It irritates me when people press the crosswalk button on quiet roads (where most of the time there is nothing coming, so you can just cross) before they have even looked to see if anything is coming. Most of the time they then cross immediately and the traffic light will go red some time after they have already crossed, holding up both cars and pedestrians coming behind (who might get there shortly before the traffic light goes green again, so have to wait for that and then wait for the accumulated traffic to clear before they can cross). There is a walking route near me that crosses a lot of roads and I not infrequently get caught behind someone doing this so I get stuck at every crossing.
I suggest that a substantial portion of that "socio-cultural-political climate" is due to foreign influence operations trying to amplify division for this purpose.
I think the foreign influence operations that aim to increase division in American society and promote equality of outcome are an attempt to counter it, not by outcompeting America but by hobbling it, seem to be somewhat effective.
But unfortunately it is the type of thing that, although obviously a superior solution, is unlikely to be adopted in the rest of the world. Where I live, as, I think, in most places, people would think you were very strange if you put those kinds of metal shutters on your windows, and I can even imagine neighbours being displeased with you as it makes it look like it is a bad neighbourhood.
Make corporation tax progressive, resulting in it being easier for small companies to compete with big ones, without requiring the government to decide what is and what isn't a monopoly.
As others have said, it was an enjoyable read, and I thank you (and everyone else involved) for caring. One small bit of feedback: I suggest being a bit more subtle about how much work you did. At times I wondered if you were telling us things just to try to impress us with your dedication rather than because they were an important part of the story.
The school that I went to buried a time capsule that was supposed to be opened in 25 years. When that time came around, some of the students present at the burial contacted the school the enquire about the opening, but no one at the school knew anything about it (the staff had all changed within that time) and the burial spot had been built on.
Where I live you had to be home to receive packages. If you weren't, you had to go to a distribution centre to collect them. During the pandemic it seemed to change, so now they just leave them at your front door, and it hasn't gone back.
I think the more coherent thing to do would be to treat banks like other industries and not bail them out. Customers would then place their money in safer banks, discouraging banks from engaging in risky behaviour.
This is like people claiming that because a higher percentage of children of high earning parents become high earners, that they got an unfair advantage because their parents could pay for them to go to good schools, etc. That might be part of it, but having parents who are intelligent enough and have the attitudes and habits to get a high earning job means that you will most likely be more intelligent than average and have absorbed those attitudes and habits as well.
I think choices was meant to mean things like being able to choose between competing healthcare providers.
Created and supported by big industry players that get them turned into law (and thus "government-imposed" - classic regulatory capture.
On the Mexican side of the border there are clusters of doctors, dentists, etc., offering lower cost treatment. I imagine that a large part of the decreased cost is due to reduced regulations that make it easier for small, independent providers to offer their services, which in turn results in substantial competition between the many providers to offer the lowest cost for the standard of treatment that patients want.
I think the change in circumstances in some Middle Eastern countries has been even more dramatic. Places like Abu Dhabi were small towns with houses made of mud/palm fronds in the 1960s.
I would ideally like to be able to fit my whole life into a suitcase and be sufficiently free of commitments that if someone asked me to move to the other side of the world next week I could. I achieve this in my own life, but I share the feeling of almost overwhelming burden you describe when I see my parents' possessions. Some day I am going to have to deal with them. It would be unbearably wasteful and disrespectful to just throw them out or give them away to people who don't value them, but disposing of them properly would be a major undertaking, and many of the items have great sentimental value to my parents so I can't imagine giving them to anyone else but at the same time I don't want them. I doubt that I could trick myself into overcoming this by "letting go" as you describe.
I live on only a bit more than that myself. I batch cook all of my meals for the week on Sunday mornings. It's simple food, all made from raw ingredients. I don't eat any sandwiches, though, since bread is usually highly processed and not cheap.
Is "wealth" the right comparison when you are talking about affording rent and food? I think it is spending that matters. There is an approximately fixed amount of land in the world, an approximately fixed amount of housing and food that can be produced per year. Jeff Bezos has a lot of wealth, but it's just a number and doesn't affect anyone else unless he spends it, using it to consume a portion of the world's available resources and thus increasing the price of them for everyone else.
Reducing the burden for those filing their taxes is nice, but an effect of simplifying the tax code that I am more interested in is that it restricts the power of the government (and so the reduces the attractiveness of lobbying politicians). The complexity provides opportunities for lobbyists to design rules that distort markets in their favour.
I was once at a restaurant beside a girl and her parents and a friend of the parents. All were American, but the girl, who had just returned from spending one semester at a university in England, spoke with a strong RP accent. Similarly I met someone (who was starting graduate school) from Texas who had just spent a summer in Germany, and spoke with an exaggerated German accent. I don't understand how they didn't realise that it made them seem foolish, rather than, as they seemed to hope, interesting and sophisticated.
I think landowners should declare a value for their property, that is used for taxation, but also allows anyone to immediately buy the land from you at that price. This would allow rival road companies to quickly purchase the land necessary to build an alternative road. Such wasteful duplication would rarely happen in practice, though, because the knowledge that they do not have a guaranteed monopoly, that another company can build an alternative road if they charge exorbitant fees, will keep the charge to use the road reasonable.
What percentage of the negative comments come from chatbots that are part of foreign influence campaigns to spread negativity in this largely Western world (or even largely US) forum?
I am certain that the people who make comments like this have never lived in a country where they had to deal with something like a government-owned bank.
In my country there used to be a government-owned airline with a monopoly. Tickets were so expensive that only the wealthy could afford them (yet somehow the airline still lost money). Then the market was thankfully deregulated. Competition substantially lowered the prices, and gave people the freedom to choose which airline to fly on.
You single out only fossil fuels, but there are so many other ways in which we are damaging the environment that we also need to worry about - PFAS everywhere, noise and light pollution, pesticides and many other chemicals in rivers, expanses of monocultures, etc. It concerns me that there is so much fixation on one form of harm, which I fear may result in less attention to the many others that we are inflicting.
If the thing they use the infrastructure to do is actually valuable, then they can just add the cost of the toll to what they charge for doing it. Splitting the cost of building and maintaining infrastructure among users is, I believe, the fairest way, and helps to avoid market distortions.
But I can explain why: they need to blend-in to build trust with other group participants and so become more persuasive when they are trying to influence, and also to avoid bot detection. The influence might also be much more subtle than talking about political topics, such as just being continuously negative or argumentative to bring down the moods of the targeted people.
There have been quite a few instances of "fake news" stories about famous people making donations, such as to hurricane victims, that the famous people have said were not true and they don't know where they came from. No one seems to benefit from these stories, and they don't seem click-baity enough to have been made-up for the ad impressions, so the goal seems to be to erode public trust in the news. When it thus appears that there are active efforts to achieve this (perhaps by countries seeking to boost receptiveness to their influence operations), I don't think the news media deserves all of the blame for the decline in trust.