Had cheap goods. With the way our food costs have exploded in the last five years we almost certainly wouldn’t have leverage over local production.

Ignoring that, the behavior that protectionist trade laws are avoiding is: Country A using tax subsidies to artifically deflate the cost of a good, flooding the market of Country B where it isn’t subsidized and eventually putting the producers there out of business so they become reliant on trade with Country A. Protectionism like this isn’t wrong, but people generally don’t like being told that they’re being barred from less expensive options so it gets dressed up in nationalism.

The USDA has banned hormones and steroids since the 50s and like 5% of chicken gets the (perfectly safe) chlorine rinse. European countries use the same rinse on leafy vegetables, they just banned it on poultry because they thought it would make processors complacent.

Only a small portion of US chicken gets the chlorine rinse, a practice that the EU recognized as perfectly safe by the way. They banned it because they didn’t want poultry processors to get lazy about other hygiene practices. They don’t import American chicken because the cost difference would destroy the local farms.

Ground squirrels. Marmots, chipmunks, prairie dogs, that sort of thing.

Tree squirrels don’t hibernate.

Playing rhythm or fighting games with any seriousness can’t be done with the extra delay. 20ms is enough to spoil it. If you happen to have a good fiber connection and an Nvidia server in your city it’s probably fine but that isn’t the case for a lot of people. (And I’d rather have more control over the experience anyway)

Having a gun can turn that fleeting ideation into a permanent decision real quick.

Statistically speaking, buying that handgun is going to dramatically increase your odds of dying by firearm.

If it helps, tell your boss I hate them and will stop going somewhere rather than install another fucking app.

I’m sure it made the rest of the plan more affordable, it was twenty years ago I don’t remember. That one detail was egregious enough to etch in permanently.

It has influence disproportionate to the number of followers. (But Hinduism and Buddhism should be ahead of it anyway, this is a very Western perspective)

Irrelevant, unless you think the body is an essential element of a being.

Well I’m pretty sure it’s impossible technology so it’s not upending anything, but mostly I just don’t think the “self” is as rare and precious as a bunch of people seem to.

Are both versions of you equally “you?”

Yes and then immediately no. Their experiences diverge from that point to become two distinct people with a shared past. It’s entirely irrelevant which body is “original”. Continuous stream of consciousness is overrated.

Yeah but he can’t taint the sun.

I prefer “naughties”

It would think it’s you, but it’s not.

Cogito, ergo sum. I am not the collection of atoms I was when I was born and I am not a continuity of consciousness from before the last time I slept.

What if they’re in a coma for long enough that all of their cells are replaced? It’s all dancing around the question: assuming there is no soul, what is the self?

The body is dying but the conscousness continues, that’s where the self is anyway. Done right it would be like falling asleep on the train and waking up somewhere else but legally fraught.