I don’t know your country’s laws, but where I live, if it’s not inhabitable it is taxed way lower (and without a roof, it’s definitely not inhabitable)

Auchan left Italy years ago

Opera mini was also great when I had very little MBs of internet traffic in my plan. Nowadays I have pretty much infinite traffic, so I haven’t used it in ages

There might be one party looking from the outside, but on the inside there are many currents, and as soon as there’s a power vacuum, those currents will infight to gain power.

Thing is, we don’t really know what’s the reason for the current worldwide trend in much, much lower natality rate. We’ve observed in rich countries and poor countries, religious and atheist countries, capitalist and communist countries (both USSR and PRC, who have had very different economic systems), in countries with no safety nets but also in countries with large social programs, in western countries, but also in eastern countries.

The only thing I can think of these days is education level. Is it possible that education is inversely correlated with natality rates? Or maybe women in the workforce. I’m not arguing for either point, I’m just thinking about what the cause of a world-wide issue might be, because it’s happening everywhere and seemingly without any clear common cause.

Is Trump going to compensate them for it??

I mean, considering his pettiness, probably. Either with carrot or stick, he wants to be heard and wants people to bend over backwards to gain his approval. In exchange, he might do a tax cut or two for those who manage to please him, while he’ll try to crush those who oppose him.

It’s not that they will run out of people. They have people, but to keep recruitment levels so high and equipment manufacturing so high they are overcharging their economy. Right now in Russia there are three types of jobs if you want to make money afaik, work in the military complex (arms manufacturing), in the gas extraction industry or directly in the military.

It’s Dutch disease x100, if the state at some point stops being able to fund the war machine, their economy collapses.

Yes, but that’s beside the point. Most people use Steam not because of Linux support or because of BPM.

Valve hasn’t revolutionized their business once Ubisoft, EA, Amazon, CDPR and Epic started to compete with them. They just kept doing what they were doing and eventually saw the bodies passing in the river

There’s always someone in the world archiving stuff, and with GOG the installers can be shared freely if they ever close shop, since they don’t have DRM. With Steam that can be a lot harder, depending on the DRM they have

Tell that to Unicode

I was thinking more about their history of being occupied for the last millennium, invaded by the mongols, then occupied and partitioned by many states, including the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth, the Ottomans, the Austrians, then finally conquered by the Russian tzars, then having their independence dreams being shattered by the Soviets, then being invaded by the Nazis and now by Russian Federation, with the latest nail being Trump’s actions.

So yeah, superpowers plural

I’m pretty sure Ukraine is already used to being invaded and picked apart by superpowers without any real say

I bet you say the same regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, right? Trump’s plan to end that war and build villas in Gaza should totally be “welcomed and anyone preventing that from happening investigated” /s

A fediverse app to empower coops and smaller taxi companies and allow them to reach users could actually be a pretty good idea and a great way to reduce Uber’s power

Arabia went from being under Ottoman rule to being under the house of Al Saud, it’s never been colonized by a western “liberal” country.

Their rules are still insane.

Wasn’t china in the 19th century a literal empire?

Nine dash line

European workers didn’t get their rights from being imperialist, they fought hard against the imperialist elites to get where they are now, and China’s elites are being just as imperialist today as any European or American elite has been since forever.

China and India is apples to oranges. There are a myriad of reasons why their paths diverged. There are other East Asian countries that did better than China way before China, while starting from a much more similar point (or even a worse point).

You could say the same about every developed nation. It took a bit more for most nations, but these nations had to literally invent concepts like public health and education, welfare and even socialism.

But yeah, every western European country has already eliminated the worst kind of poverty and on average European citizens are better off than Chinese citizens. Working conditions, working hours and safety laws in Europe are much better than the Chinese average.

The US is doing its own thing with extreme capitalism, and I’m against that, but let’s not kid ourselves, China has taken a lot of pages from the US’s economic model

One of these is not like the others