Katana314

I mean…have you seen the size of cars then and now? Or the *number* of cars then vs now?

Reminds me of an “ecchi” story idea I had where there’s a professional voyeur cameraman that’s treated women like objects his whole life, but recently come to know someone that he genuinely adores, and realizes he hates it when people objectify her or swarm her, and his favorite photo is just of her plain smile.

If you only print occasionally, do it at the library. Far better to rely on community printers that are running often to keep the ink warm.

To better explain the issue, I think, usually monopoly claims come from someone dominating multiple threads or connected elements of an industry. So, they don’t just own all the wheat fields; but also some of the best grain transport companies, as well as all the best bakeries - such that anyone offering wheat, transport, or baking, can’t compete with their integration. That’s when a company would be divided. But in this case, Valve is just one thing; it’s the bakery. They choose to bake with flour and wheat because they’ve been baking for years. Everyone else is pouring billions into trying various mixtures of sawdust to cut costs, and no one is cutting into that industry as a result. Nothing has prevented them from building their own infrastructure from scratch, except for the fact that it’s a long-term investment, and the stock market hates those.

I remember that day of the “general strike” where the simple idea was to not spend any money on big corps. I got confused, because to me, that’s a 365-day-a-year lifestyle thing for me. Maybe I’m lucky that I don’t have lifestyle needs like pet food, baby supplies, etc, and markets have been cornered there. But there’s plenty of forms of entertainment and leisure without giving it to Disney or Amazon and the like.

My libraries still lend out a lot of DVDs. I ended up getting Fallout S1 in that format, and while it was a resolution drop, it was perfectly bearable. I can guess for the audience using discs, a lot still have archaic hardware to play them on.

(Yes, I get the joke) What the hell causes people to believe there’s a large political faction that wants people in media to be unattractive? At worst, some people just get taken out of a fantasy world if the women are wearing straight bikinis for no reason, but there’s many ways to make them look sexy without attire being totally impractical.

The silliest ones I’ve seen now are ads for mobile games that put censor stickers over the “parts” of fully clothed women. (Yes, even in the game, they’re fully clothed)

Plenty of people can point to a beautiful sunrise and say “See? There’s your evidence that God exists.” And of course, you’d try to point them to genocide in Sudan, and they’d ignore you. It becomes much the same issue.

The term “faith” made a lot more sense to me once I thought of believing in the goodness of other people like a faith. You have no logic saying it’s there, even get disproved often. But you keep believing in it in spite of the absence of evidence.

Syrup and gravy are too liquidy for that to work. Honey can get VERY slow and thick, which seems to be why the premise works with this thing.

I see this design on earwax cleaners. I think the idea is to be useful for retrieving a thick, viscous substance from a tight place. Rather than scooping it, it provides a space designed for the stuff to “get stuck in” the cracks. Given honey appears in various consistencies, I can see how that would be useful; maybe more for the beekeepers than the consumer.

dives to 50 feet, removes tube from mouth to shout to Gabe, and fucking drowns

The point being, it’s pretty specifically American culture. Disregard politics, and only obsess over it when enraged about an issue. Hate on anything that might benefit people you don’t know. There are millions of humans on this planet to which those behaviors are bafflingly mad. Many of those places essentially operate under capitalist structure, with rules and safeguards in place to ensure government stays responsible for basic safety and competition remains fair. The battle to keep that structure stable is constant, but gets easier when people at all levels care about it. Basically, I couldn’t claim capitalism is perfect, but whether replacing the system or not, you need to address the greedy human culture beneath it.

Any system, in which the denizens of that system exhibit greed and selfishness, is likely going to produce similar problems. I really don’t think people are accurate about the feeling that “Obtaining and hoarding valuable things” is an act borne out of the laws of our current society. I really don’t think it’s just “economic culture” as you’ve described.