It is arguably preying on this trait that made the pricing possibleAsode from that, you can’t honestly suggest to that just ‘not being that way’ is a valid option. Sure that can work to a small degree for specific individuals, but ‘just don’t be the way you are’ to solve some specific challenge, likely at the detriment to many other traits you may not want to break, is thoughtless and ignorant advice.

Is the gift so expensive that you feel it necessary to reclaim the money? Would it feel as though something was missing if they hadn’t got you anything? It seems like the more appropriate choice in this situation might have been to accept the gift generously and simply not used it, or not used it often and continued to use the older item. Then, if asked about it, perhaps explained it at that point instead of making a point of explaining that you wanted to return the item and get the money for it.

Funny thing is even that number would be based on all the people who can pay 20 but not 800. If it all has to be balanced by the users it would probably be an order of magnitude… Or the market would play like it logically should and it would be like 3 companies paying a million a month. But what would they do with it? Sell it at a loss for like 20 per user and hope they figure out some way to make money :)

Probability manipulation seems like just being able to transfer your consciousness into whatever multiverse contains the outcome you prefer. All the other versions of you still experience all the bad outcomes, but you get to surf through your best guess at the ideal one.

Then your second thought was the wrong one

Well the population itself is not even 1/100th ‘at capacity’ in the US. The distribution of the population is certainly a cause for concern, and infrastructure is sorely in need of upgrade, but those are management problems. These are arguably exacerbated by the the fear of ‘who’ the increased infrastructure would be for, but it is in no way driven by lack of resources or space. We have huge swathes of crop land subsidized into non-food crops, crazy amounts of unoccupied land, ready access to transportation if we had drivers. Maybe the most restrictive resource is water and workforce. No magic fix for the former, but immigration would directly fix the later.

You may not want more towns/cities, and additional building should be done with pollution in mind, but it really comes down to ‘not in my backyard’-ism. There are a lot of people that exist, through no fault of their own, and to say they should live in even more cramped and dangerous environments than you just so you can afford more elbow room is exactly my point. It’s not legal or logistics reasons the US doesn’t want more immigration, it’s primarily culture and racism. Good or bad, i’d be willing to bet when someone moves in down the street with a German accent most people will think, at worst, it’s kind of interesting, but if they are dark skinned or speak Spanish, a whole bunch of people that didn’t bat an eye at the German immigrant, legal or otherwise, will suddenly have concerns about ‘over population’.

No, not on it’s own, but it’s rarely on its own. In the US opposition to illegal immigrants and racism tracks nearly one to one.

One could imagine a country where illegal immigration itself was a distinct problem, where the society was balanced in such a way that legal immigration was at an optimal rate and additional people coming into the country had downsides that outstripped the positives, when though, for example, the immigrants were of the same culture/class/standing as the existing citizens.

The US, on the other hand, is nowhere near an optimal legal immigration rate, even though we benefit pretty significantly from both legal and illegal immigration. Illegal immigrants, for example, contribute significantly to the economy while not drawing ‘as many’ benefits away. Overwhelmingly the actual arguments against illegal immigration are grounded in cultural differences and language and, to put it simply, the desire for one class to want a reason to consider themselves better than another class by an easily recognizable yardstick.

Oh nooooooooo

It knows what it did

From what I’ve seen, hail rarely harms the paint at all before the point where it will leave dents.

Likely a mixture of these answers, though if you want to wait for an expert to weigh in maybe ask for that. A roadway is obviously a very different environment with a lot of money and research put into ensuring it can handle a lot of traffic and weight, having to accommodate worst case scenarios so it’s obviously going to have a very strong base, and a comparitively very durable and thick base of asphalt. Your driveway, on the other hand, is probably going to be covered in a mixture very much driven by price. If you do the minimum underlayment and thickness, you’re probably going to need to give it every advantage possible to avoid rework.

Right, if it’s good enough it can quit advertising itself.

Really the only reason for a logo like that is to advertise to other people that you are wearing good quality. Upper income people who can afford actual high quality can’t effectively ‘show off’ that way, so they usually content themselves with flying under the radar while still comfortably fitting in wherever they feel like, or showing of in other ways like cars and vacations, but mid or lower income didn’t have as much leeway and have to take advantage of what they have available if they want to feel either part of a group or better than others.

Pretty much ‘anything’ clothing. I guess if it’s a clothing brand of good quality and there is no choice except to wear it with the logo they stick on it might be an exception, but anything outside of that is basically paying to belong to some club with basically no membership requirements except spending money.

Not sure if fruit trees would pass the “use daily” criteria, at least not in the generally acceptable sense.

I have a workshop that was converted from a barn quite a long time before I was born.

Yes, but it can only handle up to two syllable words, 5 the grade level vocab and it only follows the first 3 words of your prompt and fills in the rest with narcissistic mad-libs.

Maybe it’s not a being, maybe you have some generic abnormality that can be exploited somehow. Bonus points if the abnormality is regeneration.

Well, it might be a ‘software design issue’, but it’s really more of a branching point that was made long ago and reflects the world we live in. It could be fixed, but the point is that error messages are often not logged but people tend to act like they must be, and that their vague description of an issue should be enough to track it down like ‘something flashed on my screen last week’.

Hell people can’t even describe useful parts of an error that’s correctly happening…‘it’s not doing ANYTHING!’ can often mean anything from not booting, to the mouse not moving, to ‘it’s working perfectly but icons are snapping into place instead of staying exactly where I’m dragging them’.

Well, ‘proven wrong’ is a bit of a stretch. ‘will soon block screen capture’ doesn’t leave a lot of wiggle room, but also isn’t that crazy to read into it that maybe it would block screen capture on the presenters screen… especially if you grant that it might only have control over the teams portion of the screen. I’ve had it black out windows on my own machine even when not presenting.

But further than that, it’s not fair to say everything has to be read only from the most or the least charitable viewpoints. Context is a thing and if you’re even a little bit familiar with the history of software enshittification, it’s reasonable to assume that an uncharitable reading is fair without assuming the app will now melt your computer for spare parts if you try something that is disallowed. ‘As shitty as we can get away with’ might be a good rule of thumb.

That’s a charitable reading, and likely justified by the article, but based only on the phrasing, it’s just as likely to read that as assuming Microsoft will block all content in order to ensure the safety of sensitive data. Sniff tests have to be adapted when things tend to stink in general, or companies regularly try to cover up their smell.

But how does that answer OPs question about why is friends upon in Western society? That’s what ‘dawg’ was commenting about.