afoul of these laws when their community refrigerator was shut down after a few months of food-sharing last year.

Read the rest at the Register.

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Why it’s important to beat up robots

Was it a senseless tragedy, or was it a slice of richly deserved jungle justice when the hitchBOT, a hitchhiking “robot” (actually just a vaguely humanoid prop with a computer chip in it) got curbstomped by some jackass in an Eagles jersey, ending a sojourn over two continents?

We can probably all agree that an adult who beats up someone else’s robot for no reason is a jerk. Fine. But what about when kids beat up robots? Are they just jerks in training? Or are they onto something?

Tech Insider reports that Japanese researchers are working on programming assistive robots to avoid large groups of young children, because they’ve noticed that little kids have a tendency to push, hit, kick and throw things at robots they find wandering around public spaces:

If there’s one other thing we learned from the study, it’s that young kids may possess frightening moral principles about robots.

… nearly three-quarters of the 28 kids interviewed “perceived the robot as human-like,” yet decided to abuse it anyway. That and 35% of the kids who beat up the robot actually did so “for enjoyment.”

The researchers go on to conclude:

From this finding, we speculate that, although one might consider that human-likeness might help moderating the abuse, humanlikeness is probably not that powerful way to moderate robot abuse. […] [W]e face a question: whether the increase of human-likeness in a robot simply leads to the increase of children’s empathy for it, or favors its abuse from children with a lack of empathy for it

“Frightening moral principles”? “Yet decided to abuse it anyway”? I’m not going to argue that it’s okay for kids to go whacking stuff (although the “abuse” caught on the videos in the Tech Insider post don’t strike me as horrific). I’m just curious about what would motivate kids to want to do it. Is it just because they’re bad kids, and do these findings point to some terrifying truth about man’s inhumanity to manlike robots?

The kids weren’t just indiscriminately violent toward robots; they were more violent toward robots who were designed to be more humanlike, and the story implies that this phenomenon demonstrates some moral failing in the kids. But I think it demonstrates that kids are smarter than adults.

Adults tend to speak as if machines may actually be able to achieve humanity once they’ve been programmed to imitate it well enough. We’ve been prodding this idea since Isaac Asimov was in short pants. When adults are confronted with something that looks and sounds as behaves like a human, but which may or may not be human, we may laugh, or shake our heads, or feel ashamed, or meekly submit, asking ourselves, “Well, what does it mean to be human, after all?”

But when it happens to kids, it makes them mad.

I remember being that kid. I didn’t just dislike ventriloquist’s dummies; I was angryat them. I felt that someone was trying to pull the wool over my eyes, and I resented it. The world was very confusing, and I was expected to swallow unreasonable and nonsensical ideas every single day (the world is round? The sun isn’t really moving? Baking chocolate doesn’t taste good, even though it’s chocolate? What the hell, adults?). The last thing I needed was more flim flammery.

The story continues:

[T]he more human a robot looks — and fails to pass out of the “uncanny valley” of robot creepiness — the more likely it may be to attract the tiny fisticuffs of toddlers. If true, the implications could be profound, both in practical terms (protecting robots) as well as ethical ones (human morality).

Practical implications, sure. If an old lady needs a robot to carry her groceries, they should protect the robot. But ethical implications? Also yes — but not the ones that the researchers seem to think.

For kids, “is this a real person or isn’t it?” isn’t just an unsettling intellectual exercise – it’s a matter of life and death. They don’t know what is real and what is not real, what is human and what is not human, and it’s very important that they figure it out. When they can’t, it makes them angry. A robot is not a person, and when adults expect them to behave as if it is one, they will put the impostor in its place with their small fists and feet. And, God help us, they’re onto something that so many of us are allowing ourselves to ignore.

We stroke our chins over how much autonomy human-shaped robots ought to have … and at the same time, we shrug and speak of “line item” costs when what we have in our hands — literally, in our hands, dripping with real human blood — is demonstrably a human being.

It is a good thing to rebel against bad things, and blurring the line between human and non-human is a very bad thing indeed. Is this human, or is this not? It matters. It matters. If we can decide, by fiat, that a manufactured thing should be treated with the respect that we owe to human beings, then we can decide, by fiat, that a human being can be treated like a sack of parts. This is happening now, today, constantly, horribly. It matters.

And the robot researchers talk about troubling ethical implications. Well, show a fifteen-week fetus to those Japanese children, and ask them if it’s okay to slice it up and sell the pieces. Then we can talk about “ethical implications.” Then we can talk about who has “frightening moral principles.”

Hold the line, kids. It really is a matter of life and death.

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image is a screenshot grabbed from the video found here.

Abortion Is a Men’s Issue

In great men, two traits go together: strength and control. Power, and the knowledge of how to use that power, and when, and why.

There’s no merit in producing testosterone; but there is great merit, for the whole world, when men learn how to use it, and when they learn how to be in control of it, rather than letting it control them. Great men know when to hold their strength in check, and how to use it for the right things. Great men use their strength to protect.

Read the rest at the Register.

Photo of boy holding salamander by Simcha Fisher:

10 rules while I’m in Wichita

Far from this opera for evermore. Actually just for the weekend, for the Midwest Catholic Family Conference!

