Current social media profits from viral/mob thoughts/beliefs. The bigger the mob, the bigger the segment is for advertisers.

A "good" social media site would be closer to a non-electronic human social circle.

You have social circles based on the people you interact with. Your family, your schoolmates, your co-workers, your running group, your knitting group, your poker group ... Those would be your primary groups, and you shape your view of the world slowly and locally.
Secondary group would be organizations that you associate with but you do not know personally: Your entire school, your entire company, your church...
As the groups get bigger they become more disconnected from you personally, and carry less weight.
If something happens in the news, it would get filtered through your groups. perhaps you are "six degrees" away from the event.

With current social media, it is all flipped. Some political leader or famous person gives a view point, and the follower mob reacts to that directly.

Current social media has shown itself to be a net-negative for humanity.

Morning person or not does not matter. People can adjust to whatever time convention. That should be evident if you ever travel or move to another place in the world.

The question is where we want the most daylight? For humans, the obvious answer should be that we want more daylight while we are awake.

When is your "sleep midnight"?

Waking hours 6am-10pm: sleep midnight: 2am, awake midday: 2pm
Waking hours 7am-11pm: sleep midnight: 3am, awake midday: 3pm
Waking hours 8am-12am: sleep midnight: 4am, awake midday: 4pm

Compare that to DST, non-DST
Non-DST: Midnight 12am, Midday: 12pm
DST: Midnight 1am, Midday 1am

Non-DST is the wrong direction, unless your waking hours are 4am-8pm.
We should need to shift one more hour DST+ to even align with people that wake up at 6am.

Non-DST does not make sense with current common waking hours.

Because we enjoy suddenly driving home in the dark. (starting tomorrow)

And since everyone wakes up at 5am, it makes sense to put more daylight in the morning.

Especially if you are a farmer 200 years ago, it makes sense.

Burn the art and delete the files. Nothing is lost.

That is currently not possible, AFAIK, unless you get those "1TB"/"2TB" drives, that report a fake number, then get full and/or fail at at much smaller number. It's a problem on amazon for SSD, microsd and usb flash drives that Amazon should fix.

This takes jobs away from other able actors, and adds to the free money to the Willis estate. The copyright retirement/benefactor plan is already 95-170 years of payments. Now that clock can start after you are dead.
Good so your descendants never need to work.

Think of the children (of the rich) !

Good for the eventual all-owning AI corporations as well.

Think of the children (of Robots) !

You cannot just say there should be 50% representation of Women in every profession. Woman and Men are not approaching professions at the same rate.

To find any any potential systematic bias, one would need look at the pool of candidates for the job. Is the gender split similar? Then keep following the source, through qualified majors in colleges that feed the job pool. Is the gender split similar? Then go further. Look and STEM highschool program attendance. I think you would get closer to the actual source of any bias the further you go back. But the data would get more sparse. I suppose if you hade a parent survey of the future occupation of their kindergartener, I think you would find that 35% or less of girls were expected to be engineers.

Perhaps, not free, but the government can and should choose what transportation to subsidize.

In the US, the train system gets very little money compared to the road system.

If we removed the government subsidies/funding of the road system, _all_ roads would be toll roads, and other transportation may look more inviting. Working remotely would become the norm for many jobs.

But, unfortunately, it does not work that way. The government does not want solutions that are optimal, efficient or sustainable.

The government (or most members of government) want the solutions that leads to re-election. That means keep the "donors" happy, keep the unions happy. Keep the media happy. In theory, listen to the people. In practice, convince the people. Congress members all have approval below the worst presidents. There is a reason for that. The people are effectually not their constituents.

The government owns the currency system, at least overall. At at a low level, it owns the mechanism of non-electronic currency.

However, for electronic payments, whether, visa, mastercard, PayPal or Apple Pay, the government stays out.

This naturally leads to several competing "Toll" payment systems. 2% here, 3% there.
That is fine, but at least the government should offer some electronic currency as an alternative.

Perhaps skipping credit/debit cards would be appropriate at this point, and going directly go centralized government digital currency, CBDC, would be the correct course.

Then, this would not only help address current electronic currency monopolies/duopolies, but also the lingering threat of the crypto/incrementing-scarcity/pyramid/speculative currencies.

There is an order of magnitude more government money going to US automotive roadways than into all US train systems.

Now is very different. Less people bus to school. And schools start later. 8:30 or so.

During Little House times, waking hours were driven by light. Not so much now.

If you go to sleep at 11 and wake at 7, then you misaligned with the middle of the night by 3 hours.

Moving 12am forward by an hour still leaves 2 hours misalignment, but is better. Alignment of waking hours to daylight is better for health and safety.

> Energy and technical challenges aside, is there a merit to a decentralized currency that is not controlled by a government?

There is merit in decentralized currency, but not with the artificial scarcity model that is at the core of most crypto currencies. That model, leads to rich early adopters and poor new comers. This could never really scale to a population without having arbitrary wealth redistribution.

There are a few possibilities for creating a proper digital currency. But there is less profitable to the founders and early adopters, obviously that the pyramid like models, so perhaps the issue would be motivation for creation and adoption.

Possible crypto currencies that could be "more fair":

- Tangible coin - Every coin represents a tangible object. A cow, bushel of wheat, a coupon to buy cheapest gallon of milk....
- Person coin - Every person on earth gets one coin. Still a bit of wealth distribution, but not an artificial scarcity model.

In the end, it may be likely that digital government currencies will win against the next generation of crypto currencies. Perhaps crypto currency 3.0 ...

I wouldn't pay for windows, btw. Perhaps I would use it it if it was free. Mac os is a different story. Mac os and Linux are modern POSIX OS's. Windows is still a clunky non POSIX system with baggage from DOS and Windows NT/OS2. There is a reason windows is not on servers, routers, phones, watches, containers, and development setups. I suppose you can use WSL on windows, but why not use a modern POSIX system. Windows is primarily for MS office. The increasing macos adoption is also good for Linux as they are similar. Getting rid of systems with C:, batch files and dos prompts for good would be great.

None of the existing crypto "currencies" can scale to actually be used as a currency.

They are all used solely for speculation, and none are used as currency.

They all have the same flaw that would ultimately prevent wide scale adoption. They all are extremely biased towards the founders or early adopters.
To scale, the inequality would grow much worse.

Let's say you want BTC or DOGE to replace the dollar. Everyone in the US needs to trade in their dollars for these things.
What would that do to the price? and exponential rise of course.
First ones all in, would be trillionares.
Last ones in would hold nothing.

It would amplify any existing wealth distribution, and replace existing classes with new arbitrary classes with extreme differences.
Of course the early adopters want this. But why would others.
By putting money in, you are putting money in the pyramid, and putting yourself at the bottom, perhaps hoping that people will be below you.

I image if anyone bothered to model scaling crypto currency, they would know this.

Asset based currencies would be more fair and should be able to scale much better. Such as the corn coin or the cow coin.

I hope we can move beyond these digital artificial scarcity tokens at some point. They are all potentially very destabilizing to the economy and society.

1/6th? Now you are just making shit up.

The IFR of Delta was 1/200.

As for Omicron, please link to any data on the fatality rate of Omicron. I see articles like "2nd person in US dies from Omicron", and "7th person in UK ...". A very tiny number compared to the fatality rate of Delta. Perhaps a much smaller fatality rate than the flu...

Omicron is much different than Delta. Things have changed significantly for the better (because of ... Omicron).