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As an American: “fuck America” buy anything else
She is in a phase of skittishness where she will not look directly at anything or anyone and make eye contact. So this is “that idiot brick is scary af! (big eyes).”
Generally, I consider something to be dystopian if it is making negative assumptions about the future that are rooted in speculative fiction. These are more like science fiction, fantasy, or geopolitical.
I consider something utopian when it is unrealistic and glossing over aspects that are impossible or poorly premised while presenting them as positive.
An example of dystopian would be the Terminator films or most films and books about AI. These fall into a trope of the machine gods. These are no more than a retelling of a pantheon like mythos of supernatural gods. The issues of future AI are unrelated to this mythos. They are also based on the fallacy of dominance caused extinction. By this logic Earth is a monoculture. These conceptual abstractions are dystopian because they are making stupid handwaving assumptions that result in a dark and grim setting.
Depicting the messiness of reality does not mean a fictional story is either dystopian or utopian.
An example of a utopia is something like a biblical paradise. It is premised on brutal authoritarianism that lacks any objective nuances about the true diversity of life and opinions. It is glossing over the real differences in what people want and expect out of life in an idealized story arc that harms a lot of people. When these people are sidelined as irrelevant, the true underlying dystopian reality comes into view. Utopia is always a story of propaganda-like perfection masking a terror that lies beneath.
One can paint such abstractions on almost any story. These are not really genera even if someone calls them such.
You mentioned your story involves massive geopolitical upheaval. This concept could be painted as dystopian depending on how you write it. Throughout history there were many underlying reasons for changes. Like in the era of Alexander the Great, the conquests of the Macedonians in that age were more due to advances in equipment and a professionally trained army in an era that primarily consisted of less formal city states and small raiding parties. The era of the Romans was mostly the beginnings of broader social cohesion and coalitions of regions. The Great War and WW2 was the era of solidifying global boarders and the role of imperialism. If you are proposing a new era of evolving change, the reason for that change and why that change is a form of evolving progress in a geopolitical sense is important if you would like to abstract a label of utopian or dystopian. Otherwise it sounds like “war fiction” IMO.
It was joking around; intentional
It really isn’t that much IMO. You’ll get used to blocking more. Don’t keep scrolling and just block what you don’t want while being respectful of others that do like it. I have somewhere around 300 blocked communities in nearly 2 years all for various reasons. This ain’t reddit. No one is manipulating you for retention, but no one is tailoring and babying you either. It takes a little effort to prune the list. Most if not all of this is on reddit too, but you were less targeted by it there, assuming that is where you come from. It took me awhile to adjust to this mentality. Now I am not bothered at all by simply blocking each community. There are not more than a dozen or so people regularly posting anime stuff that I can see from my account on LW.
Careful, Boeing will send their goons between muting whistleblowers if you say that too loud.
As an American: Buy European, or Asian, or anything else please. My country needs to crash and burn on this path of stupidity.
Bibs never said Hose F. checked the hymen. If the merry story was straight, this plot hole would be closed. Old Hosed F. wore a red uniform on TNG
Currently slightly motivated to get a microcontroller toolchain working and do a deep dive. Maybe a cat toy, or maybe something else. If I can find a FOSS IDE setup I can tolerate, maybe more.
If China ever goes hardcore on open source across the board for all hardware and software, it would absolutely crush the present Western hegemony. It would be the most moral high ground move too.
Despite being disabled from a broken neck and still riding a bicycle in the evenings for physical therapy (because disability is complicated), if you are on the side of the road or bike trail having problems with a bike, I’ll still at least ask you if you need help, and I will fix almost anything you are having trouble with if asked. What I won’t tell you is how much holding posture hurts and how helping you will cost me a few days of extra pain. I’ve been there and know how frustrating it is to get stranded over something silly and shit happens. I always have layers of backup redundancy on the bike to cover almost any situation.
Very little is actually made in the USA tbh. I'm from the USA. The issue is not what is made in the USA it is American venture capitalism. Unfortunately this means you would need to look a lot deeper into every country and product along with their supply chain in particular. There is no real money in workers and assembly. We are all about the same and barely scraping by at the bottom regardless of where we are from. The real money is much higher up the chain. Places like access to global distribution networks at scale is where the real money resides. If you are making shoes in Spain and I come along like some American VC ass-hat and want to buy a 51% stake in your company, I am offering you both the access and capital required to sell 100 times more product because you will access a much larger market. I am going to cut the price of your shoes by 40%, you will make 20% more than you have ever made and I pocket the rest. What you don't know is that I just bought 3 other companies making similar shoes and will merge or close your company in 2 years after I control the whole market.
The thing is, once businesses get larger than around 20 people, you need access to money and credit in most cases. You are going to have times when you need to cover expenses, make investments and spend money you do not immediately have on hand. In a perfect world this would not seem like sound reasoning, but if your competitor has access to capital and you do not, you will find yourself out of business and closing the doors within a year or two. This is where banks are more predatory than venture capital seems on the surface. VC gives you access to money on more reasonable terms but at the cost of access to intellectual property and the inner workings of the company. Venture capitalists are often called Sharks because they will use this information to exploit any weaknesses and devour the company because each company is just another fish in the sea.
Americans, Chinese, and Russians are not the real problem in the world today and any hate for these is grossly misplaced. Almost all of us are just humans struggling to survive. There are a few tens of thousands of humans that are in control of everything on the planet, and these individuals are the immediate problem.
Unfortunately, the big picture is that venture capital is a trade off. It only really exists because of the exponential growth of silicon technology from the 1950s to now. Prior to the 1950s the world economy was lead by military spending. The exponential growth of silicon is over now. We are presently 10 years away from the last silicon fab node. The actual silicon design process takes 10 years. That means that the people that work on the edge of the science are already at the end. No other technology has ever outpaced military driven growth of an economy. The future will look like the past eras that lead to the Great War, World War 2, and all the conflicts that came before them. You see, you are concerned with what venture capital is doing in the world, but venture capital is no longer relevant. We lived at the end of what some call the Pax-Americana (American peace era devoid of large scale conflict), but in reality it was the Pax-Silicon. Military funding was not capable of keeping up with the growth potential of silicon. In a way, venture capitalists were an extension of the US military. The move that won the cold war against the Soviets was the economic growth that accompanied this move to venture capital with silicon. It is impossible to overstate the big picture importance of silicon, venture capital, and what drives economies.
The thing that matters most right now is actually freedom of information. The power to control information is the pivot point of the next great conflict and it is more important than ever while being the weakest it has ever been in centuries. There is nothing wrong with trying to hurt VC, but you will find it everywhere while it is nearly entirely irrelevant at the brands and location of manufacture. It has nothing to do with the average person in any region of the world.