> You could argue that what constitutes “humanitarian value” is totally subjective and that decisions concerning such a large amount of money shouldn’t be left to one person. But on the flip side, would you say that most governments actually succeed at representing the average person’s desire for utilizing tax revenue in a way that optimally benefits society? Do they accomplish this efficiently?
Humanitarian value is also quite a broad range. Is someone a worse person for devoting themselves to world hunger while ignoring cancer research? I would say of course not.
As for the question of one person vs a nominally democratically elected government, the western liberal perspective is that government should be by the people for the people, from which it kind of follows that a government that's elected by the people is a better representation of the will of the people than one person who answers to no one but themselves (this also goes for multinational corporations which also effectively answer to no one - yes, they may get fined in certain jurisdictions, but they can navigate where they do business to carve out the fines they'll accept and those they won't).
Where I feel we got it wrong in modern society, especially in the US, is that the centralization of power in a single national government has led to an impossible problem of balancing the competing interests of a vastly diverse country (you see this a bit in the EU as well, where the interests of western and central European countries can be at odds at times, but the EU is more loosely bound than the US). Distributing more of that power to the states/counties/cities would enable decision-making better-tailored to a more comprehensible demographic. It also gives more people the opportunity to participate in governing themselves (that "by the people" part). Only so many people can sit in the Senate, but there are a -lot- of city council positions across the country.
There's a YouTube channel called 3D6DownTheLine which has video series of two campaigns using OSE (one in Dolmenwood and another in a popular megadungeon). I can't really comment on how close it fits D&D from 30 years ago but it at least seems like it plays like how people describe old-school D&D (more emphasis on player skill and creative problem-solving).
From just watching a little bit of those videos, I think a significant part of the appeal today is that it's much quicker (thinking mainly in comparison to 3.5 since that was my introduction) to roll some attributes, pick a class, and go. It also makes the GM's job easier because they don't need to worry about balancing skill checks when the game doesn't even have skills.
Relatedly, Old School Essentials is, IIRC, B/X just more streamlined in presentation? They also have a cool-looking setting with Dolmenwood (as I gather, basically "a mix of darkness and whimsy in the style of old-school fairy tales") that just had a kickstarter for a big campaign setting guide earlier this year.
But how does this overlap with federated platforms? Then you can still balkanize into tiny groups but federate among compatible groups to rebuild larger networks bottom-up (I like to draw a comparison to how multicellular organisms are composed of many discrete cells). And if you don't federate with hosts that serve businesses, you can fly way under the radar (Pleroma even has built-in onion routing support IIRC).
But even if we're arguing physics, that's debatable. The shape and toughness of the rock are actually an effect of forces between the atoms composing the rock, and the weight of the rock is actually the interaction between the mass of the rock and the earth. The color of the rock is the effect of the interaction between the molecules in the rock and photons (which are themselves wave-like) and then the interaction between that light and the cells in your eyes.
Objects are a convenient day-to-day model in real life and software, but there are more "functional" models that comprise the object model.
> How does one even learn how to make something this amazing?
I haven't done anything quite this amazing, but I have created other things with minimal upfront knowledge and "the way" is simple: just jump in and give it your best shot with what you already know, identify the most glaring deficiency in what you made, take your best shot at solving that, and repeat that process until you have something cool. You can also use this process to focus what you spend time studying/learning, as you backfill the information you were missing to figure out how to overcome whatever obstacles you encounter.
It does take time, but you know what they say about long journeys and single steps. Sometimes there are no shortcuts and you just have to take a lot of steps.
Cigarettes are terrible addicting too and people quit them all the time.
As far as I can see, the low cost of the American lifestyle is largely subsidized by shifting the price onto others. Whether that's Amazon keeping prices low by exploiting labor in the west or Chinese manufacturers keeping prices low by exploiting labor in China or meat manufacturers keeping prices low by running factory farms, at the end of the day, the ethical choice is always going to have a higher price attached because you're eating the cost so others don't have to. The only solution is to put your money where your mouth is.
Others say legislation, but that's a transient solution at best. If the lobbyists don't get to twist the legislation in the first place, they'll just keep lobbying until they get their way. They have the money and organization to make it happen.
You can, if circumstances allow. Have no debt, make a software engineer's salary, and live on half of it. Put the rest in mutual funds. Repeat for some number of years and your investments' passive income eventually surpasses your budget, at which point you're free from the rat race.
The part people find unpalatable (and sometimes impossible, depending on circumstances) is the "live on half of it" part (but even if half is impossible, it's still worth investing what you can).
I'm not even making US software money and my budget says I can reach FU money (which, to be clear, means matching my current low-budget lifestyle, which is why it's achievable) in 5 years if no other major expenses come up.
I did decide to prioritize charitable giving because of the reasons elsewhere discussed about service being its own reward, but that only pushed it out to ~11, which is still a couple decades earlier than the typical retirement age.
Plus, when I'm gone, I can pass that income generator on to someone else and free them from the rat race, giving the next generation an even better headstart than I had.
>Few companies are willing to accept that ceiling for fear of losing market share.
The question I find interesting is: is this assumption correct? Is service scale the dominant factor in market share, or could you win a significant piece of the pie with a "Smaller YouTube by Humans"?
In theory, a more human touch could attract content creators, who in turn could bring their audience. Whether that would translate to significant market share, though, dunno.
This has me curious (as a complete crypto noob): how would one defend against such a MITM attack in general?
Only send messages to vendors with known "trusted" keys and don't trust new keys? So in general, use a trusted channel for key exchange separate from the communication channel so that a MITM needs to control both channels?
Humanitarian value is also quite a broad range. Is someone a worse person for devoting themselves to world hunger while ignoring cancer research? I would say of course not.
As for the question of one person vs a nominally democratically elected government, the western liberal perspective is that government should be by the people for the people, from which it kind of follows that a government that's elected by the people is a better representation of the will of the people than one person who answers to no one but themselves (this also goes for multinational corporations which also effectively answer to no one - yes, they may get fined in certain jurisdictions, but they can navigate where they do business to carve out the fines they'll accept and those they won't).
Where I feel we got it wrong in modern society, especially in the US, is that the centralization of power in a single national government has led to an impossible problem of balancing the competing interests of a vastly diverse country (you see this a bit in the EU as well, where the interests of western and central European countries can be at odds at times, but the EU is more loosely bound than the US). Distributing more of that power to the states/counties/cities would enable decision-making better-tailored to a more comprehensible demographic. It also gives more people the opportunity to participate in governing themselves (that "by the people" part). Only so many people can sit in the Senate, but there are a -lot- of city council positions across the country.