On a surely unrelated note, the richest man of Europe, formerly of the world, is the owner of luxury clothes brand LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE. Bernard Arnault is currently #5 on the Forbes 500 list. His kids went to a prestigious private school where they were taught by Brigitte Trogneux, who would later marry a pupil and go on to become France's first lady Brigitte Macron. Small world. Anyway, I'm sure glad that us Europeans are being diligently protected by wise regulations that completely prevent the rise of oligarchs. I can't imagine the harm caused if every trashy peasant can pretend to afford a Louis Vuitton handbag. Know your place!

Yeah, but I'd rather have the option of a government one than yet another rando company with my sensitive data

they don't just whimsically decide on a daily basis whether or not to comply with court orders. something changed legally that caused them to take action.

The result now is that no website will load because the rest of the world will have broadband anyway

That clarifies it, thanks

I want to read his "Meaning of the City" because I just like City theory, but I keep postponing in case it's just Christian morality lessons. The anarchist Christian angle makes this sound more interesting.

(Premise - suppose I accept that there is such a definable thing as capitalism) I'm not sure why you feel the need to state this in a discussion that already assumes it as a necessary precondition of, but, uh, you do you. People blaming capitalism for everything then build a country that imports grain, while before them and after them it’s among the largest exporters on the planet (if we combine Russia and Ukraine for the “after” metric, no pun intended). ...what? What does this have to do with literally anything, much less my comment about innovation/competition? Even setting aside the wild-assed assumptions you're making about me criticizing capitalism means I 'blame [it] for everything', this tirade you've launched into, presumably about Ukraine and the USSR, has no bearing on anything even tangentially related to this conversation. People praising capitalism create conditions in which there’s no reason to praise it. Like, it’s competitive - they kill competitiveness with patents, IP, very complex legal systems. It’s self-regulating and self-optimizing - they make regulations and do bailouts preventing sick companies from dying, make laws after their interests, then reactively make regulations to make conditions with them existing bearable, which have a side effect of killing smaller companies. Please allow me to reiterate: ...what? Capitalists didn't build literally any of those things, governments did, and capitalists have been trying to escape, subvert, or dismantle those systems at every turn, so this... vain, confusing attempt to pin a medal on capitalism's chest for restraining itself is not only wrong, it fails to understand basic facts about history. It's the opposite of self-regulating because it actively seeks to dismantle regulations (environmental, labor, wage, etc), and the only thing it optimizes for is the wealth of oligarchs, and maybe if they're lucky, there will be a few crumbs left over for their simps. That’s the problem, both “socialist” and “capitalist” ideal systems ignore ape power dynamics. I'm going to go ahead an assume that 'the problem' has more to do with assuming that complex interacting systems can be simplified to 'ape (or any other animal's) power dynamics' than with failing to let the richest people just do whatever they want. Such systems should be designed on top of the fact that jungle law is always allowed So we should just be cool with everybody being poor so Jeff Bezos or whoever can upgrade his megayacht to a gigayacht or whatever? Let me say this in the politest way I know how: LOL no. Also, do you remember when I said this? ‘Won’t someone please think of the billionaires’ is wearing kinda thin You know, right before you went on this very long-winded, surreal, barely-coherent ramble? Did you imagine I would be convinced by literally any of it when all it amounts to is one giant, extraneous, tedious equivalent of 'Won't someone please think of the billionaires?' Simp harder and I bet maybe you can get a crumb or two yourself.