There’s a lot of Economics in Economics.

For example Behavioral Economics actually conducts experiments to determine how people tend to react to various situations (for example, they’ve actually discovered that at least for some forms of medicine the price when told to the patient can influence how well it works, effectively having a placebo and even a nocebo effect?), so it’s pretty similar to Sciences such as Physics or Chemistry.

The rest of Economics, not really, especially the stuff directly and indirectly linked to political decision making (so, Central Bank stuff, Think Tanks, Financial Press, “Economists” in the mainstream Press) - that shit is Politics using Mathematics as a Smoke & Mirrors to make the policy-supporting unsupported and unproven claims look like they’re actually the outcome of a rigorous scientific process.

The situation is so hilariously bad that when a guy from Behavioral Economics - Richard Thaler - finally got an Economics “Nobel” Prize (which is not a prize instituted by Alfred Nobel but actually a prize from the Swedish Central Bank “in honor of Alfred Nobel” which they convinced the Nobel Committee to endorse) they didn’t give it to him for his edifice of work that disproves that real humans behave as the theoretical homo economicus human model that supports pretty much the entire mathematical edifice for Free Market Theory, but instead they gave it to him for just his work on Nudge Theory which is all about how to influence people in aggregate to do more of what people in power want (so stuff like making the desired behavior - say, “donate organs when you die” - be opt out rather than opt in to get a higher percentage of people with that behavior).

All this to say that whilst most of Economics in the present era is a Shit Show of Politics passing itself as a Science, a little bit of it is actually Science, though that little bit is almost never the stuff the “Economists” in panels in the News or in Central Banks talk about to the public or politicians.

I couldn’t agree more and had exact the same experience.

In my case I was actually in the Finance Industry when the 2008 Crash happenned and seeing what was done (the state unconditional saving Asset Owners by sacrificing the rest, in constrast with the whole Free Market stuff I had been reading on The Economist for almost a decade) and their take on it, really opened my eyes to the complete total self-serving bullshit of not just The Economist but also the whole edifice of Free Market Economics (a skepticism further boosted by me actually starting to learn Economics - especially Behavioral Economics since it’s the only “Mainly Science rather than Politics” part of it and my background is party in Physics - and deepening my understanding of the Finance Industry as I tried to figure out the Why and How of the Crash).

That shit is Politics hidden behind a veil of Mathematics purposelly misused in a way eerily similar to how I saw pricing for over the counter derivatives being done in Finance: designing models so that they yield the desired results under certain conditions and further controlling their output by feeding them with cherry picked inputs and then presenting the output of the models as “Mathematical proof” that things are as as you say they are, so basically circular logic with some complex Mathematics in the middle to hide their true nature as unsupported claims.

It’s pretty insidious Fake Science stuff if you don’t have a strong background in Science and access to the right information to pierce through it.

Well, after he got a Nobel Peace Prize, it makes sense that he moves onwards towards his next great wish: King Of The World.

Given Trump’s relation with reality and mental age, the formalism are irrelevant: in his mind if he has the shinny thing then the prize is his.

Notice how the EU just succumbed to lobbying from part of the European Auto Industry and cancelled the whole “ICE car sales ban from 2035” having even before that put extra tariffs on EV cars from China (so, not quite as extreme as the US, but none the less a caving to EU auto makers) to help big auto makers in Europe who refuse to transition to EVs (and this at a time where Diesel polution kills about 10,000 people a year in the EU, so they’re literally putting the interests of large auto makers over the lives of people).

You know what they could’ve done instead?

Subsidies for European auto manufactures with a large percentage of EV car sales relative to ICE cars (which, if high enough would mean lots of money for subsidizing smaller companies to grow and replace the larger ones if the large makers don’t increase their EV sales rather than keeping on extracting juicy margings from ICE SUVs).

The problem in Europe is political capture by dinossaur businesses which would rather make believe the next great Tech Revolution - around Renewables - isn’t happening and have pretty much bought politicians to make sure Europeans and smaller European companies can’t easilly benefit from it.

Europe has the Tech capability to go there but the current political structure (late stage Neoliberal Capitalism) were politicians mainly represent large economic interests (not only above citizens but even above small and mid-size businesses) means that at best politicians simply refuse to send serious money to forward-looking disruptive businesses or forcing the pricing-in of things like Environmental costs in products made by large companies, whilst at worst actually making laws to reduce everybody’s options to move away from buying the products of said large companies.

It might look as an economic and progress problem at first sight, but dive any further and you’ll see Economic options being shaped by Politics (in some cases simply by Politicians in Europe choosing “not to intervene in Markets” but only for markets dominated by big players, in other cases by making laws which de facto activelly obstruct adoption of improved Tech) and in turn Politics being shaped by Big Money.

I think the previous poster was absolutelly correct in their interpretation of the West’s problem in this as broader societal problems.

