True if you look at the cities, but it misses the bigger picture. There was also a trend of people moving into the surrounding suburbs and smaller towns, and commuting to the inner city. If you look at the metro area, both have actually grown.
The US is the largest country with english speakers, but it does not have the majority of speakers [1] (just India plus Pakistan have as many). So your assumption would be wrong, even based on statistics.
I've had many people try my VR headset and people experiencing motion sickness is pretty common. However you can easily train yourself to delay the onset substantially, or even completely cure it. The best thing to do is immediately take off the headset, and orient yourself in the real world until the feeling subsides. Wait at least 10-15 minutes, or even better a full day before trying again, repeat until satisfied with the amount of time you can spend in VR. I've had friends who felt like throwing up after 5 minutes be able to enjoy the experience for hours after a week of this technique. Trying to push through it just makes it worse, and you will develop a psychological barrier or fear which can be very hard to break.
Of course those suburbanites love their hard won individualism, the point is, that this kind of life is built on externalities that make it unsustainable for the majority of people to live this way.
Because it's not 10 000x harder to manage SpaceX than Joe's Plumbing. Sure the compensation should reflect in some way the effort and difficulty. But these earning ratios between the top and bottom or big and small are out of whack. Parent points out that they don't mesh with people's sense of 'right' either.
I couldn't finish the book, it just had too much unexplained fictional techno-jargon to be able to enjoy for me. I know thats the style of immersion he was going for, but it didn't click for me, even though I'm a big sci-fi reader.
He didn't do it to 'fix a disequilibrium', he ruthlessly exploited an opportunity for personal gain at the expense of an entire country. You can argue about the positive long term consequences, or the responsibility of the people that created the situation, but he is most definitely 'a' bad guy.
Yes, if you convinced a lot of people to transact in cans of beans, you would be undermining the control of the government. Just look at countries that don't have a (viable) currency. They are using dollars or euros and are subject to a foreign powers monetary policy.
Also no country defines sovereignty through voluntary consent. Laws applies to you whether you agree or not.
Would be pretty easy to do in this eastern EU country. We have laws that require stations to separate ads from content, so there is always a short animation announcing the start and end of ads.
https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/204296/berlin/population
https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/20107/vienna/population