I agree, competition for YouTube is hard to see as anything but positive. And I’m also struck by how one-dimensional many of the comments are.

Spotify has effectively been turned into a stand-in for the structural failures of streaming, while other Big Tech platforms escape serious scrutiny. That kind of selective critique is revealing.

At a cultural level, it’s fascinating: drop a few well-worn trigger terms into the conversation and bots barely need to do anything - humans complete the loop themselves. I suspect this period will be looked back on as an object lesson in narrative engineering.

I expect food would be exempt as you don’t want an angry, hungry, volatile population. Bread and Circuses

The US uses their military bases to extend their sphere of influence: which makes me think that maybe they should pay the host countries not viceversa. If they invade Greenland the number of their bases in the EU will go to zero.