To put that in context, Wikipedia says about Carnegie:

> he gave away around $350 million (equivalent to $6.9 billion in 2025 dollars), almost 90 percent of his fortune, to charities, foundations and universities

Those famously "richest Americans" were worth single digit billions in today's money. Musk is reportedly worth $600-800 billions. Imagine what he could do with that money. The Gilded Age industrialists were already devils, but to say the quality of the ultra-rich today is in the gutter would be an offense to the gutter.

This truly is the best democracy money can buy. As long as money and/or favors change hands in exchange for getting favorable laws passed, it's just legalized bribery and buying off your own "democracy".

And it snowballs, the more favorable laws someone buys, the more favorable their position, and the more they can buy in the future. The transition from "democratic facade" to "outright oligarchy" will be swift and seamless.

I had the misfortune to make some medical professionals watch me go through this :).

I’m putting the current medical definition aside, we’ve been pushing the boundaries of what’s possible and who knows what the next centuries redefine. For the longest time in human history “clinical death” was almost always followed by permadeath.

As the person doing the dying you can’t rationalize it as “no worries, it’s just clinical, I’ll be back”. You die, it’s light out, later on, a blink for you, you recover and are told “you were clinically dead”. You experienced death for all intents and purposes because I don’t think there’s a cognitive process that allows you to differentiate the stages. Heck, deep sleep might be how death “feels” like.

Do people fear death (excluding suffering) because of the threshold itself or the FOMO? Missing on what would come next?

Genetics probably play a big role in the necessary adaptations beyond a certain point.