For other examples of countries-in-countries, we can look to Switzerland, Germany, and the USA. A casual observation of all three are that their first-level political subdivision is known as a “state” and not “province” or “territory”.

Swiss history – which I admit I’m not that clear on – shows that the modern sovereign state formed as a loose confederation of smaller kingdoms unifying together. Indeed, the foundational document of the modern Swiss Confederation in 1848 directly drew inspiration from the USA Constitution of 1789. However, they made some modifications, such as having a 7-person Federal Council, which together fulfill the role akin to the American President. That is, the role of Head of State and also Head of Government (aka a Prime Minister). This style of executive governance hews more closely to the rich Swiss traditional of direct democracy, rather than that of a purely representative republic.

Germany, specifically the successor state of West Germany post-WW2, and then the unified state of Germany post reunification, is a federal republic. A republic to restore the functions of the earlier Weimar Republic, and a federation of states because of USA influence in drafting the Basic Law – Germany’s Constitution – following WW2. But unlike the USA federal system, the German system would mimic the parliamentary system of Westminster, being that of the United Kingdom. So while governmental power is distributed amongst the several states and the federation, the governance would be through indirect election of the Prime Minister. The idea is that by dividing power this way, no mustached fellow with fascist ideas could take control of the organs of power again.

Finally, examining the oldest continually-operating example, the USA currently is composed of a strong federal entity and 50 US States that wield all remaining power not reserved to the federal government. But initially, this is not what the American Founding Fathers had in mind at all. The late 1700s envisioned the original 13 colonies of the early United States of America to be independent countries that confederated for common causes, like defense and foreign policy. The precursor to the US Constitution – the Articles of Confederation (1777) – tried this, but problems quickly arose because each State had their own currency, debt levels, legal systems, and often undermined each other to advance their own position, such as favoring in-state citizens in lawsuits filed by out-of-state citizens. This made trade difficult and the federal government had little power to do anything about this.

Even with the revised US Constitution document, the whole weak federal government thing continued until the 1860s during the American Civil War, with the aftermath being a federal government that fully asserted its powers under the US Constitution. Any notion of US States being country-like would have fully evaporated by then, especially during Reconstruction when the Guarantee Clause was used to install military governance in the defeated southern states until reintegration into the Union. Such a thing would be impossible for a modern country/sovereign state.

Fun fact: the Guarantee Clause is why a US State cannot convert itself into a hereditary monarchy. The Constitution does not allow for a Monarchy of South Carolina, and we’re probably all better off for it anyway. Although if the role was an elected position – like with the Co-Prince of Andorra – then that might be permissible.

To that end, the modern US State is still a sovereign entity, in that certain things are wholly within their domain and not of the federal government’s. But US States are still beholden to the US Constitution, use the same money as the Union, and must honor interstate commerce and contracts from in- and out-of-state, as well as judicial rulings from the federal court system. But this dual sovereignty system post 1860s continues to evolve, with some states encroaching on federal authority, such as with border control.

Aspects of these three example countries find their way into most of the modern governments of Western countries, so hopefully this was a useful explainer.

I’ll take a cursory stab, but other references exist for the minutiae of how these things came to be.

Britain == United Kingdom

Great Britain == an island wholly within the UK

United Kingdom: a sovereign state (eg USA, Germany) composed of the constituent countries of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, plus a few overseas territories.

Briton: a British citizen, or someone tracing their ancestry to the UK constituent countries

The short answer for why a country (UK) can have countries (eg Scotland) in it is because the notion of sovereign states (the modern definition of countries) only came into existence in the 18th century or so.

