For 20 years, plus or minus, personal computers reversed that idea.

I gave all my Apple wealth away because wealth and power are not what I live for. I have a lot of fun and happiness. I funded a lot of important museums and arts groups in San Jose, the city of my birth, and they named a street after me for being good. I now speak publicly and have risen to the top. I have no idea how much I have but after speaking for 20 years it might be $10M plus a couple of homes. I never look for any type of tax dodge. I earn money from my labor and pay something like 55% combined tax on it. I am the happiest person ever. Life to me was never about accomplishment, but about Happiness, which is Smiles minus Frowns. I developed these philosophies when I was 18-20 years old and I never sold out.

You can always choose to go live in some other successful society where no one has any requirement to pay for the common good.
Admittedly I'm unaware of any such, and they may not exist, because the game-theory of such a society causes it to collapse rather quickly.

Nope. That's why I changed all my players to BlueOS.

Full disclosure: I was somewhat involved with the Quake development, helped Mike Abrash a little bit to optimize the asm code that actually made a pure SW 3D rasterizer fast enough to be playable.

The Castle Wolfenstein - Doom - Quake progression might seem from the outside to be a fairly linear upgrade path, but in reality Quake was at least an order of magnitude harder to achieve.

Just the number of amazing ideas John Carmack managed to come up with in order to make a real 3D game possible will forever give Quake a special place in my programming heart.

Terje

I replaced all my SONOS connects with BlueSound node Nano devices. A pricey replacement, but worth it.

As a bonus I was now able to turn off SMB1 on my home Samba server !

It'd cost less to put solar panels on most roofs in the US than to fund a single war for a year, and not a whole lot more to then include local storage/charging. This is ignoring bets we could fund and build out on community or grid storage.

I think you grossly overestimate the required investment for usual/normal use as compared to the cost of keeping the alternative going, and paying for its effects.

We've had the ability to solve the logistical problem for years. The will? Nah. No, and especially no since it became a politically polarizing issue.

Fun idea is to have some external entity hack the tractors, plow under most of the crops.
Yeay, famine.

People forget the security element of having humans in the loop way to often.

I'm Norwegian, have driven EVs since around 2000, and only EVs since March 2016:

This was the first time I could buy an EV which had both a long enough range to drive up to the Telemark mountains to go skiing, and had the 4WD to reliably get up hills on snowy/icy roads. At the time, this was a Tesla Model S, which we since sold to our son, replacing it with the "made for Norway" Model Y (which has been the best-selling vehicle in Norway for the last 3 years).

As noted above, we started with a lot of EV incentives, we saved over $5000 per year in gas and toll road fees until around 2020 when they (as planned) started to roll back some of those incentives.

However, all of that doesn't really matter: By now it is pretty much inconceivable for most Norwegians to buy any new non-EV vehicle: They are just so much better!

Terje

.. the thing that is weird about that is.. .. Congress /always/ had the power to change the laws, and the scope, responsibility and composition of the regulatory bodies.. and thus to direct the regulations.

Couldn't have written it better. 100% Agreed.

Loper Bright vests in an unelected body of /explicitly/ unaccountable (for life) folks (literally because there is no precedent) unprecedented power over what legislators can do with laws/legislation.

The topic of the law or enforcement of it, or understanding companies' behaviors doesn't require experts?

That is a courageously naive outlook.

So, who are we electing in congress or appointing in courts that understand this stuff enough to do /anything/ proper w.r.t. modern communications?

The power to regulate commerce is explicitly mentioned as one of the powers of government in the constitution. All I'm aware of saying that Congress can't do what has been done for the last nearly 200 years, having been previously upheld by prior Supreme Courts, is a dubious recent Supreme Court ruling... where the Supreme Court is a unelected bunch of explicitly unaccountable for life folks. This was, in my opinion, one of many recent dubious rulings, like "gratuities to government officials aren't bribes."

Amusingly, you assert that you want the president elect to be able to push executive orders, which vests in the executive branch powers that are not explicitly enumerated under the constitution either, and which powers it'd have made sense to restrict to the legislature as well under the recent dubious Supreme Court ruling...

I think you need to check your arguments to make them more coherent, something which is often true for the things I say as well, which doesn't render the observation false...

Or.. corrupt it worse than the alternative(s) would have presented.

We've seen the deregulated world before. Rivers that catch on fire from pollution, etc. Water that kills.
That world was much worse than today's world.

Regulation is always bad for someone. The question is /always/ does it create more good, i.e. driving the flywheel faster for everyone or not?
Too much regulation is a damper. Too little is a danger.

The biggest issue isn't the amount of regulation, or who does it-- it is that it takes too long to get anything done.
What we need is more efficient regulation (and I'd throw the courts in there too-- taking years to get /anything/ done is ludicrous).
That can come in the form of 'less' regulation, but it could also come in the form of limits to the amounts of delay that can happen because of regulations.