Do you have car home or renter’s insurance? If so, when are you planning on setting fire to your home?

If you live in an apartment, you can make your neighbors love you by making garum, an ancient Roman fish sauce, in a jar, indoors, in your apartment!

Instead of separating grocery stores by Vegetable, Dairy, etc, we should separate them into Dry Goods, Moist Goods, Wet Goods, and Iced Goods.

The jars…THEY CALL TO ME!

Use the implant to watch Eternal Sunshine again and again without spoilers.

You’re thinking far too short-term in your economic analysis.

Imagine if everyone tomorrow just started pirating the works of the major video game and film studios. Will high quality movies simply stop being made?

Of course not. There are many ways to structure a film industry. Why are films made by big for-profit companies in the first place? Market conditions have simply allowed for that consolidation. But if we change those market conditions through targeted mass piracy, the current major studio model will disappear in favor of other organizational structures.

Why can’t films be made by collaborations of various worker co-ops? You could have an actor’s co-op, a videographers guild, an employee-owned animation studio, etc. And they could all come together to collaborate on projects for a share of the total profits. Or hell, there’s nothing preventing even a major film studio from being entirely employee-owned.

If everyone stopped buying things from the giants, then the film industry wouldn’t disappear; it would adjust. Companies would become smaller as the “evil megacorp” model became unprofitable. And more space would open up for more distributed production models and for employee-owned businesses.

Your vision and imagination are ultimately simply far too limited.

If the movie is good, you should support it by making a donation to the strike fund of the unions that represent the artists that actually create the movies. You can support artists without supporting the amoral companies that produce these works.

I decided on my moral beliefs on piracy back during the days of Kazaa and Limewire. Back then the RIAA was shaking down teenagers, threatening them with statutory liabilities of a quarter million dollars per song, simply because the law allowed it. They would threaten low-income families with lawsuits in the millions and get them to settle for a still-ridiculous settlement of few thousand dollars. Even the settlements were far in excess of the full retail cost of purchasing these songs.

I decided then that if the law allows this kind of thing, then copyright law as it exists now is fundamentally immoral. And immoral laws are not worthy of respect.

I mostly take a pragmatic approach to copyright. Whether I pay for something is a combination of the quality of the work, the reputation of the company selling it, the customer service provided by the legitimate product, the probability of getting caught for violating copyright law, etc. An indie publisher that treats their people well? I’ll buy it. Mass market schlock made by criminally underpaid artists for rent-seeking megacorps? I’ll pirate that all day, every day.

But morality literally plays no part in it. I learned long ago that copyright law exists outside of the realm of morality. The decision to buy or pirate is an entirely practical one; morality simply isn’t a factor.

Meanwhile, your morality is just the bandwagon effect.

Did you know that actual historical alchemy was often banned by various kings and monarchs? They did so not due to superstition, or because alchemy didn’t work. Rather, they banned alchemy because it DID work.

We now know that you cannot use chemical reactions, however complex, to turn base metals like lead or copper into silver or gold. However, you can use alchemy to give these base metals the appearance of silver or gold. Alchemists could coat coins in durable coatings that would appear to be like silver or gold. Dip a copper coin in the right solution and it will take on the appearance of gold. And you can then take that coin out of the solution, clean it thoroughly, and the faux-gold treatment will remain. It’s not just a layer of paint resting on the surface; the upper layers of copper atoms have actually chemically reacted to produce compounds that give the appearance of gold or silver.

So, even though alchemy didn’t work to truly turn lead into gold, from the perspective of a monarch, that didn’t actually matter. Because when it comes to currency debasement, making a fake gold coin so good that it fools people is just as good as making real gold. The alchemists couldn’t turn create real gold coins, but they could create counterfeit gold coins that could be quite convincing in the right circumstances. They didn’t need to create a forgery that could fool a modern PhD chemist with a lab full of equipment; they just needed something that could fool an illiterate 12th century merchant at his shop. The process:

1. Take a mold or press a stamp of one of the king’s official gold coins.

2. Use the mold or stamp to cast, press, or forge coins out of cheap metals like copper or tin.

3. Apply an alchemical process to make the copper or tin coin look like gold.

4. Spend the counterfeit coin as a real coin.

Coins were a better target than bulk gold like bars. With a bar, you would notice that the “gold” has an incorrect density. But a counterfeit coin, mixed in with a larger number of legitimate coins? Easy to pass off as the genuine article.

Kings often banned alchemists from their realms. Practicing alchemy was often a capital offense. In terms of true elemental transfiguration, alchemy failed. In terms of the ability to create spendable wealth from nothing, alchemy absolutely did work. From the perspective of a monarch looking to protect their currency from debasement, alchemy was a very real threat.

Works have meanings beyond their surface-level detail and literal meaning. They also have themes and clear implications. And Idiocracy certainly has those. It has clear undertones of eugenics.

The first is the clear implication that population demographics require active management. In the movie, there was no mass government program to encourage births among those of low intelligence and discourage births among the intelligent. This situation developed entirely naturally through culture acting on its own. A viewer could only conclude that if this horrible future is to be avoided, that we need to start worrying a lot more about who is reproducing in what numbers. We either need government mandates or major cultural initiatives to encourage reproduction among the deserving. Idiocracy never outright endorses eugenics, but the implication is obvious. Writers aren’t idiots. They know the clear implications of their work. You don’t end up with a political movie that clearly implies the solution is genocide without realizing that’s the obvious implication.

The second is the theme that intelligence is something that can be bred or selected for at all through the social stratification we have now. Are those with PhDs really more intelligent, by writ of birth, than those that never graduate high school? Or it mostly about circumstances of birth, opportunities, personal choices, or even neonatal environmental pollutant exposure? Do we have any real evidence that intelligence differences within the species are something that can truly be selected for? Hell, what kind of intelligence are we talking about? Scholastic ability, emotional intelligence, executive reasoning, etc? There are many types of intelligence. And the very idea that the poor and those of lower educational attainment are of genetically lower intelligence is a key eugenics theme.

Yes, Idiocracy never comes right out and explicitly endorses eugenics. But the implications and themes are undeniably pro-eugenics.

Your hair is the roof of your mouth.