Re:1

Young adult stories contain romance because that's one of the most impactful parts of most teenagers experience of growing up.

First love, first kiss, the emotional impact etc.

The relationships are often unhealthy but that's partly being true to life because everyone involved is learning how to have such relationships as they go along.

A touch of "humans are weird in some way" can make for interesting stories but HFY has a weird obsession with people eating chilli as some kind of intergalactic flex.

It's very simple.

You just start with some slood...

>"You're moaning about a tiny tax that benefits society as a whole, actually being largely paid by those 3 conglomerates while prices remain the same. I genuinely don't understand your problem."

The price did not remain the same.

Prices immediately shot up right after the tax was brought in, they merely went up on both types of drinks. The cost was passed on to consumers.

This is not hard to understand but you want to not understand it.

The trend in consumption existed before the tax and continued unaffected.

> People drinking the occasional glass won't notice the tax. It's pennies.

Which would be a great argument if a lot of them didn't change their recepies to include a fraction of sweeteners. As mentioned, it does affect some people.

>And manufacturers now sell both drinks for the same price and make more profit off a diet drink.

Neatly removing the incentive for consumers to pick the low-sugar option. Utterly defeating the claimed point of the tax.

There's already plenty of store-brand drinks that sell for a tiny fraction of the price of most softdrinks and like 3 massive conglomerates that sell most of the popular brands between them.

People can drink a large glass of orange juice just fine, it's quite palatable.

There's more to diabetes than people drinking the occasional coke.

"The tax the manufacturers pay"

Every penny of the cost gets passed to consumers. It's a tax the customer pays.

Also, that's massively patriarchal and a huge slippery slope. I'll believe the UK parliament actually care about health the day they stop providing taxpayer-funded booze to members of parliament. The only people ever keen on these kinds of sin-taxes are people utterly convinced that they're better/wiser than others and they make sure they don't apply to themselves.

>Arguably

No, it's not arguable at all.

People don't just keel over dead from drinking an occasional glass of coke.

There's 35 grams of sugar in a 330 ml can of coke.

There's about 29 grams of sugar in 330 ml of orange juice.

Plenty of people can consume an occasional glass of either coke or orange juice without any negative impact on their health at all.

As a result a lot of drinks that used to be fully sugared, the manufacturers switched to a mix of sweeteners and sugar.

A friend who gets terrible migranes from the sweetners wasn''t very impressed because suddenly drinks that were formerly safe for her to drink got loaded down with sweetners.

I've been trying to sketch something out with a theme but I'm too tired to get it to come together.

"Every other civilisation either created machine intelligences from whole cloth or uploaded some of their own who always eventually turned on the others.

The humans first foray into "true" AI was uploading their elderly pet dogs followed by enhancing their intelligence.

There was a WW3 near-miss when someone tried uploading and uplifting a cat."

It feels like an SCP entry but the number is too high.

>Within each topic, Cobb asserts that there are often lower-tech, less expensive, less ethically fraught but less flashy ways to achieve what genetic editing claims to be trying to achieve. Clean air and water could save more lives than gene therapies, to give one example.

"Hey Bob, do you think we should try to cure sick children of horrible and painful degenerative diseases?"

"Nah! let em rot! we could save more lives by improving car safety so we should only do that, no curing sick children because they're meant to die or something and working out how to cure their diseases scares some old guy"

"Some 'wishes' make you feel grateful that as a djinn, a spirit of fire, your mother is in fact an active volcano. Making those 'wishes' come true makes it all worth it."

It gets worse when the price goes negative.