> The people of the USA really remind me of the people of Russia: totally depoliticized. I think in the USA many people are really focused on a pointless culture war yet aren't politically active at all.
If anything, the opposite is true. Citizens who've never protested in their lives are now in the streets. Off-year elections have had record turnouts.
154–155 million people voted in the 2024 presidential election; that's 63-65% of eligible voters, the second highest percentage in the past 100 years.
Most Americans took democracy for granted; the possibility of losing it has caused Americans to wake up.
> 154–155 million people voted in the 2024 presidential election; that's 63-65% of eligible voters, the second highest percentage in the past 100 years.
And then trump got elected which is the reason of the crisis right now.
Perhaps American people wanted this?
Also, I think that America and Russia's probably the only biggest difference right now is protests and yea, I looked at some protests in America and how people are getting shot and even one veteran got detained who worked in iraq war for 3 days and was stripped naked and wasn't allowed to say anything and this happened a long time ago because of ICE
All because he looked brown. You could fight or die for the country & they would come to haunt you.
Veterans are calling ICE against the protestors even worse than how Veterans acted during the wars towards Iraqi citizens
I have consistently called it out but most Americans from what I can gather want to desperately fit in the two boxes and not have independent support and especially when one party's effectively doing something like this. Bi-partisanship had always ended & you can't vote for anyone more than these two parties (one of which is causing an active war in greenland but the other party's better in this context but its also complicated and they still have very much an influence caused by lobbying)
> I legitimately do not understand these takes connecting everything to slavery. It's been more than a hundred years at this point. The trope is getting old.
It keeps coming up because in 2026 the compromises made to accommodate slave-owning states reverberate to this day.
The Three-Fifths Compromise of 1787 (at the Constitutional Convention) allowed slave-owning states to count enslaved people as three-fifths of a person. This gave the slave-owning states more representation in the House and more Electoral College votes in presidential elections.
This allowed the south to create a voting block that blocked legislation that would have given the formerly enslaved rights that other Americans had.
The Civil War ended in 1865; black Americans in the south were second class citizens and lived under an Apartheid state for the next 100 years until the Voting Rights Act became law in 1965.
> We killed millions over the ability to own humans
"we" didn't kill millions; it's estimated that 750,000 soldiers were killed [1].
> The Three-Fifths Compromise of 1787 (at the Constitutional Convention) allowed slave-owning states to count enslaved people as three-fifths of a person. This gave the slave-owning states more representation in the House and more Electoral College votes in presidential elections.
This is only true if you omit a frame of reference. The slave states wanted slaves to count 1:1 when assigning representatives. The free states wanted them to not count at all. From the point of view of the slave states (which is a perfectly valid point to claim as there isn't an objectively correct baseline here), the 3/5 compromise gave them less representation. So yes, from one point of view the 3/5 compromise gave some states more voice than they should have had. From another point it gave them less. That's what makes it a compromise.
> From the point of view of the slave states (which is a perfectly valid point to claim as there isn't an objectively correct baseline here), the 3/5 compromise gave them less representation.
This is not accurate, and there was a baseline: one man equals one vote.
It was a compromise because the northern states didn't want to count slaves at all because they're not allowed to vote; they were just property.
Of course, the South wanted to count slaves (for census purposes) as a person, even though they couldn't vote.
By allowing slaves to be counted as 3/5 of a person, it enabled the South to have more representation in the House, since the number of representatives is based on the population of the state.
If they weren't allowed to count their slaves, they would have had fewer representatives in the House and wouldn't be able to control legislation, etc.
They wouldn't have done it if it resulted in less representation in Congress.
> Makes sense. I assume each of them is in control and at the whims of US president?
Absolutely not.
If the president attempted to force a US-based CA to do something bad they don't want to do, they would sue the government. So far, this administration loses 80% of the lawsuits brought against it.
You're putting a lot of trust in US institutions (courts etc). The rest of the world is starting to see them as not a strong and independent as they were once assumed.
And that's before more overt issues. Microsoft/Google/etc could sue to stop the US ordering them to do what they should. Is the CEO really willing to risk their life to do that? Be a terrible shame if their kids got caught up in a traffic accident.
> You're putting a lot of trust in US institutions (courts etc)
I don't have a lot of trust in US institutions actually. The most powerful universities, corporations and law firms have capitulated to him.
So far, the tech companies have placated Trump by contributing to his causes and heaping praise upon him and not speaking out regarding the tariffs. That's enough for now.
> Is the CEO really willing to risk their life to do that?
We're not at that point; at least not so far. Besides, it's much easier to blackmail them for more money or for the Department of Justice to open an investigation or to stop a merger they want to do.
Also these companies aren't just sitting around doing nothing. Apple reworked their supply chain; all iPhones sold in the US are now made in India.
> the current generation of hardware is sufficient that hardware refreshes will continue to decline
If anything, Apple is refreshing their hardware much faster now compared to the Intel days. There's literally a new MacBook Pro and MacBook Air every year. And of course there are 3-4 new iPhones every year.
> It’s cheap enough it’s not enough to fund development of Final Cut but also not enough money to bother spending time on it. Find it odd personally, just offering them free to keep hardware makes more sense than trying to push a tiny subscription revenue number.
Apple doesn't work that way.
Unlike almost all other tech companies that are organized by divisions, Apple uses a functional organizational structure.
So all of the software teams are under one head of software; there's no senior vp of the Final Cut division, for example.
For accounting purposes, all software is lumped together.
Apple made $391 billion in revenue last fiscal year; when you're making that kind of money, you can afford to do things for reasons other than the amount of money you could make.
Whatever revenue Final Cut generates isn't required to fund the Final Cut team.
> you can afford to do things for reasons other than the amount of money you could make.
This is what I'm saying and why I don't see the point in charging at all for these apps. The existence of the subscription price tag on them is evidence against what you're claiming.
> The existence of the subscription price tag on them is evidence against what you're claiming.
I disagree. Apple doesn’t need the money, but they also know consumers don’t value free apps the same way they do for pay apps.
It also plays into people’s desire for something better than what everyone has. Everyone gets Numbers, Pages and Keynote for free, but if you subscribe, you get bonus content and features.
So while Apple doesn’t need this to be a blockbuster product, they’re not going to leave money on the table either.
> Of course, they'll eventually remove the option to buy the software by paying once, I think everyone can see the writing on the wall
There's no indication Apple is planning to end the option of paying once for these apps.
Apple introduced subscriptions for Final Cut and Logic nearly three years ago [1]; this isn't new by any means. Pages, Numbers and Keynote remain available at no cost.
Ok, you can "easily", but how quickly can you revert to a snapshot? I would guess creating a snapshot for each turn change with an LLM become too burdensome to allow you to iterate quickly.
If anything, the opposite is true. Citizens who've never protested in their lives are now in the streets. Off-year elections have had record turnouts.
154–155 million people voted in the 2024 presidential election; that's 63-65% of eligible voters, the second highest percentage in the past 100 years.
Most Americans took democracy for granted; the possibility of losing it has caused Americans to wake up.
reply