How?

I don’t pick majority opinions so society doesn’t accept everything I say. Nevertheless, without the plurality of society I wouldn’t have them.

Most of what I write is society. I rarely have an original thought.

precise value predictions

I don’t think the victims were in control before, or the people who care about them.

if her 200K+ salary isn’t a good life? then what is?

A life that doesn’t need the suggar rush.

and does what feels good to her in the moment

That’s likely how she lives. The structure of society determines if she grew up longing for suggar or if she longed for a walk. A good society can make up for plenty of resources.

democrat or republican, and how she would be a ‘suffering from the oppression of the system’ in one case, and ‘deserving of her misery’ in the other

That’s the usual team thinking. If we wouldn’t leave the media to the elite we should have more nuanced conversations.

That’s just keeping the slaves in line. The powerless are not even fighting for power.

The civil war would be between fractions who fight for control over the country.

The good news is that the civil war is still 10 or more years away. But unfortunately that doesn’t rule out a bunch of other wars.

no amount of universal anything will help the woman I saw this morning

Maybe more individual connections. If life is good, a suggar rush doesn’t have to offer the same fulfillment.

Vampire-stalking women could be even more interesting.

So, your argument is merely that the point he blogs about does not matter?

No

Or do you somehow not want people to discuss it?

No

I wrote that I don’t want to invalidate his points. I think they are valid.

All that our efforts did

That statement is just too strong.

I do not see how that adresses his core argument

It doesn’t, as I wrote in my first sentence. Free software alone is just nice enough that it is more than a little gain.

Not to invalidate his points but:

We won the debate, and gained little for users or developers. All that our efforts did was to make it easier for big corporations build things more cheaply and for billionaires to become trillionaires.

We have free software. We have Linux. We have Graphene OS.

Everybody can build whatever they want. That’s a huge win.

On top of that, a US naval blockade on Iranian ports has cut off imports the country normally counts on to fill gaps in domestic supply.

https://www.timesnownews.com/world/explained-why-iran-is-facing-fuel-shortages-and-long-lines-at-petrol-pumps-article-155980720

an uneducated population.

Is education a problem in Romania?

You forgot the members of the French foreign legion. Come to Germany and date an AfD member to make up for it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramanujan–Sato_series

there are no guarantees in life, so you have to adapt.

True, but society can be structured in a way that life is not 3 missed payments away from an existential crisis.

were able to provide decent service for all, we’d likely need to quadruple the number of healthcare workers

I think it takes much less but if only a quarter of the citizens get decent service then that’s not a good society.

it’s much harder and murkier to get into the real world details and the real world consequences of ‘improvement’ in society.

True. That’s why the best have to think about it, instead of how to deny health insurance claims to increase quarterly profits.

If most people are nurses people will be desperate for a nurse job and wages will be as low as they can get.

Anybody can become rich but not everybody.

The trick is to make it easier for clever people to get a better job than it is for them to improve society as a whole. Resources can either go into boats and mansions, or healthcare for all.

I went to college, studied useful things

Maybe also study how society works. Not everybody can follow your lead.