It's also going to make the targets even less likely to report the crime to police as well. 'Hi, I don't live in this country and I think my phone might have been stolen somewhere at some point in time over the past several hours, maybe.' is not even going to be investigated by the police, even if somebody does decide to file a report.

Come to think of it, this may all be yet another reason why thieves don't tend to abuse personal information. That sort of stuff is going to get reported and can be viably investigated by the police.

I don't know for certain why thieves are generally not typically interested in abusing user data, but I'd imagine it's because the penalties if caught would go way up. That'd go from what is generally just petty theft, which carries a slap on the wrist, to wire fraud and a whole slew of other charges, which can leave people spending most of the rest of their life in prison.

The percent that might want to choose a different-than-latest version of OS would also of course be quite small, but I suspect it would be orders of magnitude larger than the other group we're speaking of just because that group of people is going to be so absurdly tiny.

EDIT: Ahh! I was basing my statement on data from quite a number of years back, and just assuming prices tend to go in one direction in inflationary economies. The nuance here is that the NOK has weakened somewhat dramatically against the dollar, so relative prices aren't quite as insane now as they were in the past.

And I think the exceptions are often found to not really be exceptions. For instance chimps were once seen and framed, most famously by Jane Goodall, as peaceful animals who only engaged in violence when pushed to the extreme by some outside force. And in looking up info about bonobos I'm somewhat unsurprised to find that recent observations [1] are rather contrary to their reputation as the same sort of peaceful kumbaya type.

[1] - https://www.science.org/content/article/bonobos-hippie-chimp...

And so the cost:reward there was relatively poor leaving it to things like militaries and governments to carry it out for influence campaigns and what not. But LLMs have now completely changed the game. You can easily create an arbitrarily large number of passably believable personas and backstories, autonomously, with no real limitations on scale.

This is obviously going to be abused when the stakes are sufficiently high. And in this case we're talking about a market that these companies likely believe to be worth trillions of dollars. And they can likely even convince themselves that what they're doing isn't immoral pretty easily, in the same way they convinced themselves that letting their software be used to kill people by the all-so-ethical US military is perfectly cool. So why in the world wouldn't they 'inform people of the strengths of their product' on a wide scale?

You've yet to manage to compose anything like an argument and are left trying to reduce multiple football fields of space for every person on this planet down to something that might be considered small. But the reality is you can't, because it's fundamentally false. If we started this discussion without the context of what has already transpired and I asked you what you thought a 'small' lot of land would be for each person, it's obviously not going to be 4 acres, nor anywhere even remotely close to that size.

So all you're left with is bad faith arguments, child like ad hominem, strawmen, and essentially an ongoing displays of argumentative fallacies, which is what people resort to when they have an argument they want to make, but are unable to do so on a factual or logical basis.

[1] - https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/deser...

It's probably never been the case that plurality of views meant anything since online is a bubble to begin with, filtered by endless biases wherever we happen to be reading, making it an even more fringe bubble, but the advent of AI has pushed it all over the edge to the point that perceived pluralities are just completely and utterly meaningless. Somewhat depressing for a one who enjoys online chat as a pasttime, but it's the reality of the world now.

And I still have no idea why you think oil running out has any role in your argument at all. I completely agree it'll run out eventually, possibly within our lifetimes. It's unlikely to lead to anything particularly catastrophic as once reserves do start declining (keep in mind proven reserves have been increasing faster than production for decades), the price of oil will steadily rise, and it'll create some solid economic incentives to comfortably transition to other energy sources.

I'm not really following what point you're trying to make with the example cities. People move to urban areas for economic opportunities. It's thanks to the internet that deurbanization is becoming a more viable reality for more people, vaguely analogous to how vehicles enabled it at a different time in the past. Saudi Arabia existed before oil, so to speak, and will exist afterwards. Part of the reason you find them invested in basically everything stateside, to the chagrin of many, is because they're working to create a more sustainable economy. The nice thing about countries under defacto dictatorship type rules is the ability to carry out longer-term plans, even if they may sometimes be misguided. [1]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Line,_Saudi_Arabia

Now factor in larger families and the fact that some people voluntarily will want to live in close quarters (even given a free choice of all options), and you get many football fields of space, again in all directions, for every single person. This is just absolutely massive. And I think calling deserts uninhabitable is quite odd given everything from Nevada to Saudi Arabia. Basically no lands are truly uninhabitable if we want to inhabit them, even including water as the gradually expanding territory of China is demonstrating.

And, as mentioned already, arable lands have nothing to do with population distribution. As you pack people into smaller quarters, you use up just as much arable land, if not more (due to minimizing decentralization possibilities), than you do with wider distribution.

And I think when most people speak of the dream of returning to rural society to e.g. farm, they're speaking very much of the former rather than the latter.

Some human activities can have an outsized impact, but the overwhelming majority of those activities remain necessary regardless of where people live, and some will have an greater impact with widespread urbanity since some things like energy/food/water can be relatively cleanly decentralized in rural settings, at least partially, but require complete centralization in urban settings.

And as you go back you can see that our more contemporary actions are just echoes of the past anyhow. Vietnam was also started on a complete and malicious lie. [1] That lie then led to the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans, practically bankrupted the country (playing a major role in the events of 1971), left the country more divided than ever, and concluded with us running away from Vietnam with our tail tucked.

We didn't start the fire. It just always feels so different in the present because you don't know how things are going to turn out, so there's always the possibility that this time it might be something extraordinary as opposed to just this perpetual and never-ending self-crippling.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident

Many of those issues started out fairly small and had a rather small impact relative to the initial benefits of 'financial liberty', but those benefits faded fairly rapidly, while the consequences not only remain, but continue to grow. It turns out that free money is rather expensive.

If you look at the achievements and progress that was being made in the 60s in the US in practically every domain, and then you showed them what 60 years in the future awaited for them, the most common response, outside of digital gizmos, would probably be 'what went wrong?'

[1] - https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

People always exaggerate the impact of geopolitical things, because it feels like the biggest thing ever, especially when you're relatively young. But in reality we're always onto nonsense after nonsense. Countries have the wisdom and view to appreciate this, and so respond to geopolitical stuff (in action, not rhetoric) far more gradually than people do. They're certainly not going to just dump all their dollar reserves because of a single misguided war or even misguided president, or they'd have been gone long ago.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_currency#Global_curren...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system#Nixon_sho...

[2] - https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

So for instance a relevant and famous anecdote is that the original tests for Apollo launches didn't have any sort of urine/fecal disposal systems at all. In one delayed launch during testing Alan Shepard was in the capsule for hours and ended up needing to go pee. He asked for permission to depart the capsule, but that was declined to keep it all on track. So he ended up having to just pee all over himself in the suit.

Another piss poor anecdote is Buzz Aldrin on the Moon! When he departed the lunar lander capsule, the impact ended up breaking the urine collection device inside his suit. So his journey on the Moon involved having a healthy dose of urine sloshing around in his boot where it settled.

Of course there's a balance in all things. It's not like they just YOLO'd their way to the Moon. But things where the worst case outcome would be astronaut discomfort were seen as extremely low priority. In the original design, the capsule didn't even have a window or manual controls. So the astronauts were basically just being treated like human Laikas. They had to fight just to get those 'features.'

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I think a big part of the reason for this is because there are basically infinite things that can go wrong. And so if you obsess on getting every single thing right, you'll end up never doing anything at all. In 1962 Kennedy gave his famous 'to the Moon' speech. At that time, we'd only just barely put the first man in orbit but had never done anything beyond that, at all. Just 7 years later a man would walk on the Moon. In modern times we've been basically trying to recreate what we did in the 60s, and spent decades doing so. And this obsession on the details is certainly a big part of the reason why.