Hell, I’ll take someone who wants to be a billionaire, as long as they do it without exploitation. It’s just that that’s nearly impossible to do, since very few people actually individually create a billion dollars worth of value.

Look at their actions, not their words specifically.

It’s a culture where being unkind is particularly unacceptable, not specifically where you’re not allowed to be honest or forthright.

You’re allowed to not like someone, but telling someone you dislike them is needlessly unkind, so you just politely decline to interact with them.
You’d “hate to intrude”, or “be a bother”. If it’s pushed, you’ll “consider it and let them know”.

Negative things just have to be conveyed in the kindest way possible, not that they can’t be conveyed.

Brian Acton is the only billionaire I can think of that hasn’t been a net negative.

Co-founded WhatsApp, which became popular with few employees. Sold the service at a reasonable rate.
Sold the business for a stupid large sum of money, and generously compensated employees as part of the buyout.
Left the buying company, Facebook, rather than do actions he considered unethical, at great personal expense ($800M).

Proceeded to cofound signal, which is an open, and privacy focused messaging system which he has basically bankrolled while it finds financial stability.

He also has been steadily giving away most of his money to charitable causes.

Billionaires are bad because they get that way by exploiting some combination of workers, customers or society.
In the extremely unlikely circumstance where a handful of people make something fairly priced that nearly everybody wants, and then uses the wealth for good, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with being that person.
Selling messaging to a few billion people for $1 a lifetime is a way to do that.

That might just be a growing up near water thing. I think that on average, Canadians live closer to larger bodies of water than Americans do, since more than half are within day trip distance of the great lakes waterway, and then there’s Halifax and Vancouver.

Growing up in a place with water, basically everyone I know also has at least a passing knowledge of recreational small watercraft.

Where I live basically every location is some combination of “French, native American, English, Scandinavian”, “pronounced natively or not”, and “spelled like it’s pronounced or not”.

The fun ones are the English pronunciation of the French transliteration of the native word.

https://www.crowdsupply.com/sqfmi/watchy#products

In my experience it’s perfectly common.

Michigan already has universal mail in voting for anyone who wants it without cause.
It’s nice. You sign up to get sent a ballot for every election if you want, and they just send you one for every election you get to vote in.

Looks like the law came about in 1895 as an attempt to stop people from using transportation as a form of buying votes.
The context of transportation has changed a bit since then, so it wouldn’t surprise me if it got tossed out by the legislature, given all the pro-voting stuff the state has had recently.

Heh, well as a nice twist, the will of the Ohio populace is that the constitution is not intended to be the “supreme will” of the people.

I hardly think the scene in the movie with people openly weeping and retching seeing footage from the bombings is part of the movie “glossing over” the human effects of the bombs. It’s just not what the movie was about.

As for the general public, you can’t just expect people to never have a sense of humor about something ever for all time, particularly when it’s something that can occupy a significant and impactful sense of brain space.
It’s how people relieve some of the emotional tension of a heavy topic. It’s why we had COVID jokes and memes, and it’s why in the past you saw a lot more nuke humor. There was an omnipresent specter of “there’s a weapon that can kill everyone, it can kill us at any moment, we keep building more, and I’m utterly powerless in the face of this fact”.

Laughing at the juxtaposition of Oppenheimer and the aesthetic that barbie presents requires an understanding of the horror of what the man ultimately produced.