“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.

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.

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.

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

Here’s the thing. Y’all sitting around waiting for the institutions to do their job. Y’all waiting for the institutions to do the right thing. But y’all institutions have been corrupted, so they ain’t gonna do anything. It’s up to you, the people to clean up house now, by sending a strong message. And it doesn’t take that much to take action. There is incredible power in the people and in collective action. But for now it is locked away in tepid comfort. That comfort won’t last though. It never does under tyranny.

The plastic (including polyester fabrics) in your car was most likely derived from petroleum. The car parts were most likely shipped around during manufacturing using combustion engine vehicles. The energy to cast those car parts, probably some of it comes from non renewables. The labour to build the car almost surely comes from other people who consume gas (for example to drive to the EV factory)

That “100%” renewable energy? The installation and maintenance of it was/is almost certainly done with large industrial equipment and vehicles burning fossil fuels. (Similar issue with production of parts).

Look, I’m not saying you aren’t making positive choices by choosing renewable options. What I am saying is, while they are more renewable, they aren’t truly 100% renewable when you factor everything involved in it. Fossil fuels are so pervasive in society, it’s virtually impossible to both function in a modern society and not contribute to the consumption of fossil fuels.

Hard times make hard men, hard men make soft times, soft times make soft men, soft men make hard times <- we are here.

Your insight is accurate, but also as ephemeral as the assumption about the state of the world that came before it. The wheel will move forward yet again, starting with hard times hardening you.

People rather lie to themselves than face hard truths. It’s in human nature, and itself explains a lot of the evils of the world. But facing those hard truths is also liberating. The sooner we accept these human flaws, the sooner we can get back to that experiment of progress.

I think the design philosophy is that each tile represents no more than a single entity at a time, and compact enough that you can arrange the entities in a section to represent a device, room or group.

In your example, perhaps the room also has a humidifier and/or heater. So in reality, the room temperature entity isn’t truly tightly coupled with the fan. The heater and or humidifier are also a part of the whole.

With tiles, you are in complete control to arrange groups of entities that represent a larger whole, in whatever scope you like.

IMO, setting it up at home is not the bar for decentralization. I don’t think it’s even practical to run your own self-hosted fediverse server.

I think we can get just about all the same benefits of decentralization at the scale of the city.

You’ve conflated laws and ethics. Does piracy violate some laws in some jurisdictions? Unquestionably. Is every single law ethical? Unlikely.

Hear me out: what if repealing section 230 would end up killing our social media monoculture, since it would be impossible for these platforms to operate. Instead, what if people had to host their content themselves, you know, like we did back in the day, when the Internet was fun.

This is all kinda moot. There will be no companies to run when the economy crashes because there is no one to buy goods (or even to pay taxes to support government spending). It’s a giant house of cards.

AI, crypto, just like .com, are very much very real, valuable technologies that have and will continue to stick around and be used until we destroy ourselves, or something even more advanced comes along.

What was/is a grift, is all the stupid money and people around it that don’t have a damn clue where the limits of the technologies actually lie, what kinds of real problems are solved and have been sold lies stop lies without doing their due diligence.