I mean, when your service is fundamental enough to the economy, and centralized enough to make just going to an alternative a major hassle, if an alternative without a similar policy even exists, then why should they get that say? The power to effectively ban the sale of certain types of thing, or force media platforms to censor certain types of content, is the sort of power we generally reserve for governments, not private entities that can do whatever they want. Honestly they're important enough these days that they should basically be treated like some sort of public utility in my view.
Honestly, maybe slightly justified by the nature of the setting? The number of ships that seem to exist in universe, compared to the number of entire planets full of people to draw crew from, is so low that one must imagine that the entry requirements can be exceptionally high. One could also imagine better technology might imply better education technology as well as more refined techniques for using it.
Assuming the picture isn't edited or generated
Ad Jesus, sacrificed his time for your media.
rhetorical question, I do realize im not unique in that but its more to make the point that this idea seems flawed even beyond the tech not being up to it yet.
I know I can't be the only one that, even if AI was up to doing all this reliably, wouldn't want AI spending my money on it's own like this, surely? Like, I can be pretty picky and tend to spend a lot of time shopping around for things. A significant fraction of the time I end up deciding not to buy anything because I can't find exactly what I want at a price I'm willing to spend for it. I think I'd get hella stressed out that my AI would just buy the first thing that fit a category, or the cheapest, or whatever some company paid the AI developer to have it prefer, or such like that, and not to mention the worry that I might suggest buying something as a joke to someone else and have the AI hear and take it seriously or something and then my money's gone before I realize.
It's funny because the characters act in a way that is blatantly inappropriate for the situation, a lot of humor is like this, even including violence.
Which means that playing it is also free, no?
Free to play depends on what the operating model actually is I'd say. Some pay to win mobile game is worse than free with paid cosmetics, which in turn is worse than something like freeciv.
Because of inflation and such, but the important aspect of them is being super rich compared to everyone else (hence we don't count people that have a billion of some much less valuable currency), and that's a very old problem.
I don't think that businesses, not being individuals, should actually have the same rights as individuals I guess. I don't really agree with the idea that a corporation should be able to do whatever it likes by default, simply because I think corporations in general have too much power to be trusted with such.