Pimps make money from prostitutes, doesn't make it moral. If you support having a royalty, great, that's certainly your right. If you are against the concept in principle then deciding it's okay since we make money from them seems wrong.

Regardless of anything relating to the royals, it is not Queen Elizabeth who is instituting this, it is the democratically elected.

Please don't bring in our royals as if they're somehow the reason of anything. There is a symbiotic relationship in regards to the royal family that you have to understand, the people who hate them are jealous- yet would probably not like the spotlight they have. They do bring in a net gain to the country, they are educated enough in certain scenarios to represent us quite well.

I don't take exception to them, but if the public /did/ then government could restrict the funding to Her Majesty. (Which has happened a lot before and has constituted the closure of many of her castles.)

>the people who hate them are jealous

You say it like it's a bad thing -- that those jealous should be ashamed of themselves or something, when it's the other way around.

Democracy is all about people being jealous of royalty (kings, feuds, pharaohs) having all the power, land, free food and honors, for just being "born" special, and putting and end to that charade.

> Democracy is all about people being jealous of royalty (kings, feuds, pharaohs) having all the power, land, free food and honors, for just being "born" special, and putting and end to that charade.

I'm curious, are you saying that with a straight face? Because there's no way you can look at capitalism / US politics and believe that it's any different.

The US Republic is a farce of democratic processes for sure, but they at least did that to themselves. They were given a choice.

If they fucked it up and created the plutocracy they did, fine. That was their mistake to make.

We still have an unelected upper house of parliament that actually has power, as well as our unelected, divinely appointed monarch.

We were never given the choice of fucking up our own republic. We should have been by now.

My point wasn't to glorify capitalism/US politics (besides I'm not American). It was to put feudalism in perspective.

That said, modern government/economy is unfair too, but at least those on top get their power from something tangible (money) as opposed to some bloodline and most people are not exactly serfs.

On point 3 I'd say yes, enthusiastic people learn new stuff, but it has limits. There is too much technology for any one person to master, but I also think it's a trap to spend too much time constantly learning the latest technology, at the expense of actually building stuff (and learning from the experience).

At least I found myself falling into that the last time I was between jobs -- constantly watching beginner videos on new thing X, Y, Z instead of actually doing something useful in one of them.

Back in employed world of course it can be the opposite -- you become a master of whatever tech your company is using but get little exposure outside that. It is however often possible to guide the company into a new technology and get the best of both worlds.

Losing 30 million sounds like a much better (negative) indicator on whether to invest in someone than how many companies they started by 18.

>past their productive lifetime as far as economic fitness goes

One could argue that a cure for dementia would extend the productive lifetime of workers.

The vast majority of patients get it well past retirement age.