We’re already there, there’s no need for this hypothetical. We’ve reached the point where we have trademarked plants, and natural cross-pollination with neighbouring fields has led to fines to farmers because they’re technically growing someone else’s intellectual property plant.

Vaccines and drugs whose research is paid for with public funds are copyrighted and poorer nations are forbidden from obtaining them at reasonable prices.

Vanguard technologies like FPGAs are seeing a rise in later years not because the concept is new, but because 40-year-old key patents of the technology started to expire and this allowed third parties to improve on the technology, and increase its availability and affordability.

Time and time again, software and hardware designed and published with open source but licensed copyright (or copyleft) are blatantly copied and modified without permission by big tech, without any credit or compensation to the original author, in complete violation of the license terms, and nothing ever happens because they have better lawyers than the small open source people.

AI models are unlawfully trained illegally with immense amounts of copyrighted material, and then substitute artists with real understanding of the art.

No need to make up hypotheticals for a society in which this already happens

No. Al-Jazeera published a report that the electronic devices that exploded had high explosives embedded, and I’m not in a target country

[…] is a provocation worthy of military invasion?

See, that’s an entirely different statement. Threatening to join Russia’s geopolitical rival’s military alliance while bordering Russia, is provocation. The acts in Donbas since 2014 are provocation. Is it “worthy of military invasion”? I don’t believe so. The proto-fascist Russian government is clearly not acting entirely out of pure will and self defense, and I’ll be the last to defend it since I have loved ones directly suffering under that government. But it’s important to frame things correctly, and yes, threatening to join NATO while bordering Russia is a huge provocation.

Particularly, NATO has no history of defensiveness (as far as I know it has never intervened for the defensive purposes it’s supposed to uphold), but it has a history of offensiveness. Yugoslavia and Libya can both attest to that, and extra-officially (technically not NATO interventions even if many NATO members participated one way or another), countries such as Iraq can also attest. The case of Iraq is a perfect example of what unprovoked invasion in modern times is, and we are still forced to see libs fall heads over heels for a fucking Dick Satan Cheney endorsement to Kamala “most lethal army in the world” Harris.

So, yes, when a country bordering you chooses to join a historically aggressive military alliance that openly challenges you, that’s huge provocation. And it’s important to state so when we talk about the war in Ukraine.

completely unprovoked

considering joining NATO

Those two statements are in the same phrase… My god

They absolutely don’t both solve the problem, plenty of homeless people in the capitalist world compared to the 0 people in former USSR

Insane that we allow for the privatisation of wavelengths.

"NO!! ONLY I CAN MOVE ELECTRONS AT THIS FREQUENCY, I PAID FOR IT, RWAAAAHHH!!

Not very hopeful but it’s something

I don’t really have a good reason to be skpetical

“Company reports that things will go incredibly well” is very skepticism-worthy

CPI “economists”: “well, since people don’t buy meat anymore because it’s too expensive, we’ll remove it from the basket of goods that we use to calculate inflation. Isn’t that convenient?”

Source: CPI moves to cheaper variants of products over time because people stop being able to afford them, for example they used to use the price of a beef steak in their products basket but switched to ground meat because the price of the former had gone up so much that a majority of people bought ground meat instead.

Probably depends on the country, I’m pretty sure here in Spain you can donate books to libraries, and I highly doubt they go to the publisher and call them to ask “hey, want any good ol’ buckaroos?”

Russia’s Putin as opposed to…? Just funny phrasing

Dismissing entire sections of information simply because they don’t fit into your narrative or are associated with even a government source isn’t good

I routinely do this with US propaganda against China and with Israel anti-palestine propaganda, and I’m not ashamed to say it. I flat-out refuse to listen to news from these sources for the most part

Surely not my point that we should automatically discard and ignore everything from russian government sources, just to be very careful when listening to all recounts and information about an ongoing military conflict

The source isn’t a random russian person though, it’s a “Russian military administration” source, hard for me to trust a source from either government during wartime

Concerning.

I think the comment above yours is legit. There are a few people in the comment section taking the news seemingly at face value, or arguing “if this is true, then…”. All news are propaganda, just different sides, which makes the comment a bit naive, but I get the meaning given the comment section.

Elon energy on your comment

The U.S. has been gunning for Russia for centuries

Technically one century but sure, I don’t deny that the US attitude towards Russia stems from imperialism.

It’s borderline racist to claim that Russia is imperialist

“It’s borderline to say Russia has reached the final stage of capitalism, with the financialization of the economy and the concentration of capital in the hands of a few oligarchs” I really don’t see how it’s racist to say that.

when you claim that Russia is imperialist for defending it’s people from a decades-long siege that is generations old

Establishing a continuity in “Russia” and the reasons for the US hostility towards it for the past 100+ years is absurd. The reasons why Tsarist Russia was expansionist (although not imperialist since it was barely industrialized), weren’t the same as why the USSR invested in military and the US was hostile to it, and aren’t the same as to why modern Russia invests in military and why the US is hostile to it.

for defending it’s people

And I don’t claim that Russia is imperialist because it engages in warfare, that’s not my criteria. The USSR engaged in warfare and Afghanistan and it wasn’t imperialist, the argument could be made that something relatively similar is happening in Ukraine now. My point as to why it’s imperialist is the consolidation of capital in the hands of a few, and the financialization of the economy. The EU is also an empire in this regard. It’s harder to say for China given the wide state control over the private companies. I really fail to see how comparing highly developed capitalism in country A with highly developed capitalism in country B is racist of a State Department talking point.

First of all, chill. We’re all here to learn.

Second of all, you haven’t addressed my post at all, you’ve just dismissed it completely and talked about some example of cars which goes exactly in the direction of what I point towards. If the USSR had made more cars, there would have been less labour and resources destined to other goods. Cars simply weren’t a priority because they’re expensive and inefficient, if anything the USSR made too many instead of focusing on better urban planning and public transit.

There was shortage of housing

People had to wait to buy a car

Those are consequences of allocating goods based on needs rather than based on purchase power. Homelessness in the USSR was nonexistent, millions of new homes were built every year. The fact that you complain about access to housing in the USSR shows how detached you must be from the realities of access to housing in the western world even in 2024, with 50 years extra of technological development.

Your point about bribery or contacts as a form of access to goods is true, but corruption is a natural part of all systems. It’s just that it’s not defined as such in the private sector so suddenly we don’t care about it when it’s outside the public sphere. If I own a car factory and decide that the first 1000 cars will go to my friends, that’s my right to do so, it’s only illegal and immoral in the public sphere.

Again, we’re talking of different definitions of imperialism.

Despite the power of the oligarchs, this battle is about the survival of Russia as a nation-state as a whole, not just the wealth of the rich.

Ok, but that’s exactly the point. The economic interests of capitalist Russia directly oppose those of capitalist USA, why else would the USA be hostile to Russia and push NATO to its borders and blow up the NordStream? Why not do all of those things against, say, Germany? That’s exactly what I mean by imperialist nations colliding, the private capital having opposed interests.

Russia has no case of exporting money abroad to directly influence the outcome of elections

It tries through hackers though, but yes, not remotely on the scale of the US. I’m not saying “Russia is worse than the US” here, I’m saying that according to Lenin’s definition of imperialism, Russia is currently an imperialist state.

Financialization is a feature of capitalism in general

Again, yes, exactly my point, I suggest you read the book I mentioned if you wanna understand what I mean. We agree, we’re just hung up in semantics