It is possible for us to work together and fix these things.

Edit:

Moving away from leaded gas might be another example.

(CFCs and leaded gas invented by the same dude, fun fact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr. Quite a legacy...)

I also feel like a lot of modern air travel is designed around making something that's highly unnatural and inherently terrifying into something palatable for most people. I'm not talking about actual safety, but the perception of safety. Which isn't exactly a logic thing. More about keeping that lizard brain from freaking out too hard.

But just to engage with your numbers (which I don't agree are fully accurate and are definitely not at all a complete picture):

Getting the rate of starvation down from 33% to 20% in an already food-stressed region that has experienced 5x population growth could be presented as an accomplishment, yes. Flip your numbers around. In 1961 200m Africans were food-secure. Today 1200m are. A billion extra properly fed people, by your (possibly bad and definitely over-simplifed) numbers.

It doesn't matter what other countries do. We should want to step up and help. Leaders lead.

Plagiarists also steal.

So many things I am completely capable of doing on my own I simply don’t want to. I have better things to do. More valuable things.

Yes, build versus buy. The eternal question!

Daily cost of the Iran debacle: $2,000,000,000.

We sure as shit have money to fund research.

We prefer to fund second yachts, third vacation homes, and bombs.

That's why the ownership class fights so hard against them.

And they don't age well. Most of the ones around here are starting to look... grimy. Or dingy. After just a couple of years. It's a poor advertisement for itself.

And, yeah, then there's cultural eye-rolling. It's really the only vehicle I hear people openly mock when they see one... And that's not a Tesla/Elon thing entirely, since people don't have the same reaction to other Tesla vehicles.

If you can build it in a weekend so can I. So you're going to have to figure out bigger things to build.

Higher education delivers a fantastic ROI for the country as a whole. The people who benefit most from a strong economy are the wealthy. So tax them more. And put that money towards lowering the cost of education. Win-win-win.

If life was perfectly predictable then, yes, insurance wouldn't have much of a point. But alas.

We all pay in a bit and those of us unlucky enough to need a huge amount of help can have access to the resources they need. Hopefully that will never be you! But as they say: The reward for a long life is to get to experience the decay of your own body. Good health is temporary for all of us.

That said, you're right: Single-payer would be a huge improvement. Let's do that.

But just say it! Bypass the middleman who's just going to make it blurrier or more long-winded.

It'd be like putting an Indian scammer call center in charge of the telephone network because there are some dropped calls. Or electing a guy who spent a career committing fraud at every turn President because the price of eggs went up a bit. Or solving the problems of the American healthcare system by putting a guy in charge who...

Oh, wait. We're definitely going to do the crypto thing. Dammit.