If there is somebody willing to pay more for what is ultimately a limited supply of potatoes, why not sell to them. If the price per ounce of chips is too high for you, you’ll buy less chips. People who just can’t live without those chips might buy less candy to make sure they can afford them.

All the while people who make chips are asking for raises because the chip market is hot and the boss just can’t get enough people into the plant to make them. The workers know their boss needs them badly so they are comfortable asking for more. The boss relents because he needs them in there making those chips or he’s gonna lose money with potatoes rotting in the warehouse.

Sellers raise their prices because they have buyers ready to pay that higher price.

Say your have the best restaurant in town and you have a line down the street and everyday you sell out of food before lunch. If you raise your prices the line will get shorter as some of your more price sensitive customers decide to go elsewhere. Keep raising them and your shop will be empty as nobody wants your food at those prices. The “right price” is where you get the most money you can for the work that you do in a day. Right?

You should be looking at your wages exactly the same. Ask for 10k per hour and you’re going to be jobless. As for 5 per hour and you’re gonna have lots of offers but not make enough money. Try to find the “right” wage. This is why wages have been going up faster than inflation pretty much every quarter since some time in 2022.

And no, we shouldn’t punish you or our hypothetical restaurant owner for setting your prices properly.

Also, taxes don’t remove money from the economy so it would be neutral from an inflation standpoint. But that’s a much longer story.

A pretty good number of these are just pointing out differences between colloquial language and specific language.

Botanical language is useful for botanists to communicate with each other but I’m not putting tomatoes in the fruit salad. Thinking of tomatoes as veggies in your kitchen isn’t some MYTH! Calling a tall plant a tree is useful for you and I to communicate. That does not mean we are deceived or attempting to undermine the work of our botany friends.

The sugar one drives me nuts. Like yeah sugar doesn’t cause DSM-5 “hyperactivity”. Like of course not! It does give a little energy boost. And the rugrats will use the highly available energy and become a hilarious unmanageable dufus for a half hour or so.

If you actually thought that candy was going to give your child a diagnosable psychiatric condition… you’re a huge fucking idiot. If you haven’t ever noticed that giving a kid a bag of sour patch kids gets them riled up, you haven’t spent much time with kids.

Nvidia is making a thing and selling it. No matter what happens with AI tech, they are going to keep their winnings.

Everybody else… well they borrowed/raised and spent a FORTUNE on R&D, chips, and electricity to make a product that has no realized commercial value (yet?). They are either going to figure out where the money comes from soon or the bills gonna come due. The next 12 months are going to be popcorn worthy if you like watching the tech industry.

I mean the problem is that on an international level might will always make right. You cannot solve that unless you force every human being on earth to submit to some single authority…

So I suppose it will be solved up all nice and tidy if an alien race comes and enslaves us. Until then, we surf the rising and falling waves of human empires just like we have been doing for 10s of 1000s of years.

Making institutions that have “authority” but no power to enforce that authority except against the defeated isn’t really doing anything except encouraging some of humanities worst instincts (revenge, feuding, and making all conflict existential)

If you want to maximize peace and safety for civil populations, you de-escalate conflict by offering face saving off ramps to the belligerents. Affording grace and forgiveness to people who are probably complete shitbags who don’t deserve it. Humanism is hella hard though, I’m not sure we’re up to the challenge.

I managed to amass a pretty good horde of downvotes the other day with a sentiment that mirrored this comic. I probably meandered and missed my meaning but the comic author nails it

You arrest the leader of a belligerent faction by forming an army and defeating their army. Not by knocking on their door and serving papers. The ICC really doesn’t have any purpose except punishing the losers once the war is over. The winners always seem to walk free, no matter what heinous shit they did to get that win.

Play out the game theory of that in your head and think about what effect the threat of war crimes prosecution for losers (only) has on how and when leaders commit war crimes. (Hint: it strongly encourages doing ANYTHING to make sure you win)

Anybody who tries to arrest him will be at war with Israel and probably the US and probably a lot of other nations. They will break their treaty with ICC before they start that war and everyone fucking knows it. Why do we pretend?

No, it means they were ONLY held accountable because they lost the war.

Nobody prosecuted Churchill for Dresden

People’s take on this stuff always seems so naive to me. All war ever can be viewed as an attempt to arrest the leader of another group for “crimes”. When you get arrested… that means you lost the war. Winning a war means you didn’t get arrested.

