I feel like your generation really got poisoned by the boomer lies…“trust the system, put in your time, and you’ll get your turn on top if you work hard”
Most of your cohorts just seem to be wandering around confused, struggling to reconcile their worldview with the reality that everything sucks (and is rapidly getting worse)
Think more like a slurry of connective tissue, bits of fat, and scraps of meat pressure washed off the bone and swept into a drain. The legally allowable quantities of cleaning chemicals and feces are also pretty concerning…
I’m happy to eat sausage, even blood sausage, despite knowing what it is and how it’s made… but hotdogs are gross in a unique and unnatural way
No, the problem with Smith’s capitalism is that he’s constantly misrepresented
He was descriptive, not prescriptive. He was not an advocate of capitalism, he was explaining it - and if you read the wealth of nations and your takeaway was “Lassie Faire capitalism is a good idea”, reread it
Yeah, it doesn’t do that though, does it? Beta max was better than VHS, hd-dvd was better than blue ray, SD card slots and audio ports are better than not having them.
Hell, look at gaming. The free market makes shit games, because it turns out monetizing the crap out of a crappy product then doing it again is what the free market prefers over quality
Interestingly enough, I spent a summer interning in France. I got homesick and was craving peanut butter, looked for it at the store, learned the word - they had no idea what I was talking about. Showed them it written down and a picture and everything
My host family told me you could find it in the international isle, but looked at me weird… They said they only ate it as a high calorie snack when they went skiing
My point is, even though I’m constantly disappointed by even “fancy” wine and cheese a decade later, a spoon full of peanut butter is a fantastic way to shut down hunger pangs for a few hours.
Honestly, it’s better without bread or toast - that’s just empty carbs anyways. I started getting coconut flakes to sprinkle on top… It’s an easy way to class it up without adding calories or effort… It’s basically a no-bake protein cookie at that point
I’m a pragmatic programmer. I came to Linux because we were doing server-side stuff, I stayed because bash shell is a blunt tool but command line is incoherent
I mean, it comes down to jealousy, right? And that’s an emotion… You can’t really control your emotions
I think it’s more a matter of “is this a deal breaker”. Some people just might avoid those movies, some people might need to see it and get reassurance, some people can’t handle it at all. And some people just aren’t bothered - there’s people who are fine with their partner dating other people so long as they come home at the end of the night
Oh, I’m not talking about asking for forgiveness… What I’m saying is that you can straight up make enormous profit in tanking a company, and it’s not even illegal. You just have to do it right
On one hand yes, if everyone stopped buying their product then the company would go under. Just like if you just eat less, you’d lose weight
But these such oversimplifications that they lead to the wrong conclusions. You want to lose weight? Learn about nutrition, avoid triggers, and learn to cook from single ingredients. Raw willpower can work… But it’s basically the worst strategy. Most people can’t do it, and most of them that do regain the weight within 18 months
You want companies to stop doing consumer hostile things that destroy companies? You need to look at the small number of people making profits on the process of destroying the company
The problem with economics is that it’s taught like a religion. You get nice, believable mechanisms, but not only are they not tested empirically when they’re adopted, it takes decades of being obviously false for the idea to lose steam.
Inflation is an example… Wage growth is empirically not tightly coupled to it - we have the numbers, they aren’t ambiguous. But you tell this to people and they’ll scoff, because the commonly used model of economics says so in a neatly packaged narrative.
Voting with your wallet is the same. Refusing to buy a product does not push a company in a desired direction, they’ll (accurately) see it as a pr and/or marketing problem. It’s cheaper to change the minds of consumers than the build better products, it’s cheaper to lobby governments than to clean up after yourself, and it’s easier, more reliable, and highly profitable to reposition yourself to win big by tanking a company than it is to making it better