Canada, formerly the Dominion of Canada, formed from the British North American holdings plus the French parts that the British bought (ie Quebec). Granted self governance in the 1860s, independence in the 1930s, and finally full “patriation” in the 1980s to remove all vestiges of the UK from Canadian laws. However, the independent Monarchy of Canada remains, and just happens to coincidentally follow the exact same selection rules as the British Monarch. So the King of Canada will be the same person as the King of the United Kingdom, even though the Government of Canada is no longer controlled by the Government of the United Kingdom. In both sovereign states, the King is a figurehead from where authority and governmental legitimacy emanates, and the current King of Canada continues the tradition since Queen Elizabeth II that the Monarch’s appointed Governor-General of Canada shall represent the Monarch in all Canadian matters, meaning the Monarch will not directly involve themselves. In fact, it’s frowned upon for politicians to involve the Monarch directly, except to kindly ask for a new Governor-General (see 1975 Australia).

Why still keep the Monarchy of Canada? The voters haven’t chosen otherwise, to pursue a republic or any other form of government. The same applies in Australia, although it’s slightly more complicated as each Australian State derives their state-level authority from the Australian Monarch, whereas Canadian provinces exist as a part of the singular Canadian confederation; each Australian State would have to sever their connection to the Monarch, or could do so piece-meal. Nevertheless, with the Monarch delegating power within each of his “realms” to the respective Governor-General, becoming a republic is a matter of passing bills in the parliamentary system. Barbados did exactly this in 2022, replacing Queen Elizabeth II with a republic. Countries formerly part of the British Empire (circa 1930) usually join The Commonwealth of Nations, which just means they’d like to keep trading with each other but without the whole colonialism thing.

The end of the British Empire was basically slow-going, since once some parts (eg Canada) received a measure of devolved powers (like having their own parliament), the door was swung open for other parts to demand the same. Post WW2, with the status of the UK greatly diminished in deference to the USA and USSR, overseas colonies became expensive and untenable. Plus, one of the basic tenets of the United Nations – put in place to avoid yet another world war – was the right to self determination. So the colonies had to go free.

Ironically, the Scottish Parliament was not restored until 1998, having legally stopped existing with the Acts of Union 1707 that merged England and Scotland into the United Kingdom, with a single parliament but otherwise separate institutions and laws. To this day, the English Parliament has not been restored, and thus England affairs are directed by the UK Parliament at large.

The British Isles includes both the Island of Great Britain (where Wales, Scotland, and England are) plus the Island of Ireland (where the Republic of Ireland, and Northern Ireland are), and a few smaller islands. So yes, every part of Great Britain is a part of the UK sovereign state, but the UK also includes the Isle of Mann and the upper part of the Island of Ireland, and some others.

In all circumstances, “Ireland” means the Republic of Ireland; that republic is almost never called “southern Ireland”. The whole history of British colonialism in Ireland is long, sordid, and full of misery, culminating with The Troubles of the 1960s and still causing concern post-Brexit due to the EU border basically dividing the Island of Ireland.

TL;DR: everything about British history is messy. Even their former colonies have messy history, despite some being at most a few hundred years old.

I’m glad you enjoyed reading it. This was basically an invitation to brain-dump my thoughts from this past week, in light of Bluesky’s recent record user-counts, and also because I just finished reading the recently-published book Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter, a multi-faceted chronicle of how and why it happened and who knew what and when. Check your local library if they already have it.

I also follow Mike Masnick on Mastodon via Bluesky bridging, and listen to his podcast on the topic of Trust & Safety. He’s also the one who coined the term Streisand Effect, which I think makes him fairly well qualified to write banger articles like Speedrunning The Moderation Curve, which are examples of unintended consequences running amok.

To start, let’s verify that Bluesky the app is indeed open-source. Yep, it is. But that’s not the same as having all the machinery be open-source, where anyone could spin up their own, compatible service; maybe named ExampleSky. To be compatible, ExampleSky would need to use the same backend interface – aka protocol – as Bluesky, which is known as ATProto. The equivalent (and older) protocol behind Mastodon and Lemmy is ActivityPub.

ATProto is ostensibly open-source, but some argue that it’s more akin to “source available” because only the Bluesky parent company makes changes or extensions to the protocol. Any alternative implementation would be playing a game of chase, for future versions of the protocol. History shows that this is a real risk.

