Think about that the next time you're out holding a sign that says Gays for Palestine, then. ;)

Seniors are a large voting block, but they're hardly a majority. There's another reason voters, as a whole, support Social Security. Middle aged people don't want to be on the hook for the financial illiteracy of their parents.

We've already explained to you why it's a bad idea to use apps that upload everything you do to some company in California (or wherever they choose to store your data) but at least there are some legal frameworks governing what they can do, and the government we elect has some control. If that's a bad idea, can you possibly understand why it's an even worse idea to use an app that uploads everything you do to a company that's completely under the control of a hostile nation's government and that our elected government has no way to regulate? I get that *you* don't think you do anything worth spying on, but there's been lots of cases of young people in the armed forces or national security jobs using apps like this while on duty or at work.

It's true that the constitution adds some protections, but if the majority of people in a democracy are really annoyed with what you're doing (like the Canadian truckers) then they *will* find a way to get back at your or stop you. In order to allow stuff like the trucker protest to happen, there needs to be a culture that tolerates it. By and large most Canadians do tolerate it up to a point, but most of the millennial and almost all of the gen Z generation now believe that saying something they don't like is literally "harm" and therefore needs regulated. This is hardly just a Canadian problem. Has anyone from Gen Z ever heard the expression "sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me?"

Then the poor shouldn't have had so much fun stuffing me into lockers in high school, and spent more time studying. Fuck them.

Distances driven are just larger in North America. 200 miles won't cut it. The bare minimum to be acceptable to consumers is 300+ for mass adoption, and even that's going to give people range anxiety. That said, American car companies have decided they like the huge markups they could get when supply was constrained, and they're making no efforts to increase supply now that they can get electronic components again. Prices for both new and used vehicles are absurdly high. Prices for 3 year old used vehicles have jumped over 50% since 2019. It's only good for the OEMs, not the country.

How are you defining "lies"? If lying means saying something that isn't true, then that's useless because it's impossible to know anything with 100% certainty, and most of the things people argue about can't really be pinned down factually... like at what point between fertilized egg and baby does a thing become a human being. What you likely mean is that lying is saying something that you don't actually believe to be true. Not only is this useless because we can't know what someone truly believes, but most people hold some set of contradictory beliefs. What's relevant to this discussion is that totalitarian regimes love to control people's speech, so in response we have both a culture and a legal system that enshrines the value of freedom of speech in our society. Given how successful our society has been at staying a democracy even with forces trying to undermine it, then it seems like freedom of speech has value and it's right to protect it, even if you don't like what some other people say.

Even amongst "happy" movies like whatever Marvel is putting out now, the messages are just awful. Pretty much every instalment is just them introducing a new character we've never heard of, and then some other character has to tell them that they "just need to believe in themselves" and them *boom* they get superpowers through the power of belief. Like, yes, you need to believe in yourself but then you need to do a whole bunch of work to improve yourself, usually with a lesson in there where you try and fail and realize you're not good enough. Because the character is human and the story of trying, failing, and trying again resonates with the humans who go watch these movies. I get that the writers are saddled with certain restrictions, like a woman or PoC isn't allowed to be shown to have any flaws on screen, but that just makes the story unrelatable even to those target audiences. In the latest Captain Marvel movie, they go to a planet and it gets attacked and they're the cause, and instead of the drama that should have been caused by realizing you just caused all this suffering, the message was, "bad things happen, believe in yourself." That's a horrible message that only narcissists can relate to!

Where are you getting this misinformation from? The human population is going to peak later this century and then start declining. It's already happened in developed nations. As more developing nations actually... develop... they're going through the same change to urbanization and they're having fewer kids. We're actually at a point where some countries (Japan & Italy come to mind) don't have enough young people to do the work necessary to support the large generation that's retiring, and that's going to cause a huge amount of suffering and hardship. Is that what you're advocating for?

Falcon 9 launches are now able to launch to LEO for about $1500/kg but once they get the bugs worked out of Starship (the new heavy rapidly re-usable launch vehicle), the projected cost is something like $150/kg. Assuming your drug lab equipment takes up a small portion of the 100t payload, then the cost to get all those materials to orbit, manufacture it, and return it isn't out of line with costs for pharmaceuticals you can get now.

True, but there are also many religions that aren't traditional religions (and whose believers won't rest until everyone is forced to enable their insanity).

Sounds like wishful thinking by someone who has no clue where their food, goods, medicine, and services comes from. Our standard of living is directly correlated to the amount of "stuff" the people in our economy produce on a daily, weekly, monthly and annual basis. If we all worked 10% less then our standard of living would fall roughly 10%, and for some people that would severely impact their health in other ways, like access to food and medicine.

