I'd be fine as long as a company is willing to pay someone not to work elsewhere. If it's that valuable, they can keep paying me while I take a little vacation. The only thing I'd ban is having any kind of clause included as part of an employment contract. Non-compete can be agreed upon mutually by both parties at the time of an employee's departure.

Employees having a greater set of potential employers is more beneficial to them than any kind of laws or regulations that a government could hope to enact. While they're at it they should eliminate professional licensing requirements in any but the most safety critical jobs. California might have great options for employee mobility, but they've found plenty of other bullshit ways of keeping people from even getting their first job.

If adults want to use something addictive and terrible for them, that's their own choice. We let them smoke cigarettes, drink alcohol, and in more and more countries consume recreational drugs. Yet I can't think of any country where it's okay to market or sell those same substances to children and doing so would see you fined or arrested.

Social media is not good for children. They shouldn't be using it. More time playing with children, preferably outside, but definitely away from technology.

People like to think that's less expensive, but it isn't. Have you looked at the price of soda and potato chips recently? I think the junk food companies have realized that they have addicts for customers and can price accordingly. Over half of the problem is foodstuffs (and I use the term lightly) that are scarcely more than processed sugars attached to some refined carbohydrates. No one needs any of that, but it's a multi-billion dollar industry.

Meanwhile you can buy some real beef, potatoes, onions, carrots, and fresh beans. You don't need to be an expert cook to put all of that in a crock pot. It does take more effort than using the microwave, but it will produce something delicious and nutritious that doesn't cost much money.

Grocery stores always have some cut of meat on sale and the same goes for vegetables or other produce. Even if you're on a budget it's possible to make good home cooked meals that aren't packed with sugar or otherwise heavily processed to not taste like crap.

Corporations can't sell people a product they don't want. If they're making crappy pulped meat nuggets sprinkled with sugar it's because that's what people are buying. That absolute garbage isn't even cheaper than real food unless you're making money while sitting on the couch waiting for the microwave to beep instead of cooking for yourself.

Your own anecdote shows why we need a free market in healthcare. Hospitals bill that much because they only deal with insurance companies or government insurance. Let patients see the upfront costs for procedures or other care and very quickly hospitals would find themselves unable to sell something to consumers that they don't want. The government tried to intervene in a market and low and behold corporate capture has occurred.

Full grain leather will last a long time. I still regularly wear a leather belt I've had since high school and will likely have until I die. It was more expensive than some shiny looking "genuine" leather products at the time, but any of those things that I've ever owned have been complete shit that's been lucky to last a year.

I can see Apple not wanting to use actual quality leather because then they know they can't sell you a new band in a few years when you buy a new watch. People who think leather is bad for the environment fail to consider that it can last multiple lifetimes meanwhile failing to consider the multiple replacements that will be needed for crap imitation products or the low-grade pressed scraps that only qualifies as leather in a legal sense.

Please explain how it raises money with a tax rate that's below the existing corporate tax rate and based on behavior specific behavior that corporations aren't necessarily going to engage in? I think you've been hoodwinked.

Meanwhile we're spending money now that will only be hypothetically raised in the future? I don't believe that will help to reduce inflation in the slightest.

We can all rest comfortably in the knowledge that in five years generative AI will replace all of them. Frankly I consider this to be beneficial as it means that anyone with a quality idea will be able to produce an animated show. The endless cycle of Family Guy knockoffs that networks keep crapping out grew stale five years ago.

Most of our poor health is entirely our own fault. Too many people have terrible diets, lead sedentary life styles, and consume one or more substances that are actively bad for our physical or mental well being. No healthcare system in the world would work for us because we're the problem and unless we can get a solution in pill form, we aren't interested. Look at the immense popularity of a drug like Ozempic.

There's also the other side of the coin in that it's unsurprising that the US spends more money than anyone else. We have more money to spend than anyone else. What we don't spend on excess hoagies, big gulps, booze, and party drugs we spend on trying to fix the problems created by the excess hoagies, etc.

But if you do have need of medical care that doesn't come down to self-inflicted problem due to horrible lifestyle choices, the US medical system is one of the best on the planet. Better yet, it has the capability to get your problem sorted out in a few weeks or months as opposed to two years from now when there's a doctor available. Meanwhile the pharmaceutical industry will try to find some new pills people can swallow because we have the money to pay for them and a lack of desire to make lifestyle changes so that we wouldn't need them.

I'm not sure what value the company can really provide. Anyone who wanted their genetic profile has already gotten one and they don't ever need another. If both your parents have one, their children don't need one either unless there's some question of paternity. Add in the fact that many potential customers are horrified by having their data being readily available to the government with the shoddiest of warrants, if even that, and they'll never get a test.

Unless they have some new market to tap into or a new product/service to sell, I don't really see the value in the company at all.

I wouldn't even care about that as long as they do it on their own time outside off work and off of company property. Anyone pretending to support this would have a completely different opinion if these same employees had done what they had done with the exception of having a message of "shut down the borders and kick all of the immigrants out!" Those same people would probably demand that even if those employees had done that outside of work on their own time and in a way completely disconnected from the company that they still be fired for their awful person opinions.

This boils down to the simple fact that the people who support the protesters only do so because of a shared political opinion and not because of some supposed belief in the rights of the workers.

China hasn't been fully socialist since Nixon went to China. You can actually look at their GDP over time and spot where on the graph they started to implement market results policies. They aren't a fully free market society, but if they were they'd easily be the world's largest economy today. The CCP being unwilling to give up control of the country is holding the Chinese citizens back more than anything outside of the country might be doing.

Same story with other former communist countries like Vietnam which also instituted market reforms. Meanwhile countries that remained centrally planned (such as North Korea) have remained poor. Others such as Venezuela that went further down the path of Marxism have destroyed much of the wealth they previously had.

I like this if only because it means AI generated content will enter circulation at a rapid rate (because people can now make money from it) and it will ensure that LLMs start to ingest and crap out their own works. I've been told this turns out a bit like actual inbreeding and results in LLMs that are essentially retarded if we were to draw a comparison to humans.

This isn't city hall. It's private property. Can we let a gang of people occupy your yard and call you a boot licker when you get sick of them and call the cops?

Apple wouldn't name their products that way. They'd come up with something like the MacBook Air Light or the MacBook Breeze. It wouldn't tell the customer anything and is just pointless masturbatory action on the point of bureaucrats who believe the know better than everyone else.

Are they on the list and if not will they add themselves? Extortion is a pretty serious crime after all.