nitrogen cycle

I had a guy call me and want to buy $300 worth of African cichlid fish. I asked him if he understood the nitrogen cycle. The what? The process by which organics de-nitrify in an aquatic system?

I have no idea what you're talking about.

And you want to buy $300 worth of African cichlids? Yes i do. Do you realize what will happen when you put them in the tank and the bacteria that serves as the backbone of the denitrification is not present? Do you know what that does to the fish?

Hey, I'm not a scientist!

I know. So I can't sell you fish.

Another guy called me and said that what is wrong with the world is selfishness. People just think about themselves and not others. Is that a moral claim, I asked? No. Well you're claiming something moral.

Ok, it's a moral claim, he said.

So then I said, Do you understand meta-ethics? Meta what? The process by which one builds a system of ethics by understanding fundamentals and then training themselves to make surface moral judgements on the surface and based on those fundamentals.

Wow, that's a lot of big words. I'm not an ethics professor.

And yet, I said, you want to make moral judgments?

Does everyone have to be an ethics professor? he asked.

Well …. Do you realize what will happen if you put humans in the position of making moral claims when meta-ethics is not present?

I don't even know what metabolistic ethics even is …

I see that. So maybe you should shut the fuck up before you kill all the fish and all the people.