Brick houses still burn; interior walls, floors, ceilings, and furnishings are still made from wood or other flammable materials. There have been plenty of castles that caught fire, despite their stone walls.
GP's point is more about how words are spoken. When we hear speech in a language we understand, we parse the sounds as a collection of distinct units with individual meaning we call "words". But the sound wave itself isn't actually segmented in this fashion, and the separation into words occurs in our perception and interpretation. But I agree, words definitely exist, just as interpretations of sound and written characters.
I don't know if the drop off of assistance can really work that well. Say UBI is 10000 fun-bucks. A person gets a crappy job that pays 5000 fun-bucks. Their total income is now 5000+(10000-5000*.5)=12500. By getting a job and working, they've only improved their situation by 2500. Any dollar they earn above the UBI is taxed at 50%, until they've "made it" to double UBI. This amounts to taxing the poor instead of the rich, and is likely to not incentivize work as much you might like.
Most proposals for UBI I've seen are truly universal, meaning that rich and poor alike are entitled to it.
Not exactly. He had volunteers who placed the packages in front of their houses, and one of the volunteers had a friend or neighbor come by and take the package, faking the footage. It doesn't sound like Marc had anything to do with the incident and he has mentions the issue in the description of the video, though it's also a bit unclear why the volunteer would want to do this.
Actually actually, it's even more complicated than that! Works published between 1925 and 1978 needed to file a copyright extension notice before the 28th anniversary of initial publication or the work fell into public domain.
My favorite example of the gap between copyright jurisdictions is P. G. Wodehouse. He died in 1975, but published a lot of work before 1925, including a great many Jeeves and Wooster stories. So in his home country, his work won't be public domain until 2046, but in the U.S. there's plenty of public domain material. There's a similar story with Agatha Christie.
Copyright for sound recordings is pretty complicated in the US. Recordings from before 1972 were protected by a variety of state level laws, so even recordings that should be in the public domain, like ones from before 1924, weren't guaranteed to be so until the 2018 Music Modernization Act[1], and even so have a 3 year grace period from when that was enacted. It gets even more confusing for recordings from 1924-1978, when rights holders had to file for copyright and then file for extensions, AND the law has changed numerous times for different dates within that range.[2] So no, it's not really fair to say that 1970's and earlier music is fair game.
One oddity regarding characters is that the only thing that becomes public domain is the character as portrayed in that public domain material. In the case of Mickey, that means only his appearance in Steamboat Willie would become public domain in 2024, with more material being released to the public domain each year. What that entails is... sort of confusing, I think, and will come down to individual cases. Depending on how it is used, a post-2024 portrayal of Mickey might be a copyright violation or might not be.
Additionally, Mickey is also trademarked, which lasts forever as long as it is used commercially by the owner. So the mouse's likeness is not likely to be public domain as long as the Disney company exists and continues to use it.