As if I could afford any to begin with.

To respond to your last paragraph, there are regualtions to combat these things and cultural shifts we can make as populations work themselves off of the fear and stress of poverty. Everyone is terrified of not having enough money and there are so many studies showing the effect that being poor has on our ability to think critically and to plan longterm.

You live in a world that is pretty much designed to make everything seem like this is all “human nature”. We don’t have to be like this, certainly not to the degree we’re at right now, and we have ample evidence to show that this is true. I do not know why you are so resistent to these things, Liz, but I hope one day you can break free of it and see a better world than one where we need to always have the gnawing fear of abject poverty clawing at the backs of our minds 24/7. It doesn’t have to be like this.

Sure, though they also need to pay people, run the platform, run Youtube music, pay for rights to things, and a bunch of other stuff. I’m not about to say that they aren’t another greedy corporation, that would be crazy, but ya’ll expecting to pay nothing are flatout ridiculous.

Honestly, I just did that. YouTube has costs, storing and sharing all that data at high resolution and speed, so expecting that service for absolutely nothing is a little weird. We can find reasons that they’re bad, that’s fine, but good or bad they do have to pay for things.

I also pay for the Patreon of one of my favourite mandolin players because I want him to keep making content and I wanted access to backing tracks and the Discord server. He can’t do it at that level for free, and that’s ok.

Still need to do it.

I have one example, and it was the Conservative premier from Ontario who finally got rid of the single-family home only zoning restrictions. Unfortunately for conservatives that’s not exactly a right-wing policy and he likely only did it because he is corrupt as hell and developers wanted to increase density to make more money(whatever gets us there, I guess). I also haven’t looked into it and it could be very badly done, plus the amount of horrid shit he’s done really kinda does not makenit worth it.

Basically, when they’re paid off by special interests and do things uncharacteristic of right-wing policy then things go ok. Hardly a ringing endorsement.

Weird, everyone else could tell and even huge amounts of their own population could, too. Empires of the past didn’t have the internet but these days you can very easily* see how the ant colony works.

*it does require some level intelligence, but it’s pretty much all there.

If they were trained they’d probably not be constantly afraid of everything and would be able to hit their targets more often than they hit innocent bystanders.

What a sad person you are, to get so defensive when someone would ask you to not use a word that many people find offensive.

Money is power when the lack of it is death and/or suffering. If someone wants to work a little more or does something particularly awesome then ok, they get a cooler thing, but when you take care of everyone’s basic needs and you properly enforce taxation then everything on top is just a little bonus and not a runaway train to tyrrany. Money is not the core of that system but it can still exist.

I was thinking about this conversation earlier while watching a video about vaccines and was reminded also that the profit motive, for many companies in that sphere, actually prevents them from releasing technologies that could help people long term because they make more money off of costly, short term solutions. Life saving medicine is worthless to these people of they can’t charge a premium for it and but you better believe they’ll lock down that patent so no one else can get to it, just in case.

See, that’s the thing about putting money first, it doesn’t matter how you get it. Sometimes you gotta innovate, but these companies are chasing easy money, not honest money. I mean look at stock market traders and you’ll see an army of criminals and thieves. The very concept of private health insurance is making gobs of money off of people you never plan on actually helping in their time of greatest need. Large corporations will spend untold millions on propaganda and hush money schemes before they’ll actually make improvements. 3M knew the dangers of PFAS and still dumped it into the environment and hurt a lot of people. GM did the math and found that recalls for a faulty ignition would be more expensive than paying out any settlements if someone died so they just let it ride because the lives of their customers are less important than lining their pockets.

I need you to work on imagining a better world. It’s not that far away but we’ll never reach it if we don’t even try.

A massive reason why people are hard to convince in the system we live in is because they’re scared of not having enough money. Trying new things is hard and scary when you don’t have a lot of money to go around. On the flipside, if all you have to do is pay them then it doesn’t matter if your idea is good or bad, only that you have enough money to pay for it and your competitor doesn’t. A big wallet is not a good replacement for convincing people that an idea is good.

I don’t care which is easier when one of them is basically cheating. Of course it’s simpler to essentially bribe people to care, but that’s not a system we should strive for. I don’t mind a challenge if the challenge is fair, or near enough to fair.

Besides, money is definitely a fine thing to have and we know this. The problem is when it is made the central and singular goal of a system and when people who don’t have an active income stream are left in the dirt.

“Another country’s politics” bro do you have any idea how much the US influences the rest of the world? My local conservative politicians pull talking points straight out of the US and a few have even visited Trump directly to buddy up with him.

Stuff like this spreads, too. Our news is tightly woven together and we get secondhand smoke from the awful things that happen in the US and I’m tired of it.

There are many hills to die on, but I have standards and those standards are important. Just pick a better word next time and move on, it’s not that difficult.

“The people in power don’t want you to know these things!”

“Sir, you are literally the president and have control over, or have proven you can ignore, most branches of the government.”

“Shhhhhhhhhhhh”

Soooo many other words, just pick a better one.

The US: “haha the French surrender a lot”

Reality: The French actually protest shit and US citizens will roll over and die if you tell them cheeseburger prices might go up a dollar if they resist.

I’m in Canada and we’re really not much better in many ways, but we can always look to the US for comfort knowing we’re not that bad.

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Of course black patents, in a world where their ideas could be stolen and they could even be barred from access to them, went down. Like, that’s in a system with a heavy profit motive.

People will always like a little treat for doing their task. That’s at a very basic level, though, and when you start talking about everyone needing a “profit motive” you’re now talking about an economic system that claims that few people would do anything without a deeply selfish reward. And yea, not everyone would have the really great ideas but they would do work, and we can see that happen. I literally don’t have a job right now and just to keep busy I’ll go help my friends with stuff, for free, because I like to keep busy and feel productive. The low salaries in my last few jobs weren’t the reasons I left, it was because the management made it very clear they didn’t value any of us and were essentially stealing our labour to enrich themselves.

Like in the patent example, the thing people want is for their work to be recognized. If you steal their work they get pissed, obviously, but most people are happy to do things for others. I even know conservatives who are genuinely motivated to make the world a better place and who want to supprort others(except that they’re really stupid and easily misinformed so they end up doing it wrong and it turns them sour on anyone who isn’t directly in front of them).

Let’s invert the reason why people out of a job leads to political unrest: People with longer hours and low pay are simply largely unable to risk anything when there are no social safety nets, and it gives them more time to actually get into politics and learn about shitty things that the government is doing. It’s a big reason that the USA is the way that it is right now but many countries in Europe have shorter work weeks, better pay, more protections for workers, and stronger safety nets.

You’ve got everything backwards because it’s all you know. You’re justifying the suffering being inflicted on you because it’s easier than facing it.

There is also an entire mountain range of innovation thrown out because private business didn’t want it because it might negatively affect their bottom line. It’s staggering how many good ideas and smart people were thrown to the side because the company that owns them decided that it would cost too much, or how many times a company locked down IP that they never planned to use because they didn’t want to spend the money but also didn’t want anyone who did use the idea to compete with them.

What you have is a misunderstanding. Of course a lot of stuff that is “successful” is supported by corporations, that’s the system we live in no matter how good or bad it is. And you’d be shocked to realize how many government organizations or projects that only survived through government funding were major developments, if you looked. You’d be even more surprised just how many people can innovate without fancy machines and the only reason they need them is for mass production, not for the design and prototyping phase.

Seriously, we do not need to live with unpredictable, dangerous billionaire middlemen in order to make the world a better place.

I don’t know about their rage-baiting but it’s super easy to shit talk the US and, considering how much damage they do to everyone else, is pretty understandable.