Portraying it as an individual choice is inaccurate. The process of populations becoming sedentary(and agrarian) spans over multiple generations and wasn't really reversible. The early settlements likely only worked because they had some method to force people from leaving and the later settlements had to be sedentary because their neighbours were sedentary, it had a cascade effect. Oversimplified but that's the gist.

I haven’t seen the narrative that Ukraine is winning the war for at least 2 years. You should maybe choose better news sources, there’s a huge amount of very accurate reporting on it.

Additionally, the Russian economy is a wartime economy, which runs hot till it collapses or wins. It’ll be fine till it’s not, but it’s very hard to predict what that point is.

There’s just an odd legitimacy associated specifically with reading - that people want to access, and so makes other people weirdly snobbish/defensive of it.

The research that essay was largely based off was somewhat flawed though as it ignored time in camp processing food and crafting. So it only considered time spent actively hunting/foraging as work.

I say ‘somewhat flawed’ because work is a modern concept and applying it to a hunter gatherer context is quite difficult and comes with big debates on what is/isn’t work.

What you probably mean is that people take the concept of the invisible hand too seriously. Which was a relatively minor point in the book, and has somehow been magnified to the point of absurdity by the economic and political trends of the last 40 years.

Adam smith is way more reasonable than you’d think, given how he’s portrayed in the modern era.

> Indeed, we don’t have the technology to save people from themselves, yet.

The plight of the poorest in today’s societies is far more of a social and political issue than a technological one. An issue America is particularly bad on, despite all its affluence.

So the homeless opiate addict living under a city bypass is better off than King Henry VIII?

Someone should tell them.