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I guess the biggest issue I see is how do you handle global trade? Right now, tons of materials we need for even manufacturing highly advanced products and other materials requires a complex web of international trade. How do smaller communities hope to be part of that without sliding back to the pre-digital age? I know there are folks who probably don’t see that as a bad thing, but I definitely do, as I enjoy having access to modern technology and services (not to mention, I work in IT, so my job kind of depends on it).

True, that is a valid point. Maybe with direct democracy, hard safeguards, and very limited terms and funding, it could potentially be limited from expanding power. But, I’m not an expert, so I’ll leave hypothetical future social governance planning to those who are more competent.

Originally, the federal government in the US was very, very limited in power and states had much higher degrees of autonomy than they do now. It resulted in tons of problems, even agreeing on a basic common currency was problematic.

Now, I think that it’s swung too far in the other direction and that the federal government nowadays in the US has too much power. I think it’s possible to meet in the middle, where you have a semi-central body where federated communities have a common ground to address and resolve grievances with an outside, neutral party mediating things.

Anyway, just my two cents.

Wtf are you even talking about? You literally said that stateless societies have formed infrastructure. I asked you to provide examples of where that has occurred on the massive scale that modern cities exist at. Basic roads and sanitation that stateless societies create is a whole lot different than getting clean water to tens of millions of people in a relatively small, dense footprint. You could argue that Kowloon did it, but honestly it is only due to the extreme humidity in that area of the world that the whole place didn’t go up in flames due to how shoddy the ran electric lines throughout the whole city. But there were tons of other problems that existed in that place, e.g. extreme levels of mold, sanitation issues, etc.

But sure, just write me off as a right wing zealot because I challenged your worldview. I’m not even conservative, but whatever, lol.

That sounds good in theory, but incentivization is a real problem for numerous communities, particularly less urban ones. Attracting doctors, engineers, etc is much more difficult when you have a smaller pool of people even capable enough to perform those tasks to pull from. Currently this is done through money/profit, but even that isn’t enough in some areas (see how the agricultural industry is currently struggling to attract veterinarians to rural communities).

I’m not fully disagreeing with you, by the way. In a perfect world, that sounds great. It just feels like a huge world of, “if X people do Y thing, it’ll all work out just fine.” Taking that step requires a huge leap of faith by hundreds of millions of people, and hoping no sizable group rises up to eventually usurp the whole delicate transition process.

But there’ll still need to have common policies across all of those communities, otherwise you just end up right back at square one with nation states. The US and EU are literally just this, a bunch of states (US) or countries (EU) that agree to allow free travel/living/learning/business/etc between each other with a larger governing body that oversees all of it.

What stateless societies have infrastructure on the scale of NYC, Paris, or Tokyo?

How do you propose you regulate corporations or any sort of industry? You want to make sure you food is handled sanitarily, no? You want to ensure your drinking water is being cleaned correctly, right? You want to know if new medications have downsides or are at least effective at what they’re purported to do. You want to make sure bridges and tunnels are engineered correctly. Etc. etc.

Yes, government is not perfect. Yes, there are things that get past regulation all the time, but just imagine how much worse it would be with zero regulations. That’s the kind of society you’re arguing for. You literally cannot have more than a dozen people living together without some sort of social governance. Even tribal communities have some type of government in its most basic form.

Border have to exist to some degree, simply from a management perspective. Even if we threw all state and country borders away, it’d be literally impossible for a single government to effectively govern the world. You’d need to divide it all up into smaller regions to be managed. Otherwise, we’d might as well just fall back into the pre-industrial age as infrastructure erodes due to poor governmental oversight and management.

Haven’t watched Wolverine in a long time, although I’ve heard the new one with Deadpool is actually pretty good. (It’s the ad on the TV)

What is that from?

I have rarely encountered places that don’t accept cash. The only places I’ve seen signs that state no cash are smaller businesses and/or street merchants/vendors.

Regardless, I agree with the spirit of your comment. I rarely use cash anymore simply because carrying it around is inconvenient. You have to know ahead of time exactly how much something is going to cost and then when you get coins back, that’s doubly more inconvenient/annoying.

Ultimately, OP’s post is a little melodramatic. Gift cards are meant to be more personal, although in the specific context they wrote, it does feel a bit half-hearted (“Thanks for helping, here’s a random gift card I found in my wallet that I never used!”).

Well obviously not for fish. Sounds like someone’s never bought fresh pigeons from the grocery store, smh.

Or they did and are now enduring giving birth to a turd football.

I saw reports of this yesterday morning. Absolutely insane. The GOP terrorist cells’ disinformation campaign against FEMA needs to be treated for what it is by the major new outlets: Terrorism. These people are completely unhinged, and it’s not only impacting FEMA officials and other volunteers, it’s hindering the storm victims’ ability to recover. The population at large needs to turn on these traitors.

Oh for sure, I get that. But the NWS website is still meant for the public to use, and the old design layout was simpler and faster to read. Some folks might read graphs faster/as fast, but not for many of us. Regardless, another user pointed out you can click on the graph and it converts it all into an easy to read table format. :)

Holy shit, you’re awesome! Seriously, thank you haha, that makes readability so much faster.

I only ever check my weather on NWS, but a year or two ago they went from having easily read hourly forecast data to those obnoxious graphs. I have zero clue why they did that.

Iirc, tasks requiring elevated permissions wasn’t the main complaint, maybe just one of the most vocal ones.

Even with good hardware, it was not optimized for performance in general. This was amplified by the fact they also marketed Vista as having a wide range of older hardware support, which resulted in many users upgrading from XP only to have their performance absolutely tank. I think there was even a lawsuit because of how they marketed some devices as, “Vista ready.”

Regardless, Vista was still better than Windows 8.