"What? You are reading for fun? Don't you have a life? What's wrong with you? Why aren't you engaging in drinking, drugs, sex, and other behaviors that will lead to teen pregnancy?"

I really wanted to do this one, though.

Are they vagrant if they aren't moving around?

Life imitates art I guess. Aunty Wainwright did this back in the 80s in her shop on Last of the summer wine. Although her method was a bit more hands on and personable.

No Samsung ad-displaying fridges? That's good news.

Trump was not elected by the majority of Americans. He won at most 50% of the vote. Turnout was 63% of registered voters. And registered voters is approximately 75% of eligible US citizens. All told that means at most 25% of Americans voted for him. That's still shocking of course. But now you can see why the GOP is all about making voting as difficult as possible so that a mere 25% of the country can continue to force their will on the rest.

Thanks for the insightful post. And to build on your survival instinct misadaptation point, consider that our preferences were tuned through evolution or a scarcity of certain things (salt, sweet, fat, excitement, novelty, startling, etc) and work against us when there is abundance of those things made possible by modern technology (e.g. ultraprocessed foods, algorithmic feeds, several scene changes a second in Videos, etc). See:

https://www.healthpromoting.co...
"Dr. Douglas Lisle, who has spent the last two decades researching and studying this evolutionary syndrome, explains that all of us inherit innate incentives from our ancient ancestors that he terms The Motivational Triad: the pursuit of pleasure, the avoidance of pain, and the conservation of energy. Unfortunately, in present day America's convenience-centric, excess-oriented culture, where fast food, recreational drugs, and sedentary shopping have become the norm, these basic instincts that once successfully insured the survival and reproduction of man many millennia ago, no longer serve us well. In fact, it's our unknowing enslavement to this internal, biological force embedded in the collective memory of our species that is undermining our health and happiness today."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose is a book by Deirdre Barrett published by W. W. Norton & Company in 2010. Barrett is a psychologist on the faculty of Harvard Medical School. The book argues that human instincts for food, sex, and territorial protection evolved for life on the savannah 10,000 years ago, not for today's densely populated technological world. Our instincts have not had time to adapt to the rapid changes of modern life. The book takes its title from Nikolaas Tinbergen's concept in ethology of the supernormal stimulus, the phenomena by which insects, birds, and fish in his experiments could be lured by a dummy object which exaggerated one or more characteristic of the natural stimulus object such as giant brilliant blue plaster eggs which birds preferred to sit on in preference to their own. Barrett extends the concept to humans and outlines how supernormal stimuli are a driving force behind today's most pressing problems, including modern warfare, obesity and other fitness problems, while also explaining the appeal of television, video games, and pornography as social outlets."

https://tlc.ku.edu/
" "We were never designed for the sedentary, indoor, sleep-deprived, socially-isolated, fast-food-laden, frenetic pace of modern life." - TLC Principal Investigator Stephen Ilardi, PhD"

And to take that even one step further, see 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."

That's a real problem, but it ignores that the labor statistics are manipulated for political ends, so you can't trust them.

It's not at all clear to me that we currently have low unemployment among those who would be seeking jobs if they thought they had a chance. (Once you've been unemployed for a while I believe they stop counting you. Admittedly, it's been over a decade since I looked into that.)

I just looked those up, and holy crap they are all just horrible, ugly, meaningless garbage.

Considering that Apple is one of the richest corporations in the world, them doing the rebelling seems like a stretch.

My brother likes to say Star Trek also has a lot to answer for. TNGs ubiquitous touch screens are now a widespread infection in nearly all devices today including refrigerators, washing machines, and unfortunately automobiles. No one thought to ask "but is this actually a good idea?". Also Star Trek's talking computer with a conversational interface is now becoming mainstream with llms.

"Oath of Fealty" wasn't a dystopia, it was an attempt at utopia, that wasn't working out all that poorly. Nobody who didn't want to take part was forced to do so. Some people liked it and other people didn't. A few people hated it. The viewpoint character's assessment was (paraphrase)"not all cultures need to be the same".

Where are you getting this data? How do you measure "most talented"?

When K'Breel, Speaker for the Council, heard that their Martian robot spy had been discovered, he had their gelsacs flanged. No one was reached for comment.

The ironic thing is, with all that whining you sound exactly like a "Karen."

Welcome to your new tribe, friend, you were always there.