On the flip side, Mike Masnick – founder of Techdirt, author of the 2019 paper advocating for “protocols, not platforms” that inspired Bluesky, and recently added member of the board of Bluesky, replacing Jack Dorsey – argues that the core ability to create a separate “Bluesky2” is where the strength of the protocol lays. My understanding is that this would act as a hedge to prevent Bluesky1 from becoming so undesirable that forking to Bluesky2 is more agreeable. To me, this is no different than a FOSS project (eg OpenOffice) being so disagreeable that all the devs and users fork the project and leave (eg LibreOffice).

But why a common protocol? As Masnick’s paper argues, and IMO in full agreement with what ActivityPub has been aiming towards for years, is that protocols allow for being platform-agnostic. Mastodon users are keenly aware that if they don’t like their home instance, they can switch. Sure, you’ll have to link to your new location, but it’s identical to changing email providers. In fact, email is one of the few protocol-agnostic systems in the Internet still in continued use. Imagine if somehow Gmail users couldn’t send mail to Outlook users. It’d be awful.

Necessarily, both ActivityPub and ATProto incorporate decentralization in their designs, but in different fashions. ActivityPub can be described as coarse decentralization, as every instance is a standalone island that can choose to – and usually does – federate with other instances. But at the moment, core features like registration, login, or rate limiting, or spam monitoring, are all per-instance. And as it stands, much of those involve a human, meaning that scaling is harder. But the ActivityPub design suggests that instances shouldn’t be large anyway, so perhaps that’s not too big an issue.

ATProto takes the fine-grained design approach where each feature is modular, and thus can be centralized, farmed out, or outright decentralized. Now, at this moment, that’s a design goal rather than reality, as ATProto has only existed for so many years. I think it’s correct to say for now that Bluesky is potentially decentralizable, in the coarse sense like how Mastodon and Lemmy are.

There are parts of the Bluesky platform – as in, the one the Bluesky organization runs – which definitely have humans involved, like the Trust and Safety team. Though compared to the total dismantlement of the Twitter T&S team and the resulting chaos, it may be refreshing to know that Bluesky has a functional team.

A long term goal for Bluesky is the “farming out” of things like blocklists or algorithms. That is to say, imagine if you wanted to automatically duplicate the blocks that your friend uses, because what she finds objectionable (eg Nazis) probably matches your own sensibilities, then you can. In fact, at this very moment, I’m informed that Bluesky users can subscribe to a List and implement a block against all members of the List. A List need not be just users, but can also include keywords, hashtags, or any other conceivable characteristic. Lists can also be user-curated, curated by crowd sourcing, or algorithmically generated. The latter is the long goal, not entirely implemented yet. Another example of curation is “Starter Packs”, a List of specific users grouped by some common interest, eg Lawsky (for lawyers). Unlike a blocklist which you’d want to be updated automatically, a Starter List is a one-time event to help fill your feed with interesting content, rather than algorithmic random garbage.

So what’s wrong with Bluesky then? It sounds quite nice so far. And I’m poised to agree, but there’s some history to unpack. In very recent news, Bluesky the organization received more venture capital money, which means it’s worth mentioning what their long term business plan is. In a lot of ways, the stated business plan matches what Discord has been doing: higher quality media uploads and customizations to one’s profile. The same statement immediately ruled out any sort of algorithmic upranking or “blue checks”; basically all the ails of modern Twitter. You might choose to take them at their word, or not. Personally, I see it as a race between: 1) ATProto and the Bluesky infra being fully decentralized to allow anyone to spin up ExampleSky, and 2) a potential future enshittification of Bluesky in service of the venture capitalists wanting some ROI.

If scenario 1 happens first, then everyone wins, as bridging between ActivityPub and ATProto would make leaps and bounds, and anyone who wants their own ATProto instance can do so, choosing whether they want to rely on Bluesky for any/all features or none at all. Composability of features is something that ATProto can meaningfully contribute to the protocol space, as it’s a tough nut to crack. Imagine running your own ATProto instance but still falling back on the T&S team at Bluesky, or leveraging their spam filters.

