ROFL. Stow the faux benevolence. It’s nonsense. Nobody is acting out of the goodness of their hearts in a capitalist transaction. They’re choosing to pollute instead of choosing to do other things. That’s not for anyone’s benefit but their own. The long-term consequences are so well-understood that only the extremely selfish are optimizing for the short-term.

China’s choice to build a national highway system instead of a national railway system wasn’t done with ecological concerns as the priority. They’re, again, choosing to pollute more purely because of the short-run benefit instead of doing something else that optimizes for humanity’s collective benefit.

So weird how the supposedly collectivist country isn’t acting in all of our best interest. Communism is an idea so good that they’ll silence you forever if you disagree.

China is still the world’s leading polluter, in a time where those so-called “scientists” most definitely know what they’re doing contributing to global climate change like they are. No country is innocent, but making no attempt to not be first isn’t a defensible policy position.

Feel free to read Friedman’s Economic History of the United States. His treatise is the most authoritative on the subject and has withstood decades of peer review.

There is quite literally no need to be making stuff up, like you’re doing.

ROFL. That’s an ahistoric narrative. The Great Depression was caused by a lack of liquidity caused by a failure to respond to mass withdrawal. FDR then made it worse with the New Deal, causing a double-dip that only resolved itself with the WWII wartime economy.

It was the lack of Federal Reserve banks and the failures of their predecessor organizations. Vaguely blaming “capitalism” is purely ignorance combined with intellectual laziness.

The modern problems can be laid at the feet of Reagan and Nixon, mostly. Bush Sr and Bush Jr contributed. But it’s mostly Nixon and Reagan that helped corrupt the antitrust framework. The fallout breaking up Ma Bell and the Microsoft Antitrust case about Internet Explorer were both critical decisions instrumental to this deterioration.

Two of them likely did. Elon couldn’t get an invite to those parties, but he definitely tried.

They gotta make it up in volume! /s

The weakest of us possess opinions like this.

ThIs CrEaTeS jObS

In America, rights aren’t “given”, they are “respected”. This is the same distinction made about the right-of-way while driving. Nobody ever has the right-of-way, but there are times when right-of-way must be yielded to others.

The US Constitution and its amendments declares all of the rights that the US Government must not infringe upon. Nothing declares what rights Americans have. [1] There is no external authority that “gives” Americans rights. They are inherent within us from birth. It is up to our systems of government to recognize and respect what has always been there.

The Second Amendment declares a right to self-defense that extends to defense against any threat including government agents. A modernizing of the 2A language would be, approximately - A free state is a critically important feature of civilization, therefore the people of that state possess the right to self-defense using the same level of technology as the state’s agents.

The offensive use of arms is not a basic human right, but the defensive use is.

[1] The “privileges and immunities” clause of the 14th Amendment has a lot of interesting legal history around it. The main point of argument has been how broadly to read new rights into that phrase. Most reasonable people can observe that the ambiguity in that clause is likely to have been intentionally broad because of this “natural rights” interpretation that is embedded deeply within US law all over the place.

I do. Do you?

A fetish is not necessarily something that needs or must be indulged. Some fetishes are better addressed with therapy. For a lot of the same reasons that nobody should be encouraging indulging in fetishes involving children.

Seek help.

Because good guys don’t rape.

Current-gen AI isn’t great. It’s a stepping stone on the way to something that might be great, if we can figure out how to make it be something other than an accelerant for a species-ending ecological disaster.

That’s an improvement over humans. Humans violate ethical constraints due to KPI pressures far more often.

The worm. If you find one, it’s not gin.

When asked what their solutions are, responder… <checks notes> got defensive and lashed out at a straw man instead of just answering the question. Then makes vague hand-waving gestures at irrelevant tangents.

So far, I’m hearing nothing that’s better than the one I offered - let the food scientists sort this out. They actually know what they’re talking about.

This is the problem with current discourse. When the only acceptable-to-you solution requires massive structural changes to the fundamental building blocks of society, you aren’t living in the real world. Realistic solutions start from where we are and take incremental steps. If you can’t come up with a better way to define this problem to the point that you resort to irrationality and fairy tales, that’s a you problem.

Nobody said bans were correct. But just because they aren’t right doesn’t make your ludicrous opinions any better. Yes, we’d all love shorter work weeks. Let’s see you come up with a realistic plan to actually implement that in your own lifetime. In this geopolitical climate. Good fucking luck, space cadet.

Targeting “ultra-processed foods” is a stupid way to accomplish that.

Then let’s hear your genius, sure-fire, guaranteed-to-work idea that’s been built on high-quality research and rigorous data collection methodology.

You clearly don’t know how ridiculously stupid the entire food labeling regulations process is. All because CEOs refuse to do reasonable, rational things that are better for human beings than their stock price.

The problem here isn’t the regulations. The problem is the failure to recognize that every regulation is written in somebody’s blood. So, how many people is the “right” number of people who need to die of preventable causes before we conclusively say “maximizing addictive properties in food” is no longer a business practice we’re willing to accept as a nation? Do 100 people need to die? Thousands? Do you need to see millions of dead bodies piled up end-over-end like cord wood before you recognize that, gosh golly gee, maybe we should listen to scientific opinions over corporatist scumbag opinions?

Learn about how the human body processes carbohydrates. Then learn about what a truly “normal” amount of carbohydrates for a human to consume on a daily, weekly, annual basis is. Finally, compare that amount of “normal” carbs to the amount in a single bowl of Cheerios. Subtract the dietary fiber involved if you need precision. But the basic comparison is so obviously skewed that the dietary fiber part of the calculation is barely more than a rounding error.

Cheerios don’t need “banning” for any of the reasons we prohibit or control the sale of truly hazardous or life-threatening materials. Nobody said that is what is needed. Overconsumption of carb-heavy foods like Cheerios are bad for our health on a time scale measured in years or decades. Drinking drano is bad for your health on a time scale measured in seconds. Don’t get it twisted. Nobody’s treating eating cheerios like drinking drano. Insinuating such a thing is happening is simply incorrect and not a valid argument.

Humans need to eat more green things and eat less carbs. We need companies that serve human needs to truly serve the real human needs, not lie about the exploitable bugs in human cognition, pretend they’re “needs”, and try to say there’s nothing wrong with encouraging people to over-consume to the point of morbid obesity just to pump the shareholders’ stocks a few cents higher.

That’s the basic message. Humanity is more important than profit margins.

You ever ask her why she’s suddenly not as interested in satanic pedo sex cults run by elites now that she knows she helped get one elected as President?

Spoken like someone who doesn’t understand neuroscience.

A whole lot of people waste their entire lives bitching about what should not be, never lifting a finger to do anything about it, but yet expecting other people to undertake the labor that you will not do yourself.