Yes, I get that your solution is to just take all Jeff Bezos' money and give it to poor people, but this ignores the fact that Jeff Bezos' wealth is certainly not in cash and is mostly in ownership of a company which is an ongoing concern. It takes in resources and spits out services that are more valuable than the inputs, and it also employs a lot of people. If you were to take his wealth ($190B) and distribute it amongst all people in the US then each person would get shares worth about $574, or about 3.5 shares of Amazon each. In the last quarter of last year, earnings per share was about $1, so total this could give each person a universal basic income of $3.5 x 4 = $14 per year. I suppose you'd then want to do the same for every other publicly and privately traded company in the country, right? So sure, on paper that looks great.

Here's the first kicker... the people who own shares of companies are people who are focused on making more efficient and profitable enterprises. So they take the proceeds of that wealth every year and they re-invest it in growing their business or starting new businesses, both of which tend to increase the standard of living in the nation. These types of people who have the motivation to keep building larger and larger companies, and who actually have the skills to do it, are pretty rare. Now, they're also dangerous, but we have lots of rules and regulations to keep them in check, and as long as we keep constant vigilance over what they're doing, we reap the benefits of their wealth building activities, because the main way for Amazon to grow is to keep delivering what we as consumers want at a better price.

The second kicker is that most people given a lump of shares won't just live off the earnings (they will sell it), so you need the government to hold it for them (to provide the universal basic income you speak of). That means you now have the government managing these companies, and it's obvious to everyone who has ever worked with government organizations that they won't be as efficient and productive as if these were run privately.

So the only reasonable way to do this is to let private individuals own and run companies, and then tax them at whatever you think the maximum sustainable tax rate is, and use that to pay for your universal basic income. As you increase the tax rate you'll push companies out of your country, or some marginal companies will just fold because they no longer think it's worth it. So there's a limit, and this limit was actually tested back in the 70's in Scandinavian countries where they had total tax rates going up to around 60%, and they realized it didn't work and they pulled it back.

Now you're left with the current situation amongst developed nations... we have regulated market economies where people are allowed to own property and amass wealth with some limitations, and we have tax rates that are roughly 25 to 40%, and this appears to be the sustainable range. The fact is, we can't support a universal basic income at this taxation level, but we can afford social programs (like the ones we have) where we try to help the most vulnerable people in society (i.e. the ones who generally make serial bad decisions) and the rest of us have the freedom to live our lives and muddle through our days and figure it out for ourselves, and life's pretty good.

I know you have lots of brilliant ideas about how to fix all the problems of our world, and I salute you, but please brush up on how we got here before you go start breaking everything out of spite.

I agree, most of my TV screen watching is YouTube (and we have a family premium plan to avoid ads). But it definitely feels like wading through sewage to find the occasional gem. There's a rabbit hole effect that tries to push you to the extremes and it's unsettling. I actually use two different YouTube accounts where I watch stuff that's more science and tech related on one, and more video-game and geo-political stuff on the other, and the feeds are *drastically* different but with low quality misinformation flooding both of them, and it favours highly emotionally charged content with a lot of doom-and-gloom. Scam science videos are a huge problem, and they often have high production value. I like being able to find these channels where they're doing a deep dive into the latest SpaceX Starship integrated flight test, which you would never be able to find on main stream networks, but then the feed seems to think you want to watch videos of Elon Musk's social commentary. The algorithm for their feed is basically useless.

If you're just trading hoping for the stock price to suddenly jump up, that's just gambling, unless you happen to have insider information, which is illegal. People who make lots of money in the stock market over the long term start by having in-depth understanding of the industry they're investing in, so they understand the intricate details of what makes a company in that industry profitable. Then they spend a lot of time researching companies in that industry and going out and visiting them to see which ones have those properties, or could take advantage of those properties with some management help. Then they pare down their list and wait for a good deal to arise, and they move on it quickly because they already know it's the right choice. In more advanced scenarios like Berkshire Hathaway, they bought up insurance companies, who were sitting on a lot of capital that had to be invested at low risk, and they used that capital to invest in these really good deals, so they're using other people's money to invest, and they got to keep the proceeds. Big brain stuff. If you're sitting there looking at a line graph thinking you can predict which way it's going to swing next, then you're just a cash cow for brokerage services who charge you a transaction fee for every buy/sell order.

I think geoengineering is going to happen (it's technically happening now - just look at the whole North Atlantic ship trails story from last year). The reason it's going to happen is because geoengineering is surprisingly inexpensive, and within the means of large organizations (not just nations states, but large corporations) who are directly affected by climate change and have a vested interest in steering it a certain direction. At first we're going to see a lot of rogue actions, and then some kind of patchwork international agreement that at least attempts to regulate it. There will be winners and losers. This is the plot of the novel "Termination Shock" by Neal Stephenson, actually.