But if scenario 2 happen first, then we basically have a Twitter2 cesspool. And users will once again have to jump ship. I’m cautiously hopeful that the smart cookies at Bluesky can avoid this fate. I don’t personally use Bluesky, being perfectly comfortable in the Fediverse. But I can’t deny that for a non-tech oriented audience, Bluesky is probably what I’d recommend, and to opt-in to bridging with the Fediverse. Supposed episodes of “hyping” don’t really ring true to me, but like I said, I’m not currently an invested user of Bluesky.

What I do want to see is the end result of Masnick’s paper, where the Internet hews closer to its roots where interoperability was the paramount goal, and the walled gardens of yore waste away. If ATProto and ActivityPub both find their place in the future, then IMO, it’ll be no different than IMAP vs POP3.

Pew Research has survey data germane to this question. As it stands, a clear majority (79%) of opposite-sex married women changed their family/last name to their husband’s.

But for never-married women, only a third (33%) said they would change their name to their spouse’s family name. 24% of never-married women were unsure whether they would or wouldn’t change their name upon marriage.

From this data, I would conclude that while the trend of taking the husband’s last name is fairly entrenched right now, the public’s attitude are changing and we might expect the popularity of this to diminish over time. The detailed breakdown by demographic shows that the practice was less common (73%) in the 18-49 age group than in the 50+ age group (85%).

However, some caveats: the survey questions did not inquire into whether the never-married women intended on ever getting married; it simply asked “if you were to get married…”. So if marriage as a form of cohabitation becomes less popular in the future, then the change-your-family-name trend could be in sharper decline than this data would suggest.

Alternatively, the data could reflect differences between married and never-married women. Perhaps never-married women – by virtue of not being married yet – answered “would not change name” because they did not yet know what their future spouse’s name is. No option for “it depends on his name” was offered by the survey. Never-married women may also more-strongly consider the paperwork burden – USA specific – for changing one’s name.

So does this help answer your question? Eh, only somewhat. Younger age and left-leaning seem to be factors, but that’s a far cry from cause-and-effect. Given how gradual the trend is changing, it’s more likely that the practice is mostly cultural. If so, then the answer to “why is cultural practice XYZ a thing?” is always “because it is”.

For anyone looking at Keygen Church, also see their adjacent project, Master Boot Record for computer metal.

In my homegym I have an AbMat foam pad which I also use as a knee pad. And while I think the thick foam would work outdoors on tougher terrain, it would not meet your criteria to fit in a backpack.

My other suggestion would be a scrap piece of horse stall mat, which are nearly solid rubber sheets commonly employed for homegym floors. This is what I use when working in my yard, for tasks requiring a lot of kneeling. Such a piece – while heavy – could be cut to whatever size you need, using a sharp knife or a jigsaw.

I am a software engineer by trade, so when I started cooking, everything and every tool was intimidating, because I had no idea how it worked nor what it was meant for. I knew nothing about knives besides not to drop one, didn’t know the difference between a wok and a skillet, and didn’t understand how oil creates a non-stick surface on a non-non-stick pan.

What helped me was a book that wasn’t like a recipe or cook book, but something closer to a food and kitchen textbook. The Food Lab by Kenji Lopez-Alt goes into some excruciatingly scientific detail about the role of different kitchen implements, and then showcasing recipes that apply theory to practice. Each step in the recipes thoroughly describe what to do, and the author puts a lot of content onto his YouTube channel as well.

It was this book that convinced me to buy, strip, and season a cast iron pan, which has already proven its worth as a non-sticking vessel comparable to my old Teflon-coated pans. And I think for you, reading the theory and following some of the recipes might develop sufficient experience to at least be comfortable in an active kitchen. It’s very much a chicken-and-egg problem – if you’ll pardon the poultry pun – but this book might be enough to make progress in the kitchen.

