can we put the extra 30 hours on the end of each year as a formless blob of 'time off'?

no need, i'll simply keep the surplus value of my labor

A Greek proverb says a society grows when old men plant trees whose shade they shall never know. What’s the exact opposite of that?

Well what's happening right now is old men are actively uprooting anything that won't grow to shade tree size in their lifetimes. It's as if their aim is to one day build their own coffin out of the absolute last tree on Earth.

The only way to make a profit under capitalism is to satisfy the needs of your consumers, regardless if you want or not.

This isn't true. This isn't close to true, not even a little. Rent seeking, manufacturing wants/needs, extortion, the list goes on and on, but...

It will not be profitable if other external factors arise, just as regulations, licences, government-granted privileges that squash other competitors

...Yep. You've defined capitalism so that all these inevitable features of a capitalist economy are "external factors". What a stroke of genius. But much like the extraction and consumption of fossil fuels, the myriad ills that inevitably accompany it are "external" only because capitalists have named them so.

Scarcity is not something you can “conquer”.

It's not something capitalism can conquer, because any solution that would end scarcity for a good or service would thereby end profitability for the same. No capitalist would provide it; they'd sooner let their capital collect dust than be used without profit. Or in the case of the Great Depression, they'd sooner set fresh produce and livestock on fire than let other consume it without profit to themselves.

The unplanned order of markets [...] emerges spontaneously, so it costs us nothing.

Markets cost us nothing because they emerge spontaneously? Things that emerge spontaneously cost us nothing? I'll leave it to the reader to poke holes in this obvious nonsense. I'll merely point out that capitalists have proven themselves masters at turning a profit from things that "emerge spontaneously", costing everyone a great deal in the process.

vote for people that will help build the middle class up again

The point of the middle class is to split the working class in terms of income and wealth, so they spend their time antagonizing each other and mostly ignoring how the upper class is stealing everything.

We don't need a middle class; we need a strong working class.

You want a class that's got more education? Educate the working class. You want a class that's got more wealth? Enrich the working class. You want a class that's got the time and inclination to make informed political decisions? Deliver workday/workweek reform for the working class.

strictly speaking it's

here’s a gift card so ~~you can give us that money back again~~ we can keep your money but give you something for free later.

it's hard to know the extent to which the comment represents the marriage. otoh, if one were to read their comment and leave thinking "sounds like a normal, healthy marriage to me", that imo would be a premium red flag on the reader.

Hello Games had a similar issue with No Man’s Sky.

Having played at release, Hello Game's issue was much less "large scope games take long to make" and much more "we explicitly lied about features that are strictly not in the game".

if xkcd was right about jpeggy porn being niche, i'd bank on terrible AI porn becoming a niche in the future too.

Why the hell should i do that?

Read any chapter of history, particularly in the last several hundred years, and you'll find no end of answers to this question.

Then the school district told him he had to cut a key point from his presentation — that the artist he helped rescue from obscurity had a gay son. Rather than acquiesce, he canceled the last of his talks.

“We’re long past the point where we should be policing people talking about who they love,” Nobleman said in a telephone interview. “And that’s what I’m hoping will happen in this community.”

They didn't ask him not to "say 'gay'", as the title all but claims. They asked him to participate in the erasure of a relevant gay person from a story he was teaching to children.

someone who's into communism less for the equality and more for the dictatorship