People with college level reading skills struggle with them.

That’s a bigger deal than you may think it is, given that US college students are testing dumber and dumber every year, and is accelerating thanks to AI.

I know what Republicans will do. They will send AI robot armies marching through every city to just start massacring humans.

Well, the plan then, if other countries start pulling away from US tech/hegemony as you suggest they will do, and are doing, is to use overwhelming military force with unending waves of AI-powered killer robots capable of combat in land, sea, and air. Use them everywhere, all at once, against everyone in a titanic billionaire temper tantrum the likes of which has never been seen on Earth. Because, if Karp and Thiel and Andreesen and all the other tech oligarchs don’t get their wish, they will absolutely attempt to totally annihilate the planet in a massive temper tantrum.

And the cake will be “free”, as in “each bite adds to your debt and you will serve in our army until it is paid off or you die in the line of duty. In the event you die in the line of duty, your debt will be passed down to your next of kin, who will be forced to pay it until their death.”

Well, in the legal sense, I suppose it has to do with contracts and contract law. Some time ago in the US, it was determined that 18 was the legal age for adulthood because by then a person would be old enough to understand the terms of a contract and hold to those terms. Marriage is a contract. Military service is a contract. Getting a loan/mortgage is a contract.

To add to this, Web 1.0 was also known as the “read-only” Web. Webpages were managed by their owners and those owners decided what visitors saw. Those visitors also did not have the ability to add their own content to the pages. They might have had the ability to comment, or to make posts on BBS sites, but they couldn’t just submit anything. Then in 2004, it changed. We transitioned to Web 2.0. All the things you mention allowed visitors of webpages to actively submit content to those pages, and soon it became known as the “read-write” Web.

allocating a few days a month to all fit members of a community to do work which no one volunteers to do.

I can agree to that as long as it’s a spelled-out condition of living in that community. As an autistic person myself, I like having expectations and conditions written out clearly and concisely, in mutually agreed-upon language.

Privacy is one of those things I feel that if not everyone can have it, then nobody should. If the billionaires and the government want my secrets, then I want all of theirs.

Yeah, let’s put everyone’s dirty laundry out there for everyone else to see. A system where everyone has everyone else’s leverage? Beautiful. Blackmail stops working because everyone already knows, but on the upside, I also know everyone else’s dirty laundry and corpses are buried.

Did you know that Northrup Grumman developed the standard USPS mail truck? They also developed the B2 stealth bomber. Northrup never intended for their truck to also be a stealth bomber, but Ted said “I’m about to do what’s called a ‘pro gamer’ move.”

This. The most valuable properties are neighborhoods where nobody lives. Honestly, HOA boards should kick everyone out and gate up the entire neighborhood, only sending in mowing crews to sculpt the yards.

This. If there’s actually a toilet, then how does it work? I imagine the toilet probably works like the replicators do. You notice how when anyone on board the Enterprise eats, there’s dishes, but no sinks/dishwashers? When they’re finished eating, they literally set the dirty dishes down in the replicator and they’re instantly returned back to energy. I imagine the toilets work under the same principle.

Then literally Web 2.0 is the problem. All social media stops existing if we go back from Web 2.0.

“I’m glad you changed your last name, you sonuvabitch!”

“Blind box” in the tech context is an algorithm that hides its operations from everyone, even its own creators. You give it an input, and then it produces an output, without showing you how it arrived to that output.

Yeah, George would think he’s spotted some slick NFT grift or crypto rug pull that it turns out he was the one getting rug pulled, by Newman.

Yes, just like how tax preparation companies lobby to keep the IRS from just telling people what they owe in taxes. It keeps the tax prep companies in business.

Well, the show has been off the air for a long time, but I absolutely could see Kramer having an AI chatbot girlfriend, or George Costanza trying to get people suckered into an NFT grift/cryptocurrency side hustle.

Was PayPal always evil, though? The concept of it wasn’t. People wanted an easier way to conduct transactions electronically. Something faster and more convenient than, say, a Western Union money transfer order.

To go a little more in-depth, if a product would simplify certain aspects of life, make them more straightforward and less prone to a chain of comedic errors, then it’s a good product.

If a product makes things more complex, has more things to go wrong, and more corners and edge cases for some weirdo like Kramer or George to think they’ve spotted a killer side hustle, then it’s a bad product.

Now, I’m not saying that smartphones and computers and the Internet aren’t complicated, but they are far simpler to how things were done before. Read old hobbyist magazines to get a sense of the complex system of self-addressed stamped envelopes and hand-compiled mailing lists it used to take to get info on your hobby. Meeting a friend in a nearby town to go see a movie at a theater you haven’t been to before required a shocking number of cross-referenced paper resources.