Also, since it was published in 2015, it’s very likely available at your local library, so check there first before spending money to buy the book. Good luck with your culinary development!

I was once working on an embedded system which did not have segmented/paged memory and had to debug an issue where memory corruption preceded an uncommanded reboot. The root cause was a for-loop gone amok, intending to loop through a linked list for ever member of an array of somewhat-large structs. The terminating condition was faulty, so this loop would write a garbage byte or two, ever few hundred bytes in memory, right off the end of the 32 bit memory boundary, wrapping around to the start of memory.

But because the loop only overwrote a few bytes and then overflew large swaths of memory, the loop would continue passing through the entire address space over and over. But since the struct size wasn’t power-of-two aligned, eventually the garbage bytes would write over the crucial reset vector, which would finally reboot the system and end the misery.

Because the system wouldn’t be fatally wounded immediately, the memory corruption was observable on the system until it went down, limited only by the CPU’s memory bandwidth. That made it truly bizarre to diagnose, as the corruption wasn’t in any one feature and changed every time.

Fun times lol

As there may be regional differences, you might want to specify your area. For example, ice cream in the UK doesn’t have to meet the same requirements as in the USA, so oddities like cheap ice cream made with no dairy or cream is possible, using vegetable oil instead. Evan Edinger has a video on UK ice cream in particular: https://youtu.be/CfM7yZD0PlE

My guess is that reading tomes like this is useful as a vocal exercise and can be a way of “getting one’s name out” for aspiring vocal talent. After all, what better way to showcase voice work on a resume than to point to examples online? As for the exact tome, it doesn’t really matter for this purpose but might as well also contribute to the wealth of human media.

When I see “Xitter”, I think it might be pronounced Exeter, like the town in southwest England. But that feels like an undeserved slight against the good people of Devon and England.

So far as I’m aware, non-occupational pre-nominal honorifics inure to the individual, so generally speaking, if that person doesn’t want to use their title, they don’t have to. And in the same way that most people will go along with someone’s acquired honorific of Dr or Capt or whatever, the same should also apply if someone expressed that their honorific should not used. I have no citation for this, other than what I’ve seen in life.

As a sidenote, in Britain, I understand that medical doctors are able to use the pre-nominal of Dr, but surgeons specifically will drop the Dr and just use Mr. or Ms.

Apparently this stems from ages ago when surgeons did not have to have a medical degree, and the doctoral view was that surgeons were akin to butchers. This may have reflected the crudeness of early surgeries. As a result, surgeons developed a history of being Mr – it’s not clear if female surgeons also took on Mr. So after the various laws/rules changed so that surgeons also had to be medically qualified, they still kept the tradition of Mr.

Thus, a male student of medicine in the UK could go from Mr, graduate to Dr, and then graduate as a surgeon to Mr again. I have no citation for this either, but it’s plausible for the ardently traditional British nation.

If you were to properly consider the problem the actual cost would be determined by cost per distance traveled and you essentially decide the distance by which ever you are budgeted for.

I wrote my comment in response to the question, and IMO, I did it justice by listing the various considerations that would arise, in the order which seemed most logical to me. At no point did I believe I was writing a design manual for how to approach such a project.

There are much smarter people than me with far more sector-specific knowledge to “properly consider the problem” but if you expected a feasibility study from me, then I’m sorry to disappoint. My answer, quite frankly, barely arises to a back-of-the-envelope level, the sort of answer that I could give if asked the same question in an elevator car.

I never specified that California would be the best place to implement this process.

While the word California didn’t show up in the question, it’s hard to imagine a “state on the coast” with “excess solar” where desalination would be remotely beneficial. 30 US States have coastlines, but the Great Lakes region and the Eastern Seaboard are already humid and wet, with rivers and tributaries that aren’t exactly in a drought condition. That leaves the three West Coast states, but Oregon and Washington are fairly well-supplied with water in the PNW. That kinda leaves California, unless we’re talking about Mexican states.

