Not just history but the present is replete with counterexamples. Cartels abound.

wank wank, flonk flonk.

I remember a time when Slashdot was peopled mostly by humans who looked down on copyright law in general as a farce. Those were better times in a lot of ways, and this is only one of them.

There is no ethical consumption under capitalism. Everything is coercive.

Who came to defend the honor of the fire stick?

The fix is to come up with a news reader with cryptographically managed identities (not verified, just consistent) and go back to USENET with it. This does everything valuable that social networking does, but without the malevolent overlord.

This is what I came to say. Starting with elements is as close to scratch as we get, and they didn't go there

I get why someone would purchase these services from Google, I even get why people who drank the Redmond kool-aid get them from Microsoft. I don't understand who would be stupid with to get them from Facebook but also have enough money to pay for them

It doesn't matter when games have to be installed and they require massive updates which also need to be stored somewhere. Games don't play from discs anymore anyway, maybe they stream some video from them.

No.

Citation needed.

Which system doesn't?

My personal mod troll is SO MAD I EXIST.

Rent free all day, all night. They never stop thinking about me.

Then why are you only demonstrating a child's understanding of the situation? A malignant state in decline having massive manufacturing capability is not a positive thing.

I'll never buy one again anyway because they destroyed mine with updates. It was always laggy, but it became basically unusable.

The gun nuts are the ones supporting the secret police.

Whilst you're 100% correct that gun nuts are melts living in a fantasy world who would piss themselves if anyone broke into their house rather than carrying out their heroic gun fantasies, I think the GPP was referring to a breakdown in society where people get territorial and violent. Society is, as they say only three meals away from anarchy. In anarchy all bets are off.

Erm... the US is becoming a Soviet state?

Well you are aligned with Russia now.

For the uninitiated, and the reason no-one actually uses "second world" any more is because it originally meant what side of the cold war you were on. The planet was divided into three separate "worlds", the first world being US, NATO and allies, the second world being the Soviet Union and countries aligned with them, the third world was unaligned countries. As time went on and the fact most developed countries were aligned with NATO and most unaligned countries were developing or undeveloped it became shorthand for rich and poor countries and with the collapse of the Soviet Union the second world ceased to exist.

So technically speaking, the Philippines is a first world country whilst Switzerland is a third world country (the former being staunch US allies and the second being staunchly neutral).

I'm no grammar NAZI so you can use first and third world to refer to economic development but "second" world is categorically wrong as it never developed a new meaning, it ceased to exist 30 years ago. If you would like to differentiate between poor and dirt poor countries economically, might I suggest using the terms "developing" and "undeveloped" respectively as that's what you'd put on a report you'd make to someone like the UN security council.

All spelling and grammatical errors contained in this post are intentional, grammar nazis need entertainment.