I mean, if we had actual competition they’d be forced to pull their prices right back down again competing with each other.

Yeah. Patchwork benefits are ass to navigate. Like, almost dehumanising.

Okay. In detail, how do you manage complex, shifting supply chains without some kind of market?

Like, I’m also team eat the rich, but nobody can ever answer this.

The exact wording used is a bit rich, but the situation isn’t great. We need some kind of provincial refugee sharing agreement.

Prepare, sure. There’s a lot of alternate ways things could resolve, though, and MAD is about as sturdy as it’s ever been.

No, this giant corporation was never “for the little guy”, and bad pizza is not some elitist thing.

They do burgers in 'Murica? Yikes…

Conservatism varies tremendously by time and location, but I don’t know if changing or improving is ever the point. Some combination of doing it the way it used to be done, hurting the right people, and supporting the existing social hierarchy go into the mix. There’s also movements like libertarianism that tend to glom on to Conservatism, but done straight are a very different animal.

To be fair, progressive ideas can be bad sometimes too. Eugenics is a great example that all the cool forward-thinkers were into for a while. At least we try though…

Pretty much, right?

Yeah, it seems fine honestly when I’m in places where they’re common. I appreciate how we have less substance use than they do on other continents, though, and making it inconvenient might have something to do with it.

So at what point does a VR headset end up actually being cheaper than your specialty odd-size curved monitor?

No, don’t you get it? The genocide is proportional. /s

He only blocked 500 and 2000 pound bombs specifically, too. They can buy all the planes, guns or smaller bombs they want for now.

Well, no. Burning fossil fuels was indeed cheaper than any other energy source, until recently, and for some things still is by far the cheapest. So yeah, we have to sacrifice something today to not cook the Earth. Apparently that’s too abstract for us, though, and we will knowingly steer towards a cliff a few decades away.

As an example, in Canada we have a modest carbon tax, and one that comes right back to people as refunds. It’s still become a political lightning rod and the entire campaign target of the opposition, who is decisively leading in the polls right now. Another one, gen Z says they care, but it’s not grandma buying Shein.

Can’t tell if serious.

I’m not sure how you could possibly build an implant that can just redeposit itself like that.

No, really??? /s

Edit: Honestly it’s not as bad as I expected.

I don’t think that’s quite true. Where I live it has expanded from nothing to a major power source in just a few years. We’ll need grid storage of some kind to kick fossil fuels completely, but that seems surmountable. Worst case scenario we build pumped air and just eat some round trip losses.

Nuclear plants take many years to get off the ground, so I’m not sure that’s actually an easier solution. Once they’re up and running at scale they’re actually really cheap per unit production, so I would have agreed with you a decade ago, but as it is solar and wind have just pulled ahead.

Probably. They’ve mastered the art of corporate-speak; another natural language task which doesn’t require precise abstract reasoning.

I’m kind of convinced that the set of possible moral philosophies most people would agree with in practice is the empty set, at this point, so I’m not surprised those kinds of answers do better.

AIs controlling money is the application that scares me the most, honestly, not weapons. It’s flexible and attached to every section of life by design; there is no such thing as sandboxing.