• 157 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023


  • For hardware it is relativly simple, as paying for that is normal. Raspberry Pi is a private company, but produces open source hardware. Probably the way to go, is to force all companies to do so. Right to repair is imho a good starting point.

    For software the key seems to be large government or private customers. They do have a lot of money and the system not running costs them a lot. Hiring experts themself is also not always posdible. So buying in service from companies developing open source is an option.

    For R&D a lot of that is done by universities and research institutions likr NASA today. That seems to me to be a good solution.













  • It is not just the dependency ratio. When your population declines enough, you end up having trouble maintaining all sorts of infrastructure. That is especially bad in rural regions. If your population density falls, that means fewer people have to pay to maintain basically the same length of roads, electricity grid, water system and so forth. Fewer customers leads to shops and restaurants closing. With fewer young people, schools will close making even more young people leave, as it makes raising children that much more difficult. So larger villages and small towns tend to do somewhat fine, but villages end up with pretty much no young people and just die. Even worse with an overall population decline the biggest problems of cities, namely the high cost of housing becomes less of a problem.

    It really is not just the dependency ratio, which is a problem. In fact that one is often stable, as old people die.










  • The old American playbook was to ally with some local elites and then use media, secret service and economic support to bring them into power. Military force and hardcore sanctions were a tool used, if that did not work.

    Russia prefers to use military force to force other countries into doing what they want.

    China seems to work mainly with economic pressure, corruption and secret servcie work to set up favroable local elites. Their media game is not as good as the US, but TikTok is a clear sign that they are working on it. So far hard force is pretty rarer.

    To me China looks a lot more like the old US playbook. They know the Russian one is not as good, as they saw European Empires collapse by using it.