Rome died over 300+ years. They don't die instantly.

NOTE- most Americans won't realize until it's so bad they can't deny it and some will never get it even if he does Musk's Nazi Salute because they are still in denial over that.

Modern despotism has a fake democratic element so the lower third of the bell curve don't participate in any resistance or help defend the despotic "democracy."

Spot on ...

And even when Rome became a empire, with full autocratic rule, the motto SPQR (Senatus Populusque Romanus, "[For the] Senate and People of Rome") continued to be used.

For example, after the Republic's end by more than 2 centuries, in the Arch of Septimius Severus from 203 CE.

So even when democracy ends, and autocracy takes over, there is a fake semblance of what has ended.

That is exactly what the panspermia hypothesis postulates, though it proposes that live cells is what spreads, not just precursors (prebiotic molecules).

Once famous proponent was Nobel laureate Francis Crick of DNA spiral fame.

I've never seen a software distribution mechanism as careless and sloppy as NPM.

I've always been against running anything that requires NPM, because of exactly that.
Their repository governance is abysmal.
Compare that to, say, Debian/Ubuntu, and you see a huge difference.
Debian has been around for almost 3 decades, and we have not had the repositories being a vector for compromised software.

If it is NPM, I pass ...

That pretty much sums it up ...

I wish it was more widely used.

I am an XFCE users for many years (Xubuntu).

Gnome is a non starter for me ...

I wish people would try it out.
It is fast, small, and stays out of the way.

There are already plenty of news stories that appear to be just someone rephrasing the AP or some other story. i.e. "The AP has reported..." with no additional info just "summarizing" the AP story. (Rephrasing its first paragraph.) Yeah, an LLM can do that pretty much by design of the architecture. A copyright washing machine. I don't know that this was ever genuinely worthwhile human work in the first place. Now whether or not that "should" be a legal non-derivative work is a separate question.

I'm primarily interested in my own well-being.

Who wants a tombstone with the engraving "...but he had the right of way!"?

It's a somewhat winded road in the city, with cars around you and a bus-stop in the middle of the road. At the end of the road is a roundabout with backed-up traffic and a gas-station with cross-traffic, sometimes (which I had to find out the hard way).

It's not in the US, of course.

I have been riding a bike since I was four or five years old (I don't remember exactly).
I tried the eBikes at work once (I had an outside-appointment at a place not easily reachable by public transport). The go up to 45km/h.
It's insane. I don't have a motor-cycle license and never ridden one - but I would assume it's not much different.
There's very little margin of error there and no crash crumple-zone like in a car except your own body.

My commute involves a downhill-section (on public road) that I can reach 50-ish km/h when I really want.

I was once overtaken by a guy on an eBike when I was doing 52. I caught up with him a couple of red lights later and asked him how much he was doing. He said "62.5".

I studied organic chemistry, microbiology, and biochemistry.
But that was decades ago ...

I tend to agree with you.
How would they create an organism with the entire chain of biochemical pathways that are mirrored? Think about the Citric Acid Cycle, and how complex it is. All the enzymes and their precursors, and pathways that create them need to be mirrored.

But, it has been a while, so anyone with more current knowledge please correct me.

You are perfectly right, unfortunately ...

The observation that is known as Brandolini's Law rings true ...

Debunking misinformation takes a huge amount of time and effort, far more than the misinformation itself.

Misinformation has the advantage of spreading faster, being much simpler, and not needing any facts nor logic.

That is what we are up against ...

Well, I wouldn't call it lying. He's at times overly optimistic.

He's usually right but wrong about the timeframe.

It was massively propped up by government spending.

A practice Trump (said he) wanted to crack down on - but then stopped halfway through because everybody in congress wants to grab as much money as possible before the whole house of cards implodes like a neutron star.

The only one who actually believed in this BS of cutting government spending was Elon.

They did exactly that.

Temu et.al. were splitting up millions and millions of orders into even more millions and millions of parcels to get under the limit.

So, I'd call it a loophole.

Also, most of the stuff is low-value, low-quality that people mostly ordered out of boredom and literally for a dopamine shot.

Of course, it all propped up the economy numbers - but that couldn't go on forever anyway.