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Comment by WeylandYutani | Hacker News Reader

The US won the cold war in that famous kitchen when it became clear the USSR cannot make consumer goods.

A mistake that the Chinese made certain not to replicate.

Too much importance is made on free press, elections, freedom of expression. I was involved on a trade mission to Vietnam and nobody mentioned pride month.

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> Too much importance is made on free press

But how free is our press? 3 companies control 99% of UK newspapers. 6 companies control most of UK press of any kind.

Our laws on Libel are so mad, that we allowed Head of Wagner to sue a British journalists for writing about him, while he was under sanctions for war crimes.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/jan/25/uk-placed-i...

The UK has a weak media sector because it's impossible to compete with the 800-pound taxpayer-funded gorilla in the room, which doesn't need to turn a profit. The only way for UK media to remain remotely financially viable is to scour all the muck that the BBC won't touch, hence all the terrible tabloids, and even then it's touch and go at best. The libel laws are in turn a consequence of the excesses of the terrible tabloids.

Incentives and disincentives, as always.

I’d put a slightly different framing to you. Even in places like the US (where there is no clear comparison to the BBC when looking at audience and influence with public funding) you still see those exact same dynamics play out as you describe it with a huge rush to the bottom style mentality.

The problem wasn’t the public funding but rather that good journalism is incompatible with a profit maximising corporate structure. We saw the exact same thing play out online with how the fact that the internets primary business model is advertising and what that has done to content creation across all formats and all platforms almost without exception.

So like you’re saying but the opposite in some ways.

That's not why the USSR fell. It fell because of the oil crisis that crashed the price of oil, and with it, the export revenues of the USSR. That, and geriatric leaders who "ran the country without regaining consciousness". That latter part might remind you of something.

Oil export just prolonged the agony. Soviets could not reform without touching the institutions and could not survive without keeping the institutions intact. Gorbachev was not geriatric, but he was not a right caliber for that job, Soviet system did not produce those.

Watch the first 2 mins of this:

> Leonid Brezhnev New Year's Address (1979) [Subtitled]

https://youtu.be/E66oM2iAMwM?si=W6OeT2GxdfUt-nzI

And he's still more lucid than Biden when he actually begins to speak.

And that's after a pretty debilitating stroke.

Reagan...?

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