Mind you, I don’t even think that China’s political system is all that great - rather I think that in the present day the power structures in the West (more in the US, but also to quiet an extent in Europe) are actually hindering the moving forward even whilst there’s plenty of capability to do so (certainly in Europe which mainly has invested massivelly in things like Higher Education).

The US was already been past its peak as an Imperial Power since at least the 2008 Crash (though if you look at things like social mobility in the US, the seeds of it go all the way back to the 70s when the country started becoming ever less a “land of opportunity”), but Trump has definitelly accelerated the decay by a huge factor.

That said, at some point a far-right populist portraying himself as “man of the people” who will “bring back national greatness” like Trump getting power, is historically pretty common in nations which have reached a peak of great power and started decaying from there - in other words, if it wasn’t Trump, this stage of the circle of prosperity and decay would in the US have delivered power to some other similar character.

It would be great if they contributed to open source projects like the Heroic Launcher, Lutris and even Wine and DXVK.

IMHO yet another store-exclusive (even worse if closed-source) sales + launcher application for Linux wouldn’t really be a step forward for Linux.

I expect that anybody who doesn’t have a fanboy relationship towards Steam already does or will if they just think a little bit, see that an open-source store-independent universal games launcher is way more free and open (and hence aligned with the Linux ethos and immune to enshittification) than any store-exclusive sales + launcher app.

As it so happens, given that freedom in gaming is GOGs unique value proposition, business-wise it’s IMHO more advantageous for them to (very loudly and very visibly) support open source universal launchers (and maybe even some kind of open games store front protocol and open source implementation) and windows gaming adaptor layers (like Wine) serving a community with a higher awareness of the need for Software Freedom, than pushing yet another proprietary (even if open source) launcher that only works with their store - a seamless universal launcher is far more likely to pull people away from the Steam App than a GOG App.

Under such a strategy some soft marketing of in their store website promoting Linux Gaming Distros for Windows users and of promoting those universal launchers for Linux users, might help pull more people away from the closed-source store-specific application of their biggest competitor.

They have nothing to lose in doing so.

At worst “conversations” delay an American invasion giving more time for Denmark to prepare.

Any half-competent diplomat will ignore “pride” as a consideration for a chance at stopping a war or at least giving their own side’s military more time to prepare, with no actual downside (if that fails they get the exact same outcome as if they didn’t engage in “conversations”).

Also no doubt a lot of “out of the spotlight” work is going into convicing the members of that Administration who are actually intelligent types putting on a “derranged far-right populist” act for Trump and the American Public, that such a move will indirectly be bad for them personally because of the downsides for the people who own them - big American businesses - of turning Europe into an Enemy rather than merely a trade competitor.

The immediatelly obvious reason is that you can’t really have resource extraction operations in a nuclear wasteland, so Greenland (which is what I assume you were trying to spell) would become useless for them.

The next big reason is the same as why Russia isn’t doing it in Ukraine - any nation that agressivelly uses nukes will be turned on by everybody else and end up nuked themselves, because if nuclear aggression is not severely punished, other countries will go nuclear ASAP with more and more countries actually using nukes in war, incentivising even more countries to go nuclear and use nukes, a vicious cycle which is guaranteed to end with all life on planet Earth dead. Specifically in the case of Greenland, it would be an attack on Europe which not only already has 2 nuclear armed nations but also is the region in the World with the most non-nuclear countries with the knowhow and technology to go nuclear very fast if they feel threathened, so the delay between America attacking European territory with nukes and ending up a nuclear wasteland itself would be a lot smaller than if America had attacked with nukes, say, countries in Latin America (and even that would end up with America turned into glass, it would just take longer).

Obviously the highest levels of the American Military know this (its not as if they haven’t run countless scenarios on it) and would be far more likely to choose to assassinate Trump if he ever gave such an order (which would be even easier to do than the whole “Kidnap Maduro” thing) than to nuke an European nation and start a cycle that would end up with cockroaches being the dominant species of this planet.

America totally sucks at actually annexing territory (so, not merely conquering, but actually all the way to making it part of its own territory), with the last successful instance of doing it being Puerto Rico during the Spainish-American War back at the end of the 19th Century.

So of those you listed, maybe Greenland would be possible to actually annex due to its tiny population - Americans could literally just kick everybody else out, by which point the place is just empty land which can be treated like some kind of North Atlantic oil platform that just happens not to be floating, which is fine if all you want to do there is exploit mineral resources that don’t require much manpower to extract - as well as the small european occupied islands like Azores (though what would be the point of getting Azores since it has zero mineral resources and the only real value of its economic exclusive area is for Fishing which is a low economic value activity that requires quiet a lot more manpower than oil extraction).

Certainly actually annexing a South American country would almost certainly turn into a quagmire for America in the same style as Vietnam.

I mean, if you currently look at Venezuela, for all of Trump’s strutting like a rooster on it, it’s not actually occupied by America (zero boots on the ground) and any real American gains extracted from it (which in reality are far less than Trump’s proclamations would make it seem) come from literally blackmailing the individuals in leadership there with “if you don’t do what I demand I’ll do to you personally the same I did to Maduro” - that situation is not at all one where America owns Venezuela.

