OP here on a different device, a lot of people have been asking about my beef with Youtube, so I'll try and put what I noticed in a timeline.

1. Youtube comes out with the promise of revolutionizing video, I immediately love it because of its idiosyncrasy and unpredictability. Despite low production values, the videos are varied enough that I can always find something interesting and the algorithm is quite good at suggesting things I'll like. 2. Google acquires youtube, whether because of more money or improving the algorithm, the offerings get even better 3. Youtube merges with google+. 4. Youtube hires new management and begins modeling itself after the old cable companies whose lunch it had 'till now been happily eating. 5. Youtube's algorithms progressively play it safer with their recommendations, the youtube personalities I follow either become more mainstream (Joe Rogan) or increasingly complain of being arbitrarily demonetized (Phillip Defranco). 7. Present day

If you use Youtube as a substitute for television, it might not look like a decline. But I find television generally boring, and Youtube seemed to promise a general improvement. With a better algorithm for suggesting videos and a less hostile relationship to creators it still could be, but for years now it's been moving in the opposite direction on both counts.

I always give myself five minutes in which I can flip the coin as many times as I like, but at the end of that I have to go with the face that's showing. It's pretty interesting - I find myself hesitating when it's showing one face more and more. I'm sure part of it is just reinforcing an initial bias once I notice my own hesitation, but magnifying an existing bias is after all the point of the exercise.

I believe it was Charles Stross who had a character say "We would like to have Albert Einstein working in the patent office, but it still needs to function if we hire Mr. Bean".

I would add to your list, "cheaper". Any drone that can be swarmed and taken down by cheaper drones is probably a bad investment.

Japan is probably more concerned about boosting their declining pop rate, which is inversely correlated with women's education, than expanding their economy in the short term and accelerating the population decline.

It doesn't really work like that. You can't unmince meat back.

Once there is demand for education you can't roll it back by not delivering.

Moreover you can't fix anything by cheating on people and/or making their lives miserable. That's putting oneself in a very bad position indeed.

It sounds more and more of a bad joke. In Russia, you cheat on exams for University, but in Japan, University cheats on exams for you.

I would be interested in seeing the opposite examples where screwing people over fixed their birth rates (and introduced pink unicorns) but I'm pretty confident there will not be any.

There is a school of philosophy that newton's laws of motion apply to the political realm - "any action taken to benefit a minority group will result in an equal and opposite counter-reaction". I wouldn't be terribly far off if I described Sun Zu's "The Art of War" as Newton's laws of motion applied to game theory.

I don't understand why you can't tell them the reason you're leaving without burning a bridge - "I don't work well in an open-office environment, I found I was constantly distracted and inefficient. It's just not the right environment for me to thrive" isn't untrue or pointing fingers, and it's valuable feedback for your employer.

I think perhaps bigger than the open office problem is grand parent point seems obvious to me in our current society. Either you are 110% on board with what the company wants, or you aren't a team player (and implied a bad person/worker/resource). It is daring to question them, daring to say they did something imperfect.

Or more simply, if he wants to return to this employer in the future and they have the same or similar office space, they will surely ask him why he thinks that he will now, somehow, be able to work well in in that environment that was so problematic for him in the past.

Not criticizing this person, I despise my open office environment too. I also wouldn't (and didn't) tell tell my employer about this when I left for a few years in the past for the same reason.

There's a risk the word gets out that you don't work well in team, can't adapt to a new environment or can't focus under the simple stress of office life.

Discoverability seems to be a challenge on just about every streaming platform. It doesn't seem that difficult to write an algorithm that balances novelty with comfort, and yet nobody seems to have even moved in that direction. I'm not sure what the problem is, the discoverability problem seems to have gotten worse as machine learning has become more mainstream.

>What structures today are likely to survive long term?

The Georgia Guidestones come to mind. I've been quite interested in the pre-ice age golden age theory lately but I think the part missing from your analysis is that we're farther ahead on a chemical/particle tech branch than on a social engineering tech branch. We've essentially scaled up competing warbands to a planetary scale - a class 1 civilization we are not, and seem more likely to develop one on Mars than Earth.

Building the Georgia Guidestones probably cost much less in human terms than a comparably complex henge, but we lack the mindset to collectively see the value in it. To make a gaming analogy of your point, I would say we're objectively ahead on one branch of the tech tree but we overlook simpler technologies on branches we haven't explored yet, to the point of not realizing other civilizations were farther ahead in some regards while being behind in others.

Then why is it profitable to recycle glass?