It’s not like they’re handcuffing convicts to the spacecraft because all the free people declined to go up.

How? Legitimate question.

Most people do the right thing when it’s easy and profitable. Having ethics means doing the right thing even when it’s difficult.

(Not taking a position on space programs. Tax-funded programs deserve more inspection than privately-funded programs.)

This ties into my original point. Once you can’t verify what happened and are reporting your deductions, you are invariably introducing your opinions. I would prefer to read “we don’t know what exactly happened, but what we do know is X” rather than “we know X, therefore Y must also be true” without any way to actually verify Y.

If we accept that most people won’t pay a subscription, and take ads off the table as an option, then I can only think of 2 other options:

* charitable patrons (this is a thing, but I guess not effective enough?) * selling other products to subsidize the free content

These both appear to have obvious problems and for a dubious goal of making another party subsidize the visitor’s consumption cost.

Having the visitor cover their own cost seems reasonable. What currency do they have other than money or attention? Maybe a small work problem that provides an abstracted service to a separate payer (a la reCAPTCHA, but for $).

Corruption will never be solved. It could possibly be reduced if there was less ROI. I expect that would require shrinking the government so there is less centralized power. A limited federal government and more administrative power handed back to the states (within reason) would be interesting.

These things are not mutually exclusive.

If you don’t want to abide by the rules, you are not welcome and you should decline. Perhaps the organizer isn’t aware of your preference and your declining helps inform them. If they prefer your presence more than they like their silly rules, they might change them.

Deciding to attend a social gathering where you intentionally ignore the rules that you don’t like is narcissistic and rude behavior.

Are you genuinely suggesting that there is a basic social rule that says no other rules can be impressed on guests at an event? I don’t think that stands up to scrutiny.

Every event has rules — it’s inherent in being “an event” as opposed to pure chaos. Whether or not the rules are strange is open to individual interpretation. If you can’t abide by the rules of an event you are not welcome at the event. People’s polite tolerance of others’ anti-social behavior does not mean the behavior is welcome.

Genuine question. I realize they aren’t currently claiming AGI. Having to manually specify a mode seems like a non sequitur to me.