The point is competition is a factor, but not a magic bullet. Be careful when invoking it, because it won't always happen that way.

What about Steam on Linux, Microsoft charging a yearly subscription for Windows 10*, and nobody wanting to pay to continue using the computer they already bought?

*Windows 10 upgrades within the first year of release come with a free lifelong subscription until Windows 10 is discontinued. Corporate subscription is per-user on unlimited devices, rather than per-device.

Often, the reason something's been done the same way for 100+ years is because we know it works, and experimentation is dangerous. Sometimes, it doesn't even really work.

Yeah that's not going to be 100%.

Elevators already have phone and electricity to their control panels.

Actually...

Facebook hasn't silenced the voices and opinions of everyone around the world. It's just applied some tact in Turkey, where culture and leadership don't tolerate certain things. As for extremists coming from Turkey to blow up Chicken, well, people in Chicken can post pictures offensive to Rude and Reno at their own peril.

People believe that more businesses mean more competition. I've had long, drawn-out arguments that centered around this ideal that a basic income or citizen's dividend, creating a ton of people with guaranteed income streams, would draw out tons of landlords, who would create tons of housing, and then rent that housing at the bare cheapest "because of competition".

I tell people a Citizen's Dividend must be the minimum to get all basic needs. Basically, if landlords can rent a micro-unit at $300/mo, and people need $300/mo more to get food and utilities and such to live, you give them $600/mo. People want to give everyone $1500/mo, to which I say: the landlords will raise rent like fucking crazy and rent you the same shitty $300 apartment for $1000 (like in New York: $1500/mo for 425sqft studio; 425sqft rents for $500 here), because people just have $1000 to burn, and need houses. The overwhelming response? "Nuh-uh! Competition! Other landlords will get in on that, and the price will run down to the same price it would be anyway! Giving people more money doesn't cause inflation!"

They fail to consider risks, inelastic markets, the extreme cost of having empty units, and so on.

I bet i could outfit this thing with a lawn dart.

That's not as magic as people want it to seem; but it is a force to be reckoned with. Do note that most goods are priced substantially above the minimum business viable price: there's huge mark-up on all kinds of shit, at all levels, even in markets with healthy competition. Apartments are practically divorced from price competition, for example, and tend to only shift prices with general demand (e.g. they get cheaper in a tough economy, they get more expensive when more middle class move to an area, but they don't become cheaper when more landlords own the same limited number of apartments).

The sympathy isn't for the poor, destitute, unworking American; it's for the hard worker who isn't making enough. We'd rather have 100,000 starving, jobless leeches and 20,000 upstanding, comfortable workers than 50,000 starving leeches and 70,000 struggling workers.

They still need to eat, too.

You're thinking too much about laws and not enough about socialization. People make agreements between each other; lying is a violation of such agreements. By recognizing that a person has a certain expectation and then violating that expectation without addressing that it is wrong, you are lying.

I know a fair bit of history; you've said nothing useful here.

No, the nicotine does that. Everything else just causes cancer.

Nicotine in cigarettes is the equivalent of flaying open your skin when you're sitting in raw sewage: there's all kinds of nasty shit in the sewage, but removing your biggest layer of defense is kind of a bad thing.

It's Star Wars. The characters have always been tropes. The epic hero who finds the power within himself versus the evil empire. Hell, the original movies are easily likened to such epics as Final Fantasy 6 (which came later).

Most people are complaining because Jar-Jar is a goof, Anakin has a lot of teenage angst, the Jedi Council is entirely docile, Padme flips between a stiff diplomat and a flappy-mouthed chick, etc. Thing is, Jar-Jar is from an entire race of people who appear mentally retarded and act like overgrown children; Anakin was a slave child whose only social life was family life (with his mother) before he was ripped away from her, put up on a pedestal, manipulated by an evil sociopath, put into huge emotional conflicts, then faced with the death of his mother and the prophetic and eventual death of his girlfriend; the Jedi Council is made of deeply orthodox monks who value emotional stability and deep contemplation above all things; and Padme is exactly what real-life diplomats and politicians are.

People wanted Anakin to be this bland, cookie-cutter hero who magically turns villain at a small trigger, instead of growing through emotional turmoil and coming out evil. "Oh no, my wife died! Time to be Darth Vader!" is preferred over "Oh man, my childhood was so hard, there were all these people, saying all these things, I'm so confused, I've lost everything, I'm now just pissed at everything, fuck it all!" How do you complain about a teenager acting like a teenager?