It almost seems like Israel demonstrates the "tyranny of the majority" problem often attributed to democracies.
To service a majority audience, it was all too easy to do stuff like expanding settlements, violently overreact to low-level protest, refuse to negotiate towards a two-state solution, and bottleneck a free-standing Palestinian economy. Of course this marginalizes and radicalizes the minority until it blows up.
Historians can analyze if there was animosity and an occupier mindset immediately from 1948 onwards, when and how much, but it's academic. The situation today is not conducive to constructive resolutions, plus a significant part of the electorate that LIKES it that way.
They probably needed some stronger constitutional guardrails to present this sort of abuse. But again, door open, cows escaped already.
Oh, boy! As an American consumer, I'm even more perplexed what the hell they are.
Like 15 years ago, Rakuten seemed to be a normal ecommerce site. I think they bought buy.com or something to get a foothold in the US market. Then they pivoted to being some sort of cashback referral service.
I'm not really sure why that would lead customers to think "yeah, I want cloud storage from the people who made a weird janky digital simulation of the Piggly Wiggly Value Club Card!"
(AWS made it work because they could say "we have the infrastructure to host one of the busiest sites on earth, it's good enough for you", but Rakuten does not have that credibility in the US)
In the end, it's about bailing out the rich. They should have diversified their bets away from commercial real estate.
Covid mashed fast forward, but remote knowledge work was a thing before it. It was a foreseeable risk, even just from guessing normal rich people motivations: once the San Francisco crowd figured out they could cast a bigger net for talent, AND pay lower-cost-of-living city salaries to them, it was going to spread.
Sort of a pivot, but The Orville did a great bit about replicators and how if you dropped them into a society like 21st century Earth, they'd just end up coopted by the rich and further strain society.
We can't even have future nice things thanks to capitalism.
I always figured the markets that Google didn't penetrate successfully (Russia with Yandex, China with Baidu, maybe Korea and Japan) probably ended up with their own circle of innovation just because there wasn't a huge dominant player sucking all the talent and money out of the room. Thry might have gotten an edge through noncompetitive regulatory policy, but that bought them thr time to build domething more duited to local needs.
Back when it was socially permissible to acknowledge Russia did anything well, Yandex was doing some fairly innovative stuff.
Sovereign citizens are to civil lawyers as alchemists are to chemists.
They both invented their own lore to try to make the universe do what they want, except the alchemists actually strived to move towards more reliable and accurate science.
I'm not sure we should be dismissive of politicians trying to reduce interventionist foreign pokicy in the abstract. The "US as world police" paradigm is a difficult angle.
From the US perspective, it's expensive AF, delivers erratic results (see Iraq) and it's created a lot of enemies over the years, basically handing Russia and China a support base on a silver platter.
On a global level, it does seem a bit weird for everyone to come calling to one nation for support, which doesn't really encourage a multi-voiced and spirited debate if everything breaks down to "whoever has US backing wins".
There's definitely a "we wrote a cheque we no longer want to cash" lock-in factor on this conflict, but maybe it's also time to stop writing so many cheques.
I tend to wonder if subscriptions force a FOMO cycle. To keep you playing and paying, they have to bullet-train players to max level and keep you in a carousel of the latest content at all times. That leaves the rest of the game a hollow shell.
I've been getting back into Guild Wars 2 recently, and one of the draws is the tolerable monetization: a new expansion every few years, that you can buy on your own schedule (i. e. when they go on sale), and the level cap is effectively frozen, so you can go idle between releases without a meaningful loss of place. The game has to service even the non-expansion users, and the game design explicitly benefits this: the difficulty and rewards scale so that almost all areas of the game are still worth exploring once you've hit level cap, and they can put activities across the map rather than cramming it all in the latest zone.
It almost seems like Israel demonstrates the "tyranny of the majority" problem often attributed to democracies.
To service a majority audience, it was all too easy to do stuff like expanding settlements, violently overreact to low-level protest, refuse to negotiate towards a two-state solution, and bottleneck a free-standing Palestinian economy. Of course this marginalizes and radicalizes the minority until it blows up.
Historians can analyze if there was animosity and an occupier mindset immediately from 1948 onwards, when and how much, but it's academic. The situation today is not conducive to constructive resolutions, plus a significant part of the electorate that LIKES it that way.
They probably needed some stronger constitutional guardrails to present this sort of abuse. But again, door open, cows escaped already.