They’re stupid simple devices though. There’s not even any circuitry in a solar panel. There’s nothing to slip a backdoor inside. There’s caution, and then there’s just xenophobic paranoia.

There’s a limit to the gains from pooling insurance risk. Sure, you gain a lot by going from 1000 people in a pool fo 10000. But 10 million to 20 million? You reach a point where the law of large numbers takes over and adding more people doesn’t produce further gains.

In the novel Star’s Reach, in a post-collapse society, one of the main characters is a ‘miner.’ Their mining guild basically tears apart old concrete buildings, by hand, with sledge hammers to extract the old rebar from them.

OP said neolithic! You going to forge some rocks?

The world can support less than 1% of its current population if everyone reverted to a neolithic lifestyle. And countless species would be hunted to extinction during the collapse.

So in short, the answer to what I would do? Like nearly everyone else, just die. The folks from Sentinel Island will inherit the Earth.

That makes zero mathematical sense.

Meanwhile, the necromancer is standing on shore saying, “I really don’t want to get my robes wet. Take your time, bring me the kid, and I’ll take care of it.”

Why would the cost of insuring human-driven cars increase? It’s not like the risk of a human drivers will suddenly go up with driverless cars on the road. In fact, driverless cars, if they worked, would lower the claims rate of human-driven cars.

And the insurance companies won’t pressure owners to switch to driverless vehicles. True self-driving vehicles won’t require insurance at all. If the manufacturer is completely responsible for any risk, then it’s the manufacturer that has all the liability. Your self-driving car would just have a lifetime worth of insurance coverage built into the purchase price. A world of only self driving cars is a world where car insurance companies don’t exist.

Who cares if most of the panels are made in China? Panels last for decades. If China decides to embargo the EU and cut off the supply of panels, it would be a decade before that embargo really started to hurt. Enough time for Europe to spin up and entire PV supply chain from scratch.

You can’t apply the logic of petrostates to electrostates.

I like the idea of redenominating the currency instead. We issue a v2.0 of the dollar. No existing dollars are rendered invalid. You just start issuing new coins with 100x value. The new penny is worth one old dollar.

Define “it.”

Let’s go for maximum chaos. Set the Solar zenith to 1 AM.

The Jones Act.

Violence and chaos is the point. Neither Israel or the US have the means or motivation to actually occupy Iran with ground forces and to build a new government from scratch. Hell, look how well that worked in Iraq. The goal is instead to turn Iran into a failed state that is completely incapable of providing even the most basic services to its population. A collapsed state can’t build effective missiles or support proxy wars outside its borders. At best you can knock together a few hamas-style bottle rockets in garage workshops.

Right now the goal is to wipe out the government leaders and military assets. When that fails to result in the overthrow of the Iranian government, the US and Israel will move on to civilian infrastructure. The power grid. The water systems. Fuel production and distribution, bridges, ports, rail lines, etc.

If they can’t topple the Iranian regime, they’ll leave the Iranian regime ruling over a pile of ashes, a nation with the infrastructure level of Somalia.

You can’t install a friendly government with air power alone. You can however do enough damage to a nation’s infrastructure that it can’t even keep its own people alive, let alone have the spare resources to affect things beyond its borders.

That is the real goal of this war. To turn Iran into a failed state.

I mean, that’s exactly what we did last time!

There an article here?

You’re taking the wrong lesson from this. Sometimes a feckless Democrat in office is worse than no Democrat at all. In retrospect, we would have been much better off today if Biden had lost in 2020.

And this is the fatal flaw with “blue no matter who.”

The US brutally represses protests just like the Iranians. US police just have more money for less lethal weapons.

I mean, if you think about it, the null hypothesis really should be that the Earth is flat. That is after all what the human eye perceives at first examination. It was proven conclusively to be round millennia ago, but it still required proof. But if you had no other evidence than your eyes, Occam’s Razor would suggest the Earth is flat.