HighGoldstein

> I don’t know much about many of those countries, and I have no reason to spend hours googling them.

A good reason might be to back up the serious accusation a few comments above.

> A recent law has enabled the Swedish police to open mail to private individuals if they suspect there might be drugs in them. This is just one change of many that has reduced the liberties of the citizens.

While this isn't ideal in a vacuum, I don't see the alternative. If physical mail is given inviolable privacy, you're pretty much handing bad actors the perfect delivery system on a silver platter. I'm sure there's other examples of decisions that increased Swedish authorities' surveillance capabilities, but to call a country a surveillance state requires a little more than "They can check your mail if they suspect you're using it for drug delivery".

Please provide examples of how the following countries are surveillance states:

Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czechia, Croatia, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, France

> $50,000 to Sri Lanka for “climate change” isn’t a “popular program.”

Is that $50,000 annual? Because if so that's less than a rounding error for the budget of almost any country, much less the US. The costs associated with ending this program (organizational, employee time) may even be higher than just continuing to pay it.

> Paying dead people social security isn’t popular.

Is there any public statistical data on this? As far as I know US social security does periodically verify if recipients are still alive. Of course some cases will slip through the cracks, but unless DOGE plans to individually track down every recipient and see them in person I don't see how they can solve this problem. This inevitably happens with pretty much any social security system, anywhere.

> Sending money to the Taliban isn’t popular.

Is there a source for this?

> When you say Trump doesn’t care about waste, that isn’t supported by the facts. The deficit isn’t about waste, fraud or abuse, it’s about overspending. They aren’t the same thing.

He could start by reducing overspending on the US' titanic corporate subsidies, but something tells me he won't.

How do you quantify skill falsification?

> thinking damage control: can a least destructive CO2 absorber invasive species / ecosystem outpace this positive feedback loop?

Humans can fit this description and can definitely fix this if we tried. The technology we used to cause this issue in the first place is about as complex as fire and the pointy stick compared to what we have today, our executive capacity has simply not kept pace with our technological one.

Or the cause is one step removed, for example the handful of giant companies that control all US internet infrastructure, versus the hundreds all over Europe.

This sounds like a language education issue. It's easier to understand a language than to express yourself in it, so possibly Germans on average have good enough knowledge of English to understand you but not enough to adequately reply in English. Conversely, Denmark has some of the highest English literacy in Europe.

Any additive/subtractive method at that scale for coin faces sounds like a huge waste of time and effort compared to just pressing the design, but also not a coin expert.

If your "innovation" is at risk from consumer protection regulations I question whether it's a good innovation.

There are a couple of problems with this argument. One is that with a device (especially a premium one) the cost of support for a reasonable lifetime is considered baked into the price. The other is that security updates imply a security issue, meaning the company sold you an insecure, i.e. defective device in the first place.