rottingleaf @ rottingleaf @lemmy.world

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they elected a race to superiority

Unless a member of that race is against Israel, then you'll get sometimes the nicest kinds of things like "or, so then it was all right for you?" from them - that being about Holocaust.

BRICS has the downside of including Russia.

It might not seem that way, but Russia is actually the shittiest of USA's minions. Its "independent" actions like war with Ukraine are no more independent in fact than those of Saudis.

It's definitely aligned with the stinkier part of USA's elites, but somehow had good enough relationship with all of them.

Maybe reforming UN as a candidate for some actual world confederation would be a better idea.

EUR is honestly a better reserve currency, more stable already.

About divesting from dollars - I dunno how hard this is. Probably would be better for the US to provoke it to signal that time is nigh. Because otherwise this can only happen very slowly.

Nah, the more time passes, the less incentive there is for many people to pursue justice when there are newer things on their plates.

Same as modern Web's "attention economy".

But frankly in classical cultures they knew that too, catch the moment, now or never.

are not dropped, “all options remain on the table,” he declared.

That being dicks offered to him

They are not bringing anything good back. They were a nice company like 30 years ago.

That reputation held for damn long, then they killed it and created a new one of "being luxury crap for successful success", and during the transition used both.

Now it's just luxury crap. I don't know how there still are Apple users who are not after that.

When some people talk how "but it's a Unix so you can do Unix things" - with a huge pain in the butt over Linux, and there are plenty of variants of "install once and don't care after" with Linux. As in "plenty".

In general, I think the concept of trademark has gotten old. Same with patents. These allow companies to just abuse their past reputation and also sue anyone trying to do business in the niche their past self has created.

Or maybe trademarks are fine, but patents ... when they were a good thing, new inventions were patented for some period of time. Now they patent interfaces and solutions where no new invention happened.

All these protections are needed, but the system making them has gone AWOL. We need direct democracy.

One from the list, yes.

That might be true, but also a certain revolutionary purging of world politics would do a lot to return to something close to that. The golden age happened after the world war and decolonization, when western countries were full of veterans, and laws governing their lives were much simpler.

Internet-assisted direct democracy, open borders, open trade, radical changes in patent laws, simpler laws generally - all this can exist.

We simply have too much legacy everywhere strangling development.

The bad guys are trying to make it appear that the only legacy that can be stripped is that of French revolution ideals, human rights and civilization. That actually we don't have to strip, that is all good. Just them.

It's normal. Sometimes humans need surgeries, and sometimes a part of an old building has to be dismantled - maybe there's a pipe in the wall that leaks, or maybe you need to retrieve a human skeleton found using some new technology, whatever. And you throw out garbage regularly.

So a reform for direct democracy (with ranked choice between variants having, say, 1000+ initial supporters in some incubator to get to the vote itself, because we have computers, storage and connectivity to make everything desirable for such) IMHO would go a long way to fixing half the problems in the world.

Back then American industries were just complacent due to insufficient competition, and Japan's industrial development was a bit of a miracle (that "living in year 2000 since 1980s" joke).

Japan back then had (and still has) an interesting socioeconomic system, a bit similar to samurai clans went cartels, where workers are supposed to work all their life in one place (or close to that), don't squeal about worker rights and such, but be covered by lots of company-provided social nets and guarantees.

Bailouts are unacceptable period. Trained workers, factories, factory hardware, logistics specialists, engineers, patents and so on - they all remain in the economy. That a company fails and goes bankrupt is not a bad thing. It's just that company. Not the industry as a whole. If there are no additional mechanisms.

Somehow Americans seem to have forgotten that the kind of "capitalism" which gets defended is about this exactly - a company goes bankrupt, too bad. There are other companies which will hire its workers and buy its assets. Possibly new companies created by its former employees. Its shareholders have gambled and lost, well, their problem. That's what an unregulated market is, by the way, and not bailouts to big fish and horse dicks for small fish.

If something works differently - workers don't find a new place to work in, factories go to scrap metal, engineers go flip burgers, patents are collected by trolls, and new companies are not being created, - then something has been broken by an existing policy.

Patents are the worst of it, but also non-compete clauses, legal impediments for creating new businesses, legal expenses making it harder, - these things have to be removed.

