You can't know everything that has been done in the past, or is being done and finished before you ended. But as far as you are not just cloning something that you already seen working, you can explore what you are capable of doing, for the sake of it, for the experience of doing it and make it work, for the things that you think are useful or nice or whatever in what you did.

And if all that effort don't end in something that can be sold, you still grow through the process. You are not ensured commercial success even if you try something truly new. But maybe that is not always a bad thing.

Besides that, we can't achieve everything, we could not be everywhere when something interesting happens there, at the very least because a lot of those things happened in the past, or do everything because physical condition, economics, or extra conditions (i.e. being an astronaut).

So you draw lines. This is what I can do, I can go, I can be. You may push boundaries, but in the end it will always be more things outside than inside. And try to be the best on what matters on those boundaries.

And over that, there are jumps to new higher baselines like with happened in the previous El Niño, and will happen in the incoming monster one.

But in countries where participation is mandatory, at least you can say that most of the (national) negatively affected people got what they voted for.

For improper "democratic" countries where elections are rigged or participation is biased towards some population sectors in a way or another, they are not really elections by the population.

As you want a cookie, i put you in a table, napking, serve you a bag of cookies and hope that you eat/find the cookie you want, while hearing my music, watching my ads, pushing you more foods that I sell and other services. And sometimes, that is the experience you are searching for. But also, many just want a cookie.

That is what a conversational and maybe agentic interface can give you. Have someone a blueberry cookie? Then it gives it to you, and also give pointers to restaurants that give a more complete experience sometimes (while others may try to scam you). It is a shortcut, but also doesn't hide you the traditional way to access that.

They are not saints, but neither are all the ones in the other side. But the new way to access the relevant information you want, in a way that you can use it, have its own value.

Food distribution networks exists, so local lost crops may or not affect food availability (economy will be different) in most regions.

Also it will be different in absolute values, the difference with the average may be the same (or higher), but the average sea temperature now is higher, and cross thresholds that push us further into positive feedback loops towards global warming. And things don't go back to previous levels.

There had been a lot books that were influential, but appeared not too long before I read them. But some had been around for long and were been widely known, so the opportunities for reading them earlier were bigger. The Selfish Gene is in that category.

There are some basic things that you may need in a way or another that in modern world are best solved with some social network mechanism. So it is not a sharp and total cut, but identify those essentials and or limit your usage to them, or provide a alternative channel for all in your communities for that particular communication. And if your network doesn't go to alternatives you will need to reach compromises.

Most of us are not alone, and need to belong to some communities. That is a factor that have to be considered before burning your (needed) bridges.

Even the Men on Fire episode of Black Mirror was able to trick humans, with laws or not.

I agree with the suggestion of using keepass/keepassxc/etc for personal passwords and other solutions for sharing with different partners. It was a good experience in general to use pass (or some alternative UI, like gopass) to use gpg+git to securely share passwords in an environment where that was possible. But sometimes you have to adapt to what already is being used or is accepted by the other players, and not always that is the safest in your opinion, in those cases limit your exposition.

And over the domestic surveillance, that had some complaints back in that time, there is the point of foreign surveillance and intervention, that had no slowdown back then, so you can figure out where that should be today. At least Americans have some saying on their government and policies, but for the rest of the world is just the new normal.