I’m doing my part by replacing the aging PCs of my close family with Mini PCs running Linux.

It’s not at all surprising that fatcats looks at the juicy profits that Apple makes with their iOS closed garden and think “I want me some of that” - wanting to be a monopolist with captive customers makes the most business sense and is the most natural thing in a Capitalist Economic and Political environment.

Most of the economic activity around Technology nowadays is rent-seeking and only the part which isn’t at all about money - open source - isn’t about corraling people into closed spaces, removing their choices and then extracting the most money possible from people who now have no other option.

It’s kinda like 20 or 30 years ago when Banks looked at cash payments and thought that they should find a way to get comissions on those, same as they got with card payments, so already back they they were pushing things like electronic wallets (back then those were basically a special kind of card) and keep pushing it for decades (often with the support of governments, since 100% electronic payments are great for civil society surveillance), and nowadays in some countries there are pretty much no cash payments so that relentless push for controlling and getting a cut of every single trade has worked in those countries (and people in those places, such as Sweden, having traded a small hidden increase in price - due to banks now getting comissions in everything - and huge loss of privacy for a tiny bit of convenience genuinelly think they’re better of).

So yeah, these software fatcats will totally try and get together with hardware makers with a dominant market position to slowly close down PC technology - for example the whole point of TPM is to take control away from the owners of the hardware and the “trusted” in “trusted platform” (aka TPM) isn’t about it being trusted by the owner of the hardware, it’s about it being trusted by the business selling the OS, who in turn can sell access to the thus gatekept environment to software making businesses.

I believe the whole requirement for TPM 2.0 in Windows 11 even though it doesn’t actually need it is just a step in a broader strategy to turn PCs into a closed platform controlled by Microsoft, whilst as we see here other companies are trying to created closed platforms by having everything run in their servers, like Google tried almost a decade ago for games with Stadia and was also tried 2 or 3 decades ago by the likes of Sun Microsystems with the push for Thin Clients.

Might as well declare himself the Queen Of Sheba.

Obviously it’s needed to refuel the Nuclear Subs on their way to Russian waters.

More in general, “American support” isn’t necessarily a positive thing in the mid or long term, especially in Latin America and even more in the present age when Fascism is normalized in American and Fascists get elected to lead the US.

For her it risks being like a drowning person getting a nose to put around her neck to be pulled out of the water.

Yeah, I’m surprised that she actually asked the Nobel Comittee about it - just give Trump the medal and shut up whilst he loudly harps about how he has a Nobel Peace Prize.

It’s not as if that guy cares about objective reality or rules (or even has a fully adult mind) - having the shiny token is more than enough for him to go around showing it and saying he has a Nobel Peace Prize.

The most logical option for her is just giving the medal to Trump, telling him he now has a Nobel Peace Prize and letting his infantile mind twist that into him feeling like a Nobel Peace Prize recipient.

I don’t see what’s the problem with that.

It’s not as if, after giving one to Kissinger, the nobel peace prize is anything more than a bitch to political propaganda.

Whilst I have no evidence for it (it’s not like we have an alternate timeline to compare to), I believe that the changes to Intellectual Property legislation in the last couple of decades have actually slowed down innovation, probably severely so.

Certainly in Tech it feels like there’s less of a culture of tinkering and hacking (in the original sense of the word) nowadays than back in the 80s and 90s, even though with the Internet and the easy access to information on it one would expect the very opposite.

Instead of countless crazy ideas like in the age of the generalisation of computing, open source and the birth of the Internet, we instead have closed environments gatekept by large companies for the purposed of extracting rents from everybody, all of which made possible by bought for legislation to stop users from breaking out and competitors from breaking in.

I mean, outside the natural process of moving everything done before from analog to digital-online (i.e. a natural over time migration to the new environments made available by the inventions of computing and the global open network from the late part of the XX Century) the greatest “innovations” in Tech of the last 30 years were making computers small enough to fit in your pocket (i.e. smartphones) - a natural consequence of the Moore Law - and a digital parrot/mediocre content generator.

Now wonder that China, with their “we don’t give a shit about IP” posture has powered through from Tech backwater to taking the lead from the West on various technologies (first solar, now EVs) even though (from what I’ve heard) their educational systems doesn’t reward innovative thinking.

So in my view only if Europe ditches the IP legislation pushed by the US in Trade Treaties does it have a chance to be part of any upcoming Tech revolutions rather than stagnating right alongside in the US whilst trying to extract ever diminishing rents from the tail ends of the adoption phases of last century’s technologies.

I did not just very purposefully refrained from watching Qatar, I actually started boycotting sponsors - such as Coca Cola - from then onward.

Mind you, thanks to Trump since I’ve expanded that boycott to cover all American products and companies.

Shit peddler wants people to stop calling what he peddles “shit”.