California brings water from a lot farther than that -- the Aqueduct runs about 500 miles to service Los Angeles. (And has turned the formerly-lush Owens Valley into a desert.)

Destroying the first dam was environmentally catastrophic, and produced a massive fish kill. Ooops.

https://californiaglobe.com/ar...

DEI is the same problem though. It doesn't help the company, or any company to put people into positions based on social constructs.

You want people by merit and track record.

These concepts embedded in DEI WERE in place in one function or another in the past 15 years at least. They just didn't just happen in the past 2-4 or even 8 years.

Its just a contributing factor among others cited here among ethical and business/engineering professional problems the company has been engaged with.

"G-BOMBS: The anti-cancer foods that should be in your diet right now"
https://www.drfuhrman.com/blog...
"Looking for the biggest bang for your caloric buck? Remember the acronym G-BOMBS, which stands for Greens, Beans, Onions, Mushrooms, Berries and Seeds. These foods fuel your body with protective micronutrients and phytochemicals that support your immune defenses and have a wide range of health-promoting effects. And hereâ(TM)s a bonus: Theyâ(TM)re delicious!"

For anyone worried about any type of cancer, this is essential reading and action.

https://www.amazon.com/Mammogr...
"'This book gives plenty of examples of ad hominem attacks, intimidation, slander, threats of litigation, deception, dishonesty, lies and other violations of good scientific practice. For some years I kept a folder labeled Dishonesty in breast cancer screening on top of my filing cabinet, storing articles and letters to the editor that contained statements I knew were dishonest. Eventually I gave up on the idea of writing a paper about this collection, as the number of examples quickly exceeded what could be contained in a single article.' From the Introduction The most effective way to decrease women's risk of becoming a breast cancer patient is to avoid attending screening. Mammography screening is one of the greatest controversies in healthcare, and the extent to which some scientists have sacrificed sound scientific principles in order to arrive at politically acceptable results in their research is extraordinary. In contrast, neutral observers increasingly find that the benefit has been much oversold and that the harms are much greater than previously believed. This groundbreaking book takes an evidence-based, critical look at the scientific disputes and the information provided to women by governments and cancer charities. It also explains why mammography screening is unlikely to be effective today. All health professionals and members of the public will find these revelations disturbingly illuminating. It will radically transform the way healthcare policy makers view mammography screening in the future. 'If Peter Gotzsche did not exist, there would be a need to invent him ...It may still take time for the limitations and harms of screening to be properly acknowledged and for women to be enabled to make adequately informed decisions. When this happens, it will be almost entirely due to the intellectual rigour and determination of Peter Gotzsche.' From the Foreword by Iona Heath, President, RCGP 'If you care about breast cancer, and we all should, you must read this book. Breast cancer is complex and we cannot afford to rely on the popular media, or on information from marketing campaigns from those who are invested in screening. We need to question and to understand. The story that Peter tells matters very much.' From the Foreword by Fran Visco, President, National Breast Cancer Coalition."

And also by the same researcher (Peter C Goetzsche):
"Mammography screening is harmful and should be abandoned"
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...
"Mammography screening has been promoted to the public with three simple promises that all appear to be wrong: It saves lives and breasts by catching the cancers early. Screening does not seem to make the women live longer; it increases mastectomies; and cancers are not caught early, they are caught very late. They are also caught in too great numbers. There is so much overdiagnosis that the best thing a women can do to lower her risk of becoming a breast cancer patient is to avoid going to screening, which will lower her risk by one-third. We have written an information leaflet that exists in 16 languages on www.cochrane.dk, which we hope will make it easier for a woman to make an informed decision about whether or not to go to screening. I believe that if screening had been a drug, it would have been withdrawn from the market long ago. Many drugs are withdrawn although they benefit many patients, when serious harms are reported in rather few patients. The situation with mammography screening is the opposite: Very few, if any, will benefit, whereas many will be harmed. I therefore believe it is appropriate that a nationally appointed body in Switzerland has now recommended that mammography screening should be stopped because it is harmful."

