The US has traditionally solved this problem by having dozens of political entities that can compete (at least for elites) and, since the creation of the interstate highway system, the oppressed can flee.

In the UK open banking was essentially a response to GDPR this has allowed (to a limited extent) a variety of tools to be built on top of bank accounts that others would not have been.

Can someone explain to me what the difference is between a union in which everyone is a member and a government.

This might be the biggest benefit of AI coding. If I have a large legacy code base I can use AI to ask questions and find out where certain things are happening. This benefit is huge even if I choose not to vibe code anything. It ends up feeling a lot like the engineer that wrote the code is still with you or documented everything very well. In the real world there is a risk that documentation is wrong or that the engineer misremembers some detail so even the occasional hallucination is not a particularly big risk.

This.

Once you have revenue you have downside to protect. Pre-revenue the worst that can happen is that you have to start again knowing more than you did.