I mean, people on Lemmy love to dream of something like what you list, those things are good, but maybe fixing some basic things about what you already have is no less useful. Especially since these fixes do not cost any money to maintain, while, well, pensions and healthcare do.

If they are too expensive due to cost of labor, they can do, look at other comments, increased automation.

With automation China's advantages over US are mostly in the bureaucratic efficiency area. Both in the government's parts interacting with big companies and in the companies themselves.

US big companies are just too used to preferential treatment and solving market problems with lobbying, which worked when they were the spearhead of progress or something.

It will. It really does regulate itself, no /s needed.

Except that happens via some businesses going bankrupt and some adjusting.

And either it's free enough for monopolies to crash, or regulated enough for monopolies to be killed, or both.

If it's neither, then you have today's tech industry.

EDIT: And here the fears are that big companies will go down with their shareholders whining and their political cronies suffering and so on. Whether you want free market or literal socialism, the main problem is in separating private narrow interests from the state machine.

Yes. They did. That's called competition. It forces companies to improve by destroying them, except they don't want that. And politicians don't want that, cause it makes corruption unstable.

Killed Detroit too, though. But, eh, helped other parts. It's life.

Thus already in the 90s with the TRON OS a different approach was chosen by US regulators - threaten Japan with sanctions if it's allowed to compete with Windows inside Japan .

They can't threaten China, but they can prevent Chinese competitive goods from entering US market and improving its economy again.

Bad economy - poor and stressed people, poor and stressed people - worse political decisions, worse political decisions - good for middlemen which in our age shouldn't exist frankly. We have the technologies for direct democracy, it's not 1920s.

After Lem everything seems a bit too glamorous and toyish.

Liked the Expanse, yes.

But Swanwick's "Vacuum flowers" are good too.

This is necroposting, but I really like to find a thread where Star Trek fans criticize Star Trek.

So, I was a Star Wars fan in my childhood.

Jedi there have "the Force" which is kinda magic, but involves "long-range telepathy", "sensing" things far enough, and a bit of telekinesis.

Star Wars also has "blasters" which use cartridges, but seem to have a lot of power in those. Shield generators which create a mighty big thing. Hyperdrives which allow to move mass in some weird projection from normal space.

So-o. About energy.

A kinda strong Force user being killed or enraged might produce energy on the scale of, I dunno, small EMI. That happens in some SW plots.

A blaster cartridge getting a direct hit causes an explosion like a grenade, which makes sense.

A shield generator malfunctioning might kill the ship carrying it.

A hyperdrive malfunctioning is like a tactical nuke, which is why in SW plots they are very careful with hyperdrives. And this too makes sense.

And I've been, many times, told these things (including the existence of the Force) as arguments in favor of SW being tales about space wizards, as opposed to ST the sci-fi universe.

Yet in ST there are transporters, replicators and psychics everywhere, it's all the same in the sense of magic and much worse in the sense of balance.

The exploding panels check out though. In SW stuff generally explodes, and also they "hotwire" spaceships and bunker doors like you'd do a 1970s car. And "slice" (hack) everything everywhere.

I have an idea - make this issue solved via direct popular vote. Ranked choice, variants range from "Apple owns your butts" to "Apple should be punished with its monthly margin for failing to deliver hourly orgasms with its devices" to "Apple open sources and PD's everything or Apple leaves".

They'll be interested themselves in making the OS as convenient for normal usage as possible. Including the walled garden part. OK, just a thought experiment.

Nah, just a thorough reproduction of the consequences of that wrong.

Yeah, except their UI design was somehow very overloading. Very nice, especially for 90s, but nausea-inducing purely physically.

They at some point boasted that their stuff can be used without hoops and intentional impediments. In Hypercard and such times.

It seems crazy, but they even paid authors of kinda sci-fi or futuristic stories featuring their hardware.

They made it seem they are almost an anarchist company.

They also, which is even harder to believe now, aimed at advanced usage. As in - "works out of the box" and "even a child can use it" and "everything graphical", but at the same time in that spirit, which Hotline and KDX and PureData still reminisce. A user-friendly application which is not dumb.

It's actually useful to see, to understand that modern commercial claims of "user-friendly == dumb" are aimed at nothing else than centralized control and obscure shit under the hood.