The lower-friction result is that the offices become huge apartment buildings with reverse-commutes to the suburbs, hoping the "stuff to walk to" survives. There are issues with that too, like plumbing and windows.
We really don't know how consciousness works. The popular theories that it's emergent might be proven correct, or might be proven to be like the idea that phlogiston built up in a vacuum, putting out flames.
My theory is that it will turn pro sports, baseball especially, into something like boxing was decades ago, where "Johnny got paid to take a dive" was a common meme.
As a parent, I was shocked how little that's actually true, at least in some US states. Home-schooling can mean sending a copy of your curriculum to your school district and you're good to go.
Texas can be pricey, but it has huge and diverse growing urban areas with a lot of job opportunities, where someplace like Miami is really cutthroat and very expensive.
Or you'd move if you like Mexican food more than Cuban and South American food.
I generally agree with this take. Some specific unions, especially in the US, seem unnecessarily adversarial to employers, but others are known primarily for upholding professional and safety standards (I'm thinking of electricians we contracted with at a previous job).
I bought a console as a gaming device, but now my family mostly use it for YouTube and other streaming video. Similarly, relatively little of my phone time is used on phone calls. I think the distinction is mostly just locked in by history.
I thought it was safety and environmental regulations, primarily. You have to have airbags, and now antilock brakes, and now rearview cameras, etc. If you were allowed to buy a new car built to the standard of the 1970s, it would be cheap.
This is why learning Latin the way I did (very methodically and technically, with no real speaking/responding) makes you good at parsing it, but not at speaking it. There are schools today where it's taught as if it were a spoken language.
You don't have to eat fish, you just have to avoid poultry and red meat. The intent was sacrifice as penance for sins. And in the US and some other countries, it's really only mentioned during Lent (Ash Wednesday to the day before Easter); the rest of the year, it's encouraged to do that or some other form of penance, but everyone ignores it.
How do conference-room names fare in this view? My current company names them after football teams or local landmarks. But I heard about someone who used to work somewhere that named theirs after WWII battles, which was awkward for the Japanese guy they interviewed in one of them.
The approximate substitute-good for porn is actual sex, which parents generally stop teens from doing. The substitute-good for social media is talking to people in person, which parents are generally happy with.
You do sometimes hear of Olympians in the non-big-pro-league sports whose families make enormous financial and lifestyle sacrifices to let them train and compete.
The experience of going to a movie may not be what it was before streaming or even the VCR, but the fewer theaters that remain have gotten nicer in their own way. I can recline the big leather chair and have food delivered to my seat.
One of the WSJ comments made the comparison to drive-ins, which are now a rare niche thing...I think my US metro area has maybe 2 left. But those have less control over the viewer experience than a regular theater does.
When I was a kid, 30 years ago, some grocery stores did have an aisle guide printed on the cart. I haven't seen one recently, but they at least did exist.
Some life-events are just "big", and it can be very-difficult-to-impossible to relate to that experience if you haven't had one of a similar scale yourself. I still struggle with expressing the emotion "I have fortunately not had that happen to me, but what you have lived through is awful."
Can you even define "best" for creative media? Sure, there's obvious junk that most people will agree can be discarded, but culture is very subjective. So instead of barriers to getting published at all, there are barriers in the form of curation and gatekeeping.
I assume the parent comment's last paragraph is why every fantasy novel I've read in the last decade has a five-page-long lesbian romance; the author has to play ball with the publisher in order to get marketed.