Are you talking about the dog, or the car?

Are things different in the USA than across the Atlantic?

Over here you can fill like 2 shopping bags with fresh fruits, vegetables, pasta, rice, beans/lentils and all sorts of stuff easily for less than £15 (~$20) that will last 2 weeks or more. It's dirt cheap to buy that stuff in the UK and most of mainland Europe.

I genuinely wanna know?

Or they'll all install some free multiplayer mobile game that has public chat and use that to communicate.

Or just, you know, use one of the many many messaging services / chat rooms etc. that are not banned! No need to to fanny about with games

Does it need to be very competitive in the world market? As long as it's providing for and protecting its citizens, what's the point?

The EU and most European countries directly subsidise industries. It's called industrial policy and strategy. Same goes for the USA. That particular point is irrelevant, your others are good though

An LLM helped me build an automatic farm in minecraft with my child. And if you don't understand why that's impressive, you ought to reassess.

It's not that impressive at all, it just regurgitated and re-wrote the content from hundreds of websites and video transcripts that tell you how to do that... The impressive part was all of those people figuring this out and writing it up themselves.

        https://www.ign.com/wikis/mine...
        https://ender-chest.com/tutori...
        https://www.namehero.com/gamin...
        https://timesofindia.indiatime...
        https://www.youtube.com/playli...
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
        https://www.reddit.com/r/Minec...
        https://www.reddit.com/r/Minec...
        https://www.reddit.com/r/techn...

etc.

also:

  - trains often depart/arrive directly from urban centres, so you don't have 1hr+ commutes after the plane arrives to even get to where you're going
  - if you miss a train, a lot of tickets you can buy just let you get on the next one
  - capacity can easily be increased when needed by just adding more carriages
  - it's often nice just to look out of the window for a trip and seeing the world go by instead of just clouds

Privatisation. Thatcher's legacy continues to fuck us over.

The Stockholm Syndrome is strong with this one! hahaha

Governments don't interfere with markets when they "feel like it"--they'll usually do it to prevent catastrophe, promote a particular public good or strategy, or (most common in the USA) because the government has been bought and paid for by the people being bailed out.

Universal Basic Services is the best route to go. If done correctly, it avoids a shitload of unearned money going to the obscenely rich ghouls. Things like healthcare, housing, education etc. The sort of things we, in fact, achieved for a while after World War 2 was over...

That doesn't sound like teachers in the UK at all. I have relatives, friends and ex-colleagues who are teachers. The vast majority of them are trying to do their best to help the kids within the stupid constraints provided by our incompetent and malicious government.

No one gets into teaching to get rich, or to pursue some weird agenda. It pays too poorly for that. They get into it generally because they're passionate about learning and/or working with kids.

Actually they didn't. People hated cars and the deaths they caused at first. A huge propaganda effort was deployed by car-makers, and they came up with the whole concept of 'jaywalking' to shift blame to the victims. Large money won in the end as usual...

Treat those delivery apps as 'discovery' services instead. I use them to find new places that deliver on the occasion I order in. If it's good, I order direct from them for all future orders. I do the same with 'booking.com' and the like.

That's true right now, perhaps--but people can clearly see a huge downward turn is well within the realms of possibility.