Well. There was a time when currencies were to an extent interoperable, via a certain portion of silver called joachimstaler, or just taler, or yefimok, or dollar … being approximately the same everywhere. Still, that was mostly used in colonies and in international trade, locally they’d use different incompatible currencies.

You seem to have a misconception that you are sort of a gentleman to whom others have to justify something. There’s such a thing as unneeded waste of time.

Kill Hitler fundraisers are unironically one of supposed ancap mechanisms against tyranny.

I just love how reality keeps proving me right.

(Would prefer a heaven where it doesn’t, of course)

You simply don’t understand how discourse works.

This is based on your own assumption of what I think of discourse or why I said what I said.

I also said “no earlier than Saturday”.

The British Empire is most notable on this picture with its glaring absence.

Yes, about the British and the French - these are countries that still fought small undeclared colonial wars after USSR ceased to exist.

They still fucking do.

Jordan is still not very different from a UK puppet regime.

Also why the West loves Arab monarchies so much - because they don’t change anything in inconvenient directions. They sell oil, buy weapons, build nice shit. But their countries are not just staying on one place in terms of democracy, enlightenment and human rights - they are further into medieval shit than they were after liberation from the Ottomans. Then they were sort of “naturally”, traditionally tribal and medieval. Not much different from many parts of the world. But since then those puppet monarchies, installed by empires, have been changing their societies in the opposite direction. The West not just supports Muslim religious movements against Leftist movements, the West supports Muslim monarchist and fundamentalist creme-de-la-creme (not) basically Nazi movements like our recent time’s ISIS against Muslim republican and Leftist movements. So some Muslim and socialist mojaheds, like those US supported in Afghanistan, are not good enough when guys like HTS are available. Even Egypt’s ikhvans, with their democratic component, are not good enough. Only Salafi beheaders in black with their nasheeds.

Germany - at some point their society realized firmly that there are mistakes in the past to be worked through. Unfortunately that was somewhere in the 90s, and in the middle of that process they for whatever reason abruptly decided that they have understood enough and are now a morality specialist nation. Which is why a German often feels entitled to express their opinions on the Holocaust as if their nation were participating in the victim role.

In some sense USSR was a huge spoiler. It took upon itself a lot of hopes of this world, despite Stalin and repressions, and then Brezhnev happened - just covering every budget inefficiency by selling natural resources to the supposed enemy, covering every pipeline hole by buying technology of the supposed enemy, resolving every deadlock between interested local producers by cloning technology of the supposed enemy, and so on. Then after 10 years or so the whole Soviet society and even more its elite were confident in Soviet system’s inferiority, and it couldn’t end any other way than it did from that point.

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.