But what if the director can get it from a bot by talking to it instead of a human?

What if you throttle progress by ignoring stock market returns when calculating productivity so that you have an excuse to delay things like the 8-hour work day which the Greenback Party was already calling for in the 1870s? How regressive and suppressive is the current dominant economic model?

How far are you willing to maximize your selfishness beyond all reason, to ensure its failure, just so you can say see! I was right!?

"If a basic living isn't motivation enough for me to do whatever is necessary to obtain that basic living standard, why should someone else work harder so that I don't have to?"

Why not fully legalize suicide? What if I want to be self-sufficient living off the land but you force me to buy my way out of your system by participating in it first, before I can exit? Do you see the hypocrisy in your position?

Your draft response is insightful and philosophically sharp, but if you're aiming for maximum clarity and impact on Slashdot, where technical and skeptical readers dominate, a slight tightening of tone and structure could help. Here's a refined version that keeps your poetic edge but delivers the point more cleanly in plain ASCII:

"What if your 'feeling' is just a mood â" a passing mental weather pattern â" that seems profound only because it resonates with your current state of mind? Another person might feel the exact opposite: that stars scatter forever and nothing returns. Feelings alone can't distinguish cosmic truth from comforting metaphor. If gravity does pull matter back together, it's physics, not intuition, that confirms it."

Do you feel guilty at all about the homeless that are swept into furnaces these days to power your voracious electricity demands?

Is this feeble attempt to gesture at Thermodynamics predictive success as doomed to frustration as the prediction that the moon should be falling into the Earth but actually it's moving away from the Earth? How does Thermodynamics predict that mere movements on a gravitaional objects can contradict the often-taught principle that a body rotating another will eventually fall into it?

Where I live (Kamloops, BC, Canada) the all-time high temperature record for a long time was 42C, set in July 1941. Most of southern B.C. set records that month. No air conditioning. Ugh! We demolished that record when it hit 47C in June 2021. I've never been so hot in my life...

The hottest we've been so far this summer was 36C. I expect to hit the Big Four Oh at least once, but the long-term forecast isn't promising.

...laura

Being nonviolent, why can't I choose the first option? And why shouldn't I be able to announce my suicidal intentions openly, with arguments as to why suicide is a good idea, one that you should consider (and everyone else!) too?

Why is the stock market at record highs?

Remember when Reagan said Carter's couple trillion dollars of national debt was the endgame, but here we are with US stocks still the world's premier performance asset?

Is it time to ask whether Reagan did, in fact, prove that deficits don't matter?

Does it matter if the dollar depreciates 10% if your dollar assets appreciate 20%?

Why should I be happy that pure chance separates me from being hunted by drones, especially when I just get banned if I try to express sympathy for those unluckily suffering worse conditions than me? Why should I take part in this ridiculous nightmare of an unfair system?

Why won't you support laws that would let me buy a suicide solution, even if someone profits? Why force me to be underhanded and sneaky? Why are you afraid of me openly and proudly choosing death, and advocating that you should, too?

What if you buy US stocks with your dollars, and they go up more than the dollar declines?

Remember when your attitude was prevalent in the 1980s but the US stock market is still insanely profitable?