Outdoor lighting in particular, at first at least. A fun historical anecdote on this one most don't know is the saying that somebody "can’t hold a candle to [x]". It's a reference to the old profession of link-boys who were mostly poor kids who'd carry a torch at night for people to see their way about, in exchange for a penny or two.

Or perhaps you haven't. Many common resources are perfectly viable for making torches from including resin from a variety of common tree and plant types. If you want to get fancy you can even make your own pitch. It was the reason I added 'lush'. And why in the world would you want to be indoors? It'd be vastly more pleasant at e.g. your gazebo or wherever else, of course subject to climatic/weather extremes.

The concept of spending vast amounts of time indoors for both recreation and work is an extremely new thing. Not only post-electric but largely post-internet.

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Imagine democracy playing out in literally any measurable field. Think about society getting to vote on who should be on a basketball team, but without any real knowledge of the candidates' abilities beyond what they said and advertised about themselves. And then we put the winners of the vote on a team. They'd get face-stomped by a D-tier NBA team pretty much always.

Democracy isn't about maximizing outcomes, because maximizing outcomes entails the possibility of minimizing outcomes. Marcus Aurelius was perhaps one of the best rulers in all of history. His son, Commodus - raised by him from birth, was certainly one of the worst rulers in all of history. Minority rule systems oscillate between extremes of the best of times and the worst of times. Democracy is always just kind of meh, never particularly great, never particularly awful.

But it creates a stable system because while it's meh in the present, you can always envision that things will be totally different in 4 years. Of course they won't be, but there's this weird bug in our psychology that we can't help but remain optimistic, even though in reality candidate after candidate it always feels like 'well it can't get any worse than this at least' and then the next guy is like 'hold my beer.'

I think that should be fairly obvious - money + ease of traveling to. America is, relative to the world, perceived as quite wealthy. South America is full of places that are quite poor. Put the two side by side and many guys coming here speaking not a lick of English, and with no skills to boot, probably envision themselves coming home rich.

It's even relatively easy to put yourselves in their shoes. Columbia's GDP/capita is about $8k. In the US it's about $80k. Imagine how you'd feel if Canada had a GDP/capita of $800k. To many people it'd seem like a great idea to move there completely regardless of everything else about the country. People warning you that you'll end up mowing yards and painting houses while making barely enough to put a roof over your head. Bah! Nonsense! How can that be true on $800k/year!? Canada, here I come!

You can see this play out the same in places like Saudi Arabia. Not many place have the taste for their policies, religion, or much of anything else - yet they have a massive immigrant population, far higher than the US (as a percent) precisely because they pay stupidly high wages, often tax free, and have a low cost of living. You can easily become a dollar millionaire teaching English there if money is what you're after simply because you can easily save thousands of dollars a month. And if you get bored you can go watch somebody get crucified for witchcraft on a weekend now and again.