People have this weird idea that the world is an organized system with clearly defined rules. That's really not the case. The concept that a person should have a single employer, and that employer is the sole determiner of their wages is an exceptionally weird one. Waiters and Waitresses don't serve their employer. They serve their customer. The restaurant owner and customer engage in a joint employment of the waiter or waitress, and it's incumbent on the customer to contribute their portion of the server's wage, which may indeed be a larger portion than the restaurant owner's. This system incentivizes the waiter or waitress to prefer their customer's favor over that of the restaurant owner, insuring a higher quality of service for the customer, while simultaneously not encouraging the server to screw over their employer for the customer's benefit. It also establishes a lowerbound on the server's pay, while entirely removing the upperbound. It's really not a bad system, but we have to remember two things: First, for most, this is going to be a part-time job, that they do while they should be pursuing knowledge and skills relevant to the career they're trying to do-- if you really want waiting to be your career, that's possible, but it's not going to be at Denny's. Second, people follow their incentives. They don't do a thing because its they're job, they do a thing because they think the outcome will be an improvement.

I'm inclined to deposit my money into a bank that prioritizes issuing loans to people they can expect to reliably pay them back with interest, rather than a bank which limits their lending based on arbitrary measurements. This is what happened to Silicon Valley Bank. Too many risky investments, not enough reliable investments. If you want to lose your money, deposit it in a bank that refuses to lend money to people who will pay it back.

I understand where you're coming from, and while you could frame it like that, the reality is that banks add to the M1 Money Supply by incurring debt to their depositors when issuing loans. It doesn't change the M0 supply, and some of the money supplied to the loan may even have been part of the M1 supply, already. It's a complicated knot, but it actually can be unraveled if you have access to enough information.

Make the Manufacturer pay for the removal and decommissioning of the train, but don't allow them to do it, themselves. Require them to supply a replacement. The customer had a functioning product which they paid for, which became non-functioning due to an action taken by the Manufacturer.

If they released a movie today, done the way they did Jurassic Park, people would be talking about how refreshingly good the effects were. CGI was a nascent technology in those days, they didn't know how far they could trust it, and they used it sparingly. That focus on Practical Effects, enhanced and smoothed over with CGI left us with a great looking movie, with effects that still hold up, ~30 years later.

You have managed to entirely misunderstand the single most obvious parody ever written. The Vogons are a jab at British government workers. The interstellar equivalent to Mr. L Prosser. The Vogons aren't wealthy, they just work for the government. The power they have comes from government authority, and they delight in using it to inconvenience others. Wealth has nothing to do with it.

In fact, the odds are 50/50. If you're somewhere in the middle of the chain, you have visibility down to the lower levels of it, but not to the upper levels, without the upper levels choosing to communicate with you. As we are not apparently running this kind of simulation, we can only be at the Top of the Chain, or the Bottom of the Chain.

The universe does seem to have some simulation-like properties, but my suspicion is that this is a product of whatever the medium is that allows the universe to exist, rather than a literal computer. Whatever the parent existence is, there is no guarantee that it has properties which we would find familiar.

Dammit, yesterday I had mod points, and today I find this.

Being a "Trump Supporter" doesn't have a lot of correlation with being Anti-EV, but being Conservative does have a lot of correlation with being Anti-EV. Internal Combustion Engines are a known variable; today's Conservatives grew up with them, and have spent their lives getting familiar with them. As Conservatives, they don't like to change what they believe works, and EVs are new and weird to them. So they'll keep making the exact same arguments against them, that were made about the "horseless carriage" ("It's more dangerous!", "There's nowhere to refuel it!"), and they'll be wrong in the long run.

Agreed. When making their do-or-die last stand, Volition misjudged what their audience would respond favorably to. I'm personally enjoying the game now that it's on Steam, but it really doesn't have the magic that won me over in Saints Row the Third.

Saints Row was in kind of a good position to be rebooted. Saints Row 4 saw the destruction of Earth, and the death of the last remaining villain. They could have continued their adventures into space, but at some point we're not really doing Saints Row, anymore.

I think the real problem is that they kind of created 2 kinds of Saints Row. Saints Row 1 and 2 were mostly serious with some mild comedic elements, while Saints Row the Third and Saints Row 4 were entirely comedy. The fans of 1 and 2 didn't like the comedy, but the fans of 3 and 4 were able to enjoy the whole series. Saints Row the Third attracted new audiences, while also picking up fans from Saints Row 1 and 2, before they realized how different it was. Now, Volition could have returned to the serious formula of the first two games when they rebooted, but they'd lose their new audience. The gamble they made was to stick with the comedy formula from 3 and 4, and try to hold onto the newer audience. Unfortunately, because they updated their subject matter for the early 2020s, instead of what was kitsch in the early 2010s when SRTT succeeded, that newer audience failed to turn out. The audience of Saints Row is jaded of "woke politics" and didn't want that in their game. A big problem is that people saw a young black woman in skinny jeans with the sides of her head shaved, and assumed that the game was going to be preachy on "woke" subjects, when the reality is that the game lightly parodies that topic.

They had a real shot at success. They took their time, they made a big game, but in the end they misjudged their audience, and now the price is paid.

Aspartame was shown to cause cancer in mice decades ago. It's a well known piece of information. What's less well known, however, is that you will die from water intoxication, before you can drink enough diet soda to consume the human-scale dose. They had to give those mice a hell of a lot of the stuff.

We are never going to obtain post-scarcity if we start taxing robots and automation. You want to obtain the goal that Socialism can't accomplish? Let the automation happen. The solution doesn't lie in paying the workers more, it lies in eliminating the need for the jobs they're doing.

What really gets me, is that an author choosing a number based on arbitrary qualities to make a funny joke, just happening to choose the answer that turns out to be correct and meaningful, is something that would absolutely fit snugly into the world that Douglas Adams was writing about.

I'm pretty sure that I know where my cameras are, and I'm definitely not committing crimes in front of them. It's not clear to me that Amazon or Google giving that data to the police for any reason that isn't helping me or my neighbors. Given the context, if it's helping my neighbors, it's a net benefit for me. If someone doing illegal stuff in view of my driveway gets caught because my camera recorded it, then my neighborhood is improved and it's a net win for me.

If you're not behind a closed door, your reasonable expectation of genuine privacy is dubious at best.