I'm an on-call IT guy for small/med biz. Everyone is happy to see me and I am treated very well. Most have volunteered a desk or office for my use.

I do not tire of it.

> They land on your site, see US pricing, and leave. You get $0. They get nothing. Everyone loses.

How will their US customers react when they learn they're paying more for the same product?

I have two particularly notorious Seagate periods:

    Seagate bought Conner when Conner had released several models w/ 
    leaky seals. Bad sectors started at the outer edge of the 
    platters and grew inward. We had a lot of these drives
    out there and Seagate refused to honor Conner's drive
    warranties. 

    The 7200.10 series had super high failure rates. I wound up 
    replacing every one in my care, within 2 years. The 7200.11
    drives weren't much better.

I think the last Seagate lines I truly trusted were the ST series of MFM and RLL drives.

> At the end the day a medieval lord was poor but he lived a better life than the peasants.

As measured in knowledge utilized during basic living: The lives of lords were much less complex than that of modern poor people.

> Just being born in the US already makes you a top 10%

Our family learned how long-term hunger (via poverty) is worse in the US because there was no social support network we could tap into (for resource sharing).

Families not in crisis don't need a network. Families in crisis have insufficient resources to launch one. They are widely scattered and their days are consumed with trying to scrape up rent (then transpo, then utilities, then food - in that order).

> If you were given 10,000 dollars but your friends were also 100,000 dollars as well, would you take the deal?

This boldly assumes the 10k actually reaches me. Meanwhile 100k payouts endlessly land as expected.

usa sources: me+kids+decade of hunger level poverty. no medical coverage for decades. homeless retirement still on the table.

> I'm a simple man, I just want these companies to pay taxes where they make money.

The folks who bankroll elections work tirelessly to insure this doesn't happen.

> It has never _not_ been time to build all the power plants we can environmentally afford.

The US' challenge is that new energy sources are waiting 3-5 years before they can connect to the grid.

refs: https://kagi.com/search?q=how+long+are+new+energy+sources+wa...

> Alternative to archive.ph, no Javascript, no CAPTCHAs:

The other tld have been kinder to me (no captcha).

https://archive.md/J8pg5

https://archive.fo/J8pg5

> that is what ad-infested society does to everyone… you end up spending money on you sure think you were going to already

Your followup example of this is an impulse buy that happened adjacent to ad exposure. For that particular confluence, your theory could bear out.

But I'm not sure folks do that with any regularity. And for folks who rarely impulse buy or don't see/hear ads in spaces they control - I don't think they run into it.