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throwaway44773

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Of course, monopolists force you to pay extortionist prices for their services in your local market, while they get to take advantage of the global market to keep down their expenses, and move their revenue around to avoid taxes. If corporations get to be global citizens, why can't humans be free to buy anywhere in the world, and move anywhere in the world however they please.

The US has already strongly reduced the use of a very addictive substance in the past by making it culturally unacceptable in the case of cigarettes. Japan has the same culture already with food, where there is strong cultural pressure to not abuse food. Perhaps it is time to bring back shame towards overeating?

US corporations managed to make food addicting by using science to formulate food in such a way as to trigger a massive spike in dopamine followed by a massive drop a short time later. Combining that with an individualistic culture that leaves many lonely and anxious, it’s no surprise that people depend on substances to make themselves feel better. The average american puts themselves to sleep with a 2 litre of cola, a bag of chips and a pint of ice cream while playing games on their cellphones way late.

If you saw a population of people injecting heroin into their veins and getting frail, would you say you have a frail ness epidemic? No. What you have now is a food addiction epidemic. You should treat it as you treat any other addiction.

My main complaints with protests these days is that they seem to be astroturfed to keep the discontent people busy with protest that cannot bring about any meaningful local changes. Either they are about far away things happening in the world, or they are about vague ideas with no concrete steps to achieve any meaningful impact.

Scarcity of skillset. If there are 10x as many people than now willing to do the job, companies would offer much lower salaries while making the same or worse work demands.

No one needs 32GB, the same way no one needs a MacBook Air: you could very well lug around an iMac or a tower PC if you don't actually need macOS. That doesn't stop me from being annoyed at the arbitrary market segmentation that Apple enforces to get me to buy one of their "Pro" machines just because I want more memory, thereby sacrificing the portability of the device for slightly better thermal management or a CPU with better performance.

Also, in the past, I could have bought the base device and bought a couple sticks of memory to upgrade the memory. Now, I cannot do this because of anti-consumer decisions that apple made to prevent user upgrade of memory. The least they could do is offer me the possibility to pay their inflated price for more ram.

Is this the year where Apple increases the memory on the base model above 8GB? Will they finally allows you to have 32GB of memory on the macbook Air? Will Apple finally do like all other computer manufacturers and allow you to connect two external display while having your clamshell open? Or will they just force you to buy the macbook pro max ultra ultimate m4$ if you want any feature?

Kids spend too much time thinking about social issues that they are not ready to deal with because they are used as pawns in the culture wars or manipulated to feel like they need to consume more. Society has a responsibility to stop manipulating our children and giving them problems they have control over and can deal with. In plain english: stop telling kids to fix global warming and that they need plastic surgery and start telling them to clean their room and prepare healthy meals for themselves. Help them feel like they have control over their own lives and their environment and they will stop killings themselves.

Not to mention that construction has seen little gains in productivity over the past few decades resulting in the Baumol effect in the industry. There's little reason that constructing new housing cannot be automated to the degree that car construction is automated, but a variety of regulatory hurdles and little foreign competition makes building construction prices rise steadily. We need a well-funded startup to pull an Uber and indiscriminately sidestep regulation to disrupt the real estate market.

There’s already a well known correlation between heart disease and gum disease. One of the hypothesis is that plaque creating bacteria from the mouth end up in the bloodstream and create plaque in the heart. It wouldn’t be a big stretch to suggest that microplastics could take the same route to reach the heart.

Let's Ban SMS 2FA 2 years ago

The world needs identity verification as a service. By this, I mean it should be possible to go to an office of ID Check inc, show ID and prove who i am. The id vetting company can then give you a number that you can give to a company to prove you are the person you claim to be and have your password reset.

The current system of having access to a SIM card or knowing your mother’s maiden name is ridiculous.

Saying that prices rise because of corporate greed is the same as saying that fires burn because of oxygen. Sure, it's true, but it's not helpful because you cannot stop people from being greedy. What is useful is to look at why corporations are able to greedily increase their prices unchecked. That's usually because of some imbalance in supply and demand: in this case, why does the demand outstrip the supply? There are multiple reasons, but one of them is that governments have outlawed the sale of new ICE vehicles for 2035, increasing demand on the small supply of electric vehicles available. This has also caused manufacturers to reduce their investment in ICE vehicles, thereby further reducing supply of these vehicles, thereby increasing prices. Furthermore, electric vehicles are (at least at this moment) more expensive to manufacture.

Those are the expected, if not intended, consequences of environmental legislation looking to decrease CO2 emissions. I can live with that. The real scandal is that we're not building out public transit so that people do not need to own a car in the US.

The barrier to entry to driving a truck is a few months of training so the amount of people that can become truck drivers is quite large. However, the social status of driving a truck is quite low and there is a constant threat of automating the job away. Not to mention the terrible working conditions.