It was winter solstice here in the southern hemisphere today, which means the hours of sunshine start getting longer again and we can start looking forward to spring. But today was cold and intermittently rainy.
I had my Monday morning online ethics class, repeating the topic about natural resources that I did last Friday. This time there were three kids in the class, and we had some interesting disagreements! One of the kids definitely shows a bit of a New Agey/environmentalist bent, while another one today declared that he likes to think about things from an “economics point of view”. So when I asked questions like whether a country should let its farmers take all the water from a river, or if they should leave some to flow across the border into the next country, their answers were almost polar opposites. The first said they should share it, while the second said that because the river started in the first country, it’s their water and they can use it all, unless the other country offers them something for it.
And when I gave an example of an apple tree that nobody owns – it’s just growing on public land – one said that you can’t take the apples because it’s stealing, you should negotiate to share with other people; while the other said it’s fine to just take all the apples, first in first served. So it was definitely an interesting class, with lots of back and forth. But they were respectful and disagreed politely, and I got them to explain their thinking with reasons, so it was actually really good.
I worked a bit today on Darths & Droids, and did some housecleaning – vacuuming and cleaning the shower. Oh, and baked some sourdough bread.
This afternoon the rain eased off and I took Scully to the dog park. Today one of the regular women there brought a folding table, and a selection of cheese and crackers, and a big pot of mulled wine, which she reheated over a portable gas burner. This was a special celebration to mark the winter solstice – she does it every year. I recall being there one previous year when it was on – can’t remember if it was last year or the year before.
So anyway, the group of dog owners, about a dozen of us, stood around munching on cheese and crackers and drinking hot mulled wine! Very civilised!
New content today:
Now I’m wondering about the third student, how he/she reacted to the two extremists.