Why should I trust you, when stores act like they're doing me a big favor by letting me shop there?

Do you know that Jainism holds that being unhoused is part of the path to enlightenment? If I'm Jain, can you stop me from being unhoused without violating my religious freedom?

Are they vagrant if they aren't moving around?

If cigarette regulations worked how come I regularly pick up so many cigarette butts at campsites?

What if I drank a sip or glass of wine at dinner occasionally, and never felt the need to binge drink as a result?

To take food out of the mouths of hungry kids. They couldn't possibly give less of a fuck about children. I mean except for like they did in the Epstein files but I don't think that's what anyone means here...

The only question is which ulterior motive is the most prevalent. On the one hand this is red meat for voters so that they can offer them something other than a functioning economy. On the other hand they are trying to eliminate anonymity on the internet so they can relentlessly punish anyone who says anything they don't like while also pretending they are persecuted.

Whatever the result it won't help children but it will hurt you and me.

What if you hold an index fund that includes Tesla to benefit from its rise but also other companies in case it tanks, and if everyone tanks the Fed buys the fund to keep prices up?

How many Trumps does it take to skew the data?

If money printing didn't cause hyperinflation in Japan contrary to the predictions of standard economic models, can we do a better job of money printing a basic income so that everyone benefits?

Do you understand that trying to make me economically productive will just drive me to suicide (like my brother who tried climbing the corporate ladder and killed himself at 49)? Why not legalize suicide? Wouldn't it be cheaper to give me a way out (basic income, suicide, free camping) than to spend money trying to get me to like your chosen lifestyle?

And where would Argentina be without an explicit backstop from the US? If Venezuela had that US support, would they have hyperinflation or be more like Japan?

In order to produce enough food to feed a nation let alone the amount of excess food that the United States needs to produce in order to keep the rest of the world even moderately stable you need to do large scale industrial farming.

Small family farms are a pipe dream. They are also kind of pointless because as it stands we only need a few percentages of our population to grow all the food when it's done industrially. If you start trying to turn everybody in the farmers what you're going to have is a bunch of people who do not want to farm and who don't know how to do it and you're going to get food shortages.

Giving everybody a farm like Ubi is a overly simplistic solution favored by libertarian types who want to dream of Independence. We are not going to get away from having a large complex social structures even if teenagers hate them.

"Northern Democrats, led by Stephen Douglas, supported letting territories decide on slavery, while Southern Democrats insisted on allowing slavery in all territories. "

To understand that it could never fly in the current system and environment.

I get it libertarians get obsessed with Ubi because they think they can have the capitalist Paradise but they want and that they were promised as kids while having the socialist Utopia that deep down they really know they need.

It doesn't work. There's no simple answers to complex problems and just handing out cash, the simple answer to the complex problem of human beings tending to accumulate too much wealth and power coupled with our tendency to indulge in various forms of disdain and bigotry for people beneath us on the social ladder and the ability for the wealthy and powerful to exploit that tendency.

The billionaires are not going to sit quietly while you improve the quality of life of everybody at the expense of even a microscopic amount of their privilege and power. Remember if you create a system where everyone has a good quality of life then I can go online and tell Elon Musk to go fuck himself and there's not really anything he can do to hurt me. He's not going to like that because a huge part of his power comes from his ability to destroy anyone that significantly crosses him.

Not just Elon but all the billionaires.

That's a lever they are not going to just give up even accounting for the fact that they want that money for themselves.

Never mind the fact that you don't even have the political power to even try to do Ubi.

We watched as the private insurance company methodically sabotaged the affordable Care act until it was barely functional resulting in a law that while popular is still open to attack from a variety of vectors. If you think the billionaires wouldn't do that with Ubi then you're just not paying attention and you're not a serious person.

Why does the link you draw between AI slop and "cause harm" remind me of the arguments that video games cause violence and porn causes rape?

"The age limit for buying beer and wine in Denmark is 16 years in shops"

"It is socially acceptable for parents to allow their children to drink alcohol at home. "

Can I report that as a kid growing up in Paris, my Mom would send me to the store to pick up beer for her parties and I was never "carded" despite being 12 or 13?

I am in every way anti-DRM, but it's ubiquitous. A lot of publishers won't publish on GOG for this reason. I agree that Epic is arguing in bad faith. The enemy of my enemy is convenient, nothing more, so I am not delusional about Epic but I still enjoy their actions.

TBH I usually forget to go look at the free games they are typically so underwhelming, though there have been some legitimate greats too.

There are only two features of Steam beyond buying installing games which I care about, and one of them sucks. I like that it handles updates for me, but that is also the bad one, because practically none of the updates are differential. I want them to make that easier so that publishers actually do it. I know that it requires significant support from publishers when they use packed data files, but even that is something that could be addressed. (If the files are compressed individually instead of using compressed archives, then binary patches are feasible.) The other feature is Proton. Anything else including friends, achievements, and even reviews is all optional to me. I enjoy some of those features, but I would still use Steam without them.