I’m not dissing on the concept of desalination. But the literature for existing desalination plant around the world showcases the numerous challenges beyond just the money. Places like Israel and Saudi Arabia have desalination plants out of necessity, but the operational difficulties are substantial. Regular clogging of inlet pipes by sealife is a regular occurrence, disposal of the brine/salt extracted is ecologically tricky, energy costs, and more. And then to throw pumped hydro into this project would make it a substantial undertaking, as dams of any significant volume are always serious endeavors.

At this point, I feel the question is approaching pie-in-the-sky levels of applicability, so I’m not sure what else I can say.

I’m not a water or energy expert, but I have occasionally paid attention to the California ISO’s insightful – while perhaps somewhat dry – blog. This is the grid operator that coined the term “duck curve” to describe the abundance of solar energy available on the grid during the daylight hours, above what energy is being demanded during those hours.

So yes, there is indeed an abundance of solar power during the daytime, for much of the year in California. But the question then moves to: where is this power available?

For reference, the California ISO manages the state-wide grid, but not all of California is tied to the grid. Some regions like the Sacramento and Los Angeles areas have their own systems which are tied in, but those interconnections are not sufficient to import all the necessary electricity into those regions; local generation is still required.

To access the bulk of this abundant power would likely require high-voltage transmission lines, which PG&E (the state’s largest generator and transmission operator) operates, as well as some other lines owned by other entities. By and large, building a new line is a 10+ year endeavor, but plenty of these lines meet up at strategic locations around the state, especially near major energy markets (SF Bay, LA, San Diego) and major energy consumers (San Joaquin River Delta pumping station, the pumping station near the Grapevine south of Bakersfield).

But water desalination isn’t just a regular energy consumer. A desalination plant requires access to salt water and to a freshwater river or basin to discharge. That drastically limits options to coastal locations, or long-distance piping of salt water to the plant.

The latter is difficult because of the corrosion that salt water causes; it would be nearly unsustainable to maintain a pipe for distances beyond maybe 100 km, and that’s pushing it. The coastal option would require land – which is expensive – and has implications for just being near the sea. But setting aside the regulatory/zoning issues, we still have another problem: how to pump water upstream.

Necessarily, the sea is where freshwater rivers drain to. So a desalination plant by the ocean would have to send freshwater back up stream. This would increase the energy costs from exorbitant to astronomical, and at that point, we could have found a different use for the excess solar, like storing it in hydrogen or batteries for later consumption.

But as a last thought experiment, suppose we put the plant right in the middle of the San Joaquin River Delta, where the SF Bay’s salt water meets the Sacramento River’s freshwater. This area is already water-depreased, due to diversions of water to agriculture, leading to the endangerment of federally protected species. Pumping freshwater into here could raise the supply, but that water might be too clean: marine life requires the right mix of water to minerals, and desalinated water doesn’t tend to have the latter.

So it would still be a bad option there, even though power, salt water, and freshwater access are present. Anywhere else in the state is missing at least one of those three criteria.

On one hand, I’m pleased that C++ is answering the call for what I’ll call “safety as default”, since as The Register and everyone else since pointed out, if safety constructs are “bolted on” like an afterthought, then of course it’s not going to have very high adoption. Contrast this to Rust and its “unsafe” keyword that marks all the places where the minimum safety of the language might not hold.

On the other hand, while this Safe C++ proposal adopts a similar notion of an “unsafe” context, it also adds a “safe” keyword, to specify that a function will conform to compile-time safety checks. But as the proposal readily admits:

Rust’s functions are safe by default. C++’s are unsafe by default.

While the proposal will surely continue to evolve before being implemented, I forsee a similar situation as in C where code that lacked initial const-correctness will struggle to work with newer code and libraries. In this case, it would be the “unsafe” keyword that proliferates everywhere just to call older, unsafe code from newer, safe callers.

