[ben_w]

> That's ca. a quarter of the US yearly military budget.

The USA != Musk personally, and he personally was getting flack for not personally fixing it, and he personally said (not a quote) "if you can give me a plan to do it that cheap, I will", only to be given a plan that wouldn't fix it and the actual cost of fixing it would exceed his theoretical net worth.

> But we still have feudalism.

As a response to the specific bit you quoted, that's just an argument-as-a-soldier, not an interesting point.

It's also an example of "tell me you don't know what ${X} means without saying you don't know what ${X} means" — given that Scotland got rid of the last vestiges between 2000-03 and Sark in 2008, the closest thing in the current world to that is North Korea, or specifically the 500 people who still have Common Rights in the New Forest and the use of an open field system in the village of Laxton in Nottinghamshire.

But none of that matters, as the industrial revolution still broke the connection between land and power; and human-level general AI will break the connection between anything currently resembling money and power.