My kids have been extra, extra squirrelly the last few days, and I’ve had to make a few new rules, which I can only hope they will abide by while I am gone:

No spreading peanut butter on balloons.
No snapping while saying the rosary.
No sucking on the dog’s tail.
No more calling Donald Trump.
No propping ladders against the house to spy on your brothers while they do . . . whatever it is they do in their room.
No more saying, “Or IS it?!?” every time I say something is something.
No putting the gerbil in the Cheerios box while you’re cleaning out his cage. At least not until everyone’s done with breakfast.
No taunting, harassing, or otherwise impeding the progress of people learning how to use nasal spray.
Seriously, no more calling Donald Trump, you guys.

And the greatest of these is:

No singing Mulan songs in the voice of William Shatner.

These are, of course, rules for my kids, but you might want to consider adopting them for yourself. Also, no opening an email to me with “Attached you will find a copy of Heaven and Hell by Swedenborg (original text in Latin, translated to English)” in lieu of the customary: “Howdy! Attached you will find a copy of Heaven and Hell by Swedenborg (original text in Latin, translated to English).”

Manners, manners!

Hope to see some of you in Wichita! And I would be so grateful for prayers for easy travel, and for an easy time for my husband back home, who will have all ten kids, and their snapping, and their peanut butter balloons.

Netflix, Microsoft, and the Working Mom

Certainly Netflix and Microsoft are thinking of their bottom line, but they also seem to realize that their employees are people, not just cogs. Women (and men, of course) are capable of giving real attention both to work and to their children — but work and children can both be done better if working moms feel less torn, less rushed, less guilty, and less like every aspect of her life is getting short shrift. These are not impossible goals.

Women can’t have it all, and neither can men. Working and raising a family means making sacrifices — but, if employers are willing to be more flexible and imaginative, those sacrifices don’t need to be intolerable. The goal of making life easier for working moms is a very pro-life goal.

Read the rest at the Register.

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NH Defunds Planned Parenthood!

Yes, the videos are working. And yes, it helps when you write to your rep! Or at least it seems to have worked in my state of NH, where the executive council just voted to snatch $639,000 in state funding away from Planned Parenthood. That accounts for about a third of their public funding. (Their federal funding is, of course, untouched.) The $639,000 will go to four other health clinics.

According to the local TV news site:

Republican councilor Chris Sununu was at the center of attention Wednesday. He has previously voted to support Planned Parenthood contracts. In 2011, when the council rejected a contract with Planned Parenthood, he was one of two Republicans to buck his party and vote in favor of the contract. Sununu is now widely known to be considering a run for governor in 2016. He said he received more than 1,000 messages from constituents and they overwhelmingly urged him to reject the contract.

Sununu comes from a family of socially useless conservatives, but he obviously believes that the politically expedient thing, at least right now, is to back away from the increasingly toxic Planned Parenthood.

Sununu said multiple times that he is pro-choice and thinks the state should look for other providers to contract with for family planning services.

“Things are different now,”he said. “We have to take a step back and just take a pause and say ‘Is this a company and a business that we should be actively engaging (with)?’”

No, friend, it is not.

It doesn’t look like council has the muscle to force an investigation of Planned Parenthood right now. Our governor, who is lackluster on a good day, thinks there’s nothing to see here. But there are eight more videos to come. They appear to be increasingly damning, and I have high hopes that at least some states will investigate the deeply corrupt monolith that is Planned Parenthood, and will find malfeasance and fraud as well as violations of federal law. We may really see the foundation beginning to crack at last.

And yes, I’m taking some pleasure in thinking about how badly Cecile Richards must be sleeping, wondering what else is out there. May she have a change of heart as she squirms.

The main takeaway? Take the time to write those letters, even if it’s just an auto-generated email from a pro-life site. Even if your reps only listen to you because they want to keep their jobs, they may actually be listening!

But what will poor people do if Planned Parenthood is defunded?

On Wednesday, NH voted to withdraw nearly $650,000 of state funding from Planned Parenthood. Even the pro-choice legislatures of our state have long chafed against funding the top-heavy, corrupt, inefficient monolith of Planned Parenthood — not because we love babies, but because we hate wasting money.

Naturally, people concerned about the poor are upset about the vote to defund, because Planned Parenthood is like the classic abusive boyfriend: They’ve got us convinced that we need them, we’re going to be lost without them, we’re no goodwithout them, we’ll never make it on our own.

Yes, well.

New Hampshire is actually a pretty good state to be a poor woman in (it’s rated 7th in the nation for the quality of its healthcare).

I should know, having been a poor woman in New Hampshire for the last forty years, give or take a few sojourns north and south. I have always gotten free, excellent prenatal care and postpartum care, free pap smears, free breast exams, free STD testing, and — well, I’ve been offered free birth control, if by “offered” you mean bombarded with non-stop, wall-to-wall, relentless harangues about how important it is for me to get my free birth control now now now. Even when I told them I didn’t want it, they put a bag of condoms in my suitcase at the hospital anyway.

I have gotten all of these things for free. And I have never set foot in a Planned Parenthood.