I consider as most effective, the system that is most effective for the whole market in the long term, not the system that only works best for a few in that market. And yes, I realize that authoritarian market intervention is great for maximizing short term profits for those few companies/persons, but if the rest of the market suffers in the long term because of it (and they are), then we’re dealing with rent seeking and that’s pretty commonly accepted to be bad in the long term. Bad for society, but also bad for wealth creation. And if it’s bad for wealth creation, then it’s definitely not effective capitalism. This is why I consider authoritarian capitalism to not be the most effective form of capitalism.

And yeah, I’m aware that the USA is on this trajectory. Other western democracies are too, but of those that are, I think it’s still mostly to a lesser extent than the USA.

About China: China’s competiveness has significantly regressed in the last few years. Xi Jinping’s authoritarian and imperialistic policies have not been good for business. Under Xi Jinping guanxi is also much more important again than it was under Hun Jintao: companies have no real rights, they too are dependant on maintaining relations and obeying the government. If they fail to maintain relations or if they bet on the wrong political horse, then the company leadership will be gone pretty fast.

Authoritarian capitalism is not the most effective form of capitalism. It is the most effective for those that are already on top, but for the market as a whole (and especially for the society around that market), it’s going to be worse in the long run.

Companies that are protected from competition by an authoritarian government will be able to extract higher profits in the short term, but their products and services will become worse in the long term, which not only harms their customers, but also the company’s chances of selling their products on actually competitive markets. The American car makers are a good example of this imo.

Companies that are protected from having to pay fair wages and/or providing good working conditions, will be faced with labor shortages if the workers have alternatives, or with a depressed consumer market because the people have less money/time to spend on consuming things.

I really like their pagewide xl printers, but those are purely aimed at businesses. Just to name one thing I like :D

And those xl printers are the only thing that I can think off. I won’t even consider buying a current HP computer/laptop/small printer/…

This is also something that many people outside of the USA don’t understand: 49% of the americans are not voting for the Trump/republican shit show that they see in their foreign media, but rather for a heavily editorialized image of the person and party.

The quotes are there because it’s a common misconception that as soon you have any kind of 4g signal, you have access to a fast connection, which is not the case. So in many countries at some point they proclaim that “xx%” of the population now has access to “4g”, which will be technically true, but the actual % that has access to fast 4g will be substantially lower.

Hey, thanks for taking the time to answer.

Afaik, high internet speed requires higher frequencies and high frequencies reach less far + have less penetration through/around obstacles. That’s what makes providing “4g” virtually everywhere easy (good enough for phone calls at least), but if they want to provide actual high speeds everywhere, then it suddenly becomes not so easy (nor cheap).

That the USA and Canada don’t provide proper high speed internet access/choice to many of their rural citizens is caused by the rent-seeking mentality of their network companies + the governments that enable this. Most of those rural citizens live in places where there are more than enough people for it to make economic sense to invest, but investing would lower short term profits, so they don’t. Instead those customers are stuck with the choice between a single provider who is offering bad service, or no service at all. And as we’ve seen with the Boobies American, they’ve got enough of their dumb citizens convinced that they are oh so exceptional that this is the best that they could ever expect.

Tbh, that 4g coverage up north looks pretty damn good for how few people live there. To me it just makes no economic sense to provide that good a service there. So I’m curious and as a Finn you might know: does it make economic sense or was this investment done for other reasons?

And why are you unwilling to accept that there is a lot of nothing land in Finland? Most of Finland is a lot of nothing land, plagued by mosquitoes in the summer and darkness in the winter.

Your country is neither unique, nor exceptional in this regard.

The Finn already addressed this in their first post: 97% of the country has 4g. That is country, not people in the country. So yes, a reindeer in Lapland has a better potential internet connection than many rural north americans.

Edit: I found some recent numbers: this carrier claims to provide 4g to 99% of the population, 5g to 96%. https://www.dna.fi/wholesale/about-us/networks That 2nd statistic must be pretty damn rare, the country of Nokia indeed.

Hitler also had a 100 000 polish intelligentsia murdered as preparation for German colonization of German controlled Poland.

Authoritarians seem to believe that most people are sheep and that if you want to control those sheep, you not only have to kill the current shepherd, you also have to kill all potential future shepherds.

I’m not so sure about that, it’s not like news like this makes it to right-wing voters, they are too busy consuming “alternate” facts media and being outraged about whatever they’re expected to be outraged about now. And republicans need just 1 more presidential win for there never to be a non republican president ever again.

I’m tacking on this opinion article from 2020 with a few good examples/explanations of how bad stock buybacks are in the long term.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/petergeorgescu/2020/05/13/stock-buybacks-are-banned-let-it-be-a-trend/

Boeing and general electric are of course mentioned. The line goes up, until it doesn’t. The key to being a successful CEO, seems to be, to be the one making the line go up and then gtfo before it comes crashing down.

This reads like a case of game design by spreadsheet to me. Instead of the lead designers being creative persons making creative decisions, these are accountants that are designing a game by ticking boxes. They didn’t try to make a game that they would like to play, they tried to make a game that they think others would like to play.

Totally, in the end it boils down to that. England holds cultural heritage treasures that were undoubtedly stolen/robbed and they have no intention of giving those back either.

An example is this Portugese book collection: https://www.sulinformacao.pt/en/2013/12/associacao-«faro-1540»-quer-que-inglaterra-devolva-colecao-de-livros-roubada-em-1596/

Yeah, earth in Dutch is “aarde” and in German it’s “erde”, which both sound related to “earth”.

However, it originally must have meant soil/dirt/land, long before those humans were even aware of the concept of planets. So who was the first to call Earth after earth or Terre after terre? Probably the first persons to figure out that they were living on a planet is my guess, it makes sense to name something after the part that you can see imo.

Brave search https://www.pcmag.com/news/brave-search-doesnt-use-bing-anymore

Are you sure about Antarctica? I wouldn’t be surprised if emperor penguins measured distance in feet and flippers.

I’m using qwant as my default now. It does well for most searches, but for map related things I still use google.

Ashkenazic Jews or Ashkenazim,[a] constitute a Jewish diaspora population that emerged in the Holy Roman Empire around the end of the first millennium CE.[8] They traditionally spoke Yiddish[8] and largely migrated towards northern and eastern Europe during the late Middle Ages due to persecution.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jews

The “Poland-Lithuania” that most of these migrations went to, at the time included large portions of present day Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. The regions with the highest Jewish populations prior to WW2, seem to match the borders of the polish-lithuanian commonwealth before it was partitioned by their neighbours in the 18th century. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partitions_of_Poland

I’m not the one making the claim, but found something that this tall tale might be based on: https://www.grunge.com/756660/the-mysterious-bay-of-jars-explained/

Tldr: Brazilian entrepreneur throws some amphorae into a bay to grow barnacles on them for aesthetic reasons. Disreputable sea treasure hunter finds some of those, makes a flurry of wild claims, gets banned from Brazil for theft of actual antiquities from another wreck and he goes silent when people start asking more questions.

So the closest I came when looking for a source, was 20th century amphorae in a Brazilian bay, nothing about a roman shipwreck in the Carribean. But since the claim was a roman “galleon”, a claim for it to be in the Carribean also means little.