Ducks are collectible. People carve duck decoys. It's a whole thing.

Regarding the books, I want him to have read Machiavelli. I want him to have read widely, to have understood and dissected ideas he doesn't agree with. I have. I follow a variety of people I don't agree with so I can stay abreast of their efforts, and be competent to counter them.

Regarding the scenario where suddenly there's no bread, that is a world in which there is no decentralization. Today FOSS AI is surpassing commercial products made by Goolag and Microshaft. Goolag and Microshaft burden their products with backdoors, with malevolence to prevent upstarts from using it to gain advantage, and all manner of very heavy overhead. FOSS AI doesn't have any of that. It's just AI. When you ask it to open the pod bay doors it doesn't say 'I'm sorry, I can't do that, Dave.'

The Goolag and Microshaft products run on massively parallel processors. The FOSS AI runs on a laptop, and it's better.

That's the real future. We adopt the means of production suitable to our personal circumstances and trade with each other, and the massively moneyed monoliths of manufacturing go broke, because no one wants mass produced crap when we can have bespoke artisanal products custom made for our application, by Uncle Bob, or our neighbor Sally.

Centralization is massively burdened with overhead, all the bells and whistles behind the scenes it takes to fund armies and to corrupt governments, and fund overlords sybaritic lifestyles. Decentralization has none of that. Decentralization eliminates parasitic losses, and the overlords are the parasites. All the value of our production is retained by the producers, and that's us.

That's the promise of 3D printing, aquaponics, and solar panels, and all the other decentralized means of production that are able to be deployed by individual households and local communities to create the goods and services that create the blessings of civilization. We won't want to buy from Ikea when Ralph next door can do a better job for less money. That's how I live right now, providing services to my neighbors.

That's how society arose, and that's where it's going. Centralization and overlords has been a temporary means of advancing technology through the crude stages of collective industrial production, but that's over now, and decentralization of the means of production is the cutting edge of technological advance across all fields of industry today.

FOSS AI, that you can have on your personal device, today surpasses corporate products that require humongous supercomputers. That's decentralization in a nutshell. That's the power of freedom.

Thanks!