Locales differ but in my experience:

1. no one is required to eat the cafeteria food
2. the cafeteria food has a cost
3. the cafeteria food quality was low when I was young but not terrible, and is much improved now
4. many kids absolutely do bring their own lunch. My kids look at the monthly menu and decide if they want to bring something from home or eat what’s being offered at the cafeteria

To be honest I find your question confusing. It seems to start with the question of whether everyone has the option to buy items or eats at the cafeteria, but then jumps suddenly into “is the food that bad.” I don’t honestly understand quite what it is you want to know.

He left video making for a while and is coming back. Which services he posts on is a secondary matter if that.

Yes yes, I know you see everything through the lens of the disappearing middle class narrative.

But you’re unarmed with the basics. Agrarian societies run on family farms, where human hands mean more output. Developing countries have absolutely shit standards of living but they have the most kids. This is in direct contradiction to the way you see things.

The reason more developed countries have fewer children is because in a more advanced economy, workers need to be more educated and trained to produce value. They don’t begin contributing to the economy at age 5. More like 18 or 21. That is expensive. Nothing to do with boomers tanking the economy. This is fundamental and true around the world.

Don’t get so attached to a narrative that you become blind to everything else.

I don’t know how European solidarity works, but will people from France pay double for a shirt because it comes from Portugal instead of India?

Actually yeah I was just talking about this in a different post. Renewables are indeed big now and China is a leader.

BUT there is one catch with this. Liquid petroleum has never actually been that big a part of electricity generation. So all of China’s renewables, great as they are, are primarily reducing their usage of coal (which they have domestically in abundance).

Natural gas is also used for electricity, and they may have had to import that before.

But no matter how energy independent they get, it doesn’t free them from oil, which is still incredibly important for plastics and fertilizers.

A China that can’t manufacture cheap plastic crap is a China brought to its knees. A China that can’t feed its people is a China in revolution.

You seem genuinely unaware that countries like Germany legitimately have less than replacement birth rates. I don’t discount your point about paying people more, but I can acknowledge both these realities and you can too. While the class struggle with billionaires rages on, there actually are real demographic challenges.

What’s actually wrong with Indians?

I kind of suspect this is the entire point of this conflict. The US is not immune to global oil supply disruptions, but we are a net exporter now, while China relies very heavily on foreign imports. I would not be at all surprised if this was a way to put the hurt on China and the rest of the world, while blaming Iran for it. Of course Epstein distraction too, but not only that.

I’M BIG IN YA PAN! I’M BIG IN YA PAN!

I definitely agree the language issue is much more solvable at home. Going back to the OP, their goal was to counteract depression by going out to a movie. I’m not sure that watching TV at home is going to fulfill the goal. Maybe - watching a DVD together is better than doomscrolling at least.

Maybe if you’d held your tongue instead of making that apparently worthless comment about plastic, we’d all have an example to learn from.

No one’s arguing. You chipped in. It didn’t make sense. You can’t make it make sense, apparently. I guess we really are done here then.

So what? That’s not an answer to my question or a followup to your comment.

When it’s that high for years their hand may be forced. It’s a very slow ship to try to turn around.

Either pitiful delusions or deliberate scaremongering (or both). Rest in dirt, motherfucker.

Power generation is predominantly coal and natural gas. Liquid petroleum, the base material for plastics, is used very little for electrical generation.

So do you want to explain again how using more renewables instead of coal and natural gas is going to drive up plastic production? I think your point is just reflexively pessimistic.

And animal cruelty will be totally unaffected.

I think people don’t know just how successful renewables are. Taken together, they are now the single largest global source of energy, having displaced coal.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2rz08en2po

Of course, we want to see even more momentum, because while renewables have surged, so has energy demand, so fossil fuel consumption isn’t quite falling yet.

But I think you may have more reason for optimism than your comment suggests. Conservative lobbyists are not succeeding in killing renewables, except perhaps in shithole countries like Texas.

The point is just that if we want to draw a conclusion about asymmetry of costs, we can’t count only the ones that have this outsized impact, but all that are produced.

No one has the exact numbers. So all we can say is that the score is not $500/$15B

My best friend is a public defender and he ranted to me recently about how his family still won’t ask him legal advice because he’s still the baby of the family.

Being charitable… maybe the daughter has already weighed in on this and the parent is looking to cross check their answer?