Marijuana was banned to target minorities, but alcohol prohibition mostly was repealed not because white people like alcohol (white people instituted prohibition in the first place, after all), but because alcohol is stupidly easy to make from a wide variety of substances so most cultures around the world produce some kind of alcohol with their local crops. You can use pretty much anything sugary: fruit (wine), honey (mead), and grains like rice and wheat (sake & beer). It is really hard to ban a substance when half the foods in our diet can be turned into that substance if you let it sit in a jar or bucket in your closet for a few weeks.

Prohibition was repealed primarily because it was a futile effort and with alcohol being banned, very strong distilled spirits were the economical way to discreetly transport and serve alcohol since it is easier to hide a few bottles of liquor from authorities searching your truck or business than to hide large barrels of low ABV drinks like humans had been brewing and drinking for millennia. It is also a lot easier for people to drink themselves sick with distilled drinks, so ultimately it was decided that it was safer to make alcohol legal and regulated instead of having it still plentiful, but getting people sicker and funding criminal empires. It’s a lot easier to ban one plant than to ban every food source with sugar in it, but the marijuana prohibition has clearly led to many of the same problems as alcohol prohibition did.

There are still people who would love to ban alcohol if they feasibly could. Many places in the US still have local alcohol bans, I currently have to travel two counties away to legally purchase liquor and one county away from home to purchase beer or wine. Prohibition only ended on a federal level.

Someone has to stock and clean and maintain all that space and pay for the electricity it takes to illuminate and air condition such a huge area. Good luck convincing people to increase their taxes in exchange for indoor tennis courts and lounging areas. I love the idea of having more free community spaces, but the last city I lived in had the downtown library basement essentially become a homeless encampment until they closed off that entire floor of the library and then the city sold the entire library to developers who plan to demolish it and build something else there. With people struggling financially and spending most of their time staring at screens, there isn’t much demand for government spending on new public spaces.

Paper tea bags usually contain polypropylene or another plastic so they can be heat sealed shut. They aren’t fully compostable.

Well keeping it cheap and poorly regulated helps feed into the dependence on it. If it was treated like a precious good only meant for essentials that can’t be replaced by anything else, maybe we wouldn’t have ever built up sprawling suburbs and exurbs that require a car to do every little thing, are searing hot asphalt hellscapes to walk through, and are poorly served by mass transit systems because of the previous issue. Maybe we also wouldn’t have plastic in mothers’ placentas today if we had cracked down early instead of covering it up for the oil producers’ sake.

Oil is a finite resource, if all the droughts and mayhem from climate change don’t get us first, sooner or later the party will end and we will have to become a non-fossil fuel dependent world again. I doubt we will produce enough vegetable oil to replace it.

You’ve lost Fox News viewers at “(not all, obviously)”. Nuance isn’t allowed, people can’t be varied and have different interests within a particular group. All sneakers are the same, so Trump shoes equal grandpa’s New Balance shoes equals shoes from the latest brand collaboration with a celebrity that isn’t Trump.

The point is that it would be better as a nightmare that never truly happened instead of our present reality.

It costs $7 million for a 30 second spot. The Super Bowl is the only event where you can find 1/3 of America watching it, including many who are not into sports but dragged by loved ones to a Super Bowl party, so advertisers have a long history of trying to come up with the most flashy, catchy, outlandish, high production ads they can produce in the hopes that it sticks in the audience’s mind and gets people talking about it so they will tell the other 2/3 of America about talking frogs or whatever the hot new thing is. Each year there are whole articles out there about “this year’s best Super Bowl ads”.

You have to keep in mind that American football is extremely suited to ads with all the breaks in play, so it has been a favorite of advertisers for a long time. I don’t know why so many people fell in love with a game with so little action in the first place, but this is the end result of that.

What makes you think this isn’t how I code? Offices love me, this is way cheaper than a bunch of ergonomic equipment.

There was opposition to a solar farm near me that ultimately still got built. I had no idea there were lots of outright bans on building wind and solar now, this is pretty alarming.

Actually, the premiere of Alberta is trying to privatize the province’s healthcare. Just look up pretty much any Danielle Smith speech on health care, it is insane what she is attempting. I have come to the conclusion that Alberta is the Texas of Canada. They love the oil industry, hate the government, want to privatize everything, and even have their own half-hearted secession movement.

For that matter, Alberta even toyed with replacing the Royal Canadian Mounted Police with their own local provincial police. I am American so I don’t entirely understand the situation, but it sounds about like if Texas decided to kick out the FBI and have the Texas Rangers take over FBI duties within the state.

Ok now I am curious where you live that you have to provide ID to shop. Here in the US we scan the items and then swipe our payment card, the ID is only used to check your age for tobacco and alcohol purchases which can’t be sold to minors. An employee has to come look at the ID to make sure a minor hasn’t borrowed someone else’s, so it doesn’t even get scanned. Employees just swipe their work badge and confirm that they checked your age.

As for the pain, a lot of self checkout systems have very limited space and can be awkward to run all your items through. Manned stations have the conveyor so you can unload multiple items from your cart at a time to be scanned. They also have more end space so you can have room to bag everything if you are doing a big shopping trip.

I don’t think you necessarily need to know about the IT aspect if you have enough knowledge in some of the other aspects of running the business. However, if you don’t know the IT aspects, you should absolutely have a right hand person who is very familiar with the IT aspects and manages that and updates you on that side of things.

Musk has fired enough people who voiced criticism that I think he is only left with yes-men, not experts who can freely offer meaningful guidance and be taken seriously.