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> For most of human history the money was stable

Only true if you zoom out. If you actually looked the data the 1800s had wild and constant swings year to year, they just evened out during the Long Depression (i.e. the first Great Depression) by the end of the century.

Constrained monetary supply also leads to constant boom and bust cycles in a non static economy.

Well they can be betting that Republicans will lose in a couple of months and the congress will have the guts to stop him from constantly imposing entirely illegal tariffs on random countries for no reason.

Canada also had a deal they signed with Trump. Then he changed his mind and pretended (or not) he’s to demented to remember it he and not Biden agreed to deal. Then he made other proposals then randomly changed his mind again and again.

There is nothing rational about this, he’s bullying Canada because he has much more leverage over it than he has over China and Europe. Albeit he messed up the global oil supply to fuck with both of them ( and bailed out the Russian economy from collapse while he was at it) or maybe he’s just cluelessly blundered into it, who knows)

No, they had a standard bank license, no different than any other bank operating in the country. Of course it was only valid in the EU not Britain.

https://www.lb.lt/en/news/banking-licence-granted-to-revolut...

edit: Comment no longer makes much sense after the one above was edited

> been a fully licensed bank for ~6 months

They had an EU license in Lithuania for years.

French Guiana is in the EU though. While Norway is not.

Of course the cost structure for space companies is very different than for AI and electronics but Chinese companies have proven that they can achieve ~90% of what the bloated US companies are doing on a tiny fraction of their budget. Of course efficiency hasn’t been a priority in the EU for decades so unlikely they can replicate anything China is doing

> What has France been doing since WWII? If they have the know how, shouldn’t they be at the same level as US now

A lot? I mean they were on the same level or above in the early 2000s.

Ariane was sort of the SpaceX of the 80s by commercializing and significantly decreasing the cost of space launches.

> from the Germans on how to build an empire

Yeah.. the German economy is in a remarkably great state these days.

Good thing is that that Trump will never manage to figure out where French Guyana is on a map. Or worst case there is a 50% chance he’ll invade (non French) Guyana.

I guess it’s hard to provide data that you don’t have the rights to distribute and claim it’s open source.

Western Europe has been mostly stagnant or declining while real incomes for most workers have actually grown in the same period (and for a significant proportion of the population to a very large degree).

The median person and especially those in the top 10th percentile are fairly well off and respectively extremely well off in relative terms compared to people in other developed countries. To bottom deciles are of course not in the best situation but for the most part the rest of the population find it fairly easy to ignore that.

> Meanwhile, people in the EU get guaranteed healthcare

They had that 20 years ago? Since then the rich asset owners have been accumulating a bigger share of the pie in the EU as well, it’s just marginally less pronounced because there is less wealth to go about in the EU due to the multi-decade long stagnation (outside Eastern Europe and a handful of other countries). On the whole I find it extremely hard to view this as a positive without a huge amount of wishful thinking.

People in the EU need to start thinking about how to improve things rather than exclusively focusing on holding onto what they already have (which is slowly turning into scraps..). To a large extent the old EU countries just froze in time after the GFC.

“West Taiwan”? Why not just say ROC instead of inventing nonsense names..

> adopts Ukrainian drone technology cannot effectively be invaded currently

The tactical situation in Taiwan is very different though. I think it would come down more to what’s happening in the air since the stalemate in Ukraine is in large because the Russian airforce is almost completely neutralized and can only be used to launch cruise missiles from a safe distance. I doubt China would invade unless they feel they can somehow achieve at least temporary air superiority and achieve their other objectives during that period.

Air defenses are probably much more important than drones overall.

> against conventional military,

Last time used faced a conventional military that could actually challenge it was in Korea.

It won’t have complete areal superiority or entire division surrendering after running into contact with US forces like they in Iraq. “Shock and awe” of course can be very effective just probably not against China. Even now US is running out of materiel against Iran and can’t really sustain a prolonged intense conflict while being able to protect its gulf allies from ballistic missiles and drones.

> US waged war for 20+ years in Afghanistan

That was an occupation and a low intensity “pacification” mission. Waging a prolonged war against a military peer on the other side of the continent is a bit more problematic (considering that US is/was on the brink of running out of advanced weaponry in Iran despite having aerial superiority which they won’t over Taiwan, Japan would have to get involved as well cause otherwise US would have to entirely rely on the fragile carrier fleet).

Using tactical nukes (even regardless of the extreme geopolitical downsides that might bring) wouldn’t necessarily give a great tactical advantage either, unless they are willing to do that over Taiwan itself to destroy the landing forces).

Nemotron Super is sort of open source in the sense that Nvidia provides almost everything you need to replicate it from scratch. Of course it’s performance is not exactly stellar but it could be a good starting point for other research teams.

I don’t think anyone said anything about either being less evil? Just having more consumer oriented products..

It’s not as bad as dot.com of course since all purely AI companies are private and the ones on the market have pretty decent cash flow outside of AI. But the stock market pattern is not that dissimilar, the largest increases are usually just before the crash.

> But how and why is Apple to be blamed for that?

It’s not about blame, the point of anti trust and competition laws is just that, maximize competition and consumer surplus. Yes that inherently penalizes the most successful companies we collectively as a society judged that to be a fair bargain.

> The culprit certainly isn't Apple. They aren't a bank.

Sure, it’s easier to go after Apple not banks, though.

> have a great variety of devices to choose from

Physical hardware sure. Effectively there is no choice when it comes to software though.

> device they can get at whatever price they deem reasonable and affordable

Sure, but again physical hardware is not whats being discussed here. All major device manufacturers make it either were hard or impossible to install alternative operating systems (especially that got much worse for Android devices over the years).

> can't figure out how to make money without depending on Apple? A

When it comes to certain sectors that’s true. Or rather you are supposed to pay a very significant proportion of your revenue as rent to Apple to for very little in return (Apple benefits almost as much from third party developers as developers do from Apple).

> Apple has no unfair advantage against the competition, except for the incompetence of said competition

Yeah, that how most monopolies work. They are just outright better than their competition until they are in a dominant position and can get a higher proportion of the pie because they ran all the competitors out of business. That’s exactly when regulators should intervene to make the market more efficient.

Based on empirical evidence free/efficient markets can almost never exist without regulation.

> with having access to billions of Android customers

The average Android user is almost worthless economically compared to the average iPhone user. If you calculate the market share based on revenue and not total users Apple has a much bigger proportion of the pie than the raw user base would suggest.

> Which is an easy thing for banks to do.

The victim in this case are the consumers, not banks.

Overall the smartphone OS market is a not very competitive oligopoly, the government’s job is to make sure that markets are competitive.

> around and point fingers at Apple for being successful. They made their own bed.

To get into the position where you can abuse your position in the market you have to do something right, certainly. That doesn’t mean you should be allowed to do that in perpetuity.

You are forced to purchase one of them, yes.

> which unfair market conditions made it impossible

Bank applications depending on various os or device level security features? Good luck getting developers to build applications for your platform in general until you have a very large number of users (even Microsoft couldn’t manage it when the oligopoly was way less entrenched)

> Who was forced to buy an iPhone?

You are effectively forced to buy either and Android or an iOS phone to participate in society.

Since the market for phone operating systems is not even remotely competitive regulation is necessary just like in all others uncompetitive markets.

A much more accurate nonsensical analogy would be getting take out but only being allowed to eat it with Apple branded utensils because otherwise your food would catch fire.

> Users are free to choose a different manufacturer

It’s an oligopoly, so no, consumers are not exactly free to do what they want. If the market were truly competitive you might have a point.

In reality it’s closer to 0.5-1% in Europe since banks apply their own fees on top of the regulated interchange rate.

The government being able to monitor and control how every individual spends money is a double-edged sword though

Governments having absolute control on who can pay who and being able to easily restrict certain groups from participating in the economy is not ideal, though (of course currently tourists being the only group this applies to is not a big deal..)

But that’s not what actually happened.

As funny as Mechahitler was it was more of a Microsoft Tay moment with the chatbot parroting what Twitter’s users were telling him without guardrails or a safe system prompt. It had nothing to do with grok’s or Musks pro nazi views (or lack thereof)