Thanks to sprawling American car-dependent infrastructure, not even Bigfoot can walk to places anymore.

Ultimately any retirement system suffers from these weaknesses. You can have a retirement system based entirely on universal generous state pensions; it won't matter. When the economy takes a hit, the state is less capable of generating revenue.

Exactly. For middle class folks who still have to rely on the stock market for retirement, the best option is to just buy dumb index funds and hold them til retirement. You aren't going to be able to outsmart and out time the actual Wall Street traders who have PhDs in mathematics, access to microsecond trading, and a trading bankroll of billions. If you need to rely on the market, buy and hold is the only sane strategy. At least then you minimize the number of trades you make and the chances for the snakes to screw you over.

If you want real investment advice: no. If you're investing for retirement, and you're not near retirement age, you have decades ahead of you before you need these funds. You know those people who "lost everything" in the 2008 recession? Sure, some people lost their jobs and were forced to burn their retirement savings just to keep the lights on. But far more lost money because they sold when the market was in the toilet. The market did eventually recover, but the timing of the recovery couldn't be predicted in advance, so they lost out on much of the recovery. The market went back up, but they still had their 401k sitting in cash. They lost money on the dip, and then they lost money again on the upswing.

Also, keep in mind that Trump's policies mean that cash savings will be far more vulnerable in this crash than in the 2008 crash. At least in 2008, the inflation rate was basically zero. Cash didn't lose much value just sitting in your savings account. But Trump is trying to weaken the dollar to make imports more expensive and US exports more appealing to foreign consumers. And Trump's policies are expected to be rather inflationary. Cash is no safe haven right now. You could try to move your assets to foreign currencies and companies, but this crash is global. The US set itself up as the linchpin of the global economy after WW2. If the US stumbles, everyone stumbles. The only country that won't be hurt much by this crash will be North Korea. But there really aren't that many investment opportunities for foreigners in the hermit kingdom.

It sucks, but at this point you should just ride it out. If you still have decades till retirement, just ignore your retirement balance for the next few years. Just ride it out and remember that you're investing not for today, but for decades in the future. Or consider the parable of Bob, the world's most unlucky investor.

I would say that you're a civilian if you aren't currently serving in the military, regardless of former military service. That's at least how it works under international law.

That's amazing that a patient can be infected by a tumor located 5,000 km away from their body!

Or here's another idea. If this is actually a real threat, how about we treat it like one? We can simply choose not to develop certain technologies; we've done it multiple times. We've had the tech for human cloning for decades, but we decided it was unethical and to simply not pursue the technology. We could do the same for AI beyond a certain level of complexity.

Hell, if this really is a threat to the human race, I would fully support just outlawing computers entirely if that's what it took. Fuck it, we'll just go back to pen and paper. It would be an extreme step, but if that's what it takes, so be it. We can go full Dune, "thou shall not make a machine in the likeness of the human mind."

Sometimes ships really are unsinkable. You can build a small boat out of materials that are themselves buoyant. If you make a boat of a foam material or some woods, you can submerge that boat at the bottom of a lake, release it, and it will pop right back up to the surface. It's hard to build an ocean liner this way, but there are truly unsinkable boats. There is a difference between safety by backups/safety mechanisms and intrinsic safety. Your car's engine cannot explode in a nuclear fireball. It's resistant to nuclear explosions not because of some elaborate series of safety mechanisms and backups, but simply because it lacks the capability to generate any kind of atomic reaction. Physics, not engineering, provides for the safety of unsinkable boats, your car's lack of nuclear explosiveness, and fusion-fission reactors.

You speculate that the beam may not be shut off fast enough. But there IS no "fast enough" in this context. This is not some system that has the capability of spiraling out of control. Imagine you had a combustion engine that was provided air by a blower motor. The blower motor can supply a certain m^3/min, and this is all the air the engine receives. The motor can only supply the engine so much air; it is fundamentally incapable of spiraling out of control.

There's no way for a fusion-fission reactor to explode in some runaway process. You design the neutron beam so that its absolute maximum power is still well below what would be required to turn the fission reactor into a pile of slag, like orders of magnitude below. You don't put some big honking fusion reactor in this system. You build your fusion portion so that it's only capable of providing enough neutrons for a gentle slow fission burn. There simply will never be enough neutrons in the system for the fission pile to experience runaway fission.

One advantage of these reactors is they're completely meltdown proof. You design the fission component to be sub-critical - the fission core can only maintain a reaction as long as the neutron flux from the fusion reactor is maintained. The neutron flux doesn't just enhance fission, it's a necessary component for the fission to keep going at all. And the fusion portion doesn't make net energy, it's just a glorified way of turning electricity into neutrons.

If anything goes wrong, you just flip a switch and shut down the fusion part of the reactor. Temp starts increasing too much? A sensor flips a switch and the fusion reactor shuts off automatically.

These are actually far, far safer than any pure fission plant. The nice thing about these fusion-fission plants is they can be designed to be completely and utterly meltdown proof. Regular fission plants have a self-sustaining fission reaction; the plant is designed to slow the reaction down and keep it under control. With a fusion-fission plant, you can design it the opposite way. You design the fission part to be sub-critical. You use a fission fuel that cannot maintain a self-sustaining fission reaction. You design it so that the fission part is only able to maintain a reaction if it has a giant neutron beam pointed at it. And that neutron flux is provided by the fusion part of the reactor.

If anything at all goes wrong in the plant, all you have to do is cut off power to the fusion reactor. The fusion component of the reactor cannot itself make net power; it consumes electricity to keep running. So you just it off, the neutron flux collapses, and the fission portion is unable to keep its reaction going.