Supplying people with basic life necessities should not need to garner a profit.

This goes for food, water, shelter, but also electricity, healthcare, public transportation, and internet.

(Coincidentally, most of these are basic human rights.)

Society as a whole experiences net benefit (even am economic one) from those, so society as a whole should fund them.

Yes, this requires taxes.

Thanks, that’s helpful.

Question from someone outside the US who’s genuinely curious about why law-abiding citizens feel the need to carry guns to begin with:

If you’re aware of this, how often are you carrying a gun in the first place? When/Why?

Following what you say, there’s obviously the scenario where you have to defend your life (not your property).

On the other hand, as I see it, the victim in the article would not have benefited from a gun in the car and the odds of a shell-shocked BF turning the whole thing into an actual shootout would’ve been >0.

I’m not trying to argue crime statistics or morals here, I’m genuinely interested in a gun owner’s perspective.

In particular I really like the episodes that deal with interacting with other civilizations, diplomacy, and exploration more-so than say, an anomaly episode.

In light of this, and since you were able to work through the not-so-stellar episodes of ST, I’d strongly argue that Babylon 5 should be your next stop.

It has a slow start, some more mixed episodes, dated special effects and both main characters (they switched after season 1) are plain “heroic American leader” types, but virtually everything else is top tier even today. An excellent political plot, humor, great characters with genuine growth.

Just be aware that it is different from DS9 (personally, I like both).

Battlestar Galactica (the new one) and The Expanse are probably worth pointing out, too. To me, they’re the best high-production-value sci-fi shows that didn’t sacrifice their plot. Nevertheless, both are far more grim than the shows you’ve mentioned and overall “feel” different.

I genuinely like this idea, because it would allow to reach both goals.

The problem I see is that this would probably go down the same as the bodycam idea, with inconvenient recordings vanishing due to “technical issues”.

You’d need an independent third party doing life recording and delayed release. Subjectively, the US don’t have a great track record with these.

Easier idea: Just publish last week’s encryption key. Probably won’t happen because some tech supplier will lobby for a more expensive solution.

Found the morality relativist.

Except at that point the Mafia are somehow supposedly the good guys?

??

I’m no expert on the technical side of the protocol, but my BT devices only ever connect to sources they’ve been paired with.

Why would this be more difficult for hearing aids than for headphones?

My take:

Most things (especially abstract ones) that exists beyond the scope of the small-hunter-gatherer-tribe setup our brain is developed for: Quantum mechanics, climate change, racism, relativity, spherical earth, …

What separates us from the dogs is that we’ve developed abstract analytical tools (language, stories, mathematics, the scientific method,…) that allow us to infer the existence of those things and, eventually try to predict, model and manipulate them.

But we don’t “grasp” them as we’d grasp a tangled leash, which is why it is even possible for medically sane people to doubt them.

I’d argue that you can even flip this around into a definition:

If a person with no medical mental deficiencies can honestly deny a fact (as in: without consciously lying), then that fact is either actually wrong, or it falls into the “tangled leash” category.

I genuinely can’t parse this argument.

Criminalizing the victims of human trafficking makes said crime easier, because it creates hurdles for it’s victims to report it.

To cut back on the hyperbole that you’re receiving for your comment: Even badly managed oversight would be better than none at all.

Amazon warehouse workers are being exploited brutally in a system that needs fixing, but there’s much less trafficking and violent coercion involved.

My father was uninvited from the yearly family reunion due to him not joining the anti-transgender circle jerk that formed there.

Ironically though I still get emails asking me to come, for the record I am my father’s transgender daughter.

I might be misreading your situation, but just from this limited context, your father seems to have his priorities straight. Feel free to tell him that a random internet stranger thinks good of him.

Office buildings would like a word with you.

It’s the reason so many large corporations a talking about RTO, office real estate prices are set to plummet if everyone’s keeping to WFH.

Sadly, that’s only tangentially related to housing (although I believe to have read something about new subsidies for landlords converting office space into appartments).

I’m aware.

I just didn’t want to go into detail with this particular can of worms.

There is a plausible economic incentive to do this:

Reputation.

This happens less in markets with few, big sellers and lots of customers locked into long-term contracts (like ISPs), but it does happen occasionally in high competition markets where customers can take their business elsewhere easily.

Restaurants are a good example - where I live, a host might hand out a round of after-meal shots on the house to encourage a big table of uncomplicated guests to come again.

A landlord and their tenant(s) are at a natural conflict of interest to begin with.

Also, for most tenants, the rising costs for many goods and services associated to housing are bundled into rent, so to them, it’s their landlord who’s jacking up prices and being frugal with repairs etc.

Next, the term “landlords” encompasses not only uncle Mike who invested his life savings in two apartments to secure his retirement, but also the millionaire who owns a dozen houses and the middle manager who doesn’t even own the units they’re managing but has to represent a large company.

So landlords make for easy targets of frustration to begin with.

A landlord who is, on top of that, intent on not only covering costs (including their own), but wants to create generational wealth get rich(er) quickly, will have to squeeze their tenants more.

Remember: wealth isn’t created. It’s extracted.

(Yes, there’s money genuinely being generated somewhere in the realms of credits and banking, but my LL isn’t being paid by a bank. They’re being paid by me.)

Because one common assumption was that the universe might contain as much antimatter as matter.

Which begs the question: Where did it go? We would notice a huge amount of annihilation reactions in the solar system.

“Antimatter falls up” (is gravitationally repelled instead of attracted by normal matter) was an easy hypothesis to explain that.

The Behemoth from the Expanse Series had a laser with a range of literal light years.

Granted, it was a comm laser, but they did weaponize it at one point.

Even if we assume that the beam had a solar-system sized diameter after 4 ly, a weaponized output should still be in ship-killer range after an AE or five.

Ultimately, the weapon was never fired (and would have melted half the ship if it ever were).

A TTRPG campaign I wrote and ran two decades ago for a group of friends.

I knew only a fraction of what I know now, was overambitious and railroady - it should have turned into a disaster.

Instead, things just… clicked and we had a few months of gorgeous fun. Years later, one of those friends confessed to still getting goosebumps when a key scene’s theme song plays.

(Obviously, a core reason for this working so well was that we were just a great group.)