In the US it is actually even worse than that.

The government and large corporations (basically the same people owning it all) will spy on you 24x7 for anything that they dislike you doing.

But if your bike (car, etc) is stolen right in front of many cameras providing video evidence, police will not do anything about it.

I know first hand people who have crystal clear video evidence of theft, gave it to the police, and they just don't care to do anything about it.

For me, I will never own a car with any kind of screen on the dash.

Well not "our" creation since only a few oligarchs control most of the companies that engage in this.

> and only new legislation and regulations can get us out of here.

The same oligarchs control nearly all the legislators, so no way out.

After hurricane Maria in 2017 in Puerto Rico, most people had no electricity or internet for many weeks, some for many months. This kind of human (normal!) connection fluorished for all that time.

I argue that of all things, law should be as deterministic as possible.

I've always thought that we (as a country) should maintain one single ordered list of specific crimes and punishments. Every new case that wants to set a punishment must insert it into this ordered list and explain convincingly why it fits into the list at the proposed position.

This would prevent the outrageous differences we see today where someone gets a few days of house arrest for murder and another guy gets a decade of solitary confinment for stealing a pen.

> Banger statement.

True, but it's even a bit more removed than that.

For a version 0.9 prototype, AI can produce pretty awesome-feeling output even in the hands of the most incompetent. So it looks like a miracle that does it all, with zero effort.

It's later down the road that it starts hitting walls that need a competent architect in charge.

Those are ICE thugs.

The elected government is cashing in through corruption and insider trading at a pace never seen or even imagined before.

Everyone else, is in for a very bad time.

Also important to remember that diversity builds strength. Just as in biology, if all organisms are the same, they all succumb to the same virus.

I have a multi-layered firewall approach where some are Linux, some are OpenBSD, some are commercial. They'll all have bugs, but unlikely they all have the same bug.

Bugs, or exploitable security vulnerabilities?

If the latter, have you reported them all?

Not "something", housing. A pebble may last billions of years and not appreciate, but we're talking housing.

Yes housing which last a very long time cannot help but appreciate because we always have inflation. The only exception is what you identified, if the town has an economic collapse. Then, sure, nobody wants to live there. Detroit of the past being the typical USA example.

Looking at records my house cost ~$90/sqft to build. Today the exact same house on the exact same lot would cost about ~$500/sqft to build on the low end if you can find the labor, but probably closer to ~$650/sqft if you want to get it done this year.

So of course the older equivalent houses in the neighborhood will match in price to the new construction. Anything else would be impossible.

If you disagree, explain by what mechanism the old house wouldn't do that?

> It's very unlikely, he has pledged to give away most of his wealth in his lifetime,

The ultra rich give away donations in the form of stock, so they never sell it, just transfer it. So no tax to them and they get a tax deduction for the donation fair market value.

Food is obviously not comparable (you must consume it and only s*t is left over).

Cars depreciate quickly becase they wear out in the timespan of a couple decades. You can keep them going longer but it's a labor of love, not really economically worthwhile.

Housing is completely different. Absent some disaster (fire, earthquakes) it will last centuries with just basic routine maintenance. Given that inflation is a perpetual constant, something that lasts that long can't possibly not appreciate, it inevitably must.

Precisely this. I've been stuck using git since 2010 and to this day I have a large git-cheatsheet doc which I need to reference any time I need to do anything beyond the daily add+commit+push. The git commands make zero sense and are just about impossible to remember because they make no sense.

In contrast, I've never felt a need for a cheatsheet doc for mercurial commands.

> done rm -rf to start anew. Every single git user I've talked to has done that multiple times.

Indeed! Of all the source control tools I've used, git is the only one where I regulary need to do a tarball of the src repo before doing any uncommon operations because there is a non-zero chance it'll go into some unrecoverable state and need to start over.

I still use mercurial for all my personal project where I don't need to care what anyone else thinks. It is pleasant to use good tools, just like I like to buy top quality rachets or such.

Where is this?

I have lots of bank accounts, probably more than most people. Three local credit unions, Fidelity, Schwab, Chase, BofA, Citibank, Barclays, two local area banks, and two international banks. Plus a few lesser known ones for 401k/IRA accounts.

I have never installed any bank phone app. I do all my bank interactions from my desktop via Firefox.

No government service can depend on having a product from a private corporation.