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Saving Someone Doesn't Unkill Someone Else


Obvious fact of the day. Statistical aggregation clouds facts like that in the title of this post. Doing an act cannot undo another act because all acts have consequences and those consequences include the options available to oneself and to others for further action.

Say you break your mother's iPod. You buy a new one that is the same model and install exactly the same song library on it and leave it where your mother last saw the original. She then continues to make use of this new iPod oblivious to the change.

But you are not, as your bank account balance and memories will attest. All actions matter, even if those actions are words spoken and written down in the form of agreements between people. Honesty is a form of social capital, after all, and keeping to one's agreements while also respecting others will enhance one's status far more than wandering onto some absentee's land and cultivating a strip farm or a donkey sanctuary or a paintball course there.

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