Are they? As the article OP shares suggests, these films quietly make us compare our lives to what is portrayed on screen. This is advertisement 101: display people in enviable positions to portray a sense of longing for a lifestyle that one would not normally seek. A food commercial isn’t selling you a product, it’s trying to make you hungry.

If all you wanted out of these rom coms is the portrayal of a carefree life, you could just watch pharmaceutical, banking, or insurance ads.

You live in the country, but don’t drive for environmental reasons, yet you are considering using Door Dash? Can we also assume you don’t want to face the obvious answer: stockpile or grow food and cook for yourself?

I don’t mean to be overly critical, but it sounds to me like you are trying to avoid compromising on both your ideals and modern day expectations, to find a practical solution. Your pre-industrial agricultural ancestor would have spent a week stockpiling food in the root cellar, by scrounging around locally, or going very far to stockpile food. They probably were also farming animals in a significantly more sustainable/humane way, though certainly exceedingly scarcely.

Don’t forget the cost of lower and higher education in your “need for living” calculation!

Also, you’ll still need a system to determine what products and services are valuable for society.

The average human considers the Pythagorean theorem “sophistication”. Let’s not take our education for granted.

Real answer: power density. Pound for pound, gas still contains more energy than our best batteries. The weight of energy storage is still a massive deal for anything that cannot be tethered to a grid or be in close practical proximity for frequent recharging, from rockets, planes and cars (sometimes) to chainsaws and lawnmowers (sometimes).

The benefit of AI is overblown for a majority of product tiers. Remember how everything was supposed to be block chain? And metaverse? And web 3.0? And dot.com? This is just the next tech trend for dumb VCs to throw money at.

The educated and the well-travelled may have a broader set of view points to see how many different ideas and values work (or don’t work) in practice.

I don’t disagree on some just lacking empathy. But I also think not all education creates exposure to a wide range of ideas and values that stick (or the education is just too narrow), so you’ll still find plenty of people who are educated on paper, but not cognizant of a broad set of world views. I also think we are too quick to label foreign ideas==bad ourselves. Empathy is a two way street. The key in navigating this may be in identifying when an idea comes in good faith or if it is hostile.

Other than making sure to be wearing your glasses if you are near sighted enough that your local licence requires it, glasses are an irrelevant factor. It’s not like you are going into active combat duty…

“Conservative”, “right”, “left”, are meaningless, political relevative terms we should stop using. Instead, we should just describe our values on a select major view points, including power, economy, and social structure.

That made sense before rich people and foreign interests figured out how to use the same tools to get people to part with their money, to also vote against their self interest.

Democracy cannot prevail when people are so easily dupped by ads, fake news, unregulated influencers, and social media algorithms. Democracy assumes people are critical thinkers with the time, energy, and knowledge to filter information.

I’ve done it all my life by following one simple rule: Don’t Do Crimes.

TBF, That’ll be a lot harder for you to do if Republicans get back in power and make breathing, or some other unavoidable bullshit, a crime.

How is it that so many “tough guys” in the States are such big fans of this weakass soft boy.

Trump is a poor man’s idea of a rich person, and a weak person’s idea of a strong man. Always has been.

I’m pretty sure it’s accepted pretty universally that countries must accept citizens back. Reason being, if they don’t, the rejected person becomes another country’s problem, and that is bad for relations.

Admitting you were wrong is like really, really, really hard man. Takes a grown ass man to admit to one’s mistakes. But here we are, a bunch of manchildren and people who have drunk the cool aid and are beyond reasoning.

We’ve got these things called “social media” that are built expressly for the purpose of influencing people to buy more stuff (literally in the name: influencers). And if it can get people to part with their money, you can be sure the same tools can be used to get people to vote against their own interests.

We thought the internet was a tool to spread democracy. We were wrong. The Internet is a tool used to undermine democracy, so long as people using the Internet are not strongly inoculated against organized interests, foreign, and domestic.

… account for a 40% average increase in the cost of labor, […]

Do burger flippers at McD’s really earn 40% more compared to a few years ago?

Just wait till the advertisers find out the eyeballs they are paying for are also just AI sock puppets. Enshitification strikes again.

I get it, we don’t need billionaires in our society. That aside, what makes you think this is intentional exploitation?

Marriage has all kinds of default legal implications ranging from property ownership to inheritance and tax benefits, and may also affect insurance rates.

How you are affected depends on where you live and your personal situation.

Frankly, a blanket statement like this is completely irresponsible. Consult a lawyer on these matters, people. Or spend tens of thousands of dollars later in life dealing with the consequences of ignoring your legal rights and responsibilities.

To be fair, most tools are pretty bad at all other jobs besides the one it was made for. Same goes for an OS. If Ubuntu is made to off ramp people more comfortable with Windows, then that’s just a fine purpose for aln OS.

I wouldn’t describe Microsoft as a walled garden (and Canonical even less). But maybe that term comes with degrees, and different perspectives of what’s tolerable.