Reframing reducing subsidies as increasing costs is what makes people hate the idea. Gradually reducing incentives to drive would give people plenty of time to transition to other lifestyles.

You’re arguing here for continuing to prop up sprawl, is what it sounds like. You’re open to moving people away from car dependency, but not from suburbs, is my impression. I would love to be wrong about this, so please feel free to assure me you’re not proposing that people just live wherever the hell they want, no matter how unsustainable it might be.

Definitely easier and you’ll get farther reading the works of ethical philosophers as seeing what makes sense to you than starting from scratch. For me, Kant, Adam Smith, Plato, and the Stoics were the most influential, but I also read a lot of Christian and Buddhist religious philosophers.

I myself tend to think of ethics as having three components, as I alluded to above: What is moral, what is practical, and what is beautiful. And while beauty is mostly subjective and practicality mostly objective, morality is a lot trickier.

A lot of us seem to agree, because we were taught it or otherwise, that some actions (or results, or thoughts, or attitudes) are morally good and should be pursued and some are morally evil and should be rejected, repudiated, or opposed. And we even agree most of the time about a lot of what is “good” and what is “evil”. Some say that this is because it’s subjective, others think that there are objective moral truths and we have discovered them, as yet, only imperfectly. Which if either of these camps you fall into isn’t really all that important for learning to think ethically, though; what’s important is to have moral precepts that you understand and can strive towards. If you can’t understand your own moral code, how can you seriously attempt to follow it?

Once you have the ability to do moral reasoning, you learn to balance it against practical reasoning, eg. “How much can I afford to donate to charity each month and still pay rent? Are there more effective ways to use that sun for good in the world that donating it to this charity?” and weigh in your aesthetic preferences as well. After some practice, you’ll know why you did whatever you’ve done, and hopefully, be able to explain your reasons to others, even if they don’t share your practical concerns or moral code.

Tell me why you love it, I’d love to be able to give it a second chance.

Like videogame cracks, or…?

No one, until supplies are replenished. Once there’s more than one it’s fair game again.

It just feels so brusque and dismissive.

Sarong but it feels so right.

KotoR and Mass Effect. They both just feel so stilted.

And anxiety because my phone is telling me there’s some incomplete task!

But what if the text doesn’t need a response?

Literally only my phone. I don’t even always wear pants.

Eating the last one of any snack.

maybe if it’s KN-95

No vig on bets, no green tiles on roulette.

Maybe it’s not just “one thing”, but ethics. How to make decisions in a systematic way; how to do it in advance; how to weight morality, practicality, and aesthetics to reach a decision that you’ll be satisfied with twenty years later, a decision you could explain and defend to another ethical person before or after the fact.

The first song I ever sang to my daughter on the day she was born was “Oh Do Not Forsake Me” and she ate that shit up.

AI Dungeon, specifically the GPC3 “Dragon” narrator

I tried using the one that spontaneously generates text adventures, but they kept turning porny.

I gotchu fam