And they’ll pass the costs of extra security on to… yep, you guessed it: the customer.

Not proof but high grades are definitely correlated with family income.

He’s from a rich family. He went to a $40k/year all-boys private high school and was valedictorian.

Yes and they’re yet another collectible product that exploits the psychology of a subset of people who compulsively collect things. I put them in the same category as gambling and note that there’s a lot of crossover with these things (loot boxes and CCG booster packs being prime examples of a gambling and collectible combo).

It’s legal for Ukraine to defend itself from Russia.

I am for progress towards a goal.

None of the assassination advocates have laid out a concrete plan as to how assassinations will achieve their goals. All I’ve seen is:

1. Assassinate the CEOs
2. ???
3. We win!

No discussion at all of how this could backfire and lead to a dystopian hellscape, or how to avoid such a backfire. Things are very different from 1917. Technology is far more advanced and it’s not in the favour of citizens’ militias.

They’re doing so lawfully.

Oh that’s a whole other issue: inter-university competition. They’re all competing with each other over the same pool of students. Each one spends money to attract students away from the other schools who then spend money to attract them back.

Ukraine is working toward making that happen. They’re much closer to achieving it than they were 2 years ago.

And that’s great but honestly that’s still peanuts if your goal is to have a proper public health care system where no one has to go broke because they’re uninsured when they get sick.

I’m a Canadian. I want Americans to have a proper health care system. I just don’t think a campaign of assassinations is going to get you there. I think it’s far more likely to backfire and turn the US into a Robocop-style dystopian hellscape where all the big companies have their own private armies working security and regular people aren’t even allowed into their city’s business district without going through security checkpoints.

Why not nationalize all of the health insurance companies, fire all the executives, and turn it all into a public health insurance agency?

The Baumol Effect is killing us here. The more productivity gains we make in manufacturing, IT, and other technology boosted fields, the more unaffordable education will get.

Unless he made the sailboat himself out of recycled materials!

Too bad they can’t read!

Imagine the Russian commander’s surprise when he realized North Koreans don’t know anything about StarCraft!

That or the alien will simply scour all life from the planet and then strip mine it for resources. They don’t even have to be more intelligent than us. Suppose they were roughly equivalent to human intelligence but had an insect-like eusocial behaviour with a billion year old culture. They could be far more advanced than us simply due to the availability of time.

Thank you. I would even argue that Return of the Jedi wasn’t great either. I mean sure, it was beautiful and the Moon of Endor with its giant trees looked amazing, but the plot was mostly a rehash of the original (another Death Star? Really?) plus silly Ewok shenanigans that made the empire into a total joke.

So make it a one time only thing then? Next billionaire you have in the dock will know you can’t be trusted to keep your word (“return the money and your life will be spared“) and so will have zero reason to cooperate.

I admire your optimism! I could easily see us living in a Mad Max situation in 200 years.

One thing I never see people talking about with fossil fuels is that they were a one shot deal in earth’s history, never to be repeated. If global civilization completely collapses (particularly the industrial base) then attempting to start over without fossil fuels could leave us stuck in a 17th century type situation for an extremely long time.

The problem is that renewables just don’t bootstrap. They require huge amounts of minerals which we’ve only been able to mine and process using heavy equipment and manufacturing powered by fossil fuels. Trying to do all that from a minecart-horse-and-pickaxe level of technology isn’t going to work out.

The other major factor is of course all the really easy mineral sources are gone too. Instead of mining directly from the ground we’d be salvaging scrap materials from the mountains of disposable electronics we’re producing right now. That’s where things really start to look like Mad Max.

Was there a time in the past you would have preferred? I grew up in the 90s and I really miss that time period but I don’t think I’d prefer to live at any time before the 20th century over now. As complex and difficult as life is right now, other time periods tended to be much nastier for various reasons.