That’s an issue that can come up, when your inside guy for market manipulation with all the power necessary for the scheme is also an impulsive narcissist, who never was that bright to begin with, but is also clearly losing some mental faculties due to age, too.

¬(Yes; libreddit is more than a read-only frontend for Reddit)

For an adversarial relationship, as the one between EU and China, it was still one overall based on understanding and a degree of predictability. That just ends up being more attractive than an ally turning into a rabid dog and stabbing you in the back.

I think no one should be surprised by this.

Pretty much the exact same story here, only my obsession was more with PC-DOS RPGs like Ultima, Wizardry, Goldbox games, thanks to my father and older siblings influencing me there.

Yeah, but here is the tragedy to all that: It is still also deciding, which things get the capital investments necessary to exist, and the livelihood of people has been entangled with that shitshow to an absurd degree.

Sometimes I almost love that I am already at subsistence level disability payments (in a European Welfare state, so thankfully, not in danger of starvation or anything) without any real wealth beyond day-to-day living expenses, there’s not that much for me to lose every time this shit happens.

Fun fact: When choosing my starter for the first time, all I knew about Pokémon was: “It’s a game I saw someone play at school once and it kind of looked like an RPG and I love those!” I genuinely just went with what looked cool to me and had no idea there were “actual” dragon Pokémon.

Also +1 on dom@lemmy.ca noting, that Gyarados is the cool dragon in Gen1

As a bullied kid that back then just wanted a cool dragon, I protest that insinuation!

At this point, I am convinced it’s a pump and dump scheme, still ongoing, too. It only takes a few people in the know of when and where the news break about the tariff supsension, to seriously make a killing on the market, on the backs of others. Trumpists can now also (for a while) feel like their God has saved them again and never steered them wrong, or curse their momemts of doubt, when they did not buy yesterday, as their prophet called for.

It is a mixture of incompetence, impulsivity, but I am certain at this point, a huge chunk of it is outright corruption and cult tactics.

Which is why, generally, taxing wealth and having the state invest it in supportive infrastructure and subsidising is the preferred option for developed economies that want manufacturing (back).

Sweeping, protectionist tariffs are usually a painful measure of necessity, if you have an economy without any developed industrial or service sectors, where initial investments are basically impossible due there being no taxable wealth and no market incentives, because of global players always being more profitable and cheaper, than any beginning industry that has to go through growth processes and learning experiences. (More selective tariffs or outright import/export bans of course also have their place for a multitude of political reasons, e.g. the EU not wanting a lot of artificially cheap and lower-health-standards US meat)

I’m gonna be real here, just Realpolitik-wise from the perspective of “the West” sans the USA - China is currently proving that they are simply more reliable in geopolitics and even economically, and that is just damn important, even in an adversarial relationship. It isn’t even because they are a de-facto dictatorship, Russia is one too, and Russia is a mad dog. They just managed to keep their shit mostly together so far, still riding out their massive growth spurt. Even human rights abuses outside of Realpolitik don’t seem as the argument they were: internationally, the US has always had a more greyish record anyhow. But now, considering the US is quickly doing its best to catch up in domestic tyranny, that argument seems to be going fast, too.

Sadly, I don’t have huge hopes for China to be a proper “better” hegemon globally, if that should be what ultimately happens - they are facing crises of their own, and have been dabbling in their own brands of economic imperialism, and at least the way their military is gearing up contains a lot of stuff usually used for military imperialism as well.

A new day, a new opportunity to repost this meme:

It’s a repost of a meme, but damn, there’s so many great opportunities for this one:

Being a clever bastard with a gangster mindset, of course Putin would have been paranoid one way or the other, so that won’t change much I think. But things like that happening - no matter if it will end up being explainable as a proper accident or a failed assassination attempt or whatever - tend to undermine the mythos of being invulnerable and always 3 steps ahead of the game, that people like Putin want to disseminate about themselves. That’s my current hope in the political climate.

To quote myself from their comments:

So happy to see this one pop up in my notifications, will probably have to watch it twice in a row at least! I don’t want to be the annoying guy advertising other platforms in the comments, so let me preface that I mean this just exactly as is said, as a compliment: You are one of the few channels that I still return to big platforms like YT for, instead of staying in the Fediverse.

Sounds like an easy way to do unproportional damage to projects with a bit of location spoofing.

Musk having a persecution complex and paranoid delusions of the world being out to get him for his inherited identity alone and not for his actions and role in politics and the economy? That’s just unpossible!

I think that is utlimately valid - although I think the other options are all coming with their own problems. You will then have to instead live with the interests of tech corporations (including nonprofits who ultimately need funding) and advertisers collecting your data, whose interests will ultimately not be much less malignant - or small free software projects of a sometimes quite limited scope. The latter, I think, is also a valid niché, but will leave the overall standards of the internet to corporate interests.

Considering how the CEO here acts for Brave, in my opinion, this is not simply about him being an asshole or being politically questionable. To me - everything about him screams “grifter taking advantage of people’s legitimate concerns” - and he has a material interest in your data as well. Brave always felt to me like trying to sell and market privacy instead of proving to me, in their fundamentals, that they actually have my interests in mind.

Which is why I, personally, do not really understand choosing Brave above LibreWolf (or Tor Browse, occasionally), if privacy is your #1 priority.

Oh, yes, it wasn’t a direct answer, also, I’m not the person you answered to. Ultimately, my comment was more meant as an overall addition to the discussion, building on the idea of what a solution to:

Which I think is one of the big issues with OSS projects - many are based around a very small number of people being motivated to work on something for free. And it dies if that stops.

might be.

But as answers to your two points. #1 - I have no idea where they got that from, myself #2 - I think you answered that one yourself rather well, and I wanted to build on that one.

Sorry if that was confusing, my brain is also good at confusing myself at times, can’t imagine how that is for others at times.

I can somewhat understand the overall criticism, because Librewolf - as far as my understanding goes - would be in trouble without the work being done on the code upstream.

Personally, I know that this does not exist (yet), and to some people that put privacy above everything else with a more libertarian slant, this might sound like the worst option imaginable, but my “dream” way to handle it within the current economic system would be:

Have an open source, FOSS base, web-engine and all, developed with public funds similar to public broadcasting in many countries (Bonus if carried by international organisations instead of just national. Think a UN institution like UNESCO or WHO, but focused on making the internet accessible neutrally and to all). On top of that code, projects that want to put privacy above all else could still feasibly built projects like LibreWolf (an even Brave), relying somewhat comfortably on secure fundamentals.

I know, sounds like a dream, which it is at this point. But every other solution within the current economic status quo I personally thin of, I see no chance of enshittification not always encroaching and creating crises, if not outright taking over.

Oh, just to not accidentally create the wrong impression - that’s not me, I just shared the video and didn’t want to editorialise the title. If you want to give them your message (that I think is important, indeed) - you can follow the link and should be able to comment with many different activitypub account options (PeerTube itself, Mastodon, etc.) - sadly, I don’t think Lemmy is possible yet, because its design isn’t user-centric but content-centric, and it lacks some of those AP-capabilities.