I always read the dark forest differently. Solution to the problem is not a game-theoretic "hide from the apex predators", but an even more nihilistic "remain hidden, expand and evolve into the apex predator".
Or in a more biblical sense: do unto others before they do unto you.
This is already happening. Near where I live there is a newly built 7-home terrace. Each one has both a garage and a cable duct sprouting up from the edge of sidewalk in front of them.
While reductionist, I think yours is a legitimate "in a nutshell" take. It would be interesting to see the relevant statistics over time, ideally broken down by geographical regions, their median incomes and the respective employment / military recruitment success rates.
I admit that I am partial to your view of the world. A mate in university, about a quarter of a century ago, made a rather striking observation: "In the US, military is a national jobs program for a nation that is psychologically hostile to jobs programs."
We've come a long way in some aspects, while staying pretty much in place in others.
I taught infosec 101 course at a university ~20 years ago. (Twice.) On the topic of privacy I used an example of harvesting data on peoples' habits, movements and behaviours and then said that as a society we use two different terms for the same thing. "When an individual does this, it's called stalking. When a company does this, it's called data mining."
The economics department students, many of who already knew they would want to work in marketing, were quite offended.
I would have preferred to see a disclaimer at the top about how this story was Put Together[tm], but I also agree that it is a pretty fine piece of writing overall. Which brings me to my initial point...
> Over the last couple months, I've been building world bibles, writing and visual style guides, and other documents for this project [...] about two weeks of additional polish work to cut out a lot of fluff and a lot of the LLM-isms.
The amount of work and walltime expended sounds about right. You have discovered / stumbled upon the relatively well known but little appreciated job of a publishing editor. It takes a lot of nitty-gritty work and built up domain knowledge ("world bibles") to direct a piece of writing - and its author - to a level where you confidently believe that you have captured the intent and desired tone of the piece, while keeping it sufficiently tight, engaging and interesting / non-patronising enough for its audience.
Disclosure: did ~decade of freelance writing around the turn of the millennium, and have had the privilege of being schooled by a small group of good old-school journalists. And then had a publishing editor assigned for a separate project, from whom I learned even more about writing.
The best known (at least in the tech circles - in good part thanks to HN and Matt Levine) is probably IEX. The exchange guarantees that every participant is behind the exact same time delay. And they do that by having a sufficiently long spool of optic fibre between the exchange "broadcast switch" and the market maker computers.
Simple and effective. Relies only on laws of physics to create the delay.
There are also exchanges that run with "frequent batch auction" principles.[0]
Note that his half-jokey proposal for a total of 30 minutes of trading time a day is at this point a running theme. If my memory serves me correctly, he started talking about this phenomenon in the pre-plague years.
As a person from a country constantly near the top of that list, I have been saying this for more than two decades: holding the #1 spot in CPI tells nothing how well things are going for a country; it merely highlights how bad things are even for the runner-up.
Or in a more biblical sense: do unto others before they do unto you.
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