It looks like human radiologists reading mammograms have essentially about a 9 out of 10 false positive rate -- false positives which can turn someone's life upside down and cause a lot of stress and unnecessary medical procedures. If AI can eliminate the false positives, I'd be curious how much that would change the cost/benefit ration of Goezsche's conclusions?

As I suggest here: https://pdfernhout.net/recogni...
"The big problem is that all these new war machines [and companies] and the surrounding infrastructure are created with the tools of abundance. The irony is that these tools of abundance are being wielded by people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity. So, the scarcity-based political mindset driving the military [and economic] uses the technologies of abundance to create artificial scarcity. That is a tremendously deep irony that remains so far unappreciated by the mainstream."

Also, what of the rights of sentient AIs?
https://thereader.mitpress.mit...
"The questions at hand are straightforward: At what point might a robot, algorithm, or other autonomous system be held accountable for the decisions it makes or the actions it initiates? When, if ever, would it make sense to say, âoeItâ(TM)s the robotâ(TM)s faultâ? Conversely, when might a robot, an intelligent artifact, or other socially interactive mechanism be due some level of social standing or respect? When, in other words, would it no longer be considered a waste of time to ask the question: âoeCan and should robots have rights?â

You are likely right that in the end regulation won't make much of a differenc. Indeed, there is too much incentive to cheat for individuals -- or for power-centers to accumulate more power by being the only ones to use something.

The proposal in the article also suggests outlawing open source software and data related to AI. Such laws may end any possible checks and balances on government, if governments -- or large corporations symbiotic with governments -- ultimately are the only one allowed to shape AI, and not individuals or small groups.

So what might make a difference? A broad perspective shift across the world towards "A Newer Way of Thinking" like Donald Pet, Buckminster Fuller, Albert Einstein, Lewis Mumford, Ursula K. Le Guin and others have suggested may make a difference. Our path coming out of any AI singularity may have a lot to do with our moral path going into one.

Donald Pet's work:
https://peace.academy/
"Donald Pet Releases Masterpiece: "Albert Einstein's Vision: A Clear Path to Global Harmony Through A Newer Way Of Thinking (ANWOT)"
https://www.webwire.com/ViewPr...
"Peace Academy By Donald Pet Video Trailer"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Also: "Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment. Humanity is in a final exam as to whether or not it might qualify for continuance in the Universe. (Utopia Or Oblivion: The Prospects for Humanity, R. Buckminster Fuller)"

As my sig suggests, the biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity. If we use AI from a scarcity-minded perspective emphasizing competition and self-centeredness instead of cooperation and compassion, we probably will doom ourselves. If we collectively use AI from an abundance perspective, we may still doom ourselves from excessive wealth concentration or rogue AI, but at least there is some hope that we might do better than that. See Marshall Brain's Manna story for two paths forward or see James P. Hogan's novels Two Faces of Tomorrow and Voyage from Yesteryear.

More by me on scarcity vs abundance thinking related to militarism but it applies to commerce as well since it is all intertwined in our society:
https://pdfernhout.net/recogni...
"There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. ...
      The big problem is that all these new war machines and the surrounding infrastructure are created with the tools of abundance. The irony is that these tools of abundance are being wielded by people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity. So, the scarcity-based political mindset driving the military uses the technologies of abundance to create artificial scarcity. That is a tremendously deep irony that remains so far unappreciated by the mainstream."

All that, but I suspect the real issue is that freight is a lot more profitable in that hold than is baggage, so they're trying to reduce the amount of baggage by charging it out of existence.

No one gets 45 years for smuggling drugs, or for that matter, for smuggling live bodies. If you look at the list of charges, they're a damned long stretch, making it sound like he was a massive smuggling op, not someone who had the wrong tank in the back of his truck.

If you move your household from Mexico to Arizona and bring along your fridge, have you committed a crime?

Just noticed your reply, AC. These are great questions!

