The "Socialist countries" terrible environmental record was in the name of progress and pulling up most of the population in a short time frame.
The USSR pulled a feudal population up to the space age in 40 odd years, with a break in there making huge sacrifices in a world war. Of course progress like that is going to concentrate environmental errors.
China likewise has pulled a huge population out of extreme poverty, across most quintuples, in a relatively short time, even with disasters like the leap forward.
The west has had its share of environmental disasters over the couple of hundred years that they advanced. Burning rivers, air that you could barely breathe in, huge mining disaster areas and so on and its only been the last half century that the west cleaned up its act.
And much of that progress in all systems came with human rights violations. America had slavery and genocide against the owners of the land for example. Lots of other human rights violations over the years by various other western powers while progressing. Shit one western country progressed to industrial scale genocide.
Anyways, rapid progress means environmental disasters, which was the point of the over parent.

IIRC, by '97 or maybe slightly later, work on StarOffice had basically halted. Once open sourced, using the Windows format might have been a good idea. I do wonder if MS has/had any IP claims to the format.

Err, Word formats aren't even compatible with each other. Which Word format should they have followed? Staroffice was big on OS/2, should they have used Word (PM Version) for OS/2's file format? A format that was incompatible with Word (text version) for OS/2 and DOS and also incompatible with Word for Win 3.x?
The problem with the Word format is that it's main purpose is to stop others from inter-operating with others including other versions of Word and whatever version they chose, MS would have broke. MS is or at least was, very good at breaking compatibility.

Seems to me that the American Constitution doesn't really say whether a State can leave the voluntary union, so that part depends on the Supreme Court, with this one quite willing to interpret the Constitution any which way. If nothing else, your Constitution does allow amendments such as Amendment XX, the State of California is no longer part of the USA. Does mean a large majority of the country has to agree.
You're right about the economic consequences, though could go like Quebec where every time they talk of leaving, they assume an economic union would take its place and have their referendums based on that premise. Canada also now has the Clarity Act, has to be a super majority to leave, none of this 51% voting leave being enough for such a major decision. The UK should have had similar with the Brexit referendum.

The part you're missing is that gasoline that is exported is made from imported oil. Trade stops, no more oil imports to refine into gasoline in a certain part of the country, namely the mid-west. Eventually, I guess pipelines can be constructed, which takes time and steel that is no longer being imported.

Do you think Star Division had a crystal ball and could foresee that their CPM Word processor needed to be compatible with a Mac word processor?
Things were different in 1985 and even a couple of years later when ported to MSDOS, or later when first ported to Win 3.1, which was when the rest of the suite was created. The European market was different back then too.

How hard is it to change the file extension? I know Windows so probably hard if you can even see it and figure out it is just a Word document with a different extension.

There's still some left and quite likely at one point, when tribes consisted of a dozen or 2 hunter gatherers who owned next to nothing, were more common.
Examples include the Bushmen of S. Africa and the Inuit of N. America. Both pushed to the most inhospitable areas of the world. Even today the Inuit's governments in the NWT and Nunavut have legislatures with no political parties and work by consensus. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada...

Ratify Article the First. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Article the Second did get ratified after 200+ plus years as the 27th Amendment so it is theoretically possible.

There's also a feeling of disgust as you watch that cash go into a till to balance out the pleasure of receiving something. With a card, you get the pleasure right away and the disgust at the end of the month.

The problem is that things like housing has gone up much faster then inflation. Basically luxuries have become cheaper and cheaper while necessities have become more expensive. The poor spend most of their money on necessities.

Yes, having a server can be a good option, just not really worth it for me currently.

Yes, I like being able to pull all my mail to my main machine, filter it into folders and have it, backups too. IMAP for secondary machines like my phone. Since Google keeps most everything, can always go into "All Mail" to find stuff.

Well, the school curriculum when I was young meant having to read books such as Animal Farm and Brave New World which I believe was to program us with ideas.

Most of the successful revolutions have been non-violent. Think of 80%+ of Americans going on strike to demand change and knowing what direction that change should take.