Our PMs have been US lapdogs for longer than I've been alive; with a similar both sides issue where all the cunts come from the exact same private schools and social circles.
I think people would find new ways to struggle that they actually enjoy and would likely end up contributing. Imagine a couple of thousand people with their new modest but stress free budgets decide to join a yearly potato cannon contest, Sure its not going to invent anything new directly but you now have a bunch of people learning about ballistics and stoichiometry and high pressure engineering all egging eachother on to shoot that potato further. The competition gets more and more fierce and with the much lower stakes people start trying some more out there ideas, before you know it you have a modest but highly effective solution to reliably obtaining the correct gas mixture for something like a combined light gas gun.
And that's a deliberately silly example, you'd get a ton more art, people deciding to be athletes, coders, all sorts of hobies that can encourage healthy competition and often benefit society in surprising ways.
AI might be overkill? I recall back in the day people working out which images where manipulated by the way the underlying flow of colour and pixel layout didn't line up, each image ends up with a kind of grain of different size and direction. You could spot ads by detecting which image data doesn't line up with the majority and cutting it out that way.
I've been wondering about that, also perhaps a browser where your mouse position has seperate client and software side states? I know a lot of data can be gleaned from mouse movements so if the browser only updated its internal cursor position when you actually clicked that would potentially cut out that source of information?
Honestly no but if I lived in a country or bloc without nukes myself I'd want my government to get them because its the only way to not get randomly regime changed whenever the US, UK or Russia feels like it. Totally understandable why they would want them.
The Iranian regime is fucking awful, the Israeli one is just even more awful such that Iran still seem like the good guys in comparison. Its like two assholes fighting, they're both assholes but one clearly started it.
Reminds me of a half-orc I once played called Sword. Sword wielded a big sword; Swords only word was sword; Swords solution to all problems in some way involved Swords or sword.
Got a surprising amount of mileage out of using the word sword combined with different tones and gestures, as well as some fun non-violent but still sword based solutions.
Iirc Scotland has the blessing of most of the EU to get a fast tracked but with some countries like Spain having the condition that this is only on a legal exit supported by the UK. Indyref itself isn't even anti-UK so much it is not being tied to an increasingly corrupt and self sabotaging government in westminster, if the UK stopped relentlessly shooting itself in the foot the movement would likely lose most of its support.
Sounds like you could make a curved protest sign with plywood and then hide some foil between the plywood and a paper/cardboard layer for a fairly inconspicuous shield that can block and even reflect both microwave and sound cannons.
Rain? I know its not going to fall over and shoot out sparks like a cartoon but rain does mess with visibility and grip, plus this is a robot with a lot of joints and moving parts that's probably going to be maintained by someone who has to pee in a bottle so the cartoon falling over and shooting sparks isn't actually out of the question.
Is it though? Its always far easier to be loud and obnoxious than do something constructive, even with the internet and LLMs, in fact those things are amplifiers which if anything make the attention imbalance even more drastic and unrepresentative of actual human behaviour. In the time it takes me to write this comment some troll can write a dozen hateful ones, or a bot can write a thousand. Doesn't mean humans are shitty in a 1000/1 ratio, just means shitty people can now be a thousand times louder.
The main character of the world was that guy who did dumb shit like shipping coal to newcastle and bed pans to the tropics but was massively successful anyway, all of the rest of us were just NPCs for that one guy and now that he's dead the rest of the universe has no meaning anymore.
Our PMs have been US lapdogs for longer than I've been alive; with a similar both sides issue where all the cunts come from the exact same private schools and social circles.