I don't think it's intelligence but the sudden shock that these kids struggle with.
Most ivy league kids will have succeeded in ~everything before college, and likely internalized the belief of their talent / status as top of class etc. When you put these kids into a single room, by definition only a small minority can be the smartest kid in the room / acing everything. The rest need to accept the change in status for the first time in their lives - also the first time they're away from their support network - and I guess some take this particularly badly and fail to adapt.
People also seem to be overlooking the benefits of downward optionality - you effectively transform a fixed cost (servers and staff to run them) into a variable one, that you can flex down cheaply (no long-term leases or redundancy payments). It lets you test things out (e.g. entering a new market) and cheaply wind them down if they don't work out.
The "kidnapping" in your example happened in 1949. It's no longer about the hypothetical daughter, but more likely her grandchildren. Given the passage of time it's farcical to insist on reversing this.
My take is that we're still adapting to and experimenting with how to live with the internet, given how it fundamentally changes so much and the transition is still very much ongoing.
Every revolutionary technology probably generated similar amounts of hysteria about the end of civilization - think about the printing press, industrialization (luddites), TVs, etc.
Eventually things should find a happy equilibrium, it just doesn't happen immediately. But it's assuming too much to think no solution today = no solution forever.
The average professional fund manager actually underperforms the S&P. It wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that the average retail investor does even worse.
However, there's an easy way for people to overcome this - buying an index fund (Vanguard is very cheap), which lets you capture (almost) the S&P's performance.
It's hard to take advantage even if things are frothy to be honest. The market can kick the can down the road for years longer than you expect, and melt up in the process - you could lose your shirt by shorting. The only concrete advice I'd have is to avoid the most speculative sections (e.g. meme stocks) and own businesses that can thrive even without constantly raising cash.
Not the OP, but check out the below examples. Beneficiaries across the range, from fundamental equity funds, quant funds, and distressed funds. The retail guys weren't just buying shares from themselves and market makers.
Any assertion of what 'most' Chinese citizens want is unprovable given the lack of any representation on any level of society.
Plenty of China watchers are happy to claim that Chinese people all support their government - and yet the government is curiously unwilling to test this assertion in democratic polls. Tells you something about how strongly held these beliefs are (hint: not very).
A big fallacy is that the "Chinese government" is this big monolithic entity. It's not. Supporting the Chinese government does not equal support censorship.
Do you support the National Park Service?
Do you support the Federal Aviation Administration?
Do you support the USDA?
Do you support Donald Trump?
Do you support the FDA?
Do you support NIST?
Do you support Joe Biden?
Do you support NIH?
Do you support public schools?
Do you support Guantanamo Bay?
Do you support the Environmental Protection Agency?
The Chinese government, although not democratically elected, is similar in one aspect, in that it is a very multi-faceted set of institutions that do a whole lot of things well that the majority of people support, and a few things that the majority of people secretly do not support but are unlikely to be vocal about.
Most ivy league kids will have succeeded in ~everything before college, and likely internalized the belief of their talent / status as top of class etc. When you put these kids into a single room, by definition only a small minority can be the smartest kid in the room / acing everything. The rest need to accept the change in status for the first time in their lives - also the first time they're away from their support network - and I guess some take this particularly badly and fail to adapt.