It's in the name.

Summary of the entire silly discussion:

a) If one favors cats over birds, cats are pets, birds are food.

b) If one favors birds over cats, birds are pets, cats are pests.

Options not included in the discussion, but welcome to make things even livelier:

d) If one favors both birds and cats, both are pets and cats walk with bright red collars and bells so the cats can roam freely and the birds can survive.

e) If one favor neither, all are hunting targets.

f) If one favors dogs, they need come and say something offtopic.

g) If one's a fundamentalist Christian nutcase, all animals are automatons whose existence serves the sole purpose of pleasuring humans, and they won't be in Heaven because they lack souls.

h) If one's a Muslim, cats are clean and you're a sinner.

i) If one's...

Etc. etc. etc.

Kinda. The US had no officially designed language from July 4th, 1776, to February 28, 2025. English was the most used language, but not a legal requirement.

Since March 1st, 2025, there's an Executive Order signed by Trump determining that English is the official language of the United States. Executive Orders are valid until a President cancels them, so we can presume that at least in the period from March 1st, 2025, to January 20th, 2029, the US will indeed have an official language. Coming January 21st, 2029, depending on who was elected for President, it may cease having one, thus going back to its traditional approach.

To make this truly a new default would require a more permanent law than an Executive Order, preferably a Constitutional Amendment. That's unlikely though. So we may well see a situation in which the US alternates having and not having an official language in timespans of 4 to 8 years each.

Let me get this straight: you're actually, for real, in favor of hidden fees, so a business can tell you that you owe them $x more than you agreed to pay for, and now you're obliged to pay?

The right-wing ones too.

On the bright side, most Chinese people, including those in the governing party, believe in some form of reincarnation. If that exists, here's to hope all supporters of such practices may enjoy being reborn in their future-proof schizophrenic autistic sleep-deprived blood-clotting-prone monkey-dog chimeras as those scream in agony while wandering the ruins of now extinct humanity.

They can. There are laws that prevent how much they can make based on the percentage of "something-something-whatever" they put into a central banking, so there's a ceiling of sorts. But other than that, it's all magicked up, yes: Fractional-reserve banking.

Interestingly, that makes extreme sense. Capitalism in general, and Shareholder Capitalism more intensely, requires exponential growth. A company that makes (I'll throw random number for simplicity) $1 billion/quarter to grow 3%, means increasing revenue by $30 million in that period, whereas a company that makes $1 trillion/quarter needs to increase revenue by $30 billion to meet the same 3% growth. Needing to make $30 million allows for a much larger window of "good enough quality" before enshitification quicks in compared to needing to make $30 billion, so the later is way more prone to enshitify their products as soon as possible, if not before, otherwise they miss that target.

If this is how it works, then enshitification also follows the same exponential curve, and we'll definitely see more, and more, and MORE, AND MORE of it, in the next years, until the entire thing collapses as big corps all around start failing to meet their shareholder's expectations over and over again.

You're not thinking creatively enough. The way things are going, the argument will be that uncontrolled installation of unregulated Linux distributions empowers pedophiles to distribute CSAM, so government will start demanding new motherboards to only allow the installation of properly vetted operating systems that implement extensive, impossible to disable, system monitoring to make sure no CSAM can be distributed with it.

Only big corporations with a proven need for maximum performance (and governments, evidently) will be able to buy special, unrestricted motherboards, and they'll need special authorization and a proven internal governance system, subject to periodic government audits, to show they aren't allowing CSAM on their systems.

Evidently, politicians and CEOs will be free from such obligations, because they're Very Important People acting in the National Interest.

And once this is in place, the tightening will continue at a slow but steady pace.

You're under the delusion this would work under a falling population.

The total quantity of money flowing in the economy is a representation of the total amount of goods and services in existence. Your savings, as an absolute number, is meaningless. What matters is what percentage the total quantity of money, which is to say, of all goods and services, your savings represents.

If the total number goes up faster than your savings number goes up, all those savings of yours will represent a lower percentage of all goods and services in existence, so you'll be able to purchase less. You'll experience it as inflation, rendering your savings, once you retire, more and more worthless as time goes by.

If the total number remains the same, meaning your percentage of all goods and services in existence remains the same, but this total amount of goods and service itself becomes smaller and keeps diminishing after you retire, you're also going to be able to purchase less.

And we currently live an economic and sociological environment that does both things: the total number goes up faster than your savings number goes, and the total quantity of goods and services is falling due to lower birth rates, meaning less workers, meaning less production. Plus a higher percentage of retirees versus the working age people, so more competition between retirees themselves for less and less resources.

All of which adds up to saving for retirement being exactly as much of a Ponzi scheme as social security: both require more workers than retirees so the later have access to the goods and services they need to live in their older age. Any difference you perceive between them is subjective preference that doesn't alter the end result, for mathematically they're strictly equivalent.

So, no, going for savings won't solve anything. And the solution that would fix savings-based retirement, namely, higher birth rates, would also fix social security-based retirement, making the point moot.

There's one simple metric to know whether the government has access to encrypted data: angry calls by law enforcement agencies making repeated requests for lawmakers to force companies to allow access to encrypted data.

Consider how, until several years ago, the FBI and other US TLAs were arguing all the time for access to encryption, with media reporting on that almost non-stop. Consider how they all stopped talking about it a few years later, and to this day still say little to nothing about it. Now, what's more likely: that they conformed to the fact they'll never get access to it so stopped trying; or that they don't need to ask anymore?

By using this metric it's clear the UK and the EU don't have access to encrypted content from Apple and other big techs, while US most certainly does. The moment UK and EU officials stop talking about this we'll know they, too, got access to it.

And many to do. It'd be analogous to how, at one point, the British Empire was convinced by Christian militants to put its Navy in the service of ending chattel slavery, and then went and did exactly that.

Too bad they don't make Christian militants like they used to.

Okay, you need to take a deep breath, then start looking into how things are done in the real world. That's quite different from how things are done in the fantasy construct built by the books, blogs, YouTube channels, etc. of your current ideological bubble.

That's the ideal. Free-market idealists, such as Libertarians and Classic Liberals, believe that's all there is to it. Capitalists (not the same thing) see things differently. For them, investment is anything that increase their wealth, no matter what.

Hence, while productive assets are a type of investment, there are others. Rent extraction is one such. Forming cartels is another. Productive-asset-providers destruction is a fourth. Buying the best made-to-order laws from sovereign law-selling States in the free market of laws is a fifth. And so on, and so forth.

So! Housing is a rent-seeking investment type that, for maximum ROI, involves as operational costs primarily law-buying, and secondarily cartel-formation (enabled by the purchased laws). It transfers wealth up is an extremely profitable manner and, therefore, is an excellent opportunity for those operating at a scale they can in fact buy the necessary laws.