I mean, for the sake of the hypothetical, perhaps we assume that Wolverine has undergone a deep religious awakening and has decided to convert to Judaism entirely out of his own free will as an adult of sound mind and body!

Holy strawman, Batman!

Yeah, if anything, 1945-2025 may end being a historical anomaly. The US was an aggressively expensive colonial settler state though most of its history. We’re still settler colonial, but we’ve at least not been aggressively expansionist for nearly a century.

Over 300 years of aggressive expansion (if you include the colonial period.) A return to orthodoxy after an 80 year hiatus doesn’t seem so unusual in that regard. Really, everyone who remembered why we stopped acting that way has now died of old age, so we now have only our shared national mythos to guide us. And our culture has continued to celebrate its expansionist past, even if we’ve walked away from it as policy over the last few generations.

I mean, every American voter certainly has more moral culpability than say, any of the millions of Japanese civilians we incinerated in WW2.

The second amendment is still useful. You use the little guns to obtain the big guns.

And some people use full sized buses as their personal vehicles. Weird edge cases aren’t how we define words. Your exception proves the rule. This isn’t “umm actually,” this is you being deliberately obtuse.

We’re talking about how 99% of people actually interact with these machines, not a handful of oddballs living in rural Alaskan homesteads. Those few rare edge cases are not how words are defined.

Planes, for 99% of the population, are more like buses than cars. When people say, “flying car,” they specifically mean a flying vehicle that:

1. Can provide point-to-point transport.
2. Can be operated on your schedule.
3. Doesn’t require expensive licensing and training (at least no more than a regular drivers license.)
4. Can be owned or operated by the typical American family living in a typical American neighborhood.

This is what a flying car is, and it’s why planes are not flying cars.

Have you literally never seen any media depicting flying cars? Are you really that incapable of seeming the difference between this:

And this?:

For 99% of the population, the idea of using the latter for a personal vehicle is comical. You need to have a pilot’s license, and you need to own a god-damn runway in order to use it as a personal vehicle! The vision of a flying car has always been something that you could park in an ordinary suburban garage, pull it out into the driveway, and vertically takeoff without requiring you to own a giant piece of land. This is why you only see two types of people use planes for personal transport - the incredibly wealthy, or folks who live in extremely rural areas where large amounts of land are comically cheap. And it has to be something you can keep on your own land. If you have to drive to an airport to use it, you’re no longer fulfilling the point-to-point on-demand dream that the vision of flying cars represents.

Again, you need to focus on the social definition, not the technical one.

Yeah, the grocery store and food supply chains have been jacking up prices on everyone. Restaurants aren’t somehow magically immune from paying the higher food prices.

Exactly. This man has a rapist mentality.

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Sure. But you need to think lived experience, less technical specifications. Think of how these machines actually interact with everyday life. Car and bus are socially defined categories. We could just classify them all as automobiles, but we have separate classifications for cars and buses because people interact with them in fundamentally different ways.

Planes are not flying cars. They’re flying buses.

Pity the poor shepherd gamer who must sell his ram to buy more RAM.

The ID contains more information than what is printed on the front. There’s a reason it’s digital.

Seriously. The men in here don’t even realize (or maybe they do) that they are advocating for the most oppressive forms of forced body covering out there.

Simply exposing some piece of flesh does not give others permission to stare. The attitude of the comic is the very same attitude that forces women to wear burqas in conservative Muslim countries. After all, if you don’t want your face and hair stared at and creeped over, why wouldn’t you just cover your face and hair?

Someone can have an attractive face, it’s still impolite to stare. You’re literally advocating that women wear burqas. Logically, if women don’t want to have their faces stared at by creepy men, they should have to cover their faces up.

Just because someone exposes a part of their body doesn’t give you permission to stare at it. It’s impolite to stare at someone’s face, at exposed tattoos, or exposed cleavage. Really it’s simply impolite to stare at anyone’s body.

Otherwise, I hope a really aggressive bear of a gay man joins your workplace and starts obsessively staring at you. If you don’t want him staring at your face obsessively all day, you can simply wear a mask.

OP postulated that if algorithmic pricing is barred, that companies will simply raise their prices to the prices that they previously charged rich people.

Companies are not cartoons. They don’t try to maximize human misery; they try to maximize profit. Often maximizing profit does maximize human misery, but ultimately the goal is to maximize profits.

Charging everyone the current rich person price would be idiotic for companies to do. Everyone except the few wealthy folks would just refuse to shop there. Even if the company is a monopolist, people will just go without. At some point, people stop paying for Comcast, even if Comcast is the only net provider in their area. If Comcast decides to charge $10,000/month for internet, I’m just skipping having wired internet at my house, even though Comcast is the only wired provider at my address.

Imagine a company uses algorithmic pricing to price its widgets. They charge between $100-200 depending on customer’s income. But these price tiers weren’t chosen arbitrarily; they were set experimentally. They tried out a bunch of prices and found that someone who say, makes $60k/year, will only be willing to spend $120 on the widget. Jacking the price up to $200 will not mean that the guy making $60k will pay $200. It means he’ll simply not buy your widget.

Companies already try to maximize revenue. The complicated pricing structure of a company that uses algorithmic pricing is already at a local optimum for maximizing the company’s profit. For each income band, they’ve figured out the price they can charge before people start walking away. They can’t just jack up prices, as the prices are already set at their most profitable maximum.

And I don’t even care if we’re talking essentials like food. Jack up the price of any food product and people will just move to the a less luxurious product. Charging $100/lb for chicken won’t result in middle class people paying $100/lb for chicken. It will just mean middle class folks not buying chicken.

That isn’t helpful. You don’t have to have a PhD in economics to understand basic supply and demand.

That’s not how market forces work, at all.

Well yes, the incantation typically involved calling upon the ghost of the Emperor Nero.