The ICC is such a silly stupid waste of human attention. It’s like an idea that children came up with after watching Star Trek. It has no utility whatsoever for our species. We fight, we have winners and losers. If you start a fight with somebody stronger than you, you are gonna have a bad time. If you start a fight with someone weaker than you, others will think you are dishonorable. That doesn’t mean you get arrested.

“Privacy” means two different things depending on the audience. For me privacy means that my information is not being used to advance some organizations commercial interest. For others it means that my information will never be shared with a government.

Don’t advertise to me

Or

Don’t narc on me

I guess I don’t really expect a company to resist pressure from government agencies on my behalf. Especially if I have been using their service to commit crimes in my country. If you are doing things your government would prefer you didn’t, hire a good lawyer and consult with them about what should be sent via email (spoiler, it’s nothing). The mafia doesn’t send emails, or put anything in writing, if you do crimes, you shouldn’t either.

My dude, never underestimate wall streets ability to ignore tsla failing. They will hold that stock. Shorting tsla is a fools errand. The people who own tsla are immune to reality.

Everything good that tsla owners were banking on has already happened. The gravy days are in the past but… the insane valuation persists.

You cannot short stupidity.

There is no world where a 3rd party ticketing company should be able to own, or develop exclusive relationships with a venue operator.

The promoter, act, and venue operator should negotiate how tickets will be distributed when they draw up contracts. In this fucked up reality, the ticketing company owns the venues and controls all access to tickets and their distribution.

TM would still do tons of business in that world. They actually offer a compelling product to acts, venues and promoters, but they should always be in competition with the act and the venue box office.

TM and live-nation should be competitors but they have been allowed to form a vertically integrated monopoly. THIS is the actual shit the FTC was built to combat.

It’s the same thing the right does with government. It is a truism that there is all sorts of “inefficiencies” where the money is going to the wrong people for the wrong stuff.

In both cases, it’s sort of correct and sort of wrong. Corporations, governments, and any human institution beyond a certain scale (a few hundred people), will leak wealth into places it shouldn’t. It’s an unavoidable feature of our species as best I can tell.

It’s fine to accept it, it’s fine to be angry about it. It’s silly to blind yourself to it in some places and whinge about it in others.

I have no diagnosed neurodivergence and I’m looking at that list with surprise. Like, you know how fucking hard I’m working to pretend I can do that stuff?

A person who can do all that shit looks like a superhero to me. No talent… fuck… if that list had telekinesis on it’d feel about the same to me.

Re millionaires: I think that it’s probably time to update your understanding of a millionaire in the US in 2024. See that retired couple in sweatpants at the grocery store? They could easily be millionaires. See that farmer looking guy in line at the drive through? Probably a millionaire. GM line worker closing in on retirement… millionaire

A very large chunk of Americans will end up being millionaires by the time they get into their 50s and 60s. It just doesn’t mean what it used to.

There is a BIG gap between billionaires and millionaires. Becoming a millionaire no longer requires being born rich or getting some special deal. Just getting lucky enough to have steady work for 4 decades.

The idea of virtualizing computer interface displays and being able to lock them to physical locations in space is really cool. But there is no fucking way I would wear a headset just for that. I’d love to have an intangible screen that magically hangs above my stove to help with cooking tasks. But again… headset? No thanks.

This joke is both very good and EXTREMELY local.

I was agreeing with you and being a little sarcastic. Of course you are right, there is nothing genetic about it.

There is very little incentive for native English speakers to learn a second language because English is far and away the most popular second language.

Which I’m sure is a contributing factor to the complete lack of investment in second language education the anglophone world.

Amazingly native English speakers the world over seem to have this genetic predisposition! All of us just can’t seem to get it together when it comes to becoming multilingual.

OR… maybe it comes from being born into mastery of the language everyone else on earth is trying to learn. I get three words in Spanish out before my conversation partner asks to switch to English. What am I gonna do? Stamp my feet and demand I get to practice my hobby and deny them the opportunity to work on a valuable career skill. Nah. We’ll speak in English.

Your ancestors (assuming you are British) created a global language hegemony. My ancestors moved from southern Italy to the US and learned their language.