Comment by tyre 9 hours ago
As an American, this is awesome to see.
We should pay penalties for our abandonment of good faith global engagement. And economic damage really is the key to the heart of these United States of Three Corporations in a Trench Coat.
We’ve seen companies and CEOs paying millions in bribes to be close to the president. Now this aligns their financial interests with shifting our foreign policy. Not how it ought to work, but it’s the world we have.
From a less masochistic and more self-interested perspective, it's not a good long-term thing for American corporations to thrive purely due to corruption and throwing around political weight.
We as consumers (and for that matter, aspiring businesspeople) all benefit when we have more entrants to the market that are challenging the existing monopolies. And to be honest I don't think the EU has the incentives to pull this off anyway, these are manufactured headlines around what's a minor blip in the vast coffers of American corporations. I'm sure zero alarm bells are going off in Redmond because some EU bureacrats wrote a headline around switching to a Django app built in a hackathon.
It’s in the US’s best interests to be a rule follower. It maintains our status as a global reserve currency. It gives our passports access to almost every country without visas. It attracts foreign investment.
As a US citizen, it is incredibly in my selfish interest for the US to not be a shitty friend. Just as it is in our selfish interest to promote democracy, less corruption, and free markets.
While I agree with those things, morally, they are also in the pure self-interest of the United States.
They are the ones that get to face almost all of the consequences from their government. And they know that if the people that voted on their current government don't get severally punished, things will only escalate.
The only people who hate Americans as much as (or more than) Europeans are Americans.
So story time. About 8 years ago, most of corporate America tried to do this. It was called the ad-pocalypse. They came crawling back to SV in less than 2 months. Turns out, the correct response to an organized (politically based) pressure campaign is to tell them to pound sand.
When your customers see the dev bill (what it costs to make software that actually works and doesn't get its secrets stolen), they will do the same. But not after some LLM based disasters cause some chaos. Should make your life more interesting, no?
Some people profess guilt to claim credit for the sin
I would say with basically 100% certainty who they voted for, for president.
Cognitive bias is brutal. They have no idea what they are doing to their own self interests.
The selection of Americans commenting generally aren't suffering, and won't be suffering under any circumstances. They're upset that the institutions that they worship and rely on for their own professional legitimacy are now all under a buffoon, game show host, and professional wrestling valet. It calls into question the "meritocracy" that they believe rewards them for all their hard work.
They blame this on the people who lack merit, and didn't study hard enough to get their share of the highest profit margins in history. They want them to be punished. The people who actually do and make things, rather than shuffling things around, marketing things and sending emails.
It's no wonder that they hope for some sort of punishment to force people to flock to them. US Liberals offer working people absolutely nothing but mockery. The only reason they have a chance at getting back into government is because Trump's corruption will keep the people who voted for him from voting at all. MAGA (with fellow-travelers who voted for him while holding their noses, repulsed by the alternative) is falling apart over foreign wars, Epstein, and H1Bs, not any of the middle class lib objections. Democrats also will give you war, Epstein and H1B.
The midterms, and the next election, will be won by the side that has managed to disillusion slightly fewer voters to the entire democratic process. I'm sorry, but that still bodes well for the loudmouth strongman.
Yep, and watching many of my peers in tech get red pilled and vote for this administration, or even be active participants in it, has been very hard to stomach. Financial penalties might be the only thing that gets them to realize the error of their ways
I think it’s also healthy overall for there to be multiple competitors in the market versus the tech monopolies we have now that have started abusing their customers.
Yes. We are at our best when we compete and have grown too fat and lazy IMO.
>We should pay penalties for our abandonment of good faith global engagement.
How can you abandon something that never existed. While US was among the better superpowers it never for a moment engaged in good faith. Trump just makes it naked and brutish.
America is "Three Corporations in A Trench Coat"?
Everything America is doing right now is because America is precisely NOT taking corporate decisions. America is doing things to the international order that are directly fucking up American corporations. Only a committed social democrat can look at the populist right-wing chaos right now, and claim that's "Corporate" action. If anything, Corporations were more liberal than the population at large in America, and that's part of the reason why Trump's racist populism is so popular ... he's exploiting a backlash. Turns out America has far more nativists than you ever imagined.
But yeah, go ahead and call it "Corporations in a trenchcoat" because then you don't have to think about how Corporations have actually played the biggest role in promoting diversity in America. While government consistently goes sharply left and right based on whichever lunatic the American public elects next.
> anything, Corporations were more liberal than the population at large in America
They are more to the left of the population, yes. But nothing about them or the current left in the US is liberal in any real way anymore. The Dems are nothing like they were before about 2008 and the policies they push are very very different from the ones passed in that era.
PS Liberal means French enlightenment ideals which (for example) includes meritocracy as a core tenant.
It's so strange reading all these comments from Americans begging to be punished for collective misdeeds. It reads as unsettlingly masochistic.