"Buy stock in the dath ilan companies that would build the arcologies, sell stock in Earth companies that employ lots of sad exhausted people at low wages, start a company that makes real chairs, sell fiction books written by smarter authors at a much higher price to smart rich people here who have nothing fun to read... that kind of nitwit, low-effort foolishness would already be enough to make more money than I could use personally.  Somewhat more value to Earth from, say, my trying to reverse-engineer how our rating systems work based on their Network user interface, and displacing Amazon's front-end with a new product recommendation system, so that your entire economy would have an incentive to manufacture products of much higher quality at a slightly higher price.  Much more value if our governmental forms work better than yours when copied here, something that may not be true at all, and I can talk one country anywhere into adopting them and accepting a lot of immigrants and exporting real science and real medical research."

"I'm really not sure dath ilan books will have much market here."

"Do you... have... stock in, uh, McDonald's or something? To sell? Also what's wrong with our chairs?"

"They hurt.  It is possible to make people-holders that don't look like the most obvious possible chair structure somebody invented here I don't know how many centuries ago.  The way we do it requires giving up the idea that you can sell exactly the same chair to everybody, and having a facility that measures people in order to make people-holders for them.  But I have real trouble imagining that there is not some way to mass-manufacture better people-holders than this.  Guest chairs have to fit randomly sampled people and ours don't look like yours.  But they also have motors and adjust themselves using software I don't have and anatomical principles I don't know... it seems like something a startup could figure out once they knew what was possible.  But your civilization has a very general problem, from my perspective, wherein it has some problem, and people don't optimize that problem away, they just live with it.  We elected not to live being tortured by our own furniture on a daily basis, and we made that not happen.  I know what the result looked and felt like, but I don't know exactly what it takes to do the same here and successfully market the result.  It's been an obstacle to a lot of possibilities I've been considering - that you maybe can't sell any unfamiliar product at a premium, when there's no Very Serious People to accept a free sample and Amazon's rating system rates everything at 4.4 stars."

"Chairs don't hurt me, maybe your species has fragile butts."

"They don't hurt you at all or they hurt you in a minor background way you've learned to ignore?"

"I mean, shitty chairs aren't comfy because they are shitty chairs but a normal, like, armchair, is comfy."

"Maybe you've already done some accidental selection on people who aren't injured too much by the chairs you currently have?  I did Google and find a lot of people talking about how much they hate this planet's chairs, but I have no idea how statistically common they are, because your planet does not spend an amount of money on chairs or chair research that is remotely proportional to the time that people spend in chairs.  Alternatively I cannot find any science research even though it exists, because your planet's systems for tagging, discussing, and recommending funny pictures are two hundred times more sophisticated than anything your planet has ever tried with its science papers.  I am still not entirely sure that this is not the result of the moon driving you all insane, though Isabella has made steady progress on convincing me that it reflects a coherent general level of cognitive capacities and I have jumped ahead to update my second-order opinion over this predictable first-order trend."

"I don't know what that last bit means but okay. Do people really blog a lot about hating chairs? I have never seen this in my life."

"If you type 'why are all chairs' into Google it autocompletes with 'why are all chairs uncomfortable'.  We would treat this state of affairs as a civilizational emergency."

"I'm not sure that's the chairs' fault, they might have, like, back problems?"

"If you fixed the chairs, beds, desks, and the abominations you call computer keyboards, I bet there would be fewer people with - meta-level point.  Do you really want this conversation to be me complaining about everything Earth is doing wrong?  I've given myself a limited budget of time to do that every day, and I can go over it if you're enjoying this but there's not much point in doing it otherwise."

"It's actually sort of entertaining but yeah I don't wanna do it all day. Also Isabella looks hungry."

"I don't 'look hungry', we checked that!"

"Isabella is hungry, which I know without having to look at her, let's go get bagels."

"I approve!  Earth's food is pretty good except when it's not!"

"Did she make you eat at her vegan place?"

"It's a lovely vegan place, you just need to ask them if things have cilantro in them!"

"Weird food is good so long as it's not explicitly bad food!  It's fascinating that some of your food manages to be slightly strange to me, after my having eaten at enough weird-food restaurants that they didn't feel novel any more.  It suggests that our weird restaurants have legitimately managed to form a monoculture in some subdimension.  Now, this could be because Earth food is subtly wrong in some hidden way that will have objectively poor effects on my health later, but for now I'm hoping to get rich enough that mages can sort it out later if that's true."

"Ooh, what's dath ilani food like?" Alex asks, leading the way out toward bagels.

"That's like asking what Earth food is like!  But the last meal I ate before getting on the airplane was spinach salad with fried apple chips, gooey synthetic cheese which does not taste awful even though it contains the words 'synthetic' and 'cheese' in the same sentence, because our civilization would not put up with that, and the restaurant's private salad dressing with twenty different fermented ingredients.  It's all mechanically arranged more carefully than local salad and you'd eat it without stirring it to avoid upsetting the distribution of cheese, chips, dressing, and so on."

"Ooh, neatly arranged salad, might be good."

"People spend a lot of their lives on eating and derive a lot of happiness from it!  A large group of people whose desires are aggregating somewhat coherently will naturally contain lots of specialized scientists and engineers devoted to making healthier and tastier food!"

"Maybe that's why your food is decent even though you causally screened off all your recipes and had to spend the reinvention period presumably eating raw produce!"

"That's not exactly how it worked, as I understand it.  We did have to keep knowledge of how to produce steel and so on.  I expect a bunch of people invented new recipes before the old ones got phased out."