kernoble

I don't think you understand that Louis Rossmann's job and attitude used to be the norm. Owning and repairing things are core to industrial living, but modern economic forces want to make you think that its about licensing and disposability.

Ownership and agency are part of liberty, renting and dependence is not.

Even with cash, you can't buy a plane ticket without handing over all your info. Which is a good thing!

And, if I had to guess, the booking of hotel rooms probably has more to do with liability rather than tracking. There are plenty of ways of getting a roof over your head without using a credit card; though IMO they are likely a downgrade.

While your statements resonate with me, it's a bit hyperbolic to say that electronic payments/banking are the only way of exerting the control you're worried about. I think there are a lot of good points in this line of complaint about centralized private financial systems, but the ones you're raising are a bit fringe.

The universities seem to have forgotten that there role is to teach and educate, not overreach into their student's lives. College is about learning to cope and manage on your own, as well as learn. Having a different helicopter parent at the university (compared to home) won't help that development.

A lot of these high-end schools have been working to crack down on forms of risk, at the cost of a huge amount of fun and personal discovery. The issues is, this has happened for kids all the way down to when they are toddlers. People need to be able to be in risky, crazy, abnormal situations; it's part of growing up and figuring out who you are. This will only push it later in life, when the risks are far higher, and/or will just have even more uncreative drones.

I'm pretty sure

> the only solution is to create more mountain towns and ski resorts

was meant as a strawman.

One thing no one is mentioning is how China is the no.1 beneficiary of a pacified and monitored Australian populace. They are already completely dependent on the Aussie natural resource exports, and are deeply interested in Australia continuing to be friendly towards them, and could easily overwhelm them in a fight.

The thing is this "long run" is a hypothetical for investors and their finite lifetimes and finite windows of return.

Companies aren't accountable to some infinitely long running algorithm or timeless dynasty of shareholders, they are accountable to living breathing greedy humans who want to make a buck NOW, not when they are dead or for their heirs.

If I had to guess it would be something like Slack, Shopify, Squarespace or some other SaaS platform that needs to meet the needs of a hugely diverse customer base.

Ebay is somewhat like this. Though I don't think it meets all your requirements.

I'm curious how big the adjacent parking lot or parking garage will be.

Whenever I zoomed out of my bases in Factorio, I always was reminded of IC die shots.

Point being: increased speed, and therefore frequency, of communication/interaction changes the nature of our relationships.

So the change in the "underlying" doesn't have to be 10x to have a 10x effect on the relationships.