Now those people absolutely largely exist in the minds of others.

I think there's also a huge gap in costs and in people's willingness to tolerate shared spaces with bathrooms.

I think shared bathrooms are vastly cheaper, but also vastly less desirable.

The cost to add a bathroom to a house isn’t actually that much, assuming you don’t have to go insane with the plumbing.

Look at how many houses now have “en suite” bathrooms for more than just the master bedroom.

Sure, I mean the cost per unit to add a bathroom to each dorm-style units.

Where is their evidence that the internet was cut to prevent evidence from disseminating?

Are you finding and setting up a remote that works on your PC/Laptop, or are you getting up every time you want to change shows or play/pause?

Wireless keyboard with a trackpad.

Well I'm certainly not going to spend thousands of hours listening to his talking to decide how to feel about his thoughts and opinions.

How will it save lives? It'll maybe create more lives that persist beyond those on Earth, but I don't think it will meaningfully lower our global population, so a planetary catastrophe would still kill just as many people.

Also "the most important thing?"

You don't think there's any lower hanging fruit on-planet we could attend to first? Maybe addressing hunger, poverty, pollution, resource wars? You think getting the first ten-thousand people to Mars is a bigger priority than eradicating diseases that kill 10 times that many annually and that we have all the tools necessary to control? Really really?

I was gonna say Antioch, but that could do it too.

If they're not communicating, how are they sending back lots of data?

I presume these are surveillance drones and are programmed to loop back to origin

Surveillance gathered by an completely autonomous drone with no outside data, stationed far enough away to require refueling, close enough to enemy operations to be useful, that then needs to make its way back to origin, intact, through hostile territory, quickly enough for the gathered information to be useful, seems like a preeeetty big lift. Something a startup would promise to tackle with a star team of technologists over the course of like 10 years? Sure. Something they’d have designed within the past, like, year while getting shot at? I’d have to see that believe it.

Because enough people losing their own money in the same way becomes a social ill.

Much in the same way we try to limit physical addiction, which hypothetically only affects the person taking the substance, and gambling (though we're moving backwards on sports betting).

Some hypothetical social ills: 1 If it's a good source of money, it becomes more ubiquitous. This leads to entire illegal markets, which will typically lead to additional crimes, up to and including human trafficking, slavery, organ harvesting, and murder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scam_center.

2. The victims of scams will often feed shared or even stolen assets into the scam, desperately relying on an eventual return that will never come. This mirrors one of the better known social ills of gambling and addiction.

3. Even for people that never fall victim, defending against scams is tiring, irritating, and damages social fabric. An easy example is how spam cuts down on the utility of phone calls. In general, to be safe you have to be almost irrationally suspicious of anyone being surprisingly friendly, which makes non in-person connections -one of the greatest benefits of the internet - much harder and more dangerous to forge.

What do you think, is that enough reasons?

For sake of completeness, another important reason:

4. These kinds of "social ills" hypothetically affecting only individuals, actually spill over to affect their families, and, at scale, communities.

That being said, in most cases it still doesn't justify this level of drastic intervention. Otherwise, cigarettes and alcohol and even Lotto would've been banned out of existence by fiat.

So let's advance the much bigger societal ill of smartphone addiction by making people more reliant on them.

No, your reasons are laughably bad, because the societal damage caused by these scams isn't even 5% of the societal damage caused by smartphone addiction in general, and not even 1% of "general smartphone addiction" + "tiktok/instagram/infinite scroll video feed addiction" + "gacha game addiction". Let alone "(sports) betting app addiction" for the many countries where this is a thing.

I've been playing with the idea for a bit, can you give me an order of magnitude for "entry-level HiFi"? Even if that's an oxymoron, how many zeroes does it take to get an experience that's noticeably superior to, say, default car speakers or built-in Smart TV speakers?

It's like buying a gun or a car, there are all kinds of offers and all kinds of prices. You should be able to find great offers with amp+speakers under 1k€, including VAT. Probably even less with 2.0 or 2.1 systems.

It doesn't usually take much, because very few cars or TVs come with powered subwoofers or 6x9s or quality tweeters. Second hand amps, receivers, etc. are usually a good deal, entry-level speakers are pretty cheap new though.

Better than smart TV speakers? That's a low bar.

A $40 Bluetooth box from any big name brand is better than the speakers in a smart TV.