Hamartiogonic

Like a cab, but it's your car and you take care of everything.

If you need a car only once a year when going to the airport, a cab will be cheaper. If you need to go somewhere at least once a week, driving your own car will be cheaper. Likewise, if you need only a little bit of cloud storage for your photos, free iCloud or Google Drive might be fine. If you need a whole lot of storage, self-hosting becomes cheaper.

When you take a cab, do you need to worry about maintenance, gasoline, insurance, or other things? No. The same goes for cloud storage. When you throw your photos on Google Drive, you don't need to worry about electricity bills, security updates, or hardware maintenance.

When you drive your own car, you need to be a responsible driver and a car owner. Maintenance is your responsibility. Likewise, self-hosting means you need to be a responsible server admin.

Sounds like there’s also a lot of potential for soviet style gulags, forced labor camps, or basically just slavery. If that’s what USA is offering, many dictatorships would probably be glad to make a deal. Once USA figures out how to have gulgas on their own soil, the expenses will suddenly vanish entirely.

But isn’t that also a very expensive way to murder people? How can they afford a massive system like that?

On top of that, the rest of chemical industry is largely dependent on oil, with oil-based products literally everywhere. Even asphalt and bitumen used in road construction comes from crude oil. Lubricants, dyes, detergents, waxes and emulsifiers are also derived from oil, just to name a few.

Even when we develop clever new methods to manufacture all of these products from plant-based materials, the logistics chain to manage the volumes required by modern life is not there yet. Building this infrastructure will take a long time, just like it took decades to create the addiction we’re currently in.

The petrochemical industry has significant economies of scale, making it difficult to dethrone. Also, there are some shady political shenanigans to ensure its continued existence. Getting rid of oil is going to require some radical changes.

You can totally have a "socialist worker's party" that is actually anti-Marxist. You can also privatize some state-owned enterprises to maximize profits while still calling it a socialist party. Might as well abolish the unions while you're at it. These labels are just marketing baits for luring in the working class.

The blueprint is out there, just look up the history of NSDAP, and you'll see what I mean.

On the downside, they probably ended up spending more money and receiving less in return. If they bought their junk from Amazon, they also contributed to upholding poor labor practices. Nobody wins in this situation except for the corpos.

That is just amazing. How the human mind works is so bizarre at times. Even when there’s a good deal, people just don’t take it? Wasn’t it enticing enough?

Either way, some companies exploit the same mechanics to sell trash for a high price. It’s so weird and pretty dark.

Others might call it straight-up lying, deception or even misleading. Calling it “Amazon sales policy” just makes it sound nicer.

If you’re really good at customer service (i.e. manipulation), you’ll say the price just went up 10% this morning, but you’ll get a discount of the same amount, because you’re such a great pal. Basically just the normal price, but it feels nicer.

I suggest we switch to Planck based units. Just slap on a suitable multiplier to make the final unit practical in normal life and engineering. Basically like the mol unit but with a more precise and natural foundation.

If the fundamental constants of the universe aren’t exactly constant, we’re screwed and there are no good units.

Yep. This stuff is surprisingly complicated, and that’s why we need to measure the day using a standardized unit instead of defining the unit with the day.

Incidentally, Wikipedia has a nice graph about the variation of the length of day. It’s surprisingly messy and pretty far from the ideals of antiquity.