I'm not trying to be pedantic, but people who go to the level of "eliminate sugar completely" are usually pretty knowledgeable, so I'm trying to get into the specifics.

On a societal level the idea of reducing sugar is a positive one, but trying to eliminate sugar is the wrong idea. As far as I know eating a bowl of greek yogurt with homemade granola, raspberries, and maple syrup (or even some powdered cane sugar, which I don't use), has substantially more fiber, less sugar, and more nutrient balance (and less likely to overeat) than sitting down and eating a mango, yet under the current advice trend I'm doing it wrong by "adding sugar" to the greek yogurt, and I'm totally fine to eat the mango since the sugar was in there by default.

Given that factory farmed fruit has been having increasing amounts of sugar over time it's really a lot more about nutrients, fiber, and sugar, than it is about blanket rules.

Saying "no added sugar" is a positive high level societal rule, like "eat 3-5 servings of vegetables and fruit a day" but if you get into absolute rules among nutritionally educated people, things like "no added sugar" don't really track.

Also the funny tendency humans have to dislike the people who are most similar to them. Someone who is at least recognizing factory farming is bad and willing to even think that far is more similar to a vegetarian than the people who don't give a shit and never even think about where their food is coming from.

Obviously there's the cognitive dissonance aspect to point out, but we are all doing that to some extent.

The only possible non legally driven reason I can think of would be if they think the tradeoff of extra friction (and lost customers) is more than offset by fraud protection efforts. This seems unlikely cause I don't see how that math could have changed in the last few years.

I do agree there's plenty of places in other countries that have natural beauty, but the US has a combination of very large natural spaces, kept in a mostly natural state (not over developed), and does a decent job maintaining it. This is relatively rare (although the US is not the only one).

The US Forest Service has nothing to do with the amount of ads and billboards in US cities.

The word younger is implying to me that US would be considered the youngest in a list of current democracies, which I wasn't aware of.

For example some countries that have regulated monopolies can allow in small amounts of foreign products to motivate their own state sponsored companies, but without that and assuming its not something relatively straightforward like a utility or an oil company, I'm not aware of any that innovate effectively.

Using or not using a LLM is not itself a measure of how deluded someone is, for example anytime I ask a LLM a question (it can be nice for long form questions that don't translate well to a google search, I require that it provides source links for every claim. This tends to make it reply more accurately but also lets me read the page source for their top level explanation.

Yeah the use consumer grade rocket components made SpaceX become viable compared to bloated rocket companies. Short range anti missile systems are not large ordinance, they rely a lot on technology for tracking targeting, and they are not a "weapon" (as in they prevent damage not cause it except inadvertently) so it actually seems like something pretty feasible for a tech company. Build it with consumer grade hardware and you could deploy a ton of them.

Yeah I wonder about that sometimes, the maximal balance between efficiency and inefficiency. Some things are clearly a waste (like advertising as you mentioned) but then other stuff is part of innovation, and it's sometimes a bit fuzzy between the two. On paper it's wasteful that Mazda, Toyota, Ford, etc. all had to independently develop a sedan, yet it would be far worse if we only had one car company to choose from (far worse because of how monopolies inevitably stagnate).

I haven't directly experienced Japanese work culture (just language and traveling) but it seems like they value hard work above all else, which makes innovation almost a threat. You might take away someone's opportunity to show "hard work" if you removed a difficult task.

I suppose I see "any idiot" as a more general phrase, like "idiot proof", not directly meaning that anyone who uses a LLM is an idiot. However I can also see how it would be seen as disparaging.

Also, while there's a lot of examples of people entrenching into a certain behavior or status and causing problems, I also think society is a bit harsh on people who struggle with change. For people who are less predisposed to be ok with change feels like a lot of the time the response is "just deal with it and don't be selfish, this new XYZ is better for society overall".

Society is pretty much made up of personal emotions on some level. I don't think we should go around attacking people, but very few things can be considered truly objective in the world of societal analysis.