Inflamation uses up resources. When we were hunter-gatherers and had to survive ice ages - it wasn't a good idea to waste calories and vitamins just in case.

Better for 3 people out of 30 to die of flu than for all 30 to starve.

Nowadays the optimal trade-off might be completely different.

In my first job we had warehouse management system, and for testing new versions we allowed users to log-in to test environment.

Some employees didn't knew they were supposed to only log in to prod and happily worked in their warehouse accepting deliveries, stocktaking, moving stuff in real world using test db instead of the prod one. We only realized when they moved so much stuff that the inconsistencies db vs reality triggered alarms.

Even people who know because then they have to explain it which wastes time for no benefit.

Discord WILL disappear at some point and millions of people will lose their communities.

Speak for yourself. I'd happily retroactively trade a dozen IQ points back in my 20s for emotional intelligence. I'd be much happier.

Instead we paid more, got hundreds of thousands of people dead, undermined our security guarantees, and all because of short term idiocy/cowardice.

The only reasonable consequence is EU countries getting nukes and getting closer to China.

And we're digging our grave further by Trump undermining NATO guarantees.

They gave up their nukes to be betrayed. There will be A LOT of new countries with nukes soon because of that.

Whether personality is entirely based on laws of physics or not - is a separate question.

    Person me = new Person {
      body: { ... },
      personality/soul: { ... },
      emotionalState: { ... },
      memories: { ... }
    }

See Duolingo :)

BTW the value gained from travel is dropping with every new country. The single biggest lesson is just noticing everything you assumed is obvious and natural that is actually just accidental and specific to your country. Especially Americans would benefit from it.

Communication technology is critical for everything else, it changes how society functions, what forms of government and country sizes are viable, what people can think of.

Every time there has been progress in communication technology - there was disruption, wars, millions of deaths.

It happened when handwritten books enabled organized religions.

It happened when printed books enabled reformation.

It happened when radio enabled totalitarian systems in early 20th century (both Hitler and Stalin gave away state-funded radio receivers to people).

It happens now with social media.

Previous forms of government aren't sustainable till we adapt our laws and governments to the new communication technology (like BBC and media laws were democracies' response to totalitarian radios and tvs).

I think mostly they don't because people already have steam installed, and creating a new account on some other website to buy 1 game is too much hassle.

See dwarf fortress that was free for decades, and got much more popular when it was released on steam (paid version).

Or see Vintage Story which is great, and should be much more popular, but it's only available on its own website.