I don’t know whether that would help as much as you think it will. I just got out of the military, and there are definitely certain people who started out taking a lot of shit from people just like you did at that rank, but their motivation to rank up was because they couldn’t wait to become the people giving people shit.

Last year I could cast episodes of DS9 I get from Paramount+ through Amazon Prime to my parents’ TV. This year I can’t, likely as an anti-piracy measure. So I hooked my device up via HDMI. Still couldn’t watch it on the TV. You know what? I’m gonna go complain to them before I stop subscribing.

Usually when a customer talks to a customer service agent, that’s the only customer service agent they’re going to interact with that week. So they treat the customer service agent as though the converse is true, that they are the only customer the customer service agent will interact with that week, forgetting that they are actually the 10,000th.

Compared to those pain points building a modern PC should be a breeze. CPUs go in Zero Insertion Force sockets so as long as you remember to lift the little lever you won’t bend any pins. People don’t even wear static discharge wrist bands anymore (all though it couldn’t hurt) or worry about shorting things out. And power connectors only fit one way unlike the AT power connector.

Speaking of breeze your only pain point might be making sure you have enough air circulation for cooling all that gear.

We don’t have a lot of records of what speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language were thinking because they lived c. 4500-2500 BC and didn’t have their own writing. I think the for the earliest writing we have of an Indo-European language gendered nouns had already been invented.

We don’t just use capitalism to distribute information. There are free libraries all over the U.S. It’s possible to learn most of what knowledge-workers need to know for free. Then you can seek employment for using what you know and not your physical labor.

But also, economists consider humans to have infinite wants. Certainly society as a whole has infinite wants. So no matter what resources we extract from the environment, society always wants more, which creates scarcity, which creates markets, which, in a free society, creates capitalism.

So a post-information-scarcity society. It means something else with different word-order.

Oh, you want to study cybersecurity? Yeah forget what I said before, get a Framework, and if you don’t put Linux on it at least put WSL on it. Learn all you can.

Are you American? Because I seem to recall between five and ten years ago a particular event that changed the way we ran a lot of the government.

Have you read Cory Doctorow’s book on enshitification? I think he focuses more on the Internet but might help answer your question.

Pretty sure the U.S. Code says it means to act or incite to act against the authority of the United States. Such as the authority of the United States says it’s time for Congress to count and certify electoral votes, and you try to stop it from doing so. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2383

That is the book that is very critical and severe toward the United States. I think the problem is that that book was written as a counterpoint to the history of the United States we learn in secondary school. If you haven’t learned U.S. history from a U.S. high school history textbook, it is going to feel unbalanced, prejudiced, because you are not the target audience, who has grown up with an uncritical, unbalanced, prejudiced but in the other way, curriculum. I would imagine a book by a European scholar of U.S. history would have more potential to give a neutral outside but critical point of view.