I lived close to their “national hq” in my country for years, and apart from the occasional loud motorcycle they were absolutely unnoticable. I wouldn’t even have known they were there had someone not pointed it out to me.

As others have said, stay out of their way and they will stay out of yours.

Kill fewer people now is obviously the right answer, and not very interesting.

What is interesting is that the game breaks already at junction 34, which is unexpectedly low.

So a more interesting dilemma would have been “would you kill n people now or double it and pass it on, knowing the next person faces the same dilemma, but once all humanity is at stake and the lever is not pulled, the game ends.”. Because that would involve first of all figuring out that the game actually only involves 34 decisions, and then the dilemma becomes “do I trust the next 33-n people not to be psychos, or do I limit the damage now?”. Even more interestingly “limiting the damage now” makes you the “psycho” in that sense…

Yes, but it also kinda depends on what happens at and after junction 34, from which point on more than the entire population of earth is at stake.

If anything, this shows how ludicrously fast exponentials grow. At the start of the line it seems like there will be so many decisions to be made down the line, so there must be a psycho in there somewhere, right? But (assuming the game just ends after junction 34) you’re actually just one of 34 people, and the chance of getting a psycho are virtually 0.

Very interesting one!

More than 90% of the money we use does not come from the central banks, i.e. does not exist as cash and is not backed by the government directly. Instead it is book money. Here is how this works:

When a bank lends you $1000 at 10% interest for a year, they don’t physically have that money. Instead, they write into your account: We owe you $1000. They also write into their account: Skaterboy42069 owes us $1100.

See how the $1000 you have in your account just appeared out of nowhere? They are of course balanced by the bank’s $1000, but there is an extra $100 (the interest) that was created permanently. It’s up to you to come up with a way of making those extra $100 in one year. Now apply that to the entire monetary system and the whole economy, and you see how the only way is up.

As an aside: This is also precisely the reason why we need ~2% GDP growth annually, and any standstill or even shrinking is an absolute disaster. Debts don’t get repaid and are defaulted on, and money literally evaporates. Ask yourself this: imagine GDP drops 10% over night and what that would do to the economy. Why would that be such a disaster if it would simply send us back to about 2018 GDP-wise (when we all lived in caves)?