The Big Mac set in Japan is ¥750 right now.

And Burger King is even cheaper.

It baffles my mind that people would pay $18 USD for that shit. I visited the US last year and while prices in general had definitely gone up since the last time I was there, there is absolutely no justification to pay $18 for McDonald’s. It’s crazy.

The fuck are you talking about?

You’re replying to things I didn’t say. Are you hearing voices or something?

Try again. Do better.

What about when people vote against their own interests?

They have the right to do so.

What about when the majority suppresses minorities?

That is a bad thing. But talk about a dictatorship?? That’s one person suppressing everybody else.

Dictatorships are not intrinsically bad.

You can have good dictators, even if they are rare.

Hard disagree there.

But it really depends on what you value as good and bad.

For instance, if you think that people have an inherent right to have a say in how they are governed, then a dictatorship can never be good because it infringes on that right in the most serious of ways.

If you think a stable and sustainable system of government that will last beyond the life of a few leaders is important, then dictatorship is not a good system, because one good dictator creates no guarantee that the next dictator will be good, and establishing a system of dictatorship affords a bad dictator that much more power to ruin lives.

Non-wankers, in fact.

So you decided to make a pro-China anti-US argument by linking to a flat-earther meme?

You alright there?

There’s no new jobs for horses after the combustion engine was invented to do physical labor

Bingo. And this time we’re the horses.

I doubt that stores will only have one employee

It’s already here, my dude. Not every store, but some are doing this now. It’s just a question of how fast it will spread.

IT guy here, I am not that worried about AI

That’s pretty much because you’re an IT guy. You’re in an industry that AI won’t replace any time soon.

If you were a cashier, or a stock clerk, or a busboy, you should be terrified by AI. The speed at which those jobs are already vanishing is astounding. The other day I was at a restaurant, and I never interacted with a human. The ordering was done by touch panel at my table, the food was delivered to the table by a robot and I paid at an automated terminal. I don’t know how many staff were on duty but it had to be a fraction of what it would have been a decade ago. I bought clothes last week and there was one employee in the store, overseeing the self-checkout lanes (but really just sitting idly by in case anyone had issues). I read an article yesterday about how robots are now being distributed to convenience stores that can clean, stock, and reorder items, so these shops will pretty soon have only one employee in them.

The gimmicky shit that your browser AI and chatbots can do is nothing compared to how this is already revolutionizing the world.

The author wasn’t making a logical argument, so there’s no need to address his “logic.”

He’s a tourist who spent some time in a foreign country, and came to some very sweeping, rash conclusions about an entire country’s culture. It’s shallow, judgmental, and tragically commonplace among self-centered tourists who think they can understand an entire culture after 2 weeks living in a hotel on someone else’s dime. I am so done with the “white dude waxes philosophical about Asian country” trope.

“It is the result of Korea maximizing the bad points of Confucian culture and the shortcomings of capitalism.”

"In Confucian culture, there are no individuals…

"In Confucian culture, we do not try to empathize with mental health problems…

"When you learn Korean culture…

I love when tourists (let’s be real: rich, white, American tourists) visit a country and come back a fucking expert on the culture, filled with all the judgmental wisdom to dish out why that culture is inferior to their own.

Fuck this clown and his “wisdom.”

Yeah that jumped out at me too. What a privileged bunch of crap to spew.

Our brains are instead programmed to focus on our immediate needs.

Yes, we are “programmed” to buy things that we need to live, like food, shelter, and medicine. I’m pretty sure most people would save if they fucking could. You’d think that “a certified financial planner and expert in financial psychology and behavioral finance” could come up with something a bit better than another avocado-toast-like victim blaming.

Thank you! I’ll give that a try.

I’m using Cloudfare for DNS. I’ll check out what they have available.

Filthy, injured, and in Florida. It hardly gets any worse than that.

It’s even better than that, actually, because it also undermines one of the key fringe ideas that the alt-right is spreading: the independent state legislature theory. If the Supreme Court steps in to override Colorado’s decision, it would preemptively utterly destroy one of the tactics the right is planning on: have red state legislatures deny victory to anyone but Trump despite whoever wins the election.

Considering that Taiwan has been de facto an independent country for a long time, its easy to see why “forever maintaining the status quo” is the best choice for most people.

Declaring independence from China when they are already functionally independent from China would just be kicking a hornet’s nest. The outcome of a war with China would end in either a bloody defeat in which their country would be leveled and their freedoms taken away, or a bloody victory resulting in… the current status quo, just with lots of dead people.

So why would your average citizen desire anything but the status quo? They’re already a free country, this question is just asking them if they’d like a war for the fun of it, or their freedoms taken away.

Except karma isn’t real, and wishing something isn’t putting anything out. It’s just a wish. So you’re totally safe doing it.

Part of me wishes that that particular person experiences the same level of “goodwill” that they give to others. I don’t like wishing ill on people

Don’t guilt yourself for wishing ill on people. Those people deserve it, and you are not being a bad person by wishing ill on those who deserve it. Society tells us it’s bad to do that, but all that does is make us feel guilt and let bad people get away with it. Wish ill, and do it freely!

I agree Reddit is toxic. I’d argue reddit actually stopped being Reddit around 2016. But it’s posts like this that clog it all up and are partially why it is the way it is today.

I gotta agree with this. The toxicity in any reddit thread increases dramatically when the poster pre-emptively complains about all the toxicity they expect to receive. Whereas when you just ask straight without going into a whole speech about comment quality, you get much better replies. Particularly because it’s hijacking your own thread; changing it from whatever question you wanted to ask into an analysis of the comments.