The old American playbook was to ally with some local elites and then use media, secret service and economic support to bring them into power. Military force and hardcore sanctions were a tool used, if that did not work.

Russia prefers to use military force to force other countries into doing what they want.

China seems to work mainly with economic pressure, corruption and secret servcie work to set up favroable local elites. Their media game is not as good as the US, but TikTok is a clear sign that they are working on it. So far hard force is pretty rarer.

To me China looks a lot more like the old US playbook. They know the Russian one is not as good, as they saw European Empires collapse by using it.

Capitalism strives to make money. Competition means profit margins shrink. So yes capitalists are against competition.

That is one of the many reasons listening to companies is not good economic planning for countries.

Norway only has a population of 5.5million. The area is relativly big though.

Ethiopians are not Arabs. Arabic Jews experience much less racism in Israel then Ethiopian ones.

Amendment II

Döpfner being afraid Russian trolls replace his media empire as the force pushing the far right.

The EU does not import oil from Russia anymore. Gas is another matter though. However it looks like a trade war with the US is coming and having the option to reduce US oil would be very usefull.

Oh I am not saying that Tesla is not making good cars, but that cars are inferior to trains. Those companies mostly had full self driving before Tesla was founded. They also all build high speed rail, which means they are faster then Tesla. Trains also use less energy then cars. The onboard entertainment mainly is bring your own device and use the WiFi, but options for restaurants are decently common.

Those are all train manufacturers.

The EU has so many much better EV makers it is crazy. Siemens, Altsom, CAF or Talgo are superior in every way.

They are also the main developers of the Mastodon software. It is not just hosting the service. The software needs to be able to compete with Bluesky and right now it quite simply does not. The only way to get the quality needed is to have some full time lead developers. Also they need some proper admins to run the websites. Mastodon social is at 250,000 active users right now, but it is also fairly likely to grow fast with what Elon is up to with Twitter. Just to compare Twitter used to have 7500 employees, with a 1000 today.

There are ways around it, like link shorteners and so forth, but the main point is that Meta is afraid.

Voyager is already cross platform for iOS, Android and web. It is also open source: https://github.com/aeharding/voyager

Usually those artist did get some recognition during their life, but never got into the main stream. That changed due to the main stream changing and the people who did like the art showing it again. That is actually rather easy to do with something like the Fediverse. It just requires a download option. Especially when everybody is aware, that the content will be deleted, that would be a decent option.

Also a lot of content on social media in general is very short term. Stuff like politcal discussions are fairly useless after a few months in most cases. So that can be deleted without much care and again, if somebody wants to preserve it, they easily can just download it.

You can look at the thread. The initial one got a lot of replies from a “Vladimir Putin” saying “You should kill yourself NOW!”. The Git commit is even worse, with the a lot of insults. Not what usually happens on that kind of places, not that they are always kind and lovely.

Like not risking his lifelyhood to fight US and EU sanctions against a genocidal regime?

Because there are both US and EU laws preventing code from countries deemed a threat. Torvalds is paid by the Ameircan Linux Foundation, which has to work under US law and he himself is an EU citizen. Also a lot of other developers are from those countries and if they do not comply, they could get into some pretty bad legal trouble.

So it pretty much boils down to kick out the Russians or kick out all US and EU citizens and well we see Linus choice.

They are planning to buy or maybe just electricity from a new reactor type, which has never been built, starting 2030, when conventional nuclear power plants, with known technology take twice as long to built.

So if they stop the project in 18months, it has just been a waste of money.

MMT would claim rather simply that the debt can be paid back by printing more money. More money in the system means more people are employed. If you have full employment, more money leads to inflation and to fight inflation governments need to raise taxes, to take money out of the system. Obviously taxes can not be raised to infinity.

So no MMT does not claim the US can just borrow money without long term costs.

Not necessarily. As long as the debt is invested well, it is absolutly fine. If the debt is used to increase the size of the economy, that means more taxes and hence the debt can pay itself. The other scenario is the government investing into something, which increases in value. Keep in mind that the governments rates are lower the private rates, so if a government builds a lot of housing for its citizens, that increases debt, but is still cheaper then everybody building their own housing themself. Similar effects can be had by buying companies.

Debt is a tool, it can be used for both good and bad. It really depends on how good the government is.