Fellas, is it gay to speak Gaulish?

I’m all for sanctioning them too. Economic sanctions are the bare minimum we should be doing to genocidal authoritarians.

Political agenda is a funny euphemism for imperialist invasion and genocide.

Now when I’m lazy and don’t support some standards in my open source projects, I’m just going to say its for security.

Vertical integation and scale are not inherently monopolistic. Some monopolies formed because they exploited these advantages, but there are competative industries today where several vertically integrated companies compete.

Monopolies in econ 101 are not called inefficient because they extract profit. They’re inefficient because they don’t respond to market forces. Since they control all supply, they can disregard demand.

I mean if central planning can be redefined to mean decentralized capitalist markets, I’ve got a book gor you to read too.

My dude, did you even read the Peter Theil article you linked? His entire speil is in no way congruent with your point. He’s basically just saying the rent seeking from a gaining a monopoly can make high risk investments worth it. His argument is still grounded in market logic. He leaves out the people who started high risk companies they thought would be monopolies but turned out to be undesireable.

And I don’t even agree with his point, neither Google nor Amazon needed massive capital to hit the market, they needed massive amounts of capital to operate at a loss to squash their early competition to create a monopoly; something that can only be done by the horrible market distortions of a governmnet or rampant late-stage capitalist billionaires with equivalent piles of money.

Edit: I would also point out Theil is a believer in autocracy, known widely for literally owning a company whose product is disinformation, and is shilling to prevent the breakup of his monopolies. I wouldn’t trust him under any circumstances.

China has some more central planning than the US, but they lean on the same market mechanisms that the US does when it comes to most solutions, ie tax penalties/incentives and subsidies. An excellent example is their smog reduction plans.

Its also great you linked an article about Chinese steel because they do the same stuff there

There isn’t a party planner in every steel mill determining output, they let individual companies react to market forces they shape with tax structures and subsidy.

People’s republic of Walmart

Good thing Walmart wasn’t supplanted by Amazon who delegates most of whats sold to 3rd party sellers. They certainly havn’t copied that for their online sales, right?

Out of curiosity, do you think the USSR collapsed because all its own citizens thought the government was doing too good a job?

China introduced private corperations and capital because they increased efficiency and production.

Are you saying every government whose ever tried tons of central planning just messed up or randomly decided to scale it back just for funsies?

Are we just gonna ignore the fact that the whole critique of centralization is that its inefficient, ineffective, and unresponsive to peoples needs?

Like as capitalism is becoming more monopolistic, its becoming increasingly bad at delivering goods that people actually want and just becomes better at supressing and controling them. You know the same critisism thats pointed at autoritarian communism.

I don’t think this is the W you think it is.

Where are you getting free VM hosting?

The comment was in reference to VPN services. Sadly, given theres no right to privacy, you must pay to not be tracked.

i feel like most of your argument is rendered moot with encrypted dns solutions like DoH.

You misunderstand. Large ISPs run their own DNS servers which are preconfigured into the devices they sell. They are the intended recipient and you’d just be encrypting it in transit to their servers.

Another reason to use a VPN is that ISPs have every motive to sell your browsing data and they do. Unlike many other groups tracking you, your ISP inherently has your meatspace name, address, and payment information making their data easily collatable and very valuable.

If you use the default DNS on their provided router they can even tell if someone purchased an XBox, Playstation, or any other smart device just from update and telemetry lookups.

As the article says, by using a VPN youre using someone else’s ISP making that info worthless.

If your threat model includes preventing ad networks from gathering data, a VPN absolutely is a tool to prevent that. Do you have to pay for a service? Probably not if you’re technical enough; a VM in a data center is probably sufficient.

No. This is basically why you use native apps. What you could do is set up another profile on Android and you should be able to sign in on a different account for that profile and get notifications.

You don’t seem to understand terminal velocity.

I think a lot of these points have been made better elsewhere.

The extended discussion of hypothetical US interference just because of a tenuous chain of connection to the CIA is just typical US-badism. The US frequently funds tools which they think further geopolitical goals and this doesn’t inherently mean its untrustworthy, just that their methodology of control is more resilient to uncensored speech; the best example of this is TOR, decentralized, anonymous, and created by Naval Research and DARPA. The author can’t concede this point as it’d bring up they’re unsubtly simping for a different colonial power, one who does require such censorship.

Signal’s centralized nature has always been a major criticism (and it’s reasonable), however as a trade off it’s easy to on-board the tech illiterate. It’s nontrivial to set up a Matrix server and I’ve seen the difficulty of migrating activist groups there. It’s good as a long term goal, but one also has to recognize that a person struggling with housing has different concerns and will prefer to use whatever their friends and family do.