https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/pr/date/2025/html/ecb.pr2502... https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/statistics/banknote https://www.cranecurrency.com/news-insights/85-decline-in-us...

This is prohibited, not in an ideal world, but in essentially every Western democracy except the United States. I appreciate the political difficulty of implimenting this (or indeed any useful structural) change in the contemporary American political climate / level of dysfunction. But outlawing corruption is not some utopian dream.

I see the same effect all the time in fiction. Innovative challenging books don't get published (or even picked up by agents), because the publishing industry is run by the kind of people who are frightened and offended by such books. Which means the audience for those books become only those lucky enough to be exposed to older, denser, more innovative fiction - which invariably shrinks.

True.

> Its arguable that our ability to build luxurious enough societies has allowed out compassion to flourish far beyond what is witnessed elsewhere in the state of nature.

Concentration camps and famines are not the 'state of nature'. A closer analogue would be tribal societies in the Amazon basin, Eastern Africa and the like. Constant hunger and scarcity are not the norm for well adapted human cultures, nor have the been for most of recorded history.

This is the most unintentionally hilarious misunderstanding of what the RIAA does, and the power relationship between artists and publishers I've read in years. In practice the RIAA exists to maintain the copyright monopoly of a few major labels. Rent seeking from the non-artist owned catalogues of the enormous majority of musicians who never 'recoup' their initial record deal.

> While it's seductive to carve the world up into goodies and baddies, it doesn't make it true.

It's far more seductive (since it's the default) to assume class relations don't exist, and wealth distribution is meritocratic. There may not be 'goodies and baddies', but there absolutely are rentiers and workers, billionaires and plebs.

All the major labels are public companies. Which means it's the very same people - the investment class, who claim ownership and extract wealth from say Warner and Open AI (should it make any money - obviously the whole house of cards could come down first).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Stranding#Reception

It's also impossible to judge success relative to marketing budget, how well the game was pushed by Sony etc.

Clearly a critical success and an objectively good game however.

https://www.imdb.com/list/ls596355504/

Your line about capitalised 'Antifa' suggest an unserious lack of familiarity with left-wing groups and causes.

Source - I work as a professional editor (amongst other things). Please commenters, do not come at me with your five minute low bit rate projects that required only a LUT and some contrast and 'worked fine' in DaVinci on a potato.