I get that there are people out there that wrap their entire identities around work. It is so ingrained in their personalities that they cannot even day dream of a world with no work.

There are other groups of people out there where work is already completely meaningless. These people only do work so they can support themselves and their families. If they had another choice, they would not be working. They would be taking care of their kids, pursuing hobbies, traveling, engaging with communities and otherwise experiencing life.

The answer to your question is super simple or so complex the most advanced AI could never figure out.

The paper tries to paint a picture that Bill Gates was the center of the pandemic conspiracies. The Bill Gates stuff was limited to a small slice of the COVID disinformation campaign.

The social media discussions about Bill Gates were never organic. No one/bot wakes up one day with a Gates conspiracy and it goes viral. The catalyst is always a mainstream article or interview with or mentioning Bill Gates. From there, bigger influencers / bots pick it up and run with it until the trending spike dissipates.

The paper is looking at the train caboose in isolation and trying to come up with reasons for it's speed.

The magical or hierarchical thinker is very aware how their opinion is not accepted by the mainstream. It is a strategy to open with some kind of "I just have questions" statement to test the waters. If it fails, they pull back. If is is accepted, they open up a little more and repeat. Once they think you are "cool", they will dump their real opinion. The real opinion is usually very extreme.

Although you may think the conspiracy is crazy or your cousin is "aggressively uneducated", he is demonstrating quite a bit of executive function and planning. This is not crazy person behavior. It is predictable. It makes them great targets for political messaging and advertising campaigns.

The solution in the 2017 IPCC report was stop putting CO2 in the atmosphere, CO2 capture and refreeze the poles (throwing up particles to deflect sunlight). CO2 capture alone is not enough.

The reason to continue moving to renewable is that they are cheaper and less resource intensive. Lots of logistics involved in fossil fuel discovery extraction, refining, transport, among other things.

Even if we started today, we have to deal with destabilized climate. More disasters. Etc. Eventually, we will have refugee crisis. A proposal is to start building cities now (or soonish) in the north to make the process easier.

Not sure we are dealing with a doomsday this century, but we will be dealing with a mess from wilder and wilder weather.

You overcame "adversity" with no people, no rule support, no drawing on past experience and no luck.

"adversity" is external. We don't choose what adversity brings or when adversity shows up. If you don't have a repeatable process to address it, adversity will roll over you.

I was just referring to exploring options outside of immediate friends and family. We live in a society of rules. Sometimes we think the rules are against us and assume there are fewer options than what is available. Maybe asking the boss for a raise. Maybe applying for another job that you thought you were not qualified for. Etc.

That raise may give you some breathing room. That breathing room may change your perspective.

With respect to "adversity", it is neither. Proximity and luck play bigger roles.

Proximity refers to the people, paperwork and experiences you have immediately available to you. Luck is just luck. The level of confidence you have in the pieces available motivates you to push forward. That is the reality for the average person.

Many "motivation" stories are mixtures of proximity and (lots) of luck. These stories then get retconned as some heroic, self-driving motivational epic. For some people, the recon can be very intimidating and even demotivating.

I too wish I could slowly die of lung cancer so a public infrastructure project can finish a year earlier. We ALL can dream.

>How about when Governors of a large state start removing historically accurate information from our children's educational experiences in favor of lessons designed to advance a privileged cultural view?

Very next sentence...

>I'm not being political on this

Ok, buddy.

And, there are several Republican governors who have not released or set a timetable for lifting COVID emergency powers.

At the beginning of the pandemic, Republicans were screaming it was fake and just the flu. Comrade Joe has declared the pandemic over and the Republicans just can't accept it.

>Without a microprocessor supply chain all of Xi’s galactic ambitions are in lockdown.

To the extent that this is even an issue, it is a temporary one. China's space ambitions is over the next couple of decades.

>Even with it, communism is going to hold him back too much.

I get that people get confused by "communist" in the single party's name, but China is a state capitalist dictatorship. Not much in the economy or government resembles communism.

>Governance by decree is a pretty terrible way to run a space program.

The space program is not going to fund, form and come up with goals on it's own. Government has to be directing it.

>If you put one person loyal to the party in charge on the moon or mars and then have to wait for the party to make decisions with the lag/delay of asking for permission from xi it will inevitably turn into a problem.

You don't know how the Chinese government operates. You also don't know how the US and other space programs operate.

>Life comes at you fast. It comes at your exponentially faster in space.

The Chinese plan is over several decades. SpaceX took 20 years to get to where it is at. In human timescales, space exploration is really slow. Nothing "exponentially fast" about it.

>I’m relatively certain Covid...

Yeah, covid has nothing to do with the Chinese space program.

>The world is at a precipice of revolution.

Because China did a space program update? I need to get my "Alien Lives Matter" and "No Chinese in Space" protest signs ready.

Space exploration tech is ubiquitous enough that China will be able to make some progress. The reality is China lies about their GDP and economy. If the past has taught us anything, China probably does not have the money to fund the space ambitions they just announced.

>The method of Rings of Power of just randomly making every fourth character black is just silly (feels like a decade ago this would've been called "tokenism" and universally detested).

They went to each Middle Earth group and added one or two non-white characters. It's the old 90s and early 00s flavor of "diversity". On top of that, the finale either killed or excluded almost all of their "diverse" cast.

Hollywood has had a diversity problem for a long time, especially compared to other forms of entertainment, like music and sports. I feel like the diversity in RoP was done in bad faith.

Disney+ need to constantly add more rectangles to their user interface.

In America, even if you have health insurance, the cost of seeing a doctor can be prohibitive.

If you can stomach the cost, referrals, claim denials or spending hours on the phone with a service rep in India are a very stressful part of seeing an actual doctor. In some cases, the pain of dealing with the healthcare system may be worse than the disease.

I don't know what the numbers are of people choosing alternatives to the healthcare system, but I imagine the trend is upward.