Have company that completely depends on people using their brains to solve problems.

Give these people free stimulants for years so you can extract extra value out of their brains.

Stop giving them stimulants.

Brain workers are now cranky and stimulant deprived. Surely this will make them more effective…

Give brain workers stimulants again, because fucking obviously.

Why would you complete a game when you can make a constant stream of income and increase that income stream with announcements and drip feeds.

Look at this madness https://robertsspaceindustries.com/funding-goals

It is not, in fact, cheaper to impose the death penalty.

I was given the con side of the death penalty to argue once in forensics. I was actually pro death penalty and one reason was that I thought it was cheaper. I went to do research on this because it was certainly a point I’d have to contend with from the pro side.

It is vastly more expensive to execute a prisoner than to imprison them for life. https://ejusa.org/resource/wasteful-inefficient/

Now you might think, hey that’s a link to a group that wants to get rid of the death penalty, of course they are going to say it’s more expensive. Go read the studies, I did, and again and again it is far more expensive to execute.

Why? Because we, pretty reasonably, put a high burden in front of the state before we allow them to kill a citizen. The legal process for both reaching the death penalty and then the numerous appeals to that decision is not cheap. It is a massive cost that the taxpayer has to bear to uphold the ruling and actually carry out the execution.

So it is far cheaper to house a person for life, and this shouldn’t really be that shocking. The prisons are built, the daily care of a prisoner is minimal, we provide them with the barest living conditions and food. The number of people we even could execute is a tiny percent of the prison population, so it’s not like they are taking up some huge amount of space and require us to build huge facilities to house them. If you could thanos snap every prisoner that could reasonably be executed out of existence, you wouldn’t free up enough prison housing space to close even a single facility, even more so when you consider that these prisoners are a handful in each facility.

The danger with “common sense” things that confirm our beliefs is that they can be wrong. The world is more complicated than it seems. I used to believe that it was cheaper to execute than to house. I was forced to argue the other side and because I’m competitive and want to win I did the research. I’m glad I did, it taught me an important lesson in not just believing something because it felt obviously correct.

All told, I’m not really sure I’m even against the death penalty. Some people are irredeemable and their deaths don’t weigh heavy on me. On the other hand, the idea of making it any easier for the state to execute me if they want to is unsettling. The common arguments in favor of the death penalty don’t really hold up. I’m an atheist, so I don’t believe the person is going to some eternal torture, they simply cease to exist. And it’s more expensive. From a practical standpoint I see little benefit for imposing the death penalty, but I understand the point of view of people being so reprehensible they don’t deserve to live even if it’s a high cost on society.

If you would like to continue arguing in favor of the death penalty though, you’ll do yourself a favor to go research the subject. It is more complicated and nuanced than you might think at first glance. And at the end of the day, if the thing you care about is cost, you’d never execute another person. It is far far more expensive to execute a prison than to house them.

You sound a lot like me. I figured it out for myself, maybe this insight will help you, maybe it won’t apply, but I’ll share.

I’m an introvert to start and on the spectrum. The world seems built for extroverts, and for a long time I thought the thing I was “supposed” to do was a bunch of extrovert activities that required me to mask my autism and drained me of all my energy. I felt a very similar feeling of being with people but feeling alone, I was in my head carefully running the scripts and behaviors I have learned. Not consciously (well, sometimes consciously) but it was just this extra burden I was carrying around that no one else was. It wasn’t a fun day at the beach without a care in the world, it was an assault on my senses, everything is too bright and too loud and sand is everywhere and “oh, what did that person just say, ugh, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do in this situation. I don’t want to play volleyball but are you supposed to anyways because that’s what people do at the beach?”

Over time I found people whose interests more closely aligned with mine. People I could trust to share my true self with, and not the mask of social scripts that I had learned was what I was “supposed” to do. And I realized I was not alone, but that a lot of the activities that people commonly associated with social togetherness were just not for me.

University can be a difficult time, most of the fun to be had is in those activities that I wasn’t very compatible with. I used to think that maybe I was broken too, but now I think that I am just different, and there’s nothing wrong with different. I have friends and a wife and people that I care about and who care about me, the real me, and I don’t feel so alone anymore.

I wish the same for you, if you like exploring the city with headphones, find someone that wants to do that too. If you like watching a dog play with a ball, there are people that will want to do that with you too. I found the more I opened up to people about who I really am and stopped caring about who I was “supposed” to be, the happier I became, the less lonely I felt.

I am sorry things are difficult for you now, in my experience it does get better. Early 20s are the time when people want to party and go to concerts and be quite loud. In a decade those same people will enjoy a quiet evening at home just as much as you do now.

You my Internet friend are not broken, you are just different, and different is beautiful.