I just read the 'original affluent society' and (most of) your linked essay, I kind of agree with you. That said, the conclusions of Kaplan lead to estimates or 35-60 hours a week (excluding some depending on the group) and that surprised me a lot. That's very different from the image I got from some other comments in this thread talking about extremely long days with constant back-breaking work. Would you agree?

Constant, backbreaking work was not a feature of hunter-gatherer societies in the way it was of early agricultural societies, yes; at the same time, they still worked equal to or longer hours than we did, at things we would likely consider quite grueling and boring (mostly food processing), and what they got out of it was a level of nutrition even they regularly considered inadequate; moreover, a lot of the reason the average per day work estimate is so low, as the paper covers briefly, is that there were very often times, especially during the winter, where food simply wasn't accessible, or during the summer, where it was so hot it was dangerous to work, so there was enforced idleness, but that's not the same thing as leisure.

Whats the problem with attached bottle caps or volume warnings? I used to find these things annoying when I was younger but I do realise things like that can be very useful, even though they are small steps.

What do ILVA and AM stand for?

What is so fundamentally different about DID proposed in the UK or the US then? I read through some of the documents about it and the data scoping that will be available, which isn't with something like BankID seem to be the only difference. What am I missing here?

If an authoritarian state tells a bank to block you as a customer you get exactly the same result. All these options of blocking people are already available to states in general.

Very different levels of friction, though, and that matters too in practice.

It's a pretty common thing that replanted forests turn into monocultures that don't have a lot of value for biodiversity. This then leads to all sorts of problems that healthy diverse forests don't have. I don't know if that's the case with the Appalachian forests but this is depressingly common. That being said, there are good steps being taken, e.g. the rewilding projects by mossy earth.

It wasn't replanted. It just grew back when the farms were abandoned.

This wasn't because a Chinese CEO was appointed, it was because of his recent actions moving (apparantly critical) production away from the Netherlands. Where did you get this angle from?

I would argue that you can consider those thoughts. But this is the difficult bit, I've had the experience before of thoughts/feelings whatever ypu want to call them where words fall short. Knowing multiple languages helps a bit but it still falls short sometimes (very rarely).

Language is very effective at this, but I don't think thought is inherently linguistic.

To me language is just a way to label, group or organise these things. So when you learn a new one you learn a new 'labeling system/taxonomy' does that sound familiar?

Spotify is not a US company.

Having seen AstraZeneca inside, this is not the case. There's quite a lot of development going on. It is all non-fundamental though, the focus is heavily on late stage. No identification of disease mechanisms and such.