I would guess it’s obvious for everyone who gets the message that they are political targets. However it is also important to call out abuse of power, like is in the case of India, Spain, Poland, where the governing party is spying the opposition in order to find ways to get rid of them.
However the longer we allow revenues to be generated in relationships with authoritarian economies-states, the more we're empowering them.
That in a way is also a carrot - at least until a certain point of no return - where in America there's an effort to collapse the USD, and they might succeed - and then where BRICS will have buying power to influence the rest of the world to align with bad actors in each countries who aren't yet toeing the tyrannical line - and help them navigate towards a totalitarian state.
Knowing who is your ally in each nation is important, and keeping communication lines open is the bare minimum - and tyrant wannabes in different nations, except in places like China where they already are locked down in their systems, still need to creep forward in as incognito method as possible until they've captured all of the various positions necessary before they can recruit and grow their Gestapo.
Most people are unaware that Canada is about to be captured by fascists, and where laws and mandates have already passed that could allow those politicians to pretend they won the next election (multiple people in our intelligence agency CSIS already whistleblowing that China, the CCP is confirmed to have interfered in at least our last 2 elections which kept Trudeau-NDP in power) - and then pump that out and control the narratives in our state-funded media channels like CBC; mainstream news - including the biggest dissident media company called Rebel News - aren't shown on Facebook, for vector example, another vector being an arguably manufactured false flag 3-day outage of Rogers Telecommunications - where this fascist government immediately afterward mandated all telecommunications companies cross-integrate their services "to act as a backup" for other companies - which conveniently creates-allows for a centralized system for monitoring, etc.
I am not sure whether this counts as the success or the failure of the meds
Not only is this objectively true, I also have an iPhone. It's not news to me but it still makes me do a double take every time.
Maybe I should try oscillating to Linux and FairPhone again...
A relative of mine in the defense industry has told me that, generally speaking, the DoD requires that none of the components in missiles have parts manufactured by potential adversaries, which makes enough sense but is also extremely difficult now.
Thanks Delta Airlines, whose metal nametags are literally just cut sheets of aluminum with some paint on them and are still Made in China. Someone seriously wants to tell me we can manufacture bleeding edge tech when we can't even cut and paint our own fucking sheet metal?
There's plenty of places to get metal nametags made in the U.S.A. But Delta chose to go the cheapest route to save a few pennies.
As far as I know most of the machinery is made in Europe, mostly Germany, again generally higher cost than the US. So I find it difficult to believe that it can't be done in the US.
Cost cutting seems to be done much more deeply in the US than in Europe. For example, economy class on all North American airlines is rather miserable, while most European non budget carriers have a better experience in economy.
In a lot of ways, this is obviously good, most people benefit from lower prices, more value being created, etc, but I think it's also made it so that cheap-but-ethically-dubious manufacturing from other countries becomes increasingly appealing, especially since it's abstracted enough from the end-user to where they can comfortably say "out of site out of mind".
I'm no better; I know very well the conditions of some other countries, and think they're very bad. I also think it's bad that America fought a whole war to end slavery, and instead we just launder it through other countries. Still, despite me thinking all of this, I still generally shop for reasonable prices instead of trying to focus on ethical stuff.
When we can't make our own fucking blue jeans we absolutely cannot try for a technology victory.
I wonder if someone has made a “De-bullshitify English” Chrome add on to replace phrases like “mercenary hacker” and “officer-involved shooting” with more semantically correct phrases.