And this has happened in every industry invented within 30 years.

Not freely. Restaurants and daycares are regulated by the state, using laws written by larger businesses. They are limited in their ability to compete. Not sure about bicycle shops, but there is a reason why the price is going up, and it isn't because the technology has really changed in the last 75 years or so. Startup costs will prevent businesses from being opened, unless they are extremely minimal.

What's with the "photo" of the 2nd stage / capsule separation? It looks distinctly like a 3D render, not an actual photo. Or if it is a real photo, how did they get it?

The headline could be confusing. The garage was significant. My point is that people extend the concept in their heads and imagine a lot more than it really was. That is the myth part.

"As long as the opportunity to start your own business is equal"

There's only one sub-industry I can think of today where that is true, and I've yet to meet anybody who is making a living at it (though, in that sub industry, cell phone app authorship, there have been some big short-term winners, most of them produce fad and fashion, not trend).

It doesn't assign a heapiness value, though: it assigns odds of something being a heap. That still treats heaps as a crisp set. Compare: a probability function will tell me the odds of a die rolling a six, but it still either the die does or doesn't land on six; there is no "slightly six" in dice, there are just the odds of being either completely six or not. That's not the case with heaps: a collection of grains can be only slightly heapish, or very heapish, which is something different than being slightly or very likely to be (completely and unambiguously) a heap.

function pickPizza {
    return { crust -> chewy, toppings -> [ 'pepperoni', 'extra cheese']};
}

Europeans think 200 miles is a long distance; Americans think 200 years is a long time.

(And 2000 years ago is still pretty recent, even just as far as human history goes. That's closer to the Moon Landing than it is to the building of the Pyramids of Giza).

The formalism of use here is not probability, but fuzzy sets. The Problem of the Heap basically highlights that "heapishness" is not a crisp property; there is not a clear-cut line between heaps and non-heaps, rather the demarcation between heaps and non-heaps is fuzzy. A collection of grains of rice can be more heapish or less heapish, and sufficiently non-heapish (for a given purpose, context, etc) collections can be called simply "non-heaps", of sufficiently heapish collections likewise simply called "heaps", but there is never a sudden switch from heap to non-heap.

Probability doesn't express that properly, because it still speaks as though a given collection either is or isn't a heap, and adds the further complication that two different collections of the same number of grains may be a heap and not a heap respectively, though their odds of being a heap are the same.

Going back to chickens: it's not that over time, successive organisms got more and more likely to be chickens. It's that over time, successive organisms got more and more chickenish. Chickens are not a crisp set. Chickenishness if a fuzzy property.

But stillsufficiently chickenish birds came before sufficiently-chickenish-bird eggs, because a chicken egg is an egg laid by a chicken, not necessarily an egg containing a chicken embryo. (Consider: when you buy unfertilized eggs at the store, are those chicken eggs or not?)

This is tangential but I just have to comment that there is so much presumption in your suggestions. That he has retirement savings that he could live off of. That he has a house he could sell. Especially that the alternative to owning a house would cost LESS than owning one — why would anyone ever buy if not to escape the infinite debt that is a life of renting until you die?

In my 20s I wanted to spend my life doing things to enrich the world, art and writing and philosophy, but got sidetracked from those things by the need to get a stable enough life that I could do those things without ending up homeless or starving again —after that happened or nearly happened too many times for comfort. Now as I'm approaching middle age myself, it's becoming clear that it's going to take my entire productive life, if I'm lucky and things continue going as well as they recently have started to, to get to a point where I don't have to work doing pointless things that contribute nothing of value to the world just to have a place to sleep, and can actually start doing something worth doing with my life when I retire — if I'm lucky enough to ever actually retire, since it'll likely be by retirement age that housing is secured and I can start saving up food money to live off of for the few years I'll have left, and that's ignoring the probability that by then I will likely have medical expenses destroying any ability to save like that anymore.

So the alternative to "toil[ing] away the rest of my life working for The Man doing trivial things" as the GP put it isn't "sell my house" or "live off my retirement savings", it's "sleep in my car and beg for food money". In either case I lose out on actually doing anything worth living for, but in the former case at least I'm living a comfortable pointless existence.

The mold dies once it reaches my stomach anyway, and it's already there by the time the wine gets anywhere near it, so I don't know what you're talking about with "kill the fungus". But seriously, bread and water with a roquefort? That leaves a meal of the strongest savory-flavored food in the world, paired with no other flavors of note (depending on the bread you're thinking of). Gotta add some variety in there, and the sweet and sour notes of a rich fruity wine contrast the savory cheese beautifully.

And you're thinking that George Washington was one of those idiots who thought a little tyranny would work out well?

George Washington the aristocratic slaveholder who crushed the Whiskey Rebellion, screwing over farmers (including many Revolutionary War vets) to pay off bondholders? I'd say "a little tyranny would work out well" might be a decent description of his stance, sure.