I can play that game, too.

> the obvious international treaty

That's even easier. We just take the international treaty on cloud computing as a base and...

That sub is games, porn, and complaints about not having money. A waste of time.

Neither did the Buddha

My sad realization is that the Buddhists were right all along. The primary drivers of human mind, before self-purification, are greed, anger, and ignorance. What you are describing here is greed. People want to get useful things for free. This is the core of the problem. If people were, by default, expecting to pay for everything they use, spying on them would not be accepted. Instead, they want stuff for free and they choose to be willfully blind to the spying.

Or are forced to figure them out.

Then I will entertain you with another Buddhist objection - there is also no "end" since the conditioned "you" exists in the beginningless, endless cycle of samsara, while the unconditioned you (Nibbana) is unborn, unbecome, unmade, unfabricated.

There's an entire profession doing that: traders. But for most people, yes, it is not worth it. No argument there. I just don't like conspiracy theories and that line of thought, it's cheap and stupid.

Do you base your knowledge on anything other than a very mediocre movie?

If an "investor" believes the market will sell off drastically, there are many, many ways they can express that bet in the open market. They can short index futures, buy put options, long volatility... so many options that depend only on the thesis being right. It does not sound as sexy as "look kid, the billionaires rigged the system!", but it's true.

Well, if you are asking for my opinion, the gun stuff in the US is so stupid it could be considered a mental illness. I don't disagree with your points at all

Re: Sweden - according to the article you listed, Sweden is on par with the rest of Europe, worse than other Scandinavian countries, and much better than the Balkans.

Yes, it was very upsetting at the time and unfortunately remains a constant. I guess one has to go through that at least once to recognize a grifter.

> so even in hindsight, none of the concerns seem to have been legitimate.

The point was not only that the vaccines were rushed, it was also that there was a tremendous amount of coercion to force people into taking them. There are a few countries that didn't do that (Sweden comes to mind) and they ended up not having a much worse outcome than anyone else. I think it was a very telling moment in modern history, because it exposed a lot of myths, e.g. the American myth of gun ownership to stand up to a tyrannical government was totally shredded. The government turned tyrannical re: vaccines and mandates, did the guns help?