This just makes the internet a place only for the overtly shameless, which is certainly different, but you'd need to convince me it'd be better.

We pronounce epitome as "epitome" and not "epitome".

Justin Trudeau when he was elected was the most popular politician in the country by a lot.

It's a huge drag to debate this issue because multiple pollsters have published polls of both Justin Trudeau and Carney, and the results are seldom identical. Consequently, there's a lot of research involved both of polls and pollsters, and the end result won't be conclusive.

It is worth noting, polls aside, that the Carney election both finished off the NDP, and resulted in Conservative Poilievre losing his seat. And recently, Conservatives have started crossing the floor to join Carney. Justin Trudeau was popular with Liberals. Carney is generally popular.

The thing about breaking the law is that when you don't suffer any consequences, the strictly optimal thing to do is to keep breaking the law.

Eh, sounds clever but not really.

People can and do think they're "getting away with" a lot more than they come to realize once they're indicted.

Your point remains, of course, that no law is actually self-executing.

Well arguably TV did destroy people's brains, just a lot slower and less efficiently.

And in fairness, dosage is the difference between a painkiller an a heroin addiction.

It's worth noting that this was a pretty active debate as TVs were going from one in the household to one in every room. "We don't want to put a TV in our kids' room, it'll rot their brains." And there was research to back up that it had a negative effect to some degree.

So why are we surprised that when we put a TV in the kids' hands things got even worse? Meta testified on the stand recently that they're not a social media company anymore, they're now all about video. Tiktok is the new TV. Every app wants to Tiktokify. The money from TV, just pushing an endless stream of video to someone, is very good.

I pretty much agree with this.

We were able to go back to one TV in the house (at least I was), and even avoid a big chunk of the ads when watching TV (by paying for Netflix/etc) and even radio (Spotify/etc).

Except we now we put a garbage TV in every hand.

It's a terrible idea because it's a tiny screen; because it's not a shared experience, but an isolating one; because it's been proven that it's bad for eyesight/myopia. But most of all, it's terrible because the content is crap.

Spending hours watching a never ending sequence of low effort 2min videos that need to deliver on the first 30s (or they're skipped) is not the way to make anyone smarter/saner.

"Do you or a loved one suffer from an abundance of brain cells? Speak to your doctor today about whether The Jersey Shore might be right for you!"

Notably, Dune is a work of fiction.

Isn't it wonderful how much fiction can teach us about reality by building scaffolds to stand on when examining it?

Fiction is I have a hypothesis, and since it is not easy to test I will make up the results too. Learning anything from it is a lesson in futility and confirmation bias.

Gedankenexperiments are valid scientific tools. Some predictions of general relativity were confirmed experimentally only 100 years after it was proposed. It is well known that Einstein used Gedankenexperiments.

What lesson is there to learn here, is humanity at risk of moral homogenization? Is it practical for factions of humanity to become geographically distant enough to avoid encroachment by others?

Fiction is modeling going by a different name.

Assuming they haven't massively changed operations to crank up supply, which seems to be the case, they shouldn't be massively hurt with a price drop.

If this price goes on for a longer period though, I assume that won't be the case.

Well an example would be if they for example took out massive debts on the back of an expected Revenue stream

I believe Eric has said he always makes his first solutions with Perl.

I am 100% comfortable with anybody who openly discloses that their words were written by a robot.