If you give everyone $2000, then landlords can successfully raise prices because now people can pay that much, and as mad as they'd be about their UBI going straight into the hands of businesses, they're unlikely to go homeless or stop buying food to protest it, so they'll pay it. That ability and willingness to pay is called demand.

I swear gamers have the most insane Stockholm syndrome. It's super common to see them say that it's a problem that there aren't enough "exclusives" for a console. Like, dude, the problem is that the console sucks next to its competition. You shouldn't want product tying to try to make you buy it. They're literally all just branded commodity computers that are locked down to tie purchases (an illegal, anti-competitive practice) at this point. This was already litigated multiple times 20-30 years ago and the big companies consistently lost every case. Sega even lost a case where a company displayed the message "PRODUCED BY OR UNDER LICENSE FROM SEGA ENTERPRISES LTD" for a game that Sega had not approved because it was required for the console to boot, and they couldn't try to use trademarks to stop someone from developing for their console.

It was asked to do a specific thing, and then its brain turned off/was reallocated to something else entirely (e.g. CRUD programming or answering celebrity trivia). It doesn't just idly think in its downtime. If we want it to do something else, we need to ask.

Anyway, obvious clear reason why firmware signature gating should be illegal.

I think I made it clear with my "we moved somewhere nice" that that's not what I'd like either. It's not a kid's fault that their family sucks. But it's not every other kid's fault either. Schools should do what they can to discipline these kids (generally, they don't). But they also need to still teach the kids who did have loving parents instead of spending all available resources on the kids who didn't, and likely this means separating groups of kids with different needs, which they are loath to do. But it absolutely is the parents' fault. Unless someone died or suffered an extreme random personality change, that includes single parents.

People have zero concept of how incredibly absurdly fast even a slow computer is. Storage is literally 1000x faster than it was 15 years ago. My first job was firmware for enterprise storage arrays and IIRC we were aiming for 3M IOPS. That's not much more than what kids can put in their PS5 now, and these were arrays running companies like Walmart and JPMC.

(and then weirdly, when I leave, I'm "pulling the ladder up." Shouldn't it be good riddance to me? Since I'm wrong and simply bigoted, of course)

I don't really feel like quoting a bunch of studies for something obvious, but yes. Go look at SES (or educational attainment as a proxy)'s relation to family structure and screen use policy. Lower income kids are far more likely to own a smartphone or spend more hours on screens, for example. Kids whose parents went to college are far more likely to have 2 married parents. And if you've lived around both groups you'll find this is kind of obvious.

I see a lot of empty words around how I shouldn't identify poor behavior, but no suggestions for how we end it. "Break the cycle" okay how? Education is free and lower income areas generally have more school funding. We have programs for rent, utilities, food, medical care, and just straight cash.

How do we get people to value themselves and their families, much less something abstract like our republic? In this very thread there are people who are presumably somewhat wealthy saying e.g. divorce is fine.

This isn't pulling the ladder up behind me. It's noticing a ladder, climbing out of a pit, and walking away. Ladder's still right there. Meanwhile others are asking why we don't try to make ourselves more comfortable in the pit.

We do our part, and we've decided to live in an area where others also do their part and try to build a community and a society, and not in an area where people tear down the community around them, or make excuses for those who do that. Again, what exactly are you chiding me for? What should I be doing differently? It's not us keeping them down. We're gone.

I don't have a problem child. Neither do any of my neighbors. In fact it's apparently normal for 20% of my local school to test at the 99th percentile on state tests, and they're extremely polite. Weird. My wife's volunteering to lead our local girl scout troop and helps regularly at the school. It seems we're doing our part, so I'm really not sure what else you would like.