Tim Cook will happily support someone who will stop him from adopting children or getting married if it means apples market share grows by 3%.

Exactly. As you note, rich people can usually buy their way around most anti-LGBT laws. Imagine you’re a billionaire or megacorp CEO. Consider your workarounds for various anti-LGBT laws. Imagine you’re such a person but happen to be gay and/or trans.

Gay marriage ban? Hire a team of lawyers to draft a series of contracts between you and your partner. Marriage imparts hundreds of protections and benefits, but most of those can also be achieved with a mountain of legal paperwork.

Laws criminalizing gay sex? You live on a giant private compound. How will cops even know what you’re doing in there? Even if they could, you can hire the best lawyers money can buy.

Restrictions on gender ID markers? Move your official residence to a state that affirms trans rights. For a passport, get a second or third passport in the form of a golden passport (one where you invest some large sum in a country in exchange for citizenship there.) Now you have a document for international travel with the correct gender marker on it.

Bans on trans medicine? Fly overseas for any medical treatment you need. If they really crack down on it, get treated with those injectable hormone pellets. Fly out of the country a few times a year to have your hormones topped off. Do any surgeries overseas as well.

Bathroom bans? Your limo has a toilet in it. Or you comply, use the restroom of your birth-assigned sex, and have your team of bodyguards guard the door while you do so. Or, more likely, you simply never go places where you would have to use a public restroom in the first place.

The hard truth is that most discriminatory laws can be bypassed or made irrelevant if you have enough cash.

There are simply very few discriminatory laws that can’t be bypassed with enough money. They’re not at risk until people actually start being sent to camps. And, as you note, they can easily jet off to a friendly country in the event of that ever happening.

I’m just amazed that there’s apparently a middle-aged white guy in the Bloods.

You sound incredibly pretentious.

I’m sorry, but I’m not talking about McDonalds. I’m not talking about engineered food products. I mean a good thick slab of fresh bread made from flour, salt, a bit of sugar, and not much else. Served with a big dash of butter. That is heaven.

The healthspan stuff? Completely irrelevant to my point. What is the point of a healthspan if you deny yourself all the pleasures of life? Enjoy all things in moderation. But I firmly reject this whole, “well…have a little wheat bread if you muuust…anything else is abusive.”

“Do you even know what real food tastes like?”

Well you clearly know what your own farts smell like. Jesus Wept! Your head is so far up your ass you can see the contents of your own stomach.

You sacrifice and sacrifice, cutting everything out of your habits or diet that may bring you pleasure, only for the sake of extending your life. Then at the end of it all, you look back in dismay, in the dismal realization that despite your years, you have never lived at all…

I prefer the conspiracy ouroboros:

Conspiracy theories do not generate spontaneously. They’re all crafted deliberately by a nefarious cabal of corporate interests to distract and manipulate the public.

Submariner it is!

I’ve come up with the most cursed business idea in history.

I envision founding what is effectively a suspiciously cheap home-cleaning service. Like a cleaning service, we’ll require access to your home. We’ll need a key or door code. However, we don’t actually ever send anyone to clean your house.

Instead, we let you do the cleaning. We don’t DO the cleaning. We INSPECT your cleaning. When signing up for our service, you’re signing up to have a cleaning inspector show up to your house at any random time between 8 AM and 5 PM. It will be completely at random. It could be months between the random inspections, or you could get inspected 3 days in a row.

The inspector will be a form of your choosing. You can sign up for an angry boot camp drill-instructor type. You can sign up for someone who will more have the vibe of a grossed-out boyfriend/girlfriend. Or they can send a team of older inspectors that will make it feel like you’re being berated by your parents. The choice of shame is up to you!

The inspectors will go through your home, call you a slob, and belittle your cleaning ability. We won’t make it too ridiculous. By default, they would just expect you to keep things clean and neat, not lab-grade sterile. But if your laundry pile grows, you need to dust, or the bathrooms are a mess? Well you’re going to hear about it! If you are present, they will shame you in person. Regardless if you are there or not, you will be sent a report documenting in disgusting detail all the messes and cleaning errors in your house. The report will be filled with professional-grade photos of your filth. And to provide further damning motivation? The report will be posted on the public internet for anyone to view for free.

Note: customers who are clearly using this as a sex thing will be dropped from the service.