Machine learning my foot! I think Amazon has just admitted to the fact that they can't control bad actors from taking over their listings.

I find the homesteading lifestyle so unattractive from a non western perspective. The image of the lone couple battling the elements and enduring the herculean task to be self-sufficient... yikes!

Compare to the crop of Chinese youtube channels, like Lingzhi, Diaxi that show village farm life. These are more attractive because it shows self-sufficiency in the context of a larger village community. Everyone comes to help in the harvest. Everyone comes to help to slaughter a pig. Everyone comes to preserve the latest crop of fruit.

But these America homesteading channels... so dreary. You and you alone have to work sun up and sun down, why? Where is the rural communal life?

hah.

Go create this lean startup factory that raises children from infants to 18 year olds. After all interested parents are superfluous to the well being of a child.

Child raising is invisible and yet so crucial to our economy. What happens to our economy when parents refuse to raise the needed labor inputs for free anymore?

Sure but your example illustrates the key point of the article, your marriage is much like a two-person island. Which is great, as long as you two each are happy and well-matched. But it becomes hell as soon as the match is unbalanced. Stresses once managed by a community are now loaded more and more on two-person islands. If everyone turns all their energy into their two-people island and leave no room to invest in community, marriage all of sudden becomes too necessary for survival. Again awesome when you're well matched but the very definition of hell if you aren't.

Debatable if all that is true, but it does seem like the increasing atomization of society affects the nature of marriage.

Groups are unstable IME, two person islands are a much better social dynamic and it's much easier to master 1 persons mind.

You only need to watch youtube videos of abandoned houses to see clearly that houses aren't investments.

Good luck to uhaul achieving hiring goals. I imagine that they have to disqualify a significant fraction for drug use, and now they want to add nicotine. Good luck with that. Maybe they really really just want to reduce the incentive to hiring.

There's an entire economic sector that struggles with finding good people because of the drug crisis. You don't encounter this problem in startup land, but talk to restaurants or places looking for general manpower that doesn't require a college degree. Finding talent who will pass drug tests is a struggle. Now adding a nicotine? Good luck.

We couldn't get universal healthcare fast enough. When you couple employment with healthcare, it is only logical that employment will start disqualifying people based on lifestyle choices. Start with nicotine today. Tomorrow add obesity and diabetes. Why both sides of isle seem to double-down, no triple down, on getting benefits from work is crazy to me. The left sees the policy as a way of extracting rents/dues from corporations. The right sees it as enforcing a 'working makes free' philosophy on the poor.