Rust has the advantage that there isn’t much/any legacy Rust to upkeep, and that means the volume of unsafe code in Rust proframs is minimal, making them safer overall today. But for Safe C++ code, there’s going to be a lot of unsafe legacy C++ code and that reduces the safety benefit for programs overall, for the time being

Even as this proposal progresses, the question of whether to start rewriting some code anew in Rust remains relevant. But this is still exciting as a new option to raise the bar in memory safety in C++.

Haha, your reply beat out mine by only a minute.

This does not agree with what the Social Security Administration has published:

Q20: Are Social Security numbers reused after a person dies?

A: No. We do not reassign a Social Security number (SSN) after the number holder’s death. Even though we have issued over 453 million SSNs so far, and we assign about 5 and one-half million new numbers a year, the current numbering system will provide us with enough new numbers for several generations into the future with no changes in the numbering system.

For the historical questions, I don’t really have answers, especially where it involves departures from the Western world. I did, however, briefly touch up on Islamic banking, which I’ve always found intriguing as the Islamic faith does not permit charging interest on loans, viewing it as usurious. I’m informed that Christianity also had a similar prohibition on usury, but apparently it fell due to the need to fund the constant wars in Europe.

I’m not really seeing the difference in feudalism except a members only kind of participation with a crony pool of inbreds, not all that different than the billionaires of today.

I think the important distinction insofar as stock markets is that the crony pool of inbreds have access, but so too does the commoner. Well, the middle-class commoner usually. And we’ve seen David-vs-Goliath cases where the commoners put up a decent fight against the inbreds’ institutions; the whole GameStonk fiasco comes to mind. An equivalent economic upset would have been wholly impossible at any point during any feudal period in history.

What are the idealist or futurist potential alternatives between the present and a future where wealth is no longer the primary means of complex social hierarchical display? My premise is that basing hierarchical display on the fundamental means of human survival is barbaric primitivism.

From conversations I’ve had previously, possible answers to that question are presented in the works of Paul Cockshott, author of Towards A New Socialism. I’ve not read it, but friends in Marxist-Leninist parties have mentioned it. The Wikipedia page, however, notes that it’s an economics book, which could be fairly technical and difficult to read. Sort of like how Das Kapital is more-or-less a textbook, in contrast with how Wage Labour And Capital was meant for mass consumption.

Wealth extraction neglects the responsibility of the environment and long term planning.

True. The cost to the environment is not “internalized”, to use the technical term. Hence, it doesn’t need to be paid for, and is thus “free real estate”. Solutions to internalize environmental harm include carbon taxes or cap-and-trade. But the latter is a lukewarm carbon tax because it only looks at the end-result emissions, rather than taxing at the oil well, so to speak.

I’m curious how humanity evolves in a distant post scarcity future but without becoming authoritarian or utopian/dystopian

Might I recommend The Three-Body Problem and the trilogy overall by Liu Cixin? This phenomenal hard scifi work describes a space-faring future where the human species faces a common, external threat. After all, much of today’s progress was yesterday’s scifi. So why not look to scifi to see what tomorrow’s solutions might be. It’s no worse than my crystal ball, which is foggy and in need of repair.

If you’re in the USA, I cannot understate how useful it may be to refer to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics’s (BLS) Occupational Outlook Handbook (OOH), a resource which I believe has no direct comparison:

How can I learn about an occupation that is of interest to me?

The Occupational Outlook Handbook (OOH) provides information on what workers do; the work environment; education, training, and other qualifications; pay; the job outlook; information on state and area data; similar occupations; and sources of additional information for more than 300 occupational profiles covering about 4 out of 5 jobs in the economy.

As for answering the question, anecdotal conversations I’ve had suggest that the trades (eg glazier, electrician, plumber) in the USA are promising fields, since while the nature of the job might change with different needs, people still require electric wires and piped water. But the OOH could give you more specific outlooks for those specific trades.

I was once told that plumbers can make very serious sums of money, even if they’re only ever installing supply-side piping. That is to say, the plumbing for water supply, as compared to drainage or sewer pipe, which are generally perceived as less appealing.