Of course, monopolists force you to pay extortionist prices for their services in your local market, while they get to take advantage of the global market to keep down their expenses, and move their revenue around to avoid taxes. If corporations get to be global citizens, why can't humans be free to buy anywhere in the world, and move anywhere in the world however they please.
Animals who see infrared are cold blooded. My guess is that the hardware that evolution can easily produce to detect and process infrared gets flooded by the heat of warmblooded animal and is therefore not effective for them.
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.
The US has already strongly reduced the use of a very addictive substance in the past by making it culturally unacceptable in the case of cigarettes. Japan has the same culture already with food, where there is strong cultural pressure to not abuse food. Perhaps it is time to bring back shame towards overeating?
US corporations managed to make food addicting by using science to formulate food in such a way as to trigger a massive spike in dopamine followed by a massive drop a short time later. Combining that with an individualistic culture that leaves many lonely and anxious, it’s no surprise that people depend on substances to make themselves feel better. The average american puts themselves to sleep with a 2 litre of cola, a bag of chips and a pint of ice cream while playing games on their cellphones way late.
If you saw a population of people injecting heroin into their veins and getting frail, would you say you have a frail ness epidemic? No. What you have now is a food addiction epidemic. You should treat it as you treat any other addiction.
My main complaints with protests these days is that they seem to be astroturfed to keep the discontent people busy with protest that cannot bring about any meaningful local changes. Either they are about far away things happening in the world, or they are about vague ideas with no concrete steps to achieve any meaningful impact.
Regarding the Manhattan project: you can't compare the cost of research and developing a novel device vs the cost of developing the same device using stolen secrets.
Scarcity of skillset. If there are 10x as many people than now willing to do the job, companies would offer much lower salaries while making the same or worse work demands.
No one needs 32GB, the same way no one needs a MacBook Air: you could very well lug around an iMac or a tower PC if you don't actually need macOS. That doesn't stop me from being annoyed at the arbitrary market segmentation that Apple enforces to get me to buy one of their "Pro" machines just because I want more memory, thereby sacrificing the portability of the device for slightly better thermal management or a CPU with better performance.
Also, in the past, I could have bought the base device and bought a couple sticks of memory to upgrade the memory. Now, I cannot do this because of anti-consumer decisions that apple made to prevent user upgrade of memory. The least they could do is offer me the possibility to pay their inflated price for more ram.
Is this the year where Apple increases the memory on the base model above 8GB? Will they finally allows you to have 32GB of memory on the macbook Air? Will Apple finally do like all other computer manufacturers and allow you to connect two external display while having your clamshell open? Or will they just force you to buy the macbook pro max ultra ultimate m4$ if you want any feature?
Kids spend too much time thinking about social issues that they are not ready to deal with because they are used as pawns in the culture wars or manipulated to feel like they need to consume more. Society has a responsibility to stop manipulating our children and giving them problems they have control over and can deal with. In plain english: stop telling kids to fix global warming and that they need plastic surgery and start telling them to clean their room and prepare healthy meals for themselves. Help them feel like they have control over their own lives and their environment and they will stop killings themselves.
I'd be curious to see where these 14 million vacant units are located. It's quite likely that the majority of them would be located in places where people do not want to live.
Not to mention that construction has seen little gains in productivity over the past few decades resulting in the Baumol effect in the industry. There's little reason that constructing new housing cannot be automated to the degree that car construction is automated, but a variety of regulatory hurdles and little foreign competition makes building construction prices rise steadily. We need a well-funded startup to pull an Uber and indiscriminately sidestep regulation to disrupt the real estate market.