The poor have those things because they still have some amount of power. They're still needed for work, and if you make too many of them too desperate, they can threaten the people at the top. But if you let the wealth (and power) gap get too large this will no longer be the case, and the poor might lose access to those things. If the wealth gap becomes such that the rich can afford automated production and protection but the poor can not, the current economic and political systems will no longer have a reason to give access to any of those things to the poor.

Maybe it depends on the country, but here the public automatically assumes everything like this done by Russia and these increase support for open war. I don't think Russia wants deeper European involvement in the war, so I'm having trouble understanding why Russia would be doing this. They're already having difficulties in Ukraine, how would angering the European public and increasing the support for further involvement help Russia achieve its goals?

Indeed, maybe it depends on the country.

In many countries, russia’s psyop tactics do work frighteningly well, and we see this resulting in a renaissance of the far-right, who are explicitly against supporting Ukraine, and explicitly seek the rehabilitation of russia.

They are a little bit, because collective action is very hard. If everyone chooses to participate and pay the cost of organizing it is worth the cost and a union will happen. But if a number of people choose not to then everything falls apart, as it is no longer worth it for anyone to pay the cost and the union can't function. Often the benefits of a union are also a public good, meaning everyone gets the benefits of a union fighting for better working conditions whether they pay the cost or not. If so, then there's little incentive to pay and the union will have trouble keeping itself alive.

Unions need some external extra incentive, like the state forcing them to exist or subsidizing the cost of organizing, to exist long term.

How does one become hardworking? I doubt it's completely up to genetics. People who grow up around hardworking people are more likely to see hard work and its rewards, and are therefore more likely to become hardworking themselves.

This is how it will be until we figure out how to organize human life without competition. Too many of our systems are based on us competing against each other (markets, nation states), so we always have to maximize production or risk falling behind our competitors and getting devoured. We need to co-operate more instead of competing if we want to get out of this loop.

People in comfortable positions wish that other people would stop competing to take them away.

Organizing the whole world to stop competing only sounds nice when you imagine that it means you get to lock your position in life in place and stop feeling threatened.

It becomes much less attractive to most when you look at what it would actually mean to stop competing and have everyone revert to the average. Global average income is around $10K per person. If you make more than that, you’d have to give up a lot. That’s not even accounting for the sharp drop in production of things you need that would happen if the upsides of working hard were removed, leading to people working less.

A transition away from competition could also be implemented by capping the standard of living to what it currently is in the richest countries and then waiting for others to catch up. After that production would slow down yes, and that's the point. People could spend more of their time on things that really matter to them instead of things they're forced to do by competition.