If you had actually ASKED the Sioux of the Black Hills about this, you’d know they’ve told pretty much everyone “yeah we don’t like Mt Rushmore, we don’t like Crazy Horse’s relief carving either, but we think destroying them is more disrespectful than just leaving them to fall apart on their own.” Like, this isn’t an uncommon thought. It’s just more complex than “blow them up”.

Don’t forget cops and military protecting stores in disaster zones, full of supplies that will wind up getting paid for by insurance anyway and will go bad before the store reopens.

AND they actively steal small brand recipes and ideas, then have a contract manufacturer churn it out at a cheaper price.

No no, the worst thing would be having a beer with Lofwyr and everything seems totally normal after.

S-K is my favorite Corp to build stories around because it’s so incredibly easy to make lore-aware players incredibly paranoid.

The dragons are oligarchs.

Yup. The trans community has been doing this with HRT meds for YEARS because it was either straight up illegal, or almost impossible to obtain access because of the dozens of hoops you had to jump through.

And the fact that they steal recipes from small businesses and rebrand them.

Don’t take my word for it, here’s a decent piece on the subject from Taste.

https://tastecooking.com/we-need-to-talk-about-trader-joes/

+1 for If Books Could Kill. They’ve kinda run out of shitty famous self help books, but they still do good rundowns on other books now.

I’ll also recommend Michael Hobbes’ other podcast, Maintenance Phase, which is largely about health grifts.

Pretty much this. It’s the radium craze, or the ozone craze, or a whole bunch of other fads - everything has to have AI/LLMs integrated in some way or it’s not “interesting” to shareholders.

Pretty much this. Elon was never interested in what he SHOULD HAVE BEEN: making an inexpensive electric vehicle that’s widely available. Tesla had the tech to do so, but they were being driven to make insane decisions like moving the gearshift to a touchscreen (gee, I love taking my eyes off the road to shift gears), or making “futuristic” doors that actually cannot physically open from the inside (whoops, guess those just can’t be recalled since DOT has literally no teeth).

Also, I think Tesla saw the way the wind was blowing on standardization. Eventually, the DOT will enforce a standard plug, and if it’s not YOURS, suddenly you have to either remanufacture the cars you’re making, or otherwise refit them to work with the new standard.

Nobody said the managerial class had any brains.

One can seriously hope, and moreover hope that the trains are electrified. We seem to be pathologically afraid of re-electrifying rail in the US.

Yup, this is a hitlist, not a “prayer list” or whatever.

Before we started legislating car safety, more often, if you got in a crash at speed, you would be either dead or seriously injured. It was not uncommon for a front-end collision to shove the entire steering column into, in some cases THROUGH, people’s ribcages because there was no shock absorption. “Defensive driving” - avoiding a collision at all costs - was taught mostly because of this sort of problem.

I’ll speak to the effectively of modern safety engineering myself - I was involved in two serious accidents within the past two years that, were I in a vehicle without safety features, would’ve left me dead or crippled for life. One, my Jeep spun out on a patch of wet road and got slammed by two other vehicles in a pinball situation - airbags deployed and I was left with some soreness and a thoroughly-wrecked vehicle. The other, my work van got T-boned by a semi truck at speed while crossing an intersection - once again, the airbags deployed, the seatbelt locked me in place, and the fact that the rear of the vehicle was designed to squish in on itself saved me from, at the very least, a severe case of whiplash, and more than likely some severe head injuries.