throwaway44773

Of course, monopolists force you to pay extortionist prices for their services in your local market, while they get to take advantage of the global market to keep down their expenses, and move their revenue around to avoid taxes. If corporations get to be global citizens, why can't humans be free to buy anywhere in the world, and move anywhere in the world however they please.

Animals who see infrared are cold blooded. My guess is that the hardware that evolution can easily produce to detect and process infrared gets flooded by the heat of warmblooded animal and is therefore not effective for them.

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.

I pictured eagles consulting google maps to find their way before I realized that some eagles have GPS tracking devices put on them.

The US has already strongly reduced the use of a very addictive substance in the past by making it culturally unacceptable in the case of cigarettes. Japan has the same culture already with food, where there is strong cultural pressure to not abuse food. Perhaps it is time to bring back shame towards overeating?

US corporations managed to make food addicting by using science to formulate food in such a way as to trigger a massive spike in dopamine followed by a massive drop a short time later. Combining that with an individualistic culture that leaves many lonely and anxious, it’s no surprise that people depend on substances to make themselves feel better. The average american puts themselves to sleep with a 2 litre of cola, a bag of chips and a pint of ice cream while playing games on their cellphones way late.

If you saw a population of people injecting heroin into their veins and getting frail, would you say you have a frail ness epidemic? No. What you have now is a food addiction epidemic. You should treat it as you treat any other addiction.

My main complaints with protests these days is that they seem to be astroturfed to keep the discontent people busy with protest that cannot bring about any meaningful local changes. Either they are about far away things happening in the world, or they are about vague ideas with no concrete steps to achieve any meaningful impact.

It's telling that dei in latin means gods and I always found it weird that people rarely point this out.

Regarding the Manhattan project: you can't compare the cost of research and developing a novel device vs the cost of developing the same device using stolen secrets.

Scarcity of skillset. If there are 10x as many people than now willing to do the job, companies would offer much lower salaries while making the same or worse work demands.

The solution to homelessness is not allowing people to sleep in the streets, but making sure they have a place to live.

The right equivalent would be a christian proselytizing to his colleagues. He’d end up with HR complaints quite quickly.

No one needs 32GB, the same way no one needs a MacBook Air: you could very well lug around an iMac or a tower PC if you don't actually need macOS. That doesn't stop me from being annoyed at the arbitrary market segmentation that Apple enforces to get me to buy one of their "Pro" machines just because I want more memory, thereby sacrificing the portability of the device for slightly better thermal management or a CPU with better performance.

Also, in the past, I could have bought the base device and bought a couple sticks of memory to upgrade the memory. Now, I cannot do this because of anti-consumer decisions that apple made to prevent user upgrade of memory. The least they could do is offer me the possibility to pay their inflated price for more ram.