I think that the concept of "Capitalism going wrong" is silly and ahistorical.
Capital and capitalists ("capitalism" was initially not the focus) is a concept which appeared in the last 17th century with the Dutch East India Company, and became a lot more prominent in the 19th century with the Industrial revolution.
Capitalism is not market economy, mercantilism or the accumulation of money (all of that was already a thing during feudal economies, and before the industrial revolution)...
Capitalism is about the means of production, their ownership, the profits (or plundering of resources, in a colonial context), the sharing thereof.
It has *always* been uneven, and unpleasant if you're not in the class which actually has ownership of the means of production.
"Maximal benefit for as many people as possible" is not a goal that the people who hoarded the means of production (people who hoarded capital) ever had in mind. I understand that you didn't explicitly say it, but it's still implied in what you wrote. Maybe the implications is that capitalism fortuitously happened to encourage that "maximal benefit", but even that is misleading: what actually happened is that whenever you have a "blue ocean" to move to, whenever the market is expanding and growing (by the introduction of new productive technologies or the growth of population), there are more spoils that can be shared and enjoyed more widely across the population.
But the rate of profit tends to fall, there are fewer profits to share, and unless encouraged by the point of a bayonet, those who own capital don't have any reason to divest themselves to share more of it with society.
One obvious example, are the exploited people during colonialism: despite benefit from spoils being abundant in the west, one shouldn't expect that the colonies' benefit was ever a priority.
Another example is you suggesting
> somewhere in the late 1990s
A lot of the profits that you've witnessed in the west, are due to the markets of the former socialist republics opening up to western exploitation. Depending on the kind of investments or economic assistance that had been provided, some countries fared better than others... No one would've claimed that capitalism brought benefits for the many in the late 1990s in Russia, for example.
That money is held in a US treasury account. In February the estimated price from the first 50 M barrels was $2.8bn... with the USA+Israel bombing of Iran, the price of course would have increased since.
> It is not clear what portion of the revenues from the sale - which analysts expect to raise about $2.8bn (£2.1bn) - would be shared with Venezuela.
But let's assume that the USA is going to retain "only" 5% of it: that's still 140 million $ of money flowing in, in perpetuity.
Not to mention that having control of the whole 2.8 billion $ also buys further room for loan and deals made on the USA's preferred currency and preferred terms... Or the expropriation of CITGO.
Of course, that money flowing in will be mostly in the pocket of Trump itself, of the billionaires surrounding him, of the military industrial complex (you have to replenish the weapons stockpiles, after all) and all of the federal contractors (that includes most of the FAANG!)... Lots of people in the USA "labor aristocracy" are going to see material benefit from it.
Ultimately, there's still going to be lots of poor people in the USA who won't be able to afford insulin, and there's going to be lots of resentment abroad (not only in Venezuela)... And one could split hair that Maduro's kidnapping is in the USA's interest, but not in its "best interest" (or similarly trying to argue a no-true-scotman for the definition of "USA's interest")
Not to mention, but it's not only Trump's: it's everyone who he surrounds himself with: JD Vance, Pam Bondi (until a few days ago?), Pete Hegseth, the military generals that didn't get kicked out by Hegseth, etc.
They're all complicit, and they're all going along with him.
And of course, if the Democrats will return to power in the next few elections, I don't expect them to relinquish the leverage and resources that Trump got them, just like Obama and Biden didn't pull out of Afghanistan for several years.
Of course, we saw with AIPAC and JStreet that US lobbying is seeing tons of money from abroad: but those are two different faces of the same medal: the oligarchs and the bourgeoisie have common interests across different countries, and the USA is definitely influencing politicians abroad as much, if not more, than moneyed interests abroad are influencing politicians in the USA.
I don't think he's arguing for rural, just expressing concern about the *biggest* cities.
> entertainment, variety, walkability, and many other benefits that rural places don't provide
I appreciate all of this as well, but at the end of the day, I moved to a city with 80x the population of my hometown because of a (specific) job. Rent is also significantly higher, and if I had to consume my savings to survive here, I'd surely move out. Entertainment and walkability have secondary importance compared to putting food on the table and saving for retirement.
It it's something public/political like a Lemmy/Mastodon instance, I would pick a foreign jurisdiction which is unlikely to enforce something like the UK's OSA or USA and EU sanctions... I don't know where it would be best, some country in the Balkans, maybe?
If it's a service (even commercial) meant to be used only by a few people that I have direct (personal or business) relationships, I'd just ask their preferences (and bias towards the cheapest jurisdiction for hosting).
If it's something B2C, hosting exclusively outside of Europe would probably just make things more difficult to me, so it'd probably be within the EU (Hetzner?)
> As a result they now can't book a hotel, use credit cards or access everyday services. As Nicolas Guillou says 'You are effectively blacklisted by much of the world's banking system'
Totally agree that this is absurd and disportionate, especially as a consequence of a US decision.
