They did answer your question. Same way in a “capitalist” society: those who take more responsibility or risk earn more benefit. More/better food, more rank, more commission, more salary, better housing, better medical care, etc.

There are plenty of examples of this happening and also not happening under both capitalism and communism. Is there a trend? That’s a very long debate.

You aren’t wrong about those actions but it overestimates the importance of “might makes right” and seriously underestimates the importance of soft power. The meme you shared commits the same fallacy, as is the current US administration.

So what you are saying is it’s not the immigrants that are arriving that is the problem, it’s what happens to them once they are here?

Shocker.

Mains electricity is highly regulated because it can and regularly does kill people and start house fires.

I’m not sure why the author chose this sentence and why you are picking it out. The author provided no evidence of it. Instead, when you read on it seems to be an ownership problem. People rotating in and out for a year on a ten year project. You can be the most competent and skilled worker, if you don’t get the opportunity to become invested in the success of a project, of course you won’t see the project become successful.

“Selfish” would be a situation where sufficient community exists that cooperation is at all possible. I think most preppers will simply tell you that they are expecting and prepping for complete collapse. As in, like it or not, “every man for themselves” would come to them, not them seeking it out.

In other words, without arguing why a “every man for themselves” situation can’t or will never happen, the rest of your argument becomes irrelevant.

Now that question is fascinating. Haiti comes to mind as an example scenario. Are community-skills relevant in the face of roaming gangs and anarchy? I think that depends on how desperate these gangs are for immediate versus long term survival and planning. I’m also not sure Haiti is an exhaustive example of the types of societal collapse that are possible or likely.

I love Linux. I use it wherever I can. I don’t use Linux on my primary gaming workstation, for the simple reason that the display drivers, specifically mixed extended desktop and screen mirroring is just straight up ass.

Such an LLM would have the “knowledge” of almost every

Most human knowledge is not written down. Your premise is flawed to the core.

The amortization length affects proportion of principle paid down, but it doesn’t eliminate it entirely. At the same interest rate, you end up having paid more in interest at maturity of a longer amortization, yes. In practice, this can be mostly mitigated by negotiating a lower rate, or negotiating and exercising prepayment privileges.

More importantly, with a mortgage, ownership of the property is yours entirely, from day one, not the lenders’. What you owe is cash, not the property. The property is merely collateral in the event of default of payment.

BTW, multi generational loan agreements are not new. They are somewhat common historically and in other places of the world. For the same reason that multigenerational housing is the historical norm.

Yes and no. A lot of people are misinformed. It’s easy to say not being misinformed is the responsibility of the individual, just like recycling plastic is the responsibility of the individual consumer. Reality is a bit more nuanced. Misinformed people often simply don’t have access to good information or critical thinking skills to not be duped. Many others are straight up vulnerable to manipulation, through fears etc.

Democracy only works if people are informed. I think the American system has failed catastrophically to inform ordinary people.

Governments are the product of the people. There is no divine or natural laws that triggers “an election”. A government is simply created from thin air when a group of people (any group of people) get together and say: fuck the old system, we are putting that in the trash and signing a new social contract.

Of course, there’s virtually never unanimity of agreement over this social contract in one geographic area, so that social contract is only as binding as the force used to put it in effect.

Realistically, 6 months+ of government shutdown in the US will likely cause a collapse of the USA as a single unified federal entity, since the federal government effectively rots. At that point, all bets are off. A fracture of the US is very possible.

Broadly speaking this is probably true. In a smaller context, though, there are tons of counter examples. The internet for example, from just 10 years ago, was unquestionably better. AI slop, bots, enshitification, social media and browser monoculture…

The anti science trend of MAGA over the last few years…

Etc. Regression does happen, and we should not take things for granted.

I hear they are a solution to the problem of increasing mileage/efficiency. I am no fan of Tesla, but we have to admit, there is some merit to that argument, however debatable the efficiency benefits are.

That’s not to say safety isn’t a serious issue. The biggest problem is the reliance on electronics. Now if someone can reinvent the design with a highly reliable mechanical system, with multiple redundancy.

Define “never”. Never in as in never in the history of 21st century America? Pretty tame assertion. Never in the anthropological sense? That would be completely farcical.

Looks like she is standing in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Place_des_Arts. So that is likely some kind of street art.

Reality check: you don’t make boatloads of money for having useful skills everyone has (or should have). You make boat loads of money when you have useful skills that few people have.

Why stop at appliances? By that logic, humans are nothing more than self-propelled heaters. The whole universe is nothing but shifting pockets of heat like the ripples of a pond bouncing back and forth until they all disappear.

Such nihilism.

Does this correlate with a map of pedestrian trips per capita? If yes, then this map isn’t so interesting.

Sounds like the Narcissist’s Prayer to me.

This is how the United States of America turns into the States of America.