By that reasoning there is nothing preventing you from being prosperous except your own greed.

Go out into the wilderness and be prosperous like the cavemen. Having your tapwater taken away shouldn't hinder you, those prosperous cavemen didn't have the luxury of any modern amenities. Just the streams they could find and the food they could scavenge or kill.

Abandon your greedy insistence on enjoying modern luxury and go prosper. You're the only thing stopping yourself.

And I'm sure you'll have no trouble staying connected when you find the cellphone tree. After all, if humans didn't create anything then everything must be naturally occurring. It's just an illusion that modern technology requires creation of parts that could never exist naturally.

To be fair, Ford builds them as work trucks. Like you said, the biggest thing you can buy without needing an upgraded license.

The triple cab, pickup style box, and lift kit are all aftermarket. Straight from Ford it's at most a king cab with a frame rail back. Then you're supposed to put on some kind of working back (toolbox, dump truck, lift arm). That's the kind of thing you see in official marketing images.

I used to work for a company that built garbage compactor units and put them on the back of trucks like these. The main selling point was that you only need a regular license and you can fit into narrower spaces than a full size garbage truck.

They live more comfortably than you do. In an environment literally designed to maximize their ability to grow.

Y'all continually fail to understand that farmers have a direct financial incentive to keep these animals happy and healthy. Stressed animals don't grow nearly as well as happy animals, and small animals don't make money.

Taking proper care of the animals is more profitable in the long run, even if you assume that all farmers are heartless monsters who enjoy watching needless suffering (we aren't by the way).

Exactly.

Everyone loves to support local independent small businesses when it's convenient. And some people even have the gumption to hold to those ideals when it's difficult. But the vast majority don't care most of the time.

When big business makes it cheaper and more convenient to buy from them, most people will. I'm just as guilty of that as anyone else. When money and time are plentiful I love supporting a local bakery for lunch and a local book store for that greeting card. But when I'm pressed for time or money is short, it's straight back to Walmart to get a card and an entire meal for the price of one baked snack from the local place. And in 10 minutes instead of half an hour.

And the megacorps don't need a majority market share to win. They don't even need a large enough market share to be profitable, they just need to make sure your market share is too small to survive. And once you fail, then they can change practices away from kill competition and back to make money.

Do you actually care that much about the creative story behind the latest widget that was added to your new appliance? Are you going to be choosing the 30% more expensive option every time because of that concern.

We aren't talking about art here, very few people give a shit about getting a "personal connection" with their new toaster. We're talking about buy use forget consumer goods. And if someone else is selling the same quality and the same features at a lower price, that's the one that your average Joe will buy. And will keep buying until you can't afford to keep making and selling yours because you can't compete on the metrics that people care about most.

And you're going to compete with them on price then? Even when they can and will sell every unit at a loss until you're driven out of the market. Unless you're wealthy enough to be part of the good ol boys club, you can't afford to play that kind of game. They can.

None of those motivations you listed actually need IP to be abolished though.

If you're trying to differentiate yourself from the competitors, having IP protection is jn your favor. The large corporation you're competing with can't just swoop in and destroy you by making an identical product at a such a loss of profit until you run out of money.

If you're fueled by creating open source knowledge, well you can already do that. You can choose to release your IP into the world for anyone to use unrestricted.

And for a sense of community, well that's just the second point again. Abolishing IP was never going to make you feel community with Amazon. But having IP isn't preventing you from having community with individuals. You can still work on a project together without abandoning the idea of IP ownership.

So real world money that I can't actually take into the real world. This just feels like calling they're premium currency dollars and pretending it's not locked into their system.

Laypeople are perfectly happy to give baseless opinions on my actual field of expertise, only fair I return the favor on other fields. Also how do you propose we get a study which shows the problem if you aren't allowed to ask the question which prompts the study until after the study is done?

Besides, when societal dogma is driving more than anything else then the only expertise you need is to be a member of that society. And nobody can deny me that qualification.

You're not helping anything. Shit like that just builds resentment.

No, I'm dismissing the idea that the "medical consensus" is unquestionable truth.

If questioning the medical consensus was always wrong then we'd still believe that handwashing was a waste of time, and cigarettes would probably be lauded as a way to resist the miasma.

When the consensus changed to say that cigarettes and underage drinking are bad, that didn't overthrow the idea that handwashing is still good. And when the consensus changes to say that the modern approach to transitioning has caused more harm than help, that won't overthrow the idea that underage drinking and cigarettes are still bad.

Sure, I can go harass people on gymnastics forums if that's what you want. But in that case it's only fair that I start harassing people on trans forums as well. I wasn't doing either of those things before, but you said I have to so I guess it's time to go bully some trans people.

I have no problem with condemning the people who push children into intensive training for competition gymnastics. And no, I don't believe them either when they argue that "the child wanted this." The parents wanted a child who fits a certain mold and the child is just trying to make their parents happy, or atleast not angry depending on how externally abusive that parent is being.

Also I absolutely support the idea of banning under 18s from getting nose jobs, boob jobs, lip fillers, taking PEDs, etc. Heck throw in piercings and tattoos as well for all I care. No procedure and no parental permission exceptions.