But how would the owners of these coal and gas plants recover their investments??

Way more than several decades. They startded in the South-East Asia more than a century ago. Latin America shortly after.

For most of the world, capital is a malign actor and the US has the highest concentration.

For sure, but I don’t think there are non-Breaking Bad, non-cartridge, P100s. 😆 There’s normalish N100s though. E.g. this Moldex.

An N95 mask keeps you from contracting whatever the person coughing three seats away is sick from, and apparently from breathing in ultrafine particles. :D

While not ideal, it’s totally standard state of affairs. Even in PC Linux there are often some binary blobs required for proper function of some hardware. E.g. non-free firmware in Debian.

That’s what I meant - slower delivery over longer period. It’s why I said we didn’t give more from the get go. Which is likely resulting in more total weapons expended, along with the people firing them.

Oh and this is not just a European phenomenon which is why I’m not singling out the EU.

Yes. The way things ate going, at some point it may become less harmful and easier to deal with unwanted Chinese tech than American. Pay much lower profit margins as a bonus.

If we gave them more than a knife from the get go, they may have done significantly better. But then the war would have stopped quickly and a lot less shells would have been made and sold overall.

Europe probably has more raw capacity for power in terms of labour and technology but it’s much less capable of marshalling it towards a goal. The fact that you have to go through the market economy makes all the resources needed to exercise power more expensive. Russian shells cost 4x less than Europe’s. More centrally managed economies tend to outcompete at this. Having to go through the 27 countries democracies to direct it is another challenge. All Russia has to do is get several Orbans in domestic governments to keep the power level low. In effect Europe is less strong than Russia even though it could be much stronger. And this doesn’t stop with milirary power. Even simple stuff like tackling internal security from sabotage, economic security etc.

There’s also other structural blockers to projecting power, like the external energy dependence. Europe was critically dependdnt on Russian fossil fuels. Now a significant portion has been shifted to the US. As a result, uncle Donnie has a significant say in EU’s ability to exercise power over entities he likes.

This is why Kallas’es statements look more like stern finger wagging than anything real to anyone aware of these issues. Or Germany’s stern warnings to the Russian ambassador. Kaja gives good strong vibes to the EU citizenry but it’s not changing the material reality. Eventually it would stop working. My guess is that’s gonna happen quickly once uncle Donnie decides to go through with taking Russia’s reserve money under her nose and giving it to his corporations to invest in Russia, like they’re planning to.

At some point we’d have to start importing TVs from the other side of the Great Chinese Firewall to avoid unwanted US tech. It’s getting ridiculous.

Oh that looks like a nice resource.

Aren’t we subject to the embargo? If we are and we did this, I imagine we’re gonna get hit with a new round of sanctions. Perhaps we could next year when Trump’s sanctions popularity has tanked so hard he can’t use them as leverage anymore. Maybe it could be done as a matter of humanitarian relief. I don’t know. This shit is so fucking sad.

Yeah this whole thing looks like a 2-for-1 deal to topple both governments after starving their economies for a long time. Especially given the hard-on Rubio has for killing the Cuban Revolution. And then install resource-extractive governments in their place of course.

I mean I wouldn’t say no if it comes down to that and I’d probably sign up to work for the technical effort.

Ban American corporate social media altogether? 🍁 Fedecan 🍁 take over with Lemmy, Mastodon, Pixelfed and Friendica?

Nevermind, we’ll get invaded for that.

Age-restricting corporate social media isn’t “kicking teens offline.” That’s a funny straw man.

We need age restriction and regulations on moderation and algorithms. The latter alone won’t solve the problems social media poses for developing brains. Age restrictions aren’t bulletproof and that’s alright. It’s much easier to stop my child from smoking at the age of 10 when there’s a smoming ban in place than when there isn’t. I want it to be easier to raise them without developing prepubescent brain rot than not. And I think my neighbours would appreciate bringing up another Canadian that has their marbles intact.

E: Plenty parents outside of the terminally-online circles don’t even realize they should restrict social media use at an early age.

E2: Tha fact that the Australian ban doesn’t deal with the ID problem is a problem that I definitely would not want us to emulate. A problem in that it does not forbid ID collection by private corporations and it does not provide a privacy-preserving public service for proving age. Besides, Meta already knows the age of most of its users. A reasonable compliance criteria could be established that isn’t 100% that would also be good enough, subject to regulatory audits.

I think you should read the latest US NatSec strategy that came out two weeks. Also the leaked bits about pushing several countries to leave the EU. The US and RU have a common interest in the EU breaking apart. One of them has much more resources and leverage than the other. For example a lot of the Russian gas was replaced with US gas. And that’s just one point of significant leverage.

Clearly I addressed a specific part. One that has an outsized effect over the German system via its political system. If you can’t see how those other aspects can be tackled inside Germany (and the EU) and why you can’t rely on a conpetitor to stop, I can’t help you. You’re arguing to get an attacker to stop instead of tackling the vulnerabilities. That’s not how security works.

Just in case anyone else is reading this and got confused - Israel and US are also actively running disinformation campaigns in Germany today. So if for some reason Russia stops doing it today, the problem remains as the US and Israel would continue and they don’t have Germany’s best interests in mind.

Also if you’re going to pretend to engage in good faith, it helps not to downvote the person you’re replying to.

E: Downvoting harder with your alt accounts isn’t doing you any favours either.