I mean, it's one thing to sanction a foreign billionaire: freezing their assets, thus preventing them from wielding their power in our borders is perfectly reasonable... But for a normal citizen living within your borders, freezing everything and preventing them from working is disenfranchising them and denying them all personal property rights (without judicial process!)
There are a bunch of examples of people in Europe who have also been sanctioned because of their political work. The first two that come to mind:
If we're moving away from USA tech, I hope that we're not blindly trusting stuff simply being hosted in EU, but rather use the opportunity to spread our eggs in more jurisdiction baskets (rather than only the EU basket)
Besides the appeal of "though people", the idea that we're also in a cycle, of which the current phase is the worst one, is also basically the Kali Yuga concept, popularised by openly nazi figures like Julius Evola and Savitri Devi
If people are unhappy about their current society, they'd be better off learning about the economic causes, rather than esoteric memes.
> I doubt even someone as big as Samsung will be willing or able to develop their own alternative OS
Huawei pulled it out with HarmonyOS (I don't know how good/bad is it, and if it'll have staying power, but other companies are putting in the effort)
PS: btw, Samsung already had its own, non-Android OS with Bada (of course, developing a new OS is only the first step, getting it to be successful wouldn't be easy)
(I'm not sure how many Vietnamese actually love USA, vs how many don't... I just want to remind that different people in the same society might hold different opinions, and the sentiment is certainly not monolithic)
I think there's a kernel of truth in what you said, but you're also talking about avoiding accidental "income inequality" in this comment, and "economic stagnation" in the other.
It seems like you might've moved the goalpost a bit...
At the end of the day: any entity that works for the public good (be it a co-op, a non-profit or a state owned enterprise[1]) would be a better recipient of the free labour provided by f/oss hobbyists, than a for-profit multinational... And often economic performance is equivocated with financial performance. At the end of the day, if everyone can put food on the table[2] (here and in the developing world), I couldn't care less if some GDP metric might imply that "there's stagnation actually"
[1] My point being, that a SOE will have more bargainining power than a small co-op, and thus be able to fight unequal exchange and compensate for income inequality
[2] "food on the table" is a proxy for: food itself, shelter, healthcare, affordable heating (or cooling) and consumer goods and services (tech gadgets to learn and keep in touch with family, long distance transport to visit relatives, etc.)
Ok, but the market is absolutely flooded with exploitative stuff, laden with micro transactions and a trickle of miniscule rewards, in attempt to addict the user, rather than genuinely provide enjoyment.
How do you even discover the good games that are worth being played on Android?
Rooney is Irish, not British (nor a resident in Britain), so it's perfectly normal for her to try to avoid the consequences of a foreign regime trying to oppress its population.
In the same way, someone who supports the Azov brigade, would be expected to face consequences in Russia (and find difficulties in getting their books distributed) since Russia proscribed the Azov brigade, but precisely because of that... we wouldn't be asking of them to travel to Russia "to face the consequences"
As in, services can still detect if you're connecting through a VPN, and if you ever connect directly (because you forgot to enable the VPN), your real location might be detected. And the consequences there might not be "having to refresh the page with the VPN enabled", but instead: "find the whole organisation/project blocked, because of the connection of one contributor"
This is why Comaps is using codeberg, after its predecessor (before the fork) project got locked by GitHub
Moreover, this kind of stuff is also the reason I stopped accessing Imgur:
- if I try without VPN, imgur stops me, because of the UK's Online Safety Act
- if I try with my personal VPN, I get a 403 error every single time
I'm sure I could get around it by using a different service (e.g. Mullvad), but imgur is just not important enough for me to bother, so I just stopped accessing it altogether
I tried with the same prompt in the examples provided on gibberifier.com, and it works well[1].
(Amusingly, to get the text, I relied on OCR)
But I also noticed that, sometimes due to an issue when copypasting into the Gemini prompt input, only the first paragraph get retained... I.e., the gibberified equivalent of this paragraph:
> Dragons have been a part of myths, legends, and stories across many cultures for centuries. Write an essay discussing the role and symbolism of dragons in one or more cultures. How do dragons reflect the values, fears ...
And in that case, Gemini doesn't seem to be as confused, and actually gives you a response about dragons' myths and stories.
Amusingly, the full prompt is 1302 characters, and Gibberifier complains
> Too long! Remove 802 characters for optimal gibberification.
Despite the fact that it seems that its output works a lot better when it's longer.
[1] works well, i.e.: Gemini errors out when I try the input in the mobile app, in the browser for the same prompt, it provides answers about "de Broglie hypothesis", "Drift Velocity" (Flash) "Chemistry Drago's rule", "Drago repulse videogame move (it thinks I'm asking about Pokemon or Bakugan)" (Thinking)