If anyone's looking for the ongoing theatre of international diplomacy at a time of heightened tensions, Trump just proposed a 38 year-old novice/campaign operative as the US ambassador to the world's most populous nation.
Well if that's the problem, then maybe address that, perhaps by teaching people critical thinking skills?
But teaching people to ask critical questions risks unraveling the fabric of American capitalism ("Hey why is it that the government spends more on healthcare per capita than any other OECD country but with markedly worse outcomes?", "How can we call ourselves the greatest nation on Earth when we are simultaneously the wealthiest nation on the planet and still have such poor health, education and quality of life indicators?"), so we can't have that can we?
> Apple has always been adamant that the fee is for the service of using the App Store, not the payment processor
So charge developers for the service of using the App Store, perhaps with a per-download cost. To "give away" the service of the App Store only to recuperate your costs (and then some) via payment processing is just daylight robbery.
My biggest pet peeve and oft-cited example of US puritanism being imposed upon the entire world is the closed captioning system on YouTube that censors out words like s**t, f**k..
I have nothing whatsoever to do with the US, my Google account is based in a jurisdiction where I'm well past the legal age for adults and where hearing such words (and "worse") is quite normal at 14.
And yet I can't get this multinational behemoth to stop nannying me.
Even better, the folks who frequent HN could stop aiding authoritarianism by building the tech, but that would require turning down lucrative RSUs, so I'm not holding my breath.
> it doesn't matter how great your constitution is if your country is dead.
Why is the longevity of a nation more important than the values it stands for (as laid down in its constitution)? One could argue that it's better to have a great constitution that treats its citizens equally and fairly, even if the nation is short-lived and eventually disintegrates into smaller nations.
The interpersonal equivalent of this would be "It doesn't matter how great your relationship is if your marriage is dead". I'm not sure many would agree with keeping a marriage alive at any cost.
If anyone from booking.com is reading this, if you're looking for faster conversion rates, just let users save their filters! As a nomad, I don't want to think about the number of cumulative days I've spent selecting "Private bathroom", "Air-conditioned", "8+ user rating", "Laptop workspace" etc over and over.
Along the same, er, vein, check out The Open Veins Of Latin America - it's a painstakingly well-researched and fiery book on the colonization and exploitation of Latin America for its resources, under the guise of "taming the primitives". It also documents the attempts of the US in sabotaging popular, labour-led/socialist movements, nearly always successful and often involving the use of violence, all in the name of "fostering democracy".