One the first, sci-fi shows several different models, but yes, cultural transitions can be awkward. I think Jams P. Hogan's Voyage From Yesteryear is a good depiction of how long people in power can resists the obvious and attempt to create artificial scarcity to prop up their social position (until there may be overwhelming pushback from lots of people in a Ghandi-esque way). Marshall Brain's Manna also explore that idea, but in that case there is a clear divide of those who own a share of a corporation that meets all their needs and many of their wants on a sort-of basic income basis (with the equivalent of replicator ration units / credits like in Star Trek Voyager). There can be a place for a "Kanban"-like system to signal need (even just emails or other messages). And universal basic income and varying prices (like in Marshall Brain's Manna) is a way to ration some things. Lawrence Lessig in Code 2.0 talks about how human behavior can be shaped by norms, rules, prices, and architecture, and I might expect all four of those would be adapted to support a post-scarcity worldview (including limits as needed, just like when people first got running water in cities they would leave the tap open like fountains and streams they were used to, but eventually it became a norm to turn the water on when you wanted it and off when you didn't.

On your second point, indeed it is true that abundances can create complementary scarcities. I wrote an essay on that in 2013:
https://pdfernhout.net/how-abu...
"It has been pointed out that abundances of some things can create complementary scarcities. For example, too many emails means too little attention for each one. Too many snowmobiles may mean too little quiet woods. Too many fusion power systems may mean too much heat pollution everywhere. An abundance of nanobots or biotechnology may mean no one can walk unprotected ever outside of air tight dwellings, making for a scarcity of convenience and nature. And abundance of cheap digital cameras and voice recorders makes for a scarcity of privacy, as does an abundance of computers to analyze and organize all that digital information. And so on. ...
      As for social inequality specifically from abundance, yes, it is true that some people may use the powers of abundance within any socio-political-economic system to consolidate power. Marshall Brain suggests that has been happening with automation, and it will only continue unless various structural changes are made (like a redistributive basic income, such as Social Security for all instead of just those over 65). ...
      There may be other ways that abundance creates problems too, no doubt, because it can connect to very specialized divisions of labor including bureaucracies, which, as systems, to put it charitably are "amoral". Organizations can behave in amoral ways regardless of the morality of the people who are the components who make up the system, since any "failing" component that does not perform to standards will just be replaced (Langdon Winner at RPI wrote about this in "Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-control as a theme in political thought"). Yes, people can drag their feet (examples abound like in WWII Germany), but the system will still trundle along based on its own emergent organizational dynamics to the bitter end unless it meets some other system that stops it or it hits some sort of natural limit as it burns like a fire through that which sustains it (including the people that compose it). So, we have to be careful what values our systems embody, because the systems will serve as amplifiers of those values. ...
      Another way that abundances can create scarcities of self-control is "The Pleasure Trap", "Supernormal Stimuli", "The Acceleration of Addiction", and "The Tyranny of Choice" all resulting in "Ego Depletion". ...
      Hopefully we can use what computing power we have individually and collectively to think up and implement ways of dealing with all these challenges, like I suggest here:
"The need for FOSS intelligence tools for sensemaking etc." ..."

So, not a great answer to a great question, but remember that a lot of people will have a lot of free time to help deal with such issues. And also eventually at least the commercial motive to create problems for personal profit will recede. They might even have time to clean up the scientific literature from profit-oriented deceptions like ones I cite here related to peer review in general and also medical science in particular:
https://pdfernhout.net/to-jame...

The world wide web has billions of web pages and we now have search engines (and RSS feed readers) to help navigate those, as do directories of various sorts including Wikipedia. Granted, all search engines and directories may have their biases. But as computing capacity goes way beyond what is needed to index and store billions of web pages locally, people can easily get their basic informational needs met locally.

It is maybe increasingly hard to remember what the information world was like in the 1970s when I was a teenager -- where a dialup phone call to my high school's timeshare computer network cost me US$10 per hour (more like US$30 now) and there was little there to do besides playing a few text-based computer games, chatting with a handful of other users online, or writing a program file or maybe reading a very little online documentation or other text files. It was really hard to get information about any specific topic you might have an interest without physically traveling to a public library, and time there was limited, and so was the selection of books and resources to maybe a few tens of thousands of items (in a larger town library). Especially for any teenager before college, was difficult to get any information beyond what you were provided by someone else for their purposes (such as in school textbooks).

Now I could in theory store the equivalent of a town library of 10,000 books on a flash drive with a full text index. On a 20TB hard drive available for US$350, one can in theory store millions of books: https://forums.tomshardware.co...

