Having been involved in campaign treasury myself, you absolutely can run a campaign on a shoestring budget. A good campaign costs a bit more, but at the end of the day it all comes from small dollar donations, and if you’re getting a meaningful amount of votes you should get some of those as well.

People tend to blame the government if their services aren’t working or the economy preforms poorly, working class solidarity be damned. That’s why it’s tempting to shut strikes down even if you endorse the basic concept in theory.

Obviously there are regional differences, e.g. US vs Canada vs EU. I think the tendencies are the same but the degree is different at any point in time.

I will point out that in Canada, there’s not much money in politics. We don’t have a Citizens United equivalent. Pretty sure European countries are more like us, although each one has a distinct system.

It’s an essay format, not a deductive argument so the thesis is stated, then it’s given support. Not saying you should be convinced, just explaining why it seems like this.

Alright, I guess I’ve delivered as much rebuttal as is appropriate, then.

It’s also a light year away from an exhaustive analysis. I can’t do that here and now. It takes books to do this.

You know, too much length on each analysis itself actually reduces strength, in my experience. If one’s idea is that complicated, they need to put it in a modular, structured form (so not prose), or are guaranteed to have made logical errors somewhere inside.

Democracy was pushed by the bourgeoisie.

Sure, because it weakened the aristocracy over top of them, not because it was a better way to keep the proles down. Marx, who you probably respect, held that, and it has strong support from modern scholarship as well.

A king may care about his subjects, the rich barely care about the poor.

So, again, that’s not real history. Now most people of a given high class start in a slightly lower class and get lucky, while monarchs are raised in a system of open extreme violence and either knew they were an almighty heir from the start, or were willing to kill and betray friends and family to usurp power. A look through history books will confirm they tend to be more brutal than guys like Paul Fireman (who’s boring enough you’ve never heard of him) or Amancio Ortega (who you also probably haven’t despite being number 9), on average.

I doubt it was driven by competition, since the USSR was never close to lifestyle parity, and the US was never at any real risk of pro-communist unrest. You can’t really make the policies of the period (good or bad) have nothing to do with American voters.

Like, every service by law being available in both seems like overkill. It’s good to have services available in other languages than English, so there’s no reason to shut it down proactively, but native languages, Mandarin and Punjabi seem like equally major priorities without Quebec.

I suppose French on every label would also be overdoing it, by that logic, although without that it would feel less like home.

See, that just seems like “it’s ideology, but also billionaires are there”. European businesses don’t want tariffs, but there’s still European tariffs. The simplest explanation would just be that it wasn’t their call.

It feels like you’re starting with your conclusion and then building a story about it to end at whichever facts are appropriate for the instance. It’d be more convincing if you could put it in a form agnostic of where and when it’s being applied. Like, when do billionaires want tariffs, and when don’t they? Then, does it actually predict policy decision?

Yeah, there’s estimates going both ways for conditions of ordinary people in the European Medieval period. There’s probably more than one truth - it was non-uniform and lasted a millennium. It was also a pretty poor region after the collapse of Rome, so even the rich could only be so rich. Stone age hunter-gatherers would have a pretty much perfect Gini for the same reason.

For richer premodern regions like the India and China estimates are much higher (here’s a really recent analysis on some of them). Ditto for societies before the Medieval period, although usually they just go off of house sizes for that and the results can be so high they seem impossible. It’s also worth mentioning Gini has some problems for this kind of thing - the paper I link emphasises other metrics more as a result.

Looking at modern dictatorships, Russia is said to have most of the world’s billionaires, and their official 2021 value is up at 0.880. Unofficially it’s probably worse. Other dictatorships report lower values, but anyone connected to the third world knows they’re bullshit and the elites own absolutely everything. The US is also an outlier; Canada is 0.726, Iceland is down at 0.649.

There was only more inequality after the renaissance. Much of that time was democratic.

No? The first modern thing that people will even claim as democracy is the US at the the end of the 18th century, and it was very rich, male and whites-only. Before that you had the age of absolutism, and before that you had various republics like Florence or classical Athens, but imagine voting bodies at least as exclusive as the early US and pretty unstable, with periods of effective dictatorship. Ordinary male citizens gradually got rights over the 19th century, and the first unrestricted, universal suffrage appeared in New Zealand in 1893.

TBF inequality kept increasing in the democratic US, but then it went down in the postwar era, which is unprecedented in history. Being equal before the law doesn’t mean equal in practice, but it’s just kind of common sense that it would be closer.

For one thing, inequality is still way lower than it was before democracy.

Wouldn’t the US working in ever deeper cooperation with both China and the EU be better for business? Billionaires move pretty easily between all three anyway.

By all appearances they’ve never fully committed with China because of the ideological gap, and are cutting out the EU now do to new, emerging ideological differences.

Taking in Africans is political poison right now in Europe, and outsourcing local industries has never been super popular even if it makes sense.

I’m sure it will happen, Africa will develop and start taking on lots of low-end manufacturing and similar, and Europe will probably be a very good customer. But, in terms of a strategic alliance for the EU, most African nations are not a contender. South Africa maybe.

Ah, okay.

So what’s the threshold for this power to be used? It doesn’t actually say.

Is Heise a reliable source? There’s not much corroborating this ATM, and the legislation title returns nothing - maybe because it’s just a draft.

Edit: Also ironic that they make you sign away your full GDPR rights to view the privacy article without an account.

SWAT breaking in to enforce some drug law and shooting the dog is a pretty common thing in the US. They still do it. But, we’re not talking about the US, so it might be harder to just sweep that kind of thing under the rug with tough-on-crime arguments.

Not OP. I was agreeing with you, haha.

It’s kind of the problem with Lemmy sometimes.

Hmm. I’m not into conspiracy theories, if that’s where this is going.

Hmm. I wonder where OP’s number came from.

If everyone else doesn’t know what they’re talking about, maybe you don’t know what you’re talking about.

Justin, of course, was a culture war liberal with his gender equal cabinet etc

So on the left.

I think I’ll just leave it there.

Maybe the latest discovery by Dragonfly.

Far fewer people will be able to read it, without doing something illicit and maybe expensive, although certain countries will still be free enough. On the other hand, it (or PieFed or a future version) could be endorsed by the remaining nations, or just have had some more exoduses of users come in.

Slight chance the AI winter we’re going into is short and some specific fusion with classical algorithms succeeds at AGI, so singularity stuff is going on and being posted about. 2038 problem, as someone else mentioned.

Edit: Q-day stuff could be done, coming soon or ongoing. If it’s done - which I kinda expect - it’s still a massive source of both breaches and fun mods on old, locked software and hardware.

Allowing calls to proliferate in the first place and be addressed would indicate some level of free speech.

5% sounds high just by how things are, and how little people understand what it is. I’d buy 1%, though, and that’s something.