Sorry to hear that. Sister had an aneurysm a couple years ago. They coiled it, lasted two weeks, then gone. Best wishes for your father and your family.
Put another way, if spending maybe $100, maybe even a couple hundred bucks, might save you thousands, is it really that bad of an idea? For the first few years?
Why stop at groceries? Make everything variably priced. Vary the prices enough so that no matter how much or little you work, in the end everyone's costs (and wealth) are equal. Da komrade!
In behavioral psych terms what you've identified would technically be referred to as "rate of responding." Its identification as the primary focus of observation in the clinical setting (
and in fact a variable even worth examining!) might be Skinner's greatest contribution to the field.
There is a sliver of hope that we can successfully decommission fossil fuel energy and master climate engineering, i.e. employ technology to solve global, systemic problems created by technology. But it is hard today to distinguish optimism from delusion.
Watching TV at home "wastes energy." Going out to dinner "wastes energy." Doing anything except working on a cure for cancer "wastes energy." In fact, even people working on a cure for cancer or a covid vaccine will only see the fruits of their righteous labor used to enable millions to....waste energy.
This is literally the worst argument against crypto.
The energy "waste" argument against Bitcoin is really one of the silliest there is. One man's waste is another's treasure.
"Unlike other economic activities, the bitcoin scheme produces absolutely nothing for all this waste."
Does playing video games "produce absolutely nothing?" Some would say so, others would say not, that it produces positive emotions in players. But the entire ecosystem of gaming no doubt "wastes" more energy than bitcoin mining. Who gets to decide, to decree, what constitutes "waste?" That it's ok to engage in certain activities, like gaming, which some people would classify as "waste," but not ok to engage in others.
And the climate change argument as the cherry on top. Time to power down everything then. No more bitcoin mining, no more cars, no more travel, watching movies, it's all "wasteful." Shut it all down.
I have zero artistic ability. My father is a very accomplished amateur artist. I've got into this discussion with him several times. Rather than Pollock's work, the best exemplar supporting the argument that artistic value is arbitrary is, in my opinion, Rothko's color field paintings [1]. My father explained to me that the reason it's in the Smithsonian is because he did something no one else had ever done before, he reduced the traditional landscape painting to it's absolute minimum. Same thing for Pollock, he did something no one else had ever done before. At least according to a very small clique of New York Jews. (Joking. Kind of. Not being anti-semitic, I'm an atheist Jew.)
Of course, the fact that this guy [2] is not also in the Smithsonian is strong evidence that it is in fact completely arbitrary.
These days, holding all other factors constant, SV companies will generally hire {gay|female|trans|minority} candidates before {male|white|indian|asian}. So companies are apparently not at all concerned about hiring members of protected classes, rather they prefer to hire them.
Now, if you want to make the argument that older employees don't boost the companies D&I numbers, while at the same incurring the risk of a protected class, that's a subtly different argument....