I don't know what I'm going to teach them about politics when the time comes, since (what most people mean by) politics is essentially a particularly malevolent and dangerous species of advertising, but at the same time I don't want to make them too cynical.

I don't know if the boiling frog thesis explains it, since it's gone from near-zero to 100 in non-western countries over the past couple of decades, unlike the west where it's built up slowly over the past century and a half.

Christianity and worldviews typically associated with the 'east' (as I've seen them discussed here and elsewhere) disagree in both their view of the 'building blocks' of reality, and in their 'big picture' view. They disagree on base questions like if there is really a "you", or whether change is real, or whether the material world is real, or whether multiplicity is real, or whether the truth of A implies the falsehood of not-A, and so on. (I've heard all of the above answered in the negative here.) And they disagree on 'big picture' things like the goal of human existence, the nature of the Absolute, what it is to live a good life, whether evil is the result of illusion or is (in addition to this) a defect in the will and caused ultimately by an indescribably malevolent being, whether a human being can reach a 'blessed' state by his own power, etc.

So the differences are vast and essential, on both the macro and micro levels. The fact that some beliefs and practices influence other beliefs and practices doesn't change this.

(The emergence of the "18 year old who just read Dawkins for the first time and thinks science disproves sky-daddy lolz" atheists on this thread is also most unfortunate.)

Obviously this doesn't apply to classified ads or their electronic equivalents. But what we normally mean by advertising, where people are paid vast sums of money to think very, very hard about how to manipulate you to hand over money for shit you don't need, is vomit-inducing. Billboards are even worse because they deface and degrade the public landscape, and ugly landscapes can contribute to depression, anxiety, irrational anger, and other problems. They are as bad as littering.

What has made people think this is ok?

Detestable if they're doing it anyway to prevent competitors getting hold of it.

I would love to give a local-LLM agent full access to my (very modest) homelab, but can't trust it not to delete my files or do something crazy. Maybe giving it its own non-root username, and therefore read access, allowing diagnosis but not fixing. But even a non-root user can do some damage, or exfiltrate system info just by using curl.

Yes, this is exactly right. To put it another way: When we quantify something, we abstract away everything about that thing that is not quantifiable. So our thinking is only about a tiny aspect of that thing's existence.

But remember: the uber-rich are allowing millions to immigrate to the rich world, to prevent precisely this. (I'm not commenting here on whether immigration is a Good Thing or a Bad Thing, simply noting that large-scale immigration brings wages down, and that the low birthrate is consistently stated as its main driver.) Also, remember that paying for all those unproductive old people will consume enormous amounts of wealth, something that didn't apply during the Black Death.

Energy is very easy to produce cleanly (nuclear, and solar is looking better and better). The barriers to doing so are political and financial, not technical. They will be made worse by having an aged-heavy population, which is less innovative, less willing to invest in the future, and less willing to try new things. And it makes a poorer society, obviously.

Malthus has been proved wrong at every juncture. Lack of children is about to bite us very, very hard.

"It is characteristic of such knowledge [ethics] that it should be deficient in “exactness,” in precision of statement, and closeness of logical concatenation. We must not look for a mathematics of conduct. The subject-matter of Human Conduct is not governed by necessary and uniform laws. But this does not mean that it is subject to no laws."

"[T]he man of education will seek exactness so far in each subject as the nature of the thing admits, it being plainly much the same absurdity to put up with a mathematician who tries to persuade instead of proving, and to demand strict demonstrative reasoning of a Rhetorician."

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/8438/8438-h/8438-h.htm

I agree that charging interest on a full-recourse loan is a wicked and disgusting thing to do to one's fellow man, and I'd say it's in the same genus as slavery. Usury is to fraud what robbery is to larceny. It's also interesting that the markets where usury is most prevalent (housing, college fees) are the ones that have seen the most insane price increases.