now "old folks" in question are demanding a lavish retirement at the expense of me and those who are currently young despite the fact that when they funded something similar for their grandparents, the proportional burden was radically lower. a society that would significantly burden the future of its young (and therefore its own future) to cash out the olds smacks of a ponzi scheme and is hideously distorted.

what's more, elder care sucks dollars from investing in interesting industries (colonizing space, growing our industrial base, new computing technologies) to mindless nonsense. instead, those dollars will go to building bingo halls.

importing large groups of people sometimes works; we did it pretty well in America because we had so much room to grow. transportation and communication were also much harder, so it was less easy for people to maintain ties to their former country and family there; they adapted a little more, though ethnic ghettos were still a problem.

it's not an intractable problem but saying "just get immigrants bro" isn't really a good solution. we are sometimes biased in the US because we are selective (too much so, I think). we bring in the best from high-population areas like Africa and India and we see benefits for that. on the other hand, while migrant working and a moderate level of illegal immigration are fine and even economically beneficial, it would be silly to deny that the current levels are causing severe problems. when you lose that selectivity and control, things don't turn out so well. and to import enough people to make up for falling birthrates we would have to broaden our horizons beyond skilled workers.

- scanning twitter DMs, google chat, gmail, google messages, discord messages, and google meet for "sextortion" with "language analysis"

- automatically watching all video calls for CSEA

- policing the above (through unspecified means) for "grooming"

So before jumping on "muh elon bad" and "muh bigtech needs regulation" think about what exactly they're trying to regulate and how.

(Source is their press release here https://www.esafety.gov.au/newsroom/media-releases/second-se...)

your piracy example is better. consider that it's the rise of more convenient options (netflix and spotify) not some effective policy that curtailed the prevalence of piracy.

i understand the arguments about artistic value, but those are quite separate from yours.

Unions ironically act very conservative these days. They could take some bold steps to potentially create very worker-friendly, worker-owned shops, which would create a voluntary, non-coercive path towards the "market socialist" structure many people advocate.

Even in large industries like automobiles where this is hard, they could probably start doing something like smaller-scale parts production and sell those.