WiseThat

You, an average person? Probably homeless after you offended the wrong rich person.

If you're rich though, you are immune to consequences.

Cars are also REALLY not that convenient. I'm a dad to a four-month-old, and getting to appointments by bus/metro is SO much easier than using the car.

Car:

• Have to get the fucking car seat in the back seat
• Pack stroller in as well
• Drive with potentially screaming kid who feels isolated and lonely, feel like I'm gonna crash at any moment
• Parking lots SUCK to walk around in with a stroller,have to push kid out into the open before I can see around these tall cars and just hope nobody is speeding

Transit:

• Push stroller right on to kneeling bus/level-boarding platform
• can attend to my baby the whole time, no fussing.
• don't have to worry about parking AT ALL

Yeah, the definition of "Productive" is all sorts of wacky when you consider that, by the numbers, the people doing high-frequency stock trading are some of the most "productive" people on the planet, because they manage to hoard so much money to themselves.

Meanwhile, the people actually providing goods and services that make people's lives better and create new things, those people are "unproductive", because they don't get filthy rich off their honest work.

The real reason we are not "productive" is that foreign investors are paying us to do the hard work of extracting resources (lumber, ore), or generating new research (we have MANY top universities), but then demanding that the money made from refining those resources or selling those idea goes to them, in other nations (typically the US or China)

Okay, so the problem is that because fossil fuels are cheap, most people don't find it very worthwhile to explore new or more efficient ways to do things. This is especially true for the wealthy, for whom gas and heating costs are basically nothing, so they will do dumb shit like heat their homes while leaving windows open, or buy larger and less efficient luxury cars.

The federal program fixes this. It adds a small cost to using fossil fuels, collects that money, and pays it back out to everyone. That means that people who use more carbon than average (which, again, is the willfully wasteful) will see a small penalty for their waste, while the people who are already trying their best to cut back will see a LARGE benefit, as they get a direct payment of cash for doing their part to conserve. If you are about average, there's very little impact on you, but you NOW have an economic inventive to try and economize.

I don't understand how the custom that a married couple adopt a single last name affects this at all, this issue would be caused by the last-naming of the KIDS, not the adults.

Yep, it's fine to roleplay a character who can't be cured, or just prefers it that way. Just as it's also fine to have a tabaxi be a vegan, because it's a fantasy and players are allowed to express themselves however they wish and the lore is always secondary to player enjoyment.

Even in a setting where having your head chopped off is a minor inconvenience for anyone who has 1000g, there would still be people who choose not to have an amputation healed for any number of reasons, and thay choice should be up to them.

I'm pretty sure it was invented as a series of fairytales to get kids (and slaves) to shut up and obey their masters, with the threat that asking too many questions would get them tortured by a spooky ghost.

And then it got WAY out of hand

The problem is that's literally just money laundering?

They are using a shell corporation and bullshit liscencing fee to cover over the fact that this transaction is and should be illegal.

Like, the idea here is that the church is not allowed to donate to a political figure, so they've set up a shell corp in the middle. The church pays $60 to the shell corp, who sends back 30 cents worth of paper, and then passes on 59.70 to Trump as a "licencing fee", which is obviously just going to be spent on his campaign.

It's not all that uncommon for workplaces to require a specific OS

They measure up to 4.0 metres (13 ft 1 in) long, weigh as much as 590 kilograms (1,300 lb)

Huh. Nope.

I would be strongly in favour of abolishing the minimum wage IF AND ONLY IF there is also a guaranteed UBI.

I would happily serve icecream for free if I got a UBI.

Janitors would need higher pay than many other jobs.

Galt's Gulch was much more Socialist Commune than libertarian.

Money had no use as Ragnar was running around distributing gold to everyone on a regular basis, John Galt had built a literal free energy machine and was giving the power away AND giving vanishingly cheap lectures on how to build one. Even the scarce resources (like the only car in the entire society) were being rented out for 50 cents a day.

Plus all these fiercely competitive supercapitalists would just step aside and just allow competitors to operate with no challenge. The iron mine, and coal mine were all running at industrial scales to serve a town of a few hundred (they had robot labour and free energy) and when the copper miner just showed up they just let him stake a an exclusive claim and start digging with no issue.

I highly recommend Adam Lee's critical readthrough on patheos.com https://www.patheos.com/blogs/daylightatheism/series/atlas-shrugged/