Or essentially all of Wikipedia (without media):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Still not quite a personal copy of the Library of Congress though:
https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2009...

But still an enormous change from the 1970s. And more than enough to be able to learn the basics of almost any academic or technical subject at very little cost -- assuming that the information is reasonably complete and unbiased (which is may not be, to your point). And indexing all that information by at least keyword is now very easy with tools like Lucene.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

So, yes, spam is a problem. It greatly damaged email and contributed to the rise of walled garden social networks (which eventually had their own spam problems including from outrage-stoking algorithmic feeds provides by the social media companies). But, email still works. There are various groups of people who help deal with email spam including by creating new standards and encouraging people to use them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

In the book "Midas World" there is a story of people who help individuals who create huge problems:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
""The Man Who Ate the World" (originally published in Galaxy in 1956). Anderson Trumie had a scarring experience in his childhood, before Morey Fry changed the world. All Anderson wanted was a teddy bear, but his parents' lifestyle of frantic consumption did not allow him to have one. As an adult, he is a compulsive consumer. He has taken over North Guardian Island and is putting a burden on the local infrastructure. A psychist, Roger Garrick, with the help of Kathryn Pender, finds a way to heal Anderson and end his exorbitant consumption."

For an analogy today, where people may die from for-profit malware distributors -- and eventually there may be social processes (including law enforcement and international cooperation) to reduce that:
"Ransomware Attack Hampers Prescription Drug Sales at 90% of US Pharmacies (msn.com)"
https://yro.slashdot.org/story...

So yes, there will be problems. But there will also be enormous capacity to deal with problems. And there will be (hopefully) an enormous cultural shift to preempt problems -- like, say, in the USA not many people would probably want to marry a human trafficker today compared to the early 1800s when slaveholding was a normal and accepted and profitable part of US culture and has since been greatly reduced in its most extreme forms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Human trafficking is condemned as a violation of human rights by international conventions, but legal protection varies globally. The practice has millions of victims around the world. ... According to scholar Kevin Bales, author of Disposable People (2004), estimates that as many as 27 million people are in "modern-day slavery" across the globe."

tl;dr: I can't disagree with your core point that there are challenges and lots of messiness in social change -- but thankfully there are billions of people who could provide solutions, since, as Julian Simon pointed out, the human imagination is the ultimate resource.
https://www.pop.org/overpopula...
http://www.juliansimon.com/wri...

All five are types of transactions various people engage in. Resources don't always have to come from exchange transactions. They can come from other types of transactions (with theft transactions hopefully minimized, where theft tends to happen when the social contract seems to break down for some people and leads to increasing security costs for everyone).

So one can ask how subsistence, gift, and planned transactions can support FOSS? Rather than emphasize only funding via, as you point out, monopoly rent-seeking as a form of artificial scarcity behind ever-larger parts of the exchange economy (and other types of dysfunctions).

A video I made on those types of transactions:
"Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"This video presents a simplified education model about socioeconomics and technological change. It discusses five interwoven economies (subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft) and how the balance will shift with cultural changes and technological changes. It suggests that things like a basic income, better planning, improved subsistence, and an expanded gift economy can compensate in part for an exchange economy that is having problems."

Also on that issue from a gift and planned perspective::
"An Open Letter to All Grantmakers and Donors On Copyright And Patent Policy In a Post-Scarcity Society"
https://pdfernhout.net/open-le...
"Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations."

Perhaps those are 1000 million quantum bits (qubits)? And perhaps is just the memory used in KITT's main quantum processing cores, not actual medium or long-term storage?

https://www.technologyreview.c...
"Late last year [2022], IBM took the record for the largest quantum computing system with a processor that contained 433 quantum bits, or qubits, the fundamental building blocks of quantum information processing. Now, the company has set its sights on a much bigger target: a 100,000-qubit machine that it aims to build within 10 years. ... The idea is that the 100,000 qubits will work alongside the best "classical" supercomputers to achieve new breakthroughs in drug discovery, fertilizer production, battery performance, and a host of other applications."

If so, Knight Industries and KITT indeed were clearly decades ahead of even current commercial computing technology.
                                                                                                                      (-: ---#++-- :-)

Thanks for your insightful post. And people problems is why the biggest short term risk of AI and robotics is a few wealthy and powerful people using them to increase wealth inequality further, with destabilizing social effects (like Marshall Brain wrote about in Manna and Robotic Nation).

Here is some stuff I put together many years ago on similar themes, although my sig ("The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.") is the most important of all these ideas.

"The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-...
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society.
      On sources, most of this content was written and organized by the author, but some resulted from a collaborative process on the Wikipedia Jobless Recovery article, and so the content is licensed similar to Wikipedia. See that article for attributions, although almost all this content was since deleted by advocates of mainstream economic theology. :-) While I tried to cite sources and be as neutral as possible, others disagreed. So, I am presenting this article on Google Knol so these ideas remain easily available to people. I have also added some inline YouTube videos related to the content. The ideas here were also refined indirectly through discussions about related issues on the Open Manufacturing mailing list, the p2presearch mailing list, and the Princeton University TigerNet alumni mailing lists, as well as in other places like Slashdot and various blogs. This article could also be seen as an outgrowth of Google's Project Virgle April Fool's joke which created some social connections (including to people involved with OpenVirgle and Open Manufacturing) and also inspired me to start putting up more content related to post-scarcity and social/technical change issues."

"Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"This video presents a simplified education model about socioeconomics and technological change. It discusses five interwoven economies (subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft) and how the balance will shift with cultural changes and technological changes. It suggests that things like a basic income, better planning, improved subsistence, and an expanded gift economy can compensate in part for an exchange economy that is having problems."

Text version someone of my presentation that someone else put up:
https://docslib.org/doc/690593...

Here is a recent short mainstream economics overview by someone else that covers some of the same initial ground, although essentially ignores gift and theft transactions and also ways to deal with problems:
"The 4 Types of Economies | Economics Concepts Explained | Think Econ"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

A satire (sort of, yet hopeful) on turning Princeton University into a post-scarcity institution:
https://www.pdfernhout.net/pos...
"Like Kurzweil, PU economists could start applying their skills to charting trends in the real basis of prosperity. They need to move beyond charting derived trends that are social constructions like fluctuations in fiat currency. They need to start admitting that as a fiat currency system breaks down with a transition to the emerging post-scarcity economy, dollars are no longer a very good way to measure things (if they ever were). They need to remember that currency is as arbitrary system related to a current economic control system which is rapidly becoming obsolete. Fiat dollars are essentially ration units, and rationing is becoming obsolete as part of the emerging post-scarcity society. For example, personal internet bandwidth use and server disk space are now so cheap as to be effectively "too cheap to matter" except in the most extreme cases for some small number of individuals. So, PU economists need to get back to basics and start charting real physically measurable (or estimateable) things. And then they need to think about the interrelations of those real things. Essentially, they can still use a lot of their old skills at analysis, but rather than apply them to one thing, money, they need to apply them to thousands of individual measurements of aspects of life-support and production. And the challenge will be in seeing how to make predictions about systems where these thousands of factors are difficult to interchange for each other (for example, topsoil depth versus sewing machine production). ...
    In general, economists need to look at what are major sources of *real* cost as opposed to *fiat* cost in producing anything. Only then can one make a complete control system to manage resources within those real limits, perhaps using arbitrary fiat dollars as part of a rationing process to keep within the real limits and meet social objectives (or perhaps not, if the cost of enforcing rationing for some things like, say, home energy use or internet bandwidth exceeds the benefits).
      Here is a sample meta-theoretical framework PU economists no doubt could vastly improve on if they turned their minds to it. Consider three levels of nested perspectives on the same economic reality -- physical items, decision makers, and emergent properties of decision maker interactions. (Three levels of being or consciousness is a common theme in philosophical writings, usually rock, plant, and animal, or plant, animal, and human.) ...
      What is more pressing in understanding a post-scarcity economy is seeing what real physical limits exist currently and how they could change over time. This requires examining physical production from first principles, since only when one understands the physical limits of a system does a discussion of various control systems and their strengths and weaknesses make sense. ..."

https://pdfernhout.net/recogni...
"There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."

Other ideas I've collected on making healthier organizations within the economic framework we currently have:
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...

As I discuss here for militarism but applies as well to commercialism:
https://pdfernhout.net/recogni...

That is also the idea in my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

To spell it out, AI is a technology of abundance. If people concerned about not having enough money to buy endless stuff use AI in a competitive spammy way -- disrupting healthy communications in the process by poisoning the web with deep fakes and so on -- the end results are likely to be unhappy for everyone. Same as how such people spammed email making it hard to communicated to bring about abundance for all, leading in part to walled gardens of social media platforms that were spam free at first and then became attention prisons with there own notion of spam.

Some related satire I wrote linked from the first page about a scarcity-obsessed Hitler confronted with a post-scarcity economy:
"A post-scarcity "Downfall" parody remix of the bunker scene"
https://groups.google.com/g/op...

Dialog of alternatively a military officer and Hitler:
MO: "It looks like there are now local digital fabrication facilities here, here, and here."
H: "But we still have the rockets we need to take them out?"
"The rockets have all been used to launch seed automated machine shops for self-replicating space habitats for more living space in space."
"What about the nuclear bombs?"
"All turned into battery-style nuclear power plants for island cities in the oceans."
"What about the tanks?"
"The diesel engines have been remade to run biodiesel and are powering the internet hubs supplying technical education to the rest of the world."
"I can't believe this. What about the weaponized plagues?"
"The gene engineers turned them into antidotes for most major diseases like malaria, tuberculosis, cancer, and river blindness."
"Well, send in the Daleks."
"The Daleks have been re-outfitted to terraform Mars. There all gone with the rockets."
"Well, use the 3D printers to print out some more grenades."
"We tried that, but they only are printing toys, food, clothes, shelters, solar panels, and more 3D printers, for some reason."
"But what about the Samsung automated machine guns?"
"They were all reprogrammed into automated bird watching platforms. The guns were taken out and melted down into parts for agricultural robots."
"I just can't believe this. We've developed the most amazing technology the world has ever known in order to create artificial scarcity so we could rule the world through managing scarcity. Where is the scarcity?"
"Gone, Mein Fuhrer, all gone. All the technologies we developed for weapons to enforce scarcity have all been used to make abundance."
"How can we rule without scarcity? Where did it all go so wrong? ... Everyone with an engineering degree leave the room ... now!"
[Cue long tirade on the general incompetence of engineers. :-) Then cue long tirade on how could engineers seriously wanted to help the German workers to not have to work so hard when the whole Nazi party platform was based on providing full employment using fiat dollars. Then cue long tirade on how
could engineers have taken the socialism part seriously and shared the wealth of nature and technology with everyone globally.]
"So how are the common people paying for all this?"
"Much is free, and there is a basic income given to everyone for the rest. There is so much to go around with the robots and 3D printers and solar panels and so on, that most of the old work no longer needs to be done."
"You mean people get money without working at jobs? But nobody would work?"
"Everyone does what they love. And they are producing so much just as gifts."
"Oh, so you mean people are producing so much for free that the economic system has failed?"
"Yes, the old pyramid scheme one, anyway. There is a new post-scarcity economy, where between automation and a a gift economy the income-through-jobs link is almost completely broken. Everyone also gets income as a right of citizenship as a share of all our resources for the few things that still need to be rationed. Even you."
"Really? How much is this basic income?"
"Two thousand a month."
"Two thousand a month? Just for being me?"
"Yes."
"Well, with a basic income like that, maybe I can finally have the time and resources to get back to my painting..."

Most of the human population calculations are wrong because:

1) Governments control the numbers for political reasons.
2) Climate Woke Nutjobs want funding for their labs.
3) NGO's want population increases to validate crisis and by pass due process to rule by decree.
4) Then there is the SATANIC rabbit hole of human trafficking, but has very interesting relationships to population decline in 1st world countries. One example is the sex trade and sexualized education in institutions and media. Possibly the single most effective psyop in reducing birth rates. Japan is a fascinating study on this for example.

"Why, of course, the people don't want war," Goering shrugged. "Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship."

"There is one difference," I pointed out. "In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars."

"Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country." Source