Does it need to be very competitive in the world market? As long as it's providing for and protecting its citizens, what's the point?

The EU and most European countries directly subsidise industries. It's called industrial policy and strategy. Same goes for the USA. That particular point is irrelevant, your others are good though

An LLM helped me build an automatic farm in minecraft with my child. And if you don't understand why that's impressive, you ought to reassess.

It's not that impressive at all, it just regurgitated and re-wrote the content from hundreds of websites and video transcripts that tell you how to do that... The impressive part was all of those people figuring this out and writing it up themselves.

        https://www.ign.com/wikis/mine...
        https://ender-chest.com/tutori...
        https://www.namehero.com/gamin...
        https://timesofindia.indiatime...
        https://www.youtube.com/playli...
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
        https://www.reddit.com/r/Minec...
        https://www.reddit.com/r/Minec...
        https://www.reddit.com/r/techn...

etc.

also:

  - trains often depart/arrive directly from urban centres, so you don't have 1hr+ commutes after the plane arrives to even get to where you're going
  - if you miss a train, a lot of tickets you can buy just let you get on the next one
  - capacity can easily be increased when needed by just adding more carriages
  - it's often nice just to look out of the window for a trip and seeing the world go by instead of just clouds

Privatisation. Thatcher's legacy continues to fuck us over.

The Stockholm Syndrome is strong with this one! hahaha

Governments don't interfere with markets when they "feel like it"--they'll usually do it to prevent catastrophe, promote a particular public good or strategy, or (most common in the USA) because the government has been bought and paid for by the people being bailed out.

Universal Basic Services is the best route to go. If done correctly, it avoids a shitload of unearned money going to the obscenely rich ghouls. Things like healthcare, housing, education etc. The sort of things we, in fact, achieved for a while after World War 2 was over...

That doesn't sound like teachers in the UK at all. I have relatives, friends and ex-colleagues who are teachers. The vast majority of them are trying to do their best to help the kids within the stupid constraints provided by our incompetent and malicious government.

No one gets into teaching to get rich, or to pursue some weird agenda. It pays too poorly for that. They get into it generally because they're passionate about learning and/or working with kids.

Actually they didn't. People hated cars and the deaths they caused at first. A huge propaganda effort was deployed by car-makers, and they came up with the whole concept of 'jaywalking' to shift blame to the victims. Large money won in the end as usual...

Treat those delivery apps as 'discovery' services instead. I use them to find new places that deliver on the occasion I order in. If it's good, I order direct from them for all future orders. I do the same with 'booking.com' and the like.

That's true right now, perhaps--but people can clearly see a huge downward turn is well within the realms of possibility.

Not really, the post-WWII (in the west) period saw unprecedented improvements in human rights, social safety nets, co-operation, etc.

Since the 1980s, pushed hard by Thatcher & Reagan, rich bellends were empowered more and more and more--and started to fuel divisions between populations to distract from the fact that they were making the world worse in every possible way to satisfy their own greed and insecurities.

We definitely should stop subsidizing their defense.

I agree, I live in Europe--the problem is the USA originally wanted Europe dependent on them militarily and economically, treaties and deals all twisted Europe's arm to achieve this. It's not the USA was doing us a favour, it was all entirely in their own interest.

There are such things as smaller independent ISPs where if something goes wrong you can speak to a human who will likely care. Same goes for landlords. Electricity supply, well depends on the country as to that setup. Some things are unavoidable.

If half the internet was not on AWS, but on 15 - 20 different providers and outage of one would not be a big story.