I want to tell a short story to all the people who say they find the Explain feature useful and would be disappointed if it were removed.
Before the Americas were discovered in the Middle Ages, sugar was exorbitantly expensive. No regular person could afford it, only kings and lords and dukes and such. The sugar canes of which sugar is made require a tropical climate, so they were grown only in India and were called the “reeds that produce honey without bees”. It was extremely labour intensive to make sugar out of these canes, and farmers had to break their backs in a hellish heat.
The sugar was imported from India for prohibitively high prices and was used by the ruling class as a “secret ingredient” to improve the taste of disgusting bitter medicine.
When the Americas were discovered, the Europeans learned that there was another place on earth, besides India, where the climate was right to plant sugar canes. Of course, it was still labour intensive and therefore expensive. But by moving to slave labour, the plant owners could drastically lower the price of the sugar that was exported to Europe.
Thanks to slavery, regular people could now finally also enjoy the sweet, sweet sugar. Regular people started to sweeten their tea, to produce bon-bons, et cetera. But working on the sugar plants, in the tropical climate, riddled with Malaria-carrying mosquitos, as a slave, was still hell. Millions of African-Americans died: of exhaustion, of diseases, of whiplashes and other “punishments” by the cruel slave owners. I hope I have to tell nobody that slavery is one of the worst atrocities committed by humanity.
I am very sorry if I offend anyone, but when I read some of the answers in this forum, all I read is, “I like sugar. I really like how my tea tastes after I sweetened it with sugar. I would be very disappointed if the sugar were taken away from me.”
Just to be very clear, before anyone comes after me, I’m not accusing you of slavery or any such thing. The horrors of slavery on these sugar plants didn’t happen because the Europeans hated the slaves slaving away on the sugar plants in some distant land. These horrors happened because the Europeans didn’t care about the slaves. They didn’t even think about them. They only ever cared about how much better their tea tasted with some sugar in it. They only ever cared about their own experience.
So many answers in this community remind me of this. They only stress how ChatGPT helps them with their target language, and completely neglect the other sides of the issue.
Let me ask you all a question: Is the difference between having and not having some sugar in your f***ing tea worth the unimaginatively large suffering that is very purposefully kept away from you becoming aware of it? And then tell me again you’d be disappointed if the sugar exports and exploitation of slaves were stopped after people finally found their moral conscience.