NGram

Varying levels of disappointed for me.

Others elected a very pro-suburbia mayor who is slowly making our city worse for people who rely on transit (like me).

The provincial government is somehow worse. The leader is very corrupt, which anyone voting should’ve predicted since he used to be a drug dealer… (and also this is his second term)

Federal government just gave a standing ovation to Charlie Kirk so… yeah they’re winning for being the worst right now. Sadly enough that was the only leader I actually voted in support of. Every politician in the room when that happened should resign. It’s now the second time many of them have applauded a Nazi in that room (and this time they definitely knew he was a Nazi).

Technically free education and universal healthcare are more communist than socialist (as in, they achieve communal control/ownership over them instead of just social ownership). But broadly, communism is a form of socialism so…

And before anyone says that either of those examples aren’t controlled/owned by the government, let me point out that having a monopoly on who pays for something is an awful lot of control over it. You even see this with (nongovernmental) health insurance; they exert a lot of control on what doctors do by saying what they will and won’t pay for. Ownership is just the end game of control.

I hope the Moscone Center didn’t have to ban all LGBTQ+ and/or 18+ events to get Visa to commit

It’s never really been about upfront price so much as longevity. If you can avoid a laptop upgrade e.g. every 5 years by upgrading just a few components instead, it’ll last you longer and cost you less longterm.

Fundamentally, the cheapest way to build electronics is with very little modularity. Making parts swappable is more complicated to design and needs more components to be included. Both drive up the cost of the product.

No sweat if it’s too expensive or that’s not what you care about (ok, though you should sweat not caring about longevity), but making it all about the price is sort of missing the point. Capitalism is a tool for improving our lives but is not the only tool for that.

I don’t. Personally I think it has led to more proxy wars, as the stability-instability paradox suggests. I think the amount of actual aggression went down after WWII, but has since recovered and surpassed pre-WWII levels. But now everyone is afraid of declaring war on nuclear powers, so they’ll let the nuclear country get away with genocide or other atrocities instead. Look at Israel and Russia right now for easy examples. Seems like the winning strategy now is to convince your adversaries that you’re crazy enough to launch your nukes and then you can do whatever you want without other countries taking a strong enough stance to stop you. That’s not peace, that’s nuclear intimidation. I don’t even see a peaceful way out of it.