By that reasoning there is nothing preventing you from being prosperous except your own greed.

Go out into the wilderness and be prosperous like the cavemen. Having your tapwater taken away shouldn't hinder you, those prosperous cavemen didn't have the luxury of any modern amenities. Just the streams they could find and the food they could scavenge or kill.

Abandon your greedy insistence on enjoying modern luxury and go prosper. You're the only thing stopping yourself.

And I'm sure you'll have no trouble staying connected when you find the cellphone tree. After all, if humans didn't create anything then everything must be naturally occurring. It's just an illusion that modern technology requires creation of parts that could never exist naturally.

Humans absolutely created prosperity. The thing that was already here was nomadic hunter gatherer tribes that were perpetually one bad winter away from death.

Cutting off necessary resources is cruel. But refusing to acknowledge that those resources are provided by man made systems doesn't help you. Going to bed hungry is very natural. Wild animals do that all the time. Tap water is not natural, everything about how that water got from the river into your tap was man made.

Just because it's natural doesn't mean it's better, and just because it's man made doesn't mean it's bad.

They live more comfortably than you do. In an environment literally designed to maximize their ability to grow.

Y'all continually fail to understand that farmers have a direct financial incentive to keep these animals happy and healthy. Stressed animals don't grow nearly as well as happy animals, and small animals don't make money.

Taking proper care of the animals is more profitable in the long run, even if you assume that all farmers are heartless monsters who enjoy watching needless suffering (we aren't by the way).

Exactly.

Everyone loves to support local independent small businesses when it's convenient. And some people even have the gumption to hold to those ideals when it's difficult. But the vast majority don't care most of the time.

When big business makes it cheaper and more convenient to buy from them, most people will. I'm just as guilty of that as anyone else. When money and time are plentiful I love supporting a local bakery for lunch and a local book store for that greeting card. But when I'm pressed for time or money is short, it's straight back to Walmart to get a card and an entire meal for the price of one baked snack from the local place. And in 10 minutes instead of half an hour.

And the megacorps don't need a majority market share to win. They don't even need a large enough market share to be profitable, they just need to make sure your market share is too small to survive. And once you fail, then they can change practices away from kill competition and back to make money.

Do you actually care that much about the creative story behind the latest widget that was added to your new appliance? Are you going to be choosing the 30% more expensive option every time because of that concern.

We aren't talking about art here, very few people give a shit about getting a "personal connection" with their new toaster. We're talking about buy use forget consumer goods. And if someone else is selling the same quality and the same features at a lower price, that's the one that your average Joe will buy. And will keep buying until you can't afford to keep making and selling yours because you can't compete on the metrics that people care about most.

And you're going to compete with them on price then? Even when they can and will sell every unit at a loss until you're driven out of the market. Unless you're wealthy enough to be part of the good ol boys club, you can't afford to play that kind of game. They can.

None of those motivations you listed actually need IP to be abolished though.

If you're trying to differentiate yourself from the competitors, having IP protection is jn your favor. The large corporation you're competing with can't just swoop in and destroy you by making an identical product at a such a loss of profit until you run out of money.

If you're fueled by creating open source knowledge, well you can already do that. You can choose to release your IP into the world for anyone to use unrestricted.

And for a sense of community, well that's just the second point again. Abolishing IP was never going to make you feel community with Amazon. But having IP isn't preventing you from having community with individuals. You can still work on a project together without abandoning the idea of IP ownership.

So real world money that I can't actually take into the real world. This just feels like calling they're premium currency dollars and pretending it's not locked into their system.

Exactly. You're unlikely to spend a significant percentage of the total cost on your third party inspection. But that third party inspection will give you information worth way more than they cost. Either the peace of mind that you're paying a fair price (and doing so fully aware of the issues that you may need to resolve), or encouraging you to negotiate lower/walk away. In all 3 situations you end up leaving the deal more confident that you made the best choice, and usually the inspector earns that money.

Whoever is in charge of that road needs to make up their mind. No wonder the crew got sloppy, it's changed direction atleast three times. And that's just from what we can see on the Google maps photos that go back to 2008, no idea how much longer this may have been going on.

Though in this picture I assume left is correct because of the car facing left that obviously got on the road upstream of this intersection.

It's worse because a large portion of people here are the people who don't use Facebook/instagram/tiktok. So while this isn't a new extreme in terms of privacy breaches, it is a new level in terms of what's potentially affecting us directly.

Heck, it feels like we only just left the time when "don't poop for 3 days" wa sthe dead horse of lemmy memes.