Is there reason to expect they’ll ever recover without an AI bust that takes down the U.S. economy?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defeasible_estate

Granting land conditionally such that the ownership reverts once the condition stops being met is very much a thing. I can't find the full details of this particular case, but it sounds like the property went through a long sequences of transfers that probably make the legal situation tricky.

I’ve seen some stuff bordering on this idea from the self-directed education folks, but even the most radical proponents I’ve seen are saying stuff like “try to leave interesting materials about topic X around the house, rather than always asking your child if they want to learn about topic X.” And even that is more about which methods to use to inspire a child to learn.

If a quarter of the people who tried a comparable theft got thrown in jail for 2 years and another quarter got shot by a security guard, I suspect attempts would be rare.

The financial damage done by the thief is presumably irrelevant to the thief, beyond the fact that sentencing is probably stricter for bigger thefts.

Let's say that you have some curriculum C that you think is vital for children to learn, and you want as many children as possible to learn C.

Even ignoring ethics, it's not obvious to me that attempting to coerce all children into learning C is the best way to accomplish your goal!

In some sense, sure, any time you buy something you apply some upward price pressure. Of course, whether the resulting price changes measurably depends on many things, like the scale of your purchase relative to the scale of the market, the price elasticity of demand, who the marginal buyers and producers are, etc.

But the point is that we have notable index funds which are marketed to customers as having the intention to own segments of the market according to certain rules, and they are changing those rules with relatively short notice and for reasons that seem suspicious to many customers.

The calendar was back-dated 500 or so years after Jesus, by a European guy before Europe had the concept of zero, leaving us with 1-indexed years. Then, 200 or so years after that, another guy (still lacking the concept of zero) made the even less venerable decision that the year right before 1 AD would be 1 BC.

We could just decide today that 0 came right before 1 AD and was the first year of the first century AD. Then we’d just have to shift all BC dates by 1 year in all our history books.

The upside would be that arithmetic on year labels starts working again. The downside is that there are way too many history books and no one will ever do this.

Of course, the easier way out is to just decide today that either 1) the first century began in 1 BC or 2) the first century